Tales from the Hound - The Silent Room

September 2067. Veckert is still trying to crack the Dreamers' case. Her eyes are set on Rishel (real name: Lai de'Malevich), Saìl's former third in command and Yard inmate for a while. It all revolves, once more, around the Flowers. And Veckert won't leave any stones unturned to find the truth about them.

White walls. White ceiling. White floor. All white. Insulated. Warm. A small desk with a chair, several pens and sheets of white paper. A chemical toilet with a shower. A metal cot on one side. That room didn’t look comfortable, when watched from the other side of the bulletproof glass, and for a good reason: it wasn’t supposed to be comfortable. Veckert glanced at the reflective surface, still acting as a mirror on both sides. It was a matter of privacy: prisoners couldn’t be spied on 24/7 and had some limited rights to be left alone. So, she took the chance to comb her azure rapunzelian hair, going way, way down to her knees, taking care of styling them and taming some of the most rebellious strands. Her emerald eyes reflected on the glass too, as did her residual scars – the traces of a face reconstruction that worked well enough but lasted way too long. Unfortunately, while her skin and face features had been restored almost completely, her voice had remained somewhat of a mess, bordering on the chainsmoker stereotype.

Whatever. Still better than an emotionless text-to-speech engine.

She took off her black trench coat, leaving her mauve t-shirt and black pants on show. It was end of August, after all – there was no need for wearing leather-replacement jackets, except that it looked cool and was cool. Warm in winter, fresh in summer – all thanks to some new nanofibers that made it disperse more heat than it kept in the hot season. Still, Britain had never really known the meaning of “good weather” – even its summers were mild, compared with what one could enjoy just a couple thousand kilometers south. She wondered if her favorite trench coat would still work as well on the Mediterranean coasts of France. Her mind wandered shortly to the golden sand, the beautiful sea and that searing sunlight that made a mess out of her ever-pale skin. She tried not to think too hard about it and looked instead at her reflected picture once more, whistling in admiration. Turning thirty had destroyed her mood at first, but now she was learning to appreciate her maturity and lack of wrinkles. Having her face rebuilt from scratch after that horrible incident might or might not had been the cause of that. Well, at least one unexpected boon from such a disastrous event that shattered her life.

She lazily pushed the button near the glass. Little by little, the reflective surface turned transparent in both directions, causing the other Veckert to disappear. In her stead, inside the now visible white, silent room, stood a different figure. Taller than her (not that it was that hard), masculine, wearing an orange inmate uniform. He was staring at her through the window too, with his deep blue eyes, which complemented his blond hair. Veckert sat down at the split desk under the window, joined her hands while waiting for her host to take a seat.

“I hope you’ve slept better, last night.”

Her voice echoed on her side of the glass, as a set of loudspeakers relayed it to the silent room. There were two full seconds of delay between each transmission. It was a built-in security measure, something Michio Funabaki himself came up with. When it came to ROPES, one had to be extremely cautious, borderline paranoid. Too many lives had been already lost due to carelessness. Veckert saw the lips of the man moving, but no sound came out of them. Until, a couple instants later, the speakers on her side of the room relayed his answer.

“If it’s a joke, I’m not laughing, detective.”

She squared him, scanned his face. Late twenties, slightly younger than her. Well toned, maybe he was hiding a six-pack or two under that uniform. But, more importantly, he looked suspiciously like him. Like Saìl Takara. She browsed her printed documents, looking for the personal data of the man in question, following them with the tip of a pen. Lai de’Malevich, one of the late Saìl’s bodyguards. Adopted at birth by Kashemir de’Malevich, a Slovenian guy with too much money for his own good, grown up in Lichtenstein, found a job in New Langdon. No connections with the Takara or Hibara families, not an open one at least. Real parents unknown, though. He might have been Saìl’s bastard brother, or something to that effect. Yet, that wasn’t the reason he was there, kept inside the silent room. Veckert stared at him, started articulating her next retort.

“It was a serious question. An acquaintance of mine is a Dreamer too and is slowly getting better. She mentioned that she’s going there less and less, maybe only two or three times per week.”

“Oh, really? Did she tell you this before or after you fucked her?”

Veckert almost snapped the pen in half, before answering with her shiniest smile.

“Before. Afterwards we had other, more important matters to settle. Having a bout with her and her girlfriend at the same time was more than this hound could chew. Especially thanks to her girlfriend’s mechanical fingers. That built-in vibration function is pure bliss.”

That was a blatant lie, of course. Professional etiquette prevented her from sleeping with potential witnesses. Perhaps more importantly, her personal standards would have never, never allowed her to take advantage of a girl in a state of emotional distress. While she was desperate for some body warmth, a threesome with a happy couple that had just gone through a hard moment was way too far on her discomfort scale. Still, she couldn’t let him win, not without a fight. Which somehow worked, as the man behind the glass seemed to be taken aback by that answer.

“I…”

“That was a joke, de’Malevich. I don’t mix work and pleasure. There’s time for both, but you can’t mingle them or you’re ruined.”

The man sighed, stared at her with something that resembled pleading eyes, fidgeting with his hair as his lips moved, again seemingly with no sound.

“Rishel. Could you please… call me Rishel? I know that my name is Lai de’Malevich but…”

Veckert shrugged. It was a small concession, one she didn’t mind. If that meant he would speak more freely, it would have been a good bargain.

“Fine, Rishel. I was wondering what the origin of that name was, after reading it on your file. I couldn’t make head or tails of it.”

The usual two-three seconds of delay before the message was relayed. Veckert hated that buffer, it made any conversation sound stiff and impersonal, much like talking with an astronaut in orbit around Mars. But, again, graveyards were full of rookies that decided that talking to a ROP (or RDP, as they were called back then) was a sound tactic. Michio had personally executed at least a couple of them, before retiring. Poor Michio. The man Yard needed for the job, except nobody told him what the job was until he fell knee-deep into it. Ten thankless years of training new agents and losing them on a regular basis. Everyone would have gone mad, but, somehow, Michio resisted. Veckert had been his last trainee, right after the Walking Night struck New Langdon. Contrary to EiN, she wasn’t familiar with ROPES at all and had to be schooled, and who better than a soon-to-be-retired Michio Funabaki could do that? Veckert didn’t have it easy either way, though. Until that fateful encounter of five years before, the most dangerous stuff she dealt with had been phages, combat robots, drug dealers, smugglers and corrupt corporate CEOs. Little did she know that a man able to activate an electric blue lion substrate at will and a masked hobo that spouted gibberish would be her gateway into the wonderful word of their unstable reality.

“Rishel… that name doesn’t have any meaning, detective. It’s just a word I made up after… waking up from the Dream for the first time. Yeah, Rishel is a random sequence of sounds that… felt right. I can’t be Lai de’Malevich anymore, so any name is better than none. Because he died. Whoever he was, Lai de’Malevich died a brutal death. I’m what’s left of him, like all Dreamers. I might be Lai, but am I, really? I… don’t know.”

Veckert browsed her documents again, somewhat puzzled by that remark.

“A brutal death? This isn’t what’s written here.”

“Much like that of other Dreamers, my death wasn’t recorded. Yet, it happened… but I’m still here. After trying to take my own life… and failing miserably. Or succeeding miserably – your call.”

She nodded at the man behind the mirror. According to Lejl’s testimony, most Dreamers had died in at least one frame of reference, be it a camera tape or a witness report, but were somehow still alive. Lejl said they were glitches in the reality matrix. If Dr. Sanderbach was to be believed, they were corrupted data that wasn’t properly deleted and lived inside the universe’s very own recycle bin. Whatever the interpretation, that meant every Dreamer was supposed to be a ROP of sorts, even if a pretty stable one. Her eyes fell on a pile of other documents, copies of a staple of handwritten papers. She sighed heavily at that sight, wanting to delve her head between her arms and disappear. That staple was delivered not even two weeks before by no other than Blindseraphim herself, causing half of the police station to go ham with rumors about she and Veckert having something going on. Except those documents had been written by the shaky hands of no other than Paddy the Phagefucker. Veckert bursted into something resembling a fit of primal rage, when she realized it. It felt like dramatic irony in its purest form: the single human woman she despised the most had put together a comprehensive analysis of the Human Blood Flower infection, while she was on Nirvana withdrawal, no less. And not any analysis, but the most precise and detailed analysis on the phenomenon to date, something even the best brains at Yard had trouble grasping.

To think I have to thank a girl who had sex with a goddamn haemo...

Veckert spent the best part of her life killing phages before they chewed on the people of St. Patrick SHIELD, never considering them anything more than mindless monsters. Framing them as an invasive species made them sound less threatening than they actually were. So many people had fallen into that scheme that now there were even groups advocating for keeping them around, maybe in a corner of the Dead Zone. Were it for her, nuke it was, but she didn’t call the shots and couldn’t have Paddy O’Rilley arrested for spreading misinformation. Using intel that depraved ditz collected made her feel extremely uneasy, as if she owed her something, but the reward for swallowing her pride and accepting that unexpected help had been worth it. Or, at least, Dr. Tey thought so, which was fine too. She wasn’t very strong on science, so, if the actual scientist was happy with those data, they probably had some real value.

“Alright, Rishel. Now, for the reason why I interrupted your well-deserved rest behind bars… I need to ask you something.”

She picked the top sheet from the staple, scanned it from the first line down, before stopping at a picture. She turned it towards Rishel, stuck it to the glass with her fingers.

“What do you know about this?”

As soon as sound reached him, his eyes turned to the piece of paper, went wide open. He blinked a couple times, stared at Veckert, stared back at the photo.

“W… what is this…?”

“What’s left of Saìl Takara… or brother Derakines, as you called him. After he fell from the Bonzaga tower, his body was squashed into a pulp, but not human pulp. Not flesh and bones. This was what he was harboring inside, apparently. Something that turned him into… well, I think a cocoon wouldn’t be a bad description. What do you know of this, Rishel?”

His hands went for his stomach, as he started to sweat, to breathe heavily. The white room felt smaller and smaller, the walls closing in, compressing him, keeping him prisoner of that reality, getting nearer and nearer, like a trash compactor. Those images ran through his mind, as he violently shook his head, coughed once, twice.

“Rishel?”

Veckert’s voice was but an echo, something he didn’t, couldn’t register. Brother Derakines had blossomed. He had blossomed, much like that weird man told him would happen.

“Every Dreamer is a seed! A seed, you see? Speak with the flowers to bloom, to blossom to your full potential!”

That had been such a weird conversation, at The Lighthouse. He was there to get something to drink, something heavy and possibly with enough alcohol to keep his mind numb, after he got the results of the DNA test. It turned out that calling Saìl brother Derakines was correct for all the wrong reasons, at least if the biological samples he had analyzed in secret were to be trusted. Of course, Saìl didn’t know anything about it. Of course, he wasn’t ready to tell him anything either. Rishel would remain Rishel, his trusted third in command, the shadow of Deshvawn. Well, at least he knew that abandoning the de’Malevich name was more granted than he could have thought when he did it. Yet, in the stupor of liquor, he met that peculiar guy. His skin was gray-ish and he smelled like rotten meat, despite layers and layers of perfume. On top of that, he wore a face mask and an eyepatch of sort, leaving only one, single violet eye free from decay.

“You’re one, right? Another one, another seed!”

One hell of a weird way to start a conversation, he thought. Something that granted an annoyed answer, to send the stranger away. Nobody wanted to talk with a corpse.

“Seed your mother, will ya?”

“Which mother? Which of the many? Oh, oh so many!”

That felt like the weirdest way to retort, but Rishel was already too deep into Bacchus’s embrace to shoo him away. So, he downed a glass of whiskey and kept ignoring the poor sod that looked like a scarecrow with too many loose screws.

“Get lost. I’m mourning.”

“Lost? I’ve been lost for such a long time, but I’ve found myself back. This vessel, you see, thought he wasn’t us. But he is us, we are him. Which means that we don’t have so much time left, yes? But something most beautiful happened! Oh, something so beautiful! The Tides brought new life to Gaia! New life I created! Isn’t it incredible?”

It was no use. Layers and layers and layers of gibberish. Tides. Gaia. Whatever. Rishel just wanted to down yet another whiskey, cursing against his father and mother, people he never met. People who decided to keep his older brother, but left him in the mud, condemning him to grow in an orphanage. People he hoped were dead and buried six feet under.

“I’m happy for you. Or sorry for your loss. Whatever.”

“When you go to sleep, Lai de’Malevich, look for the flowers. You’ll see them in your Dream. I promise you this.”

At those words, Rishel’s attention woke up with a bang. He had never told the stranger his name. He had never told anything about the Dream, about being a Dreamer. The adrenaline made him come back from his alcohol-induced stupor, trying to make sense what had just happened. Only to stare at emptiness instead. An empty spot, where a corpse-like man had been sitting. Of course he had searched for him, of course, but in vain. It was like that weirdo had never been there in the first place. His eyes had moved to the empty glass. Maybe, that was the reason. Maybe, that was just a projection of his subconscious and not a real event. That felt comforting, so his mind settled on that.

He regretted his confidence greatly, when, that same night, he saw the first flowers blooming among the dead red sand of the True World.

“Rishel?”

Veckert’s voice echoed in his head, as his grip on his perception stabilized. He was there, not in the Dream. He was there. He was awake, really awake. In what most humans called their reality. He breathed one, two times, slowly, his heartbeat went back to normal.

“I’m here, detective. I’m… back.”

That vile rafflesia flower that once was Saìl… how could it… how would it…? He shook his head, grabbed his stomach again.

“I… I don’t want to blossom like him, detective. I…”

He punched the desk, keeping his feelings at bay, suppressing his tears before they even had a chance to flow, turning his sorrow into rage.

“If… if I tell you what I know… can… would you be able to help me?”

On the other side of the glass, Veckert nodded, before staring at him, right in his eyes. Hers was the gaze of someone whose determination was untamable.

“If you cooperate, we’ll do everything in our power to guarantee your safety. You have my word.”

He wanted to laugh. Nobody could stop the Dream. Nobody could play against the will of a multidimensional being, let alone save him from the horrible fate that befell Saìl. Yet, Rishel wanted to believe it. He needed to believe it. So, he started to talk.

“The flowers… appeared overnight inside the Dream. There’s a before and after the flowers, detective. After they bloomed, brother Derakines changed, his… his focus changed. See, he was sure that the flowers, the first sign of new life in the Dream, were a message from Emperor Arkaneis. He… convinced us of this. Not only me, but all the Dreamers. He instructed us to touch the flowers, smell the flowers, even… eat the flowers. We did it… well, sort of. I trusted brother Derakines, but…”

But after hearing the ramblings of the zombie at The Lighthouse, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He just got near them, smelled them, but nothing more. Yet, he knew that the simple action of getting close to them doomed him.

“… I didn’t go through with it, not completely. It felt weird, you know? Being told to eat flowers like that? Who would do it, I thought. But, you see, I was an exception. Hell, Deshvawn said he chewed two dozens of them, just to impress our leader! I… I think I’ve just touched one of them. It wasn’t pleasant, it was stinking like rotten flesh. It was… repulsive, detective.”

Veckert nodded, went through the pages of her report. The plant that bloomed from Silman’s dead body, the one that was retrieved from Saìl’s remains… they were of the same kind. Similar to rafflesia flowers, but – contrary to her original beliefs – not so similar to the rekashiza. Different shape, different structure even. As if the flowers and the giant plant that bloomed in Shard weren’t connected, or just weakly so. Which was surprising, all things considered, as her first gut instinct had been to add the rekashiza to the list of crimes against humanity that Baal the Mad had committed. The fact that she was wrong felt most unpleasant, but at least made it clear which direction she had to focus her energies in. She decided to shelve that thought for the moment, as that was something for another day. She browsed the documents put together by the annoying phagefucker, about the Human Blood Flower. Dr. Tey had gone through that report too, finding some similarities between the two known cases of human blossoming and that new evolution of the blood chrysanthemum. There was a huge genetic overlap between them, as if they stemmed from the same origin but diverged at some point. Still, part of their biology seemed to be the same, down to their late stages of development, which was more than they could have asked for.

Rishel kept talking, words flowing like a river.

“Brother Derakines asked us to endure it, to guide other Dreamers to reach for the flowers. He said… he said that we needed to be ready, because in November… something would have happened. Before he could tell us more, though, he… he died. Because of you. Because of… that thing festering inside him.”

“November, you said.”

“Yes, November.”

They both stood silent for a while, simply glancing through the window. Then, Rishel started talking again, his lips moving before the words could reach the world outside the cell.

“I don’t know… I can’t understand what those flowers did to Saìl, but I know what effects they had on me. After Saìl’s… death, I’ve been experiencing them more and more often. While in the Dream, detective, I’ve started hearing voices. A multitude of voices, all different, calling for me. It’s… more than I can stand, detective, they are chewing my mind. Among those voices I… I can hear…”

He swallowed his saliva, gritted his teeth.

“… I can hear brother Derakines’s voice too. He wants me to join him, but I…”

He paused, incapable of going forward. Veckert nodded.

“Alright, Rishel. That’s enough.”

She tapped on the desk, taking notes with a pen on the scattered sheets.

“I have an offer for you.”

“… that is?”

Veckert crossed her hands under her chin, without losing eye contact.

“I’ve received the results of the full body examination Dr. Tey performed on you the day you were admitted. It took him a little too long to analyze the data, but now we have some certainties.”

Rishel gripped the desk with both of his hands, his pupils shrank, his muscles stiffened. His brain braced for the worst, with the visceral feeling of knowing what she was going to say. Veckert waited for the message to be relayed, before continuing.

“A third of your stomach’s tissue has been replaced by unclassified plant matter. You’ve got a seed germinating inside you, but its development is in a very early stage.”

Rishel gulped, looked down at his belly, his hand stretching around it, wrapping it in a sort of primal instinct of protection, self-preservation. Plant matter. Replacing his flesh, cell by cell, turning him into a host. First the inner tissues, then the muscles, the tendons, the bones, the skin, the tongue, the eyes, the teeth, his lungs, his heart, his brain. He gasped for air, his eyes wide open, incapable of accepting what he already knew, somehow. He had been infected. The how and the why wasn’t important, what was important was that he wasn’t human any longer. Plant matter. Those two words shattered his mind. How long? How long till…

“Rishel? Rishel! Come back! Listen to me, okay?”

He lifted his chin, gazed at the woman on the other side of the window. There wasn’t a shade of pity in her eyes. There wasn’t a shade of resignation. Hers was the stare of someone who fought through Hell and lived to tell the tale. And, as such, she spoke, with the calmness of a still lake under the moonlight.

“This is my offer: you help us as a test subject and allow our research team to retrieve samples from your flower. In return, we will administer you some experimental drugs to contain it and – possibly – restore your body to its previous state. Dr. Tey is working on a new type of nanomachine therapy too, which might ease some of your symptoms.”

Rishel pressed his fingers against the palms of his hands, almost cutting them with his nails.

“An offer? In your position, you could have your lapdogs vivisect me and call it a day! Why would you extend me an offer?”

Veckert crossed her hands under her chin again, squinting her eyes, following their reflections in his blue irises.

“I don’t need another corpse. I need someone with something to live for. You have a choice, Rishel. Make it matter.”

She stood up, reached for the switch on the wall.

“I’ll wait for your answer. Let me know when you are ready. If you want to die a flower, alone, in this silent room, like a martyr… I’m not stopping you. If you want to have a second chance, though… let me know, okay? Push that call button at any time and I’ll come.”

Then, she flicked the switch, causing the loudspeakers to disconnect, the window to turn into a double mirror again, insulating her from him and him from her. No sounds, no pictures, no communications with the outside. She felt relieved, somehow. Rishel couldn’t see her fall onto her chair, drawing a deep breath, completely exhausted. As she kept staring at the ceiling, with her adrenaline slowly draining from her fibers, a sound of steps made her turn towards the door. A man in a lab coat came out of it. Neck-length, white straight hair, blue eyes, pale complexion. Albino. He wore two earrings on his right earlobe, complementing a face that made him look younger than his twenty-eight years of age. He was carrying several printed sheets of paper, together with a modern tablet. Veckert waved her hand at the newcomer, sighing loudly at the same time.

“You couldn’t show up earlier, could you?”

“Was it that stressful?”

“Next time, you tell an inmate that they have a parasite flower growing inside their belly, Dan.”

Dr. Danael Tey nodded without adding a word, stared at the specular window of the containment room.

“Why are you giving him a choice?”

“Because I’m not a bastard, Dan. I know we need data, I know it, but…”

He chuckled, smiled at her.

“Everett would be proud of you, Veck.”

“He’d be proud of you too, Dan. Except, he’d hate your new hairdo and your earrings. Especially your earrings. Didn’t he scold you about them, once?”

“Once? More like seven times.”

Veckert laughed a little. Dr. Tey was the favorite pupil of her mentor, Everett Lyonell, but the old man couldn’t get around his personal tastes. St. Patrick SHIELD and non-conformance weren’t exactly going hand in hand, back then. He sat down close to her, moved through the pages open on his tablet.

“This acquaintance of yours, Lejl Kaleidos… I haven’t found anything wrong with her body, after I’ve inspected it thoroughly.”

I wish I could inspect it too, Veckert thought, before chastising herself for even considering that in the first place. Dr. Tey moved to the next page, sliding his slender fingers on the display.

“I mean, she has situs inversus and is functionally sterile, but, aside from that and some other minor anomalies – such as her pupils turning cat-like with no forewarning, I couldn’t identify any of the symptoms that affected other Dreamers. No plant tissue. No seeds either. You can tell her to relax, she won’t suddenly burst open into a bunch of vines and tentacles anytime soon. On the other hand, this Rygal Deshvawn…”

He turned the display so that Veckert could see it, showing a picture with clearly marked red arrows and circles, on top of a list of parameters, most of which marked in red too. Veckert’s eyes went wide open, as soon as her brain managed to elaborate on what she was reading. Her mouth almost fell agape.

“… in just two weeks?”

“In just two weeks, yes. The shock of the physical trauma might have sped up the development. But he hasn’t realized it yet, since the changes aren’t visible from the outside. He’s still the same boastful idiot. We’ve moved him to quarantine bay, though. This isn’t something we can play with.”

Veckert glanced at the results again, stared at them, lost in thought for several seconds. She touched the surface of the tablet, calling the page relative to Lai de’Malevich on screen. She massaged her chin, while comparing it with that of his partner in crime.

“How would you rate de’Malevich’s chances of survival?”

“Very high, provided we start treating him immediately. His flowers haven’t germinated yet and their roots haven’t broken through his stomach. He can be saved, if he wants it.”

Veckert turned to the now silent wall of the containment cell, stretching a little in the process.

“Ball’s in your court Rishel. I’ll wait for your answer, whatever it is.”

She took her jacket back from the chair, wore it with an elegant twist. Not too cold, not too warm. The perfect fit for all seasons. Then, she grabbed Dr. Tey’s arm, pulling it towards her.

“You look like someone who needs an ice cream, Dan. What about a short trip to the cafeteria?”

Dr. Tey cracked a smile, let himself be pulled by his colleague, before patting on her hair, making full use of her short stature.

“Only if you don’t start ranting about yet another one of your messed up dates, Veck. Or have you finally found a girl who can stand you longer than Geri did?”

“I’m working on it, okay? Things aren’t that bleak, it’s just that…”

“We said no ranting.”

“Deal. Then, ice cream and a soda for two, my treat!”

She walked away with him, leaving the room with a satisfied smirk on her face. She wondered what Rishel was thinking about, after hearing that last piece of dialogue with the good doctor. Switching off the loudspeakers only on her side might have been a low blow, but it was all that she needed to do to let him know about his current state from the mouth of a scientist and make it look like an accident. She would have come back after the ice cream break to switch it off again, pleading a honest mistake. What was important, was that Rishel could hear Dr. Tey’s breakdown.

She glanced one last time at the reflective windows of the cell.

Live and thrive or die and be deleted.

The decision was his and his alone.