What the Flesh Remembers 02
Sequencing: Anachronic
Cognitive Insights: Disabled
Primary Entities: Beshel Sarn | Feya | Ro’kaza
Wandering Entities: None detected
Verification Status: Confirmed
Halfway through the passage of stuttering lights inside the medipod, Feya thought, It must be near dawn. The clear thought slipped away and faded. Her body floated within the life-support chamber, surrounded by streaming data that meant nothing to her but had become familiar. In the moment, she remembered little beyond this—the here and now—her existence confined to glowing interfaces and the slow beat of artificial life.
Small surgical droids drifted through the fluid that cradled her, causing faint eddies. They tended to her, adjusting sinewed cabling that threaded through her tissue. Their pincers fused her vessels and circuits, the feeling like needles crawling under the skin. A dull, haunting ache clung to the emptiness where her limbs had been.
The sterile tang of antiseptic clung to the pocket of air at her mouth. Beneath it, a harsher taste surfaced: the singed edge of blistered skin and the copper tang of still-hot blood. Her eyelids quivered with brief spasms, then stilled. The chamber blurred out of existence.
She crawled through the fog, limbs pushing against the rough soil. An ashen mist glowed with its own faint light, throwing distorted shadows. In the distance, shapes moved, and their footfalls echoed in a skittering rhythm, phasing in and out.
The dull pulse of pain yanked her back. The sensation returned—a phantom itch in her legs. Her brain insisted they were still there, moving, twitching against the restraint. Lights flickered again as the drones adjusted her balance and administered a slow, controlled drip of sedatives.
Somewhere, far above, a diagnostic pulse hummed. Her eyelids opened again. She fought to stay awake, but the sudden warmth dragged her back into slumber.
Nearly two full arcs of trailing the path had led them here at last—a dark scar carved into the mountain's flank.
They advanced in precise silence. The space around her shrank. The ring tightened. Her pulse thundered in her ears as one of the creatures lunged—bladed forelimb slicing down.
A sharp pain exploded as a claw ripped through her flesh, the edge slicing cleanly through muscle and bone. The force sent her crashing to the ground. She lay there, still breathing. The creatures pressed closer, legs clicking like metal teeth.
For an instant, she glimpsed him through the fog—his face half-turned. His arms lowered, his gaze following the chaos as if he were watching something unfold in the distance. There was no urgency in his movements, only a calm observation. Feya's eyes locked onto his, her chest heaving, but the next instant, he was gone, swallowed by the mist.
Another sharp flicker of lights. Her chest jerked as the remaining muscles spasmed involuntarily. The life support systems adjusted, and for a moment, she thought she felt her legs again, the tingle of movement, the rush of adrenaline, but the moment passed, and then—nothing.
From the emptiness, voices spilled—muffled and quiet at first. They had been there before, distant murmurs at the edge of consciousness. Now, they were closer. One spoke in clipped tones, the other smoother, almost melodic.
One of them was Vatbipe. Feya could understand her. The second voice— clipped and grating—was human. Her mind recoiled from the sound, instinctively rejecting it.
“Dr. Tolka, both patients’ vitals have stabilized within normal limits. Cellular regeneration has initiated in response to the stimuli, and metabolic homeostasis has been confirmed. It’s been a long shift, and I need rest. Can you take over from here and inform the superintendent that I had to leave early?”
“Yes, Dr. Morva, I will do that. But before you go…” Dr. Tolka hesitated, her voice dropping to a quieter tone. “Please tell me. What do you think about all this?”
“What do you mean?” Morva asked, turning to face her.
Tolka glanced at the medical pods, then back at Morva. “The patients, the incident—none of it makes sense. I want to hear your thoughts, off the record.”
Morva turned her eyes toward the two medical pods, then inspected the one where Feya lay cocooned under life support. Her gaze lingered for a moment. “About which one?” she asked.
“Let’s start with the Vatbipe.” The human began cutting the data stream for the latest readings. “Nearly drained of all blood, yet here she is, somehow alive. This isn’t the worst I’ve seen your kind survive. We are not surprised by this.” She left the console in the far corner of the room and walked over to inspect the medical pod. Feya could feel her presence. It was the closest she had been to another creature in what seemed like an eternity.
Morva responded in a voice heavy with fatigue. “She is alive, yes, but barely. No voluntary movement, only sporadic neural activity—fragments of consciousness, at best. The fact that her system hasn’t collapsed is nothing short of a miracle. But the other one…” The voices grew faint again. They were walking away.
Morva leaned over the medical pod in the other corner of the laboratory, rubbing her hands together absently. “This Er’ax male. His central nervous system is extensively damaged, nonfunctional. His brain should have suffered complete failure by now. But, look.” She gestured toward the display.
“These readings,” Morva continued, “indicate ongoing activity—look at the delta rhythms, still fluctuating, and here, beta waves indicating potential consciousness. But notice the anomaly,” she pointed to a series of data points on the display. “This region near the hippocampal complex—some of these synaptic firings seem to terminate within the cortex, yet we cannot map their origins. It is as if the neural impulses are being projected into his brain from an external source.”
“Spinning on axes that belong to a different world,” Tolka said, more to herself than to Morva.
No response.
Tolka continued, glancing at the two patients lying still in their pods. “No one survives the resetstorm. Not outside the gates. So why these two? And now, they’re alive, right here. Don’t you wonder about that?”
Morva answered after a long pause. “Maybe we’ve misunderstood the resetstorms from the very beginning.” She glanced around, weighing the prudence of continuing, then pressed on. “Generations before us have grappled with the resetstorms, accepting them as chaotic tempests that erase the world. But perhaps they’re not random at all, but part of a more purposeful pattern—a metabolic cycle, cellular regeneration on a colossal scale.”
She leaned against the console, fingers tracing absent patterns on its surface. “A form of regeneration,” she continued. “Organisms undergo processes like molting and metamorphosis—shedding old layers to allow for new growth. Perhaps the station itself is alive in ways we don’t fully grasp, engaging in cyclical renewal to maintain equilibrium, to self-regulate.”
Tolka studied her closely, contemplating what she had just heard. “The Terminus isn’t alive. Resetstorms aren’t natural—they are system resets, like a machine purging corrupted data. It is a defragmentation protocol, not a creature shedding its skin.”
Morva met her gaze steadily. “But consider that complex systems, even artificial ones, can exhibit emergent behaviors: self-repairing polymers, adaptive algorithms.”
“And where do the two survivors fit into this theory?” Tolka retorted.
“Maybe they didn’t fight against the storm’s changes,” Morva said, her voice uncertain. “Somehow, they… adapted to them, became part of whatever came next.” She blinked slowly, her gaze drifting to Feya’s pod. “There may be other explanations,” she continued, placing her hand gently on the glass, “but whether we can drag them out of these bodies…” Her voice trailed off as she looked at Feya’s still face behind the window. “I hope she will wake one day. Not now—but she is not done yet.”
“What about the male? Are you writing him off?” Tolka asked.
“I have never seen anything like this. For all we know, the storm did something to him that we cannot measure.” Morva paused again, glancing back at the patients. “That does not help in predicting his chances.”
Tolka rubbed her chin. “They want to move him out of critical care. Take him somewhere else. No specifics were given.”
“I saw,” Morva muttered, almost to herself.
A sharp object pressed against Feya’s back, and the scent of burning circuitry and ozone filled her nose. The memory rushed back
The drones hummed softly around her, unaware of the folding nightmares playing out behind the closed eyelids. Her breathing slowed, and the chamber’s temperature cooled. Something imperceptible shifted, a faint tremor running through the air, somewhere far beyond her awareness but just outside the glass. The two voices fell abruptly silent.
Feya drifted away so far that she did not hear the door explode open. The gunfire was silent to her, just a muted strobe behind her closed eyelids as bullets cracked through the medics’ skulls, blood arcing across sterile surfaces. Bodies hit the ground, collapsing like emptied sacks without a sound in her mind.
A man stepped over the bodies without looking down, with no more concern than if it were debris.
“Agent Sarn, the facility is secure,” came cold and detached voice.
“Prepare the pods for transport.”
[TO BE CONTINUED]
