Standing up from her crouched position, her eyes darted back and forth as she read the situation.
Things were in the air, all around her.
It looked like trails of black dust, weightless yet floating with some form and purpose, flocking together in various ways.
> Analysis: unidentified airborne lifeform detected
- insectoid in scale
- gather sample for further analysis
They were smaller than the smallest flying insect, as small as dust particles.
She swept through a nearby strand of this black dust with her hand. The swarming creatures reacted by evading her. She managed to grab a handful on her second attempt. She placed her hand over her mouth and sucked in, swallowing as many creatures as possible.
> Analysis: contagion detected
- design optimized for payload delivery
- violation of AUM charter
- out of scope biological weapon deployment
- compiling [2] sources from long-term archives
- generating report...(4s)
- complete
The scan result that came out of these creatures was disturbing. They were triangular and had a sharp appendage on the bottom. Her synthesizers could not place this anywhere in natural evolution. It was too different.
> break analysis result
- brennar belt genocide [last updated 3163 years ago]
- payload delivery through synthetic insects
- genetic targeting of young adults
- ~71,848,234 direct casualties
She had seen such weapons before. Swarms that swept through a population much more comprehensively than any bomb. Swarms that could self-replicate and target individuals, individually. Memories of horrid scenes of death and decay resurfaced, there were corpses as far as the eye could see. She had been there all those years ago.
Snapping back to the current epoch, she could tell this wasn’t the exact match. Humanity adapted to be more resistant to such contagions through accelerated evolution. The same weapon from millennia ago wouldn't have an effect on the majority of the human populations in the current epoch. The only similarity was the delivery method.
> Analysis: insects display sensitivity to heat
- a target vector?
Liera considered. She could test something here.
> Sineul: mimicking life signs
- locking all vents
- increasing internal temperature to mimic human average
- internal fluid pump set to mimic blood circulation
The reaction from the swarm surrounding her was immediate. Every single insect in the vicinity dashed straight for her. In less than 10 seconds, she was nearly covered with them.
> Analysis: insects display aggressive interest in living things
- displays a strong impulse to pierce and burrow
She reverted to her default state. The creatures that attached themselves to her fell off, limp and useless. Every insect tried to burrow into her skin, using their appendage as a tool to cut their way inside. Every creature was made from the contagion itself. Her synthesizers couldn’t classify its building blocks. She knew Aegis warned her about this. This parasite took its time killing its targets. A weapon should kill way faster. This was something else.
> Sineul Recommendation: prioritize soul preservation
Liera started walking towards the district wall looming above the buildings.
A sudden movement caught her attention, her eyes automatically tracked the shape as she passed an alleyway. She turned around to see nothing.
> Scanning....
- no life signs detected
She expected to see a person as she turned the corner to where the movement vanished into. What she saw made her pause.
It was small. Standing at less than half her height was a child.
It was a girl, aged somewhere between 7 and 10. She was horribly disfigured as if someone beat her to a pulp with a blunt weapon. The one eye that still clung to the socket stared at nothing as one corner of her mouth drooled black, viscous liquid.
Liera's mind exploded with questions. Did her scanner lead her to a faulty judgment? It never failed her before. She ran it again as she knelt to face the child that took no notice of her presence.
> Scanning...
- no life signs detected
There it was again. She looked kindly towards the child.
"Can you see me?" she voiced in the softest tone she could. "I can help you"
The girl made a sudden dash towards her. Liera noticed her throat movements, she tried to speak, trying to say something but the only thing that came out was a pitiful groan. Her windpipe was broken with several bruises across her neck. Liera grabbed the child to inspect the damage. The girl tried her best to resist against her machine strength.
> Analysis: heavy blunt force trauma to the neck
- subject is dead (78% confidence)
But the subject was very clearly moving. Liera had seen this before, but they couldn't speak. This girl still had a lot of sentience for something that was supposedly, dead. That attempt to speak required a functioning brain.
Which she still had.
Her brain was intact and it was receiving oxygen from some other means that didn't involve the respiratory system. Liera set her down. The girl waddled away, dragging her twisted feet along the asphalt as if she was never interrupted.
It was the exact behavior that she observed with those insects. It was the same total disinterest in non-living things. Liera could run the same experiment here. She could mimic life signs to see this girl's reaction. She decided against it. It felt wrong to provoke this pitiful dead thing. Instead, she followed her, as her path also led towards the wall.
The girl stopped every now and then, slowly turning her head towards the next direction. This happened every 37 seconds like clockwork. after about two minutes of wandering, she reached her destination. It was a corpse of an adult. Liera didn't need a scan for this one. The body was in a bad state. It was fabric, bones, hair and held together with black tar. All of the biomass that once made a person had turned to a goo-like substance except for some skin tissue. The black tar pooling around the body had various viscosities, some larger shapes that resembled muscles still clung to the bones. The dead child stood idly next to the corpse, trying to speak words that never came.
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> Scanning…
- no life signs detected
- brain interface chip detected
It was embedded in the thick tar next to the skull. Liera picked it up. Her fingerprints adjusted internally to read the chip. She extracted all of the data in milliseconds. It didn’t contain much. The last thought streams were recorded in the cache and they indicated a state of heightened emotion. Liera synthesized the experience from it and swept through it.
”meime”
She turned around to see the small child, trying to catch her breath. The language was different from the standard L1. It was some variant of L4 with a Herpatuan dialect.
She knelt in front of the child. Her hands reached the pale face hidden under the hood of a thick windbreaker. Waves of sorrow passed through her as her eyes blurred with tears. Her daughter was dying.
“We’re safe here,” She whispered, her voice breaking as her trembling hands caressed the dying child’s face. It pained her greatly to see the blood shot eyes. Black liquid flowed from her nostrils and coughed, grabbing her chest with both her hands.
“It hurts…” the child whined as she furiously wiped the tar off her precious face. She knew this was hopeless. There was a thick trail of dried blood trailing down to her inner garments from the side of her neck. Her daughter had been unlucky. Somehow, during their escape from the quarantine zone, a parasite had burrowed into her neck. It was already too late when they noticed it.
She held her daughter, having nothing to say to her as the words choked in her throat. It wouldn’t take long for her precious child to turn into an abomination. She couldn’t let this happen. She held the plasma cutter to the back of her daughter’s head as she hugged her for the last time.
This went on for a lot longer than Liera anticipated. She spent every second she could hugging her child before her various complaints about pain and discomfort stopped making sense. Her words became meaningless and repetitive. Soon afterwards, it was just her last words on repeat, telling her how much the parasite hurt her in broken sobs and wails. Unable to bear it any further, she squeezed the trigger.
The gun was aimed at herself. Abomination or no, she couldn’t bring herself to kill her own child. Blinding pain erupted from the side of her head as she fell to the ground. She had missed the shot. The plasma beam grazed her brain just enough to paralyze her. She watched helplessly as her daughter warped into something she couldn’t recognize as the parasite ate more of her. Her words turned into noise and she bounced through various emotions.
At one point in this ordeal, her daughter bit her thigh as hard as her small mouth could muster. She watched, frozen in horror as small crawling insects erupted from her mouth, followed by thick streams of tar. The first parasite that landed on the open wound immediately burrowed into her. She felt every bit of the painful path it cut through her body towards her head. She tried her hardest to grab the plasma cutter again, to end herself but her fingers didn’t do what she wanted them to.
It took a long time for her to die, her mind screaming all the way into the void until the very last nanosecond and her mind screamed even further, a cruel mimicry of her own pain echoed by the parasite.
Liera finished the synthesized experience. There was no more information to gather from it. Subjectively, it took an agonizing 2 hours for the woman. For Liera, only 1.76s had elapsed.
What she experienced didn’t explain how the child ended up beaten, She concluded it must’ve been the work of someone else.
Besides the harrowing fate of the pair, she gathered peripheral information from the chip. It painted a picture of the catastrophe the way this woman experienced it. It was just as Aegis said in the recording she left. There was a military blockade of the wall. Rhea administration tried to contain the spread to the central block where the parasites were first detected.
This woman had an entirely new theory, informed from different sources. She believed this was an act of terrorism. She believed some fanatic unleashed a final empire era swarm weapon on the population.
The administration and the military referred to the parasite as 'Vervid'. A multi-stage life form of unknown origin. The insect was its larval stage. Liera doubted this terrorism angle. No mere fanatic could craft an entirely new life form. Even in the golden age of the final empire such feats required controlled knowledge and expensive infrastructure.
The child idling at the remains of her mother swayed every now and then, responding erratically to vague stimuli. Liera considered ending her. She could do it very easily. There wasn’t much else to break and she could vaporize her entire head. She could complete what her mother didn’t have the courage to do.
> Sineul recommendation: do not engage
- subject is deceased
- subject is the only sample of its kind
She grabbed the child.
> Override
In one swift motion, she crushed the back of her head. The body went limp and her mouth opened, spilling tar from every orifice. She noticed gray balls rolling out with the tar that came out thicker with the last spasm of the body.
Suddenly the vervid swarm around her shifted. All black trails rippled in frenzied patterns. Something grumbled in the distance. Liera increased the scanner to its maximum effective range.
> Scanning...
> Analysis: unidentified object 30m
- multiple movement signatures
> Sineul Recommendation: do not engage
- unknown target
- gather more information
- contagion swarms are uninterested in humans without life signs
- use the inherent invisibility advantage
Liera placed the child next to her mother and paced a considerable amount of distance away from their position.
As she kept her eyes on the street, the swarm increased; more trails converged from other directions.
A huge shape emerged. It was as large as a building and it came uncannily quiet.
A sphere made from the tar.
This sphere had wrinkles that shifted and resonated with the vervid swarm around it. She couldn’t detect any means of propulsion. It was just a sphere floating between buildings, steering itself to her former location.
A group of people emerged from an alleyway. She counted eight adult males, three females and five small children. They were skeletal, their flesh already blackened with tar. The sphere dashed to their location in a split second at uncanny speed, parting the gathering vervid swarm with its movement.
It lowered itself upon the crowd and the wrinkles changed into a pattern that rippled from the bottom towards the top. Moments later, it slowly raised itself off the ground. The crowd was no more. Charred bones and ashes of clothing lay in a pile.
The sphere had claimed their tar for itself.
It hovered above the mother and child. It took less than a second to absorb their remains. When it was done, it left a heap of their smoking bones and ashes. Liera made a quick decision.
> Scanning…
> Analysis: material absorption
- vervid construct is repurposing converted biomass
- internals comprise of intricate strcutures and dense mechanisms
- generates energy through gyroscopic rotations among layers
The sphere stopped abruptly and reversed its course. It detected her presence from the scanner pulse.
She walked out from her position.
Somehow, this sphere had detected her presence from the scanner pulse. Her scanner was basically a low power secondary shield that she could extend at various distances from her body emitters. The sphere had noticed such negligible amount of energy. That in itself was useful information.
> Analysis: L-98 battle-frame out of range
- base frame combat training stopped at 287645 steps
- body frame [knee_r] suboptimal
> Sineul Recommendation: use beam emitter
- internal structure is complex, implying high criticality
Liera raised her right arm with her hand flattened and her fingers straightened. She aimed that vertical line at the sphere using her left hand to stabilize her firing hand on the elbow. Her pupils dilated as she locked onto the target.
> Sineul: beam emitter primed
- hand emitters calibrated…(0.4s)
- cooling vents opened
- estimated energy cost: 3%
The Klin shield around her hand thickened as billions of orange dots shifted towards her finger tips. The vent lines on her upper body glowed yellow from her ramped-up field generator.
She started cutting.
Her shield violently extended from her hand towards the sphere in a straight line. The Klin beam was the force equivalent of throwing a tungsten rod near speed of light. There was no sound of impact; it obliterated anything that it came into contact with. The effects were instant as it atomized all matter in its path. It perfectly lived up to the name given to it in the golden era when Klin weapons were called 'unmakers'.
The vervid swarm shifted as thousands of insects turned to vapor, disrupting their swarm communication patterns. The sphere shifted, frenzied patterns rippled on its surface back and forth from the hole that reached all the way to its center.