Midnight Metropolis: Chapter Thirteen (4/4)
BioPulse X5
A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀
New chapters posted every Friday! Scroll to the bottom for content warnings.
Tattie flexed her fist, forcing more blood into her palm. She advanced towards Autumn’s mustachioed companion but Brax blocked her path.
“He could be useful,” he said.
There was too much white showing in Tattie’s eyes, drowning her pupils to pinpricks. “How so?”
“We never did manage to lay our hands on a floor plan for this place. It would save time wandering the corridors if we took a guide with us.”
“I’m not helping you freaks,” the researcher managed. “You killed Autumn.”
He’s not being brave. Not really. He’s terrified of losing his job. If the N.E.X. terminate someone for gross misconduct, they’re rewarded with an all-expenses paid trip to Husk Central.
“Autumn’s not dead,” Ginx said. “She’s just taking a little hemo nap.”
The man’s mouth opened and closed, his chin quivering like a dancing jelly. He seemed both amazed and utterly horrified that the repulsive Ginx-creature could speak.
Ask the little research muppet what his name is. Pretend you’re not a threat.
Ginx held back a sigh. “What’s your name?”
“Malcolm.” The man seemed ashamed of himself for speaking his name out loud. He inclined his head slightly, his eyes unfocused.
“No one will know you helped us, Malcolm,” Ginx said. “Show us where your research facility is. Take us to the place where the big brain computer lives, and my associate will dose you as soon as we’re in. You’ll go to sleep just like Autumn, and when your N.E.X. overlords find you, you can tell them you were attacked. Swear to them you don’t remember anything. You look like a trustworthy kind of nerd; they’ll believe you.”
Malcolm stood straighter. He cleared his throat, producing a loose, phlegmy noise.
“The brain computer? Do you mean the BioPulse X5?”
“Is the BioPulse X5 an ancient relic stored in an underground lab?” Tattie asked.
Brax had found a length of gauze in a scantily stocked employee’s aid kit. The seer held her freely bleeding hand out to the side, stiff and impatient as he carefully wrapped the fraying material around it. When he was done, she snatched her hand away.
Malcolm nodded slowly. “I suppose you could call it a relic. It’s actually an extremely sophisticated piece of equipment, revolutionary in its time—”
He stopped when Tattie glared at him.
“I don’t care how sophisticated the equipment is. I just want you to take us to the bloody thing.”
The fabled underground research facility was located through four further corridors, two doors, and a long flight of cast iron stairs. Ginx would have opted for the elevator. It was a sonic version she’d never seen before, powered by an adaptive series of deep blast soundwaves designed to shoot the cab through a network of chrome tubes that dissected the building like interlacing veins—but Tattie insisted she felt safer using the stairs. Ginx let it go. She was letting it all go tonight. Anything to get her to her real goal, which was snatching Toni and immediately ejecting from the planet.
The computer suite, as their new friend Malcolm insisted on calling it, was through the last door at the end of the final corridor. The N.E.X. buried their secrets deep.
“And here we are,” he announced with a tremor in his voice. He held a thumb to the security plate, then stepped back and pressed himself against a wall.
The overly eager giantess exploded into life against the oily blue corridor.
Have you rinsed your teeth today? Happy smiles, happy lives!
“Is there a way to shut her up?” Tattie asked Malcolm.
He shook his head.
“Then our time together is at an end.”
Ginx wondered if he would start whimpering again.
“But you won’t hurt me,” he said. “You promised, right?”
“That depends,” Brax said. Malcolm startled as though he’d forgotten Tattie’s more softly spoken other half was there. “Are we going to find any nasty surprises through that door? Any security cameras, spy drones? More researchers?”
“Not that I know of,” Malcolm said. Tattie took a step towards him and he held his hands up, fumbling for better words. “There shouldn’t be anyone else here,” he said. “Autumn and I were the only researchers who signed in tonight. The support staff are all at home, and the husks have disappeared Mervaroid-knows-where. The only security down here is the fingerprint scanner. The X5 might reject you, but I assume you know about the—”
“The X5 might reject us?” Tattie said. “I think you’d better explain yourself, Malcolm.”
Malcolm looked as though he wanted to crawl right out of his skin. “The BioPulse X5 is a hemo-fusion device. I told you it was sophisticated; so sophisticated, it autonomously decides who can and can’t operate it using a refined algorithm of its own design.”
“What does that even mean?”
Now, Malcolm appeared to be trying his best to sink through the ground and evaporate into the austere floor plates. “I think it either likes you or it doesn’t.”
She’s about to pop.
Ginx gave Tattie a firm calm-down-crazypants look before commanding Malcolm’s attention. “Does the X5 like you?”
“No.” Malcolm’s voice was so low and reedy, Ginx had to strain to catch it. “The X5 has never accepted me. Autumn was one of the only researchers—”
“Bloody great,” Tattie roared.
Brax massaged his temples. “So if this computer decides it doesn’t like any of us, we’re basically fucked.”
Just get us inside. I’ll make this old relic squeal.
“We can’t give up now,” Ginx said. “We haven’t even tried yet.”
Tattie nodded, reaching for Brax’s hand and squeezing it. “When you’re right, you’re right, Ginx.”
She glanced at Brax, checking he was on board before dropping his hand and reaching for Malcolm. Fresh hemo had escaped the edges of the gauze wrapping her palm.
“You promised not to hurt me,” Malcolm said. “You promised—”
He fell the moment Tattie’s bleeding hand brushed his cheek, eyes wet and blank, body slack as a severed marionette. Ginx wasn’t sure why, but imagining deadweight-Malcolm smashing against the floor plates made her pause. She urged her pliant mouth-splits apart, ejected a tentacle, and wrapped it around Malcolm’s body before his face met metal.
“I would have caught him,” Tattie protested.
Yeah, right.
Ginx lowered the sleeping researcher to the floor and rolled him out of her suckered grip with a soft popping sound. When he came to a slow stop against the wall, the giantess blared above him, sterile and horribly pristine against the rain-slick blue.
Your work is valued. We are the N.E.X., and we appreciate you.
Brax gave the gurning vision a surly salute as Tattie pushed open the door to the computer suite.
A river of cables greeted them, layered along the walls and running across the ceiling of a room that stretched in front of them like the claustrophobic length of a tram car, dimly lit by stuttering neon spots and a forest of green computer screens. There were computer terminals along both walls, each a bulbous-screened behemoth equipped with a control glove and a hemo port. They seemed arranged in worship before their master, a colossal white and silver god looming at the back of the room. There was no question that this was the BioPulse X5.
They crept towards it in silence, each oddly humbled in this technological chapel. The air was alive with a thrumming power that radiated humid and stale from the multiple lengths of cable. Ginx reached for the daemon. She was surprised it had no comment to make, and she wanted to know its thoughts about the X5, but even her chatty, tentacled companion had lapsed into a respectful hush.
The X5 was easily seven feet high—a bank of keyboards, touchpads, and holo-portals that stretched from wall to wall. Hanging at its pinnacle like an angular face was a monitor bigger than a Bhume Valley viewscreen. It stared with steely benevolence at an operator’s chair the size and shape of a throne. Ginx followed the chair’s bulbous, black leather lines, then locked eyes with a gaping, fleshless skull. It was a chrome helmet, protruding from the backrest on an arching nest of fat black cables.
“I’m assuming that’s where I have to stick my head,” Tattie said. She reached to touch the skull-helmet but pulled away before her fingers could graze the icy metal.
“Why would you assume that?” Ginx said. “I’m the daemon host, I should do it."
“And I’m the sodding Arcanoforge, as people insist on reminding me. Who do you think the X5’s going to like more? A meat puppet with a daemon wedged under her rib cage, or a magickally infused uber witch?”
The daemon roused, flushing Ginx’s skin with heat and lifting the small hairs on the backs of her arms. It was excited.
The Arcanoforge. Of course. That’s why I sensed her power; it emanates from her flesh in foul, malodorous waves.
“What’s an Arcanoforge?” Ginx asked.
“I didn’t cover it with magickally infused uber witch?” Tattie shifted where she stood, placing one hand on her hip in a gesture that appeared both awkward and overly confident.
She didn’t mean to let that slip. Her true identity was a nasty little secret. So secret, even I couldn’t prise it out. See how her fingers are fidgeting? She’s embarrassed and annoyed with herself. It’s delicious.
Brax looped an arm around Tattie’s shoulders. He tried to pull her closer to him but she remained rigid and unyielding.
“If Tattie strikes out, you take a shot,” he told Ginx. “We have three chances to access the X5. Hopefully, it likes one of us.”
They began to study the operator’s chair and the X5 terminal, searching for a likely place to insert Verna’s antiquated diskette while Ginx watched in sullen silence.
Turn to your left. There’s a metallic unit on the wall, a supply cabinet.
Ginx glanced towards the cable-strewn wall. The daemon was right as usual. A discreet metal cabinet was screwed to the brick, reflecting dull green light from the computer screen blinking below it.
Of course I’m right. There’s a piece of equipment inside that can help Toni. It looks like a large winged corkscrew with a long needle at the centre. Go grab it.
Ginx turned away so she could whisper into her hand undetected. “How will it help Toni?”
The N.E.X. researchers call it a nano drain. It’s what they use when they dehusk people.
Tattie and Brax still had their backs turned to her, busy with their tentative prodding and probing of the BioPulse X5. Ginx crept across the room and slid the cabinet doors apart. She found what she was looking for hanging from a hook inside, a thick steel device with two curved arms and a long stabbing tongue. She slipped it into the back pocket of her scratchy husk trousers.
“You could have told me about this before,” she whispered.
I never kept anything from you, Ginx. Never think that. I didn’t know they stored nano drains here. I had assumed all dehusking was completed at the Voidspire. I might be able to read minds, but I can’t see through walls. Not yet.
“But you could see inside the supply cabinet?”
Things like that become easier the closer to them I am.
Ginx glared at the X5, serene and arrogant as an alien deity. “I didn’t need the data on that ugly computer. You encouraged me to find it for no bloody reason.”
And if that nano drain hadn’t been here, or had been locked away in another part of the building, that data would have been all we had. I was hoping there might be information enough to construct our own drain, or intelligence on some other means to deliver Toni from her nano-infused bonds. I am here for you, Ginx. I’m on your side, always.
Ginx would have argued further, but Tattie and Brax were finally ready to attempt communication with the X5.
“What are you doing over there, Ginx?” Tattie said. “You can whisper with your daemon later, I’m about to jack in.”
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