#05 M.H.U.D (MUTAGENIC HUMANOID UNDERGROUND DWELLERS)
Roof of the Palmer House Hotel
Downtown Callisto City (Callisto, Jupiter IV)
Present day
“Weren’t you afraid of getting in trouble with the Bureau dorks?” Bill Murray asked.
“Cops or Military Police don’t scare us, you know!” Ali replied as she drew her .50, and spun it like a space cowboy.
“I see…” the actor reacted by replacing the safety that had popped off. “I too made fun of the MP during my service.”
I jumped into my sapiens’ arms. With a flick of my paw, I activated her wrist computer to check the time. We had been stuck in the water tank for twelve hours. The stench of sweat and grease—mixed with pot, KFC and boredom—gave birth to a cough-inducing scent loaded with carbon dioxide.
“You’re confusing real life with Stripes…” I said to our guest as Ali opened the door to let in a draft.
“Anyway, have you reached the reporter? Damn. I’d like to play a news correspondent someday.”
“You sure will,” Ali declared.
“I’d love to be in a movie,” I intoned, switching places with my partner. It was her turn to watch the roof of the building across the street.
“Can’t you help Lee with his career, Bill?” she joked.
Bill Murray pondered. “A film where I’m a journalist. And where there would be a hairball, too. I’ll ask Ramis—but go ahead with your story, Ali. Please.”
“Can you keep telling it while on the watch, partner?”
“I’m multitasking, grumpy groundhog.”
I began my grooming. “You can indeed eat in your sleep. But that’s about it.”
Deep Loop District
Callisto City (Callisto, Jupiter IV)
A month ago
“You’re late,” grumbled Miss Roger, the reporter we had met hours before. She was standing against a railing surrounding one of the many dangerous sinkholes in Callisto City’s industrial zone.
Deep mines had been dug in the chondrite crust during the colonization. Martian engineers injected an immense quantity of iron oxides brought from the main belt into the moon’s heart. Coupled with giant turbines consuming a lot of power, the “filling” of Jupiter IV had endowed it with a substantial gravitational force almost similar to Earth. Thus, the satellite had been able to acquire an atmosphere.
“Ali is used to long showers,” explained Zéphyr as we hopped off a taxicab. “What does our evening look like?”
“Gloomy and windy,” replied the Freak as she pulled up the zipper of her yellow jumpsuit to her chin.
The walls of the narrow chasm were covered with sticky algae, oozing a disgusting red liquid. From the top to the unfathomable depths, the curiously inverted edifice had no apparent entrance and looked more like the gaping throat of a titanic cosmic entity.
“Should we really go down?” I asked, searching with the tip of my foot for the first rungs of a ladder in the silt surrounding the edge.
“Those are magnetic walls leading to the safety hatch a little further down,” Zéphyr replied. “Do you have boots, June?”
She nodded.
“I don’t!” I uttered. I was still wearing my gym shorts and hoodie. “Besides, the flamethrower wouldn’t have been a luxury now!”
“I’ll carry you on my back,” Zéphyr said, ignoring my remark.
Not very reassured, the journalist took the first step. Her magnetic sole fixed, she found herself perpendicular to the wall, before escaping a sigh of relief.
Our slow progress required us to clear the moss mats and the rows of slimy lichen with the tip of our feet. Clinging to my cyborg’s neck, I tried to think of more pleasant moments. Like our gaming nights, or The Land Before Time—no, wait. That’s the one where the little dinosaur’s mother dies, right? Ouch.
Unfortunately, walls covered with filth weren’t the only danger. Not being a ‘borg with superhuman faculties, the Freak struggled against the nauseating winds rising from the depths. Several times, she had to turn around to absorb the gusts. It was as if the iron monster residing at the planet’s heart snored in its sleep.
“You okay, September?” I asked.
“Of course!” she cried out to us. “I—”
Her last unsteady step went through a barrier of vegetation, and she disappeared behind it. My girlfriend leaped forward in reflex, and we both tumbled headlong into the seeping gorge.
A second later, I was caught by the collar by the giant mouse, which pulled us through the wall. The next thing we knew, we were on top of each other in a dark, sticky stairwell.
“My—my apologies…” the Freak stammered as she awkwardly straightened up before massaging her shoulders.
“Interesting. We seem to have fallen through the seaweed covering that crack,” Zéphyr explained.
“This is indeed really interesting…” I coughed. “...not.”
While massaging my bruised throat, I examined the large strain in the steel wall. It didn’t look accidental, nor natural.
“Let’s go down,” the reporter replied, probing with her freshly lit flashlight the clawed footprints leading into the abyss. “We’re in the old filling system. Converted into sewers.”
“Ugh! I hate sewers… There’re always clowns roaming around…”
With my Desert Eagle on alert, I summoned enough courage to conduct the group down a grimy concrete stairwell.
During this endless descent, several door remnants appeared along the walls. None of them yielded to my shoulder thrusts. The humidity had attacked the hinges and sealed the place; forcing us to continue deeper into the colonial complex. The same humidity made my cyborg’s holosuit sizzle.
“The wireless signal wanes too,” she whispered to me when the reporter was away.
The final spiral steps led to immense plexiglass doors slowly collapsing under their own weight. Behind them, a vast round room as large as the Symphony Center’s Orchestra Hall was bathed in halos of reddish glow emanating from huge skylights dotting the walls. They must have been invisible from the outside because of the lichen.
“Check this out. Turbines…” explained the Freak, hastening her pace. “Abandoned for at least 40 years.”
The entirety of the place was indeed occupied by steel engines climbing into the heights. These dozens of magnetic pillars were as wide as the Kitty.
“If the area has been neglected for decades, why is there a Macintosh IIcx on this desk?” asked Zéphyr. She diverged to a workbench barely concealed under a tarp.
“Because someone’s hiding here,” I concluded, revealing a second computer and a handset. “There are claw marks on the modem. Do you think the Radio Freaks are having LAN parties?”
“The beasts aren’t the ones playing with the latest electronic equipment on the market. Come and see,” replied the Freak-mouse. Her voice got lost in its own echo.
Zéphyr and I walked around a weathered turbine to find a makeshift camp. Tents and tarps clumsily concealed a ransacked field lab. On most of the metal crates stored against a water recycler, appeared a curious symbol with three helixes.
“Mendel Genomics…” Zéphyr whispered, tapping the same symbol on a moisture-curled notepad. “Cronian corpos.”
“Knowing their core business, they should be linked to the mutants,” the Freak reacted, pointing her flashlight at some blood trails.
From the blue halo, she stumbled upon a pile of lifeless bodies. Still wearing their white lab suits and gas masks, the Mendel’s envoys have been gruesomely chopped up.
“Captain Bosch,” I read on an identity card. I had to hold my nose because of the rotting smell. “More like Captain Butchered.”
“The Mendel didn’t just send the Geek Squad…” the Freak responded, searching the bodies. Behind one of them, she found a half-eaten electric club. “But mercs or a security team too.”
Zéphyr snatched the ID from my fingers. “It’s definitely a monitoring station. The computers and servers correlate the energy spike detected in your data, June. These people wanted to hide their monkey business in the middle of the filling turbines. They certainly fell victim to the monsters. But, did they really create them? We—”
“Mendel Genomics specializes in genetic manipulation,” the Freak interjected, trying to turn on a Mac. “Shoot! They’re fried. We need to get the main data-core to find out more. We’ve got a scoop!”
Zéphyr also searched the tables and tents but uncovered no servers. “This is odd. It had to be someplace.”
“Can’t the data be directly sent through the intraweb?” I asked before remembering Zéphyr losing the wireless signal minutes ago.
“Impossible,” she confirmed. “There is too much concrete. The only solution would be to—”
“Fuck!” I had toppled forward when my foot got caught on something. A huge cable hidden under a tarp. “What’s this?”
“Some sort of intraweb line. Let’s follow it!” Zéphyr proposed.
The exploration continued in the greatest silence. Weapon still in hand, I progressed up the trail to the other end of the room, where a corridor led off. The access to the latter had been… nibbled away.
“How many mutagenic underground dwellers are roaming around here, October?” I asked the reporter who crouched to remove a tooth stuck in a leaking lead pipe.
“There are paths in every direction…” she replied, glancing at the footprints.
“The answer you’re probably looking for is ‘a lot’,” my cyber-girlfriend went on, jumping across the water.
On the other side of the tunnel, she started tightrope walking on a narrow gas pipe to avoid stepping in the water.
I grunted halfway down the gray torrent where a silver trickle with a strong smell of hairspray floated. “Ew! What are we wading in?”
“Whatever the people of Callisto can’t digest,” the Freak replied.
“This is the worst birthday ever, Z…” I complained as I took the lead on the pipe.
We arrived after a long mountaineering to a sluice gate. On the other side, its concrete supports barely stuck out of a deep moat circling around an anarchic hill occupying the center of another wide circular hall.
Connected to the cable coming out of the polluted water—and various others leading to the heights—a black monolithic as tall as a spaceport vending machine occupied the summit of Mount Garbage. Filth covered it almost completely. This block of steel, rusted in places, appeared to be the receptacle of the nose-itching silvery liquid trickling from an opening at least a hundred meters above us.
I finally broke the silence at the bottom of the rickety stairs leading to the ominous fridge: “What the fuck is this?”
“The data-core, no?” the Freak reacted, climbing the first steps covered with StarMart plastic bags. “Connected to the city.”
Once on the top, we closely inspected our discovery. After clearing the silvery tinted sediment, a small spherical glass appeared to be embedded on the nearest side. Inside, we discovered a tiny ball of pink flesh floating in a liquid with a curious resinous aspect.
The never-born had no eyes. We could discern every blood vessel and cartilage of this miserable cadaverous body. His mouth was a simple slit sewn around the blackened mouthpiece of an artificial respirator. From there, a continuous stream of red froths escaped, and his cracked chest threatened to break at each breath. Wires also provided a connection to the monolith through a plastic placenta fixed at the back of the globe.
“That’s a gnarly Freak-bubble gum…” I commented.
The reporter scoffed. “Not every odd-looking creature is a Freak, bounty hunter…”
I felt my cyber-girlfriend’s hand gripping my arm. “By—by the rings of Saturn!” she stuttered, petrified. “This is a Monsutā!”
