“Storm-child. Arise.”
Waking up from the psychic command wasn’t the same instantaneous process as being put to sleep. It took a few seconds, though it was faster and more painless than just about any morning I’d ever had. I was aware enough to know what had happened, to know to struggle. Not that it did anything. My hands were bound firmly behind my back, and my feet were secured to the legs of a sturdy wooden chair.
The Woman in White stood before me in all her finery, reikverratr mask on her face, clad in her dress and hood, arms behind her back in a formal at-ease posture. She looked down at me as though I were an interesting bug in a well-maintained glass terrarium.
The backdrop to my captivity was hauntingly familiar. A dark basement room stuffed to the gills with scientific apparatus, chemistry equipment, caged experimental animals, random electronics. The Woman in White’s head was within inches of the low ceiling, though she seemed remarkably unbothered.
I already knew where I was. But my conscious mind refused to believe it.
“You’ll be happy to know that the awakening phrase is just as effective as the shut-down phrase,” said the Woman in White. Though her voice was still the same buzzing, horrible distortion, her tone was oddly… deferential.
“Of course it worked, I set the neurological keys myself. Really, you need to be more trusting.”
The moment I heard that oddly accented voice from over my shoulder, it was like the bottom had fallen out of my stomach and my heart was about to explode. I knew that voice. It was the other voice I’d heard in the very beginning, before I’d even come to Selene, just after first being awakened in this new world. It had the same pseudo-Slavic accent I’d heard on the recording machine in Nemesis’s underground lab, promising her knowledge and material to destroy the Halflance family once and for all. And I realized, hearing it in person, fully conscious and without the distortion of a primitive audio recording, that I’d heard it somewhere else too. And as I looked past the Woman in White, I realized that I’d heard that same voice in this very same place.
“No,” I said. “No, no, no, not you. What are you doing here?”
“Ah, Emma, you are awake,” she said. The source of the voice circled around, and even as she came into my field of view I refused to believe it. “It’s an odd question to be asking, though. You know perfectly well what I’m doing in my own lab!”
Dr. Tersine grinned manically, stalking around me as though I were a sensitive piece of equipment that she might disturb with sudden movements. She looked about the same as she had the last time I’d seen her, before being distracted by Alonhall’s discovery of the fifth murder victim: a small, slightly hunched, rail-thin figure with huge brown eyes. She must have been concealing her accent, swapping out the foreign one for something more local.
If Tersine was working with the Woman in White, then that meant she’d almost certainly been aware of the murders as well.
“I guess that explains why you haven’t been responding to my messages,” I said.
Dr. Tersine nodded, cringing slightly. “I am very sorry that it took this long. Falem and I were in a disagreement about what to do about you, especially after the… altercations at the Society ball and the Red Chimney building. The latter was the final straw, but I can be so indecisive sometimes.”
“So you decided to kidnap me,” I said. By looking down I could see that my feet were bound to the leg of the chair by primitive cuffs, basically two cast-iron rings connected by a chain. Testing revealed that my hands were bound the same way.
“Falem wanted you killed as a threat. But, well, I was more reasonable. I know that we can sit down and work out our differences peacefully.”
“Who’s Falem?”
Dr. Tersine raised an eyebrow at me for a second, then suddenly seemed to realize that she’d forgotten something. “Oh, yes. Falem is my assistant. The two of you have had so many run-ins, I’d nearly forgotten that you’ve never been formally introduced.” She stepped aside, gesturing to the Woman in White. “Emma, this is Falem. Falem, this is Emma.”
Without moving a muscle, her affect completely flat, the Woman in White said: “Charmed.”
“Wait, the Woman in White…Falem, she’s your assistant?”
Tersine nodded again. “We’ve been working together for years. I find that we complement each other quite nicely. Falem, take off that mask of yours, show Emma who she’s talking to.”
“As you wish, Doctor,” Falem said. She reached up to the reikverratr mask and, after undoing a pair of clasps at the sides, smoothly removed it.
For a moment I didn’t know what I was looking at; I thought that she’d somehow been wearing a second mask underneath the first. But as my eyes adjusted I realized exactly what I was looking at. Falem’s face was not a face of flesh, but of metal, and I’d seen its ilk before. It was the same complex, pseudo-insectoid design as on the archopolids, but vastly scaled down and shaped to match a human face. The mouth was a flat plate through which noise was projected; the eyes were huge compound lenses of tiny silver mirrors, each one surrounded by three secondary pinhole sensors.
All of those things, and the complex layering of steel cylinders and plates making up the body of that face, were things I was familiar with from my studies. Those were the trademarks of Forebearer automaton design. But an automaton that could speak, an automaton that could almost pass for human… I’d never heard of anything like that.
“What the fuck?”
Falem quickly replaced the mask, evidently made uncomfortable by the exposure.
Tersine watched my expression with keen interest. “I would have perhaps phrased it more politely, but yes, my assistant is very impressive, on a technological level. The most advanced automaton ever discovered, found buried in the rocky soils of the Creandasian foothills.”
For a moment, I forgot my sense of horror, my hatred for Falem and her many crimes—apparently carried out on Tersine’s orders—and I was just a scientist again. “Nobody knew… The Forebearers had fully solved the artificial intelligence problem, created artificial life, and nobody knew.”
“The secret,” Falem said, voice audibly smug, “was that thought is not localized to the brain. My electronic components generate an artificial Mesmeric field, which generates my consciousness through emergent reaction with my computational elements. Quite ingenious.”
For a brief moment I felt the urge to ask more questions. But I shook that off, reminded of my situation by the metal links digging into my wrists. I tore my eyes away from Falem and fixed my glare on Dr. Tersine. “You found the most advanced machine ever built, a miracle of science, and you used her as an assassin. You ordered her to murder five innocent women!”
Dr. Tersine held up a finger to her lips and shushed for silence. “Let’s not get distracted. That kind of talk will just make things worse. Instead, I would like to explain to you my goals, and the nature of our relationship. And perhaps we can come to an arrangement.”
“Talk me into submission, huh?” I said.
“Scientist to scientist. Call it an academic dialogue.”
It was absurd on its face, that after everything she thought she could still convince me of anything. And yet as I looked into her eyes, I didn’t detect an ounce of insincerity. Which meant that I could put her optimism to use. The longer she talked, the more time I had to figure out an escape plan, and the more she believed that I was listening, the more she would lower her guard.
“Fine. Fine. Let’s settle this… like ladies.”
“Like ladies, yes,” said Tersine. “In which case I suppose it would be best to start with some proper introductions. My name is Nika Tolvana Tersinêvka, Doctor of Electrobiology, trained at the Moudrost outside of Grand Rochathan, former director of the Svenhal Labs, first ever scientific adjunct to the reikverratr program, currently on long-term assignment behind enemy lines. Speaking less formally, I am also the most brilliant scientist in the world, and the bringer of the next stage in human evolution.”
While she listed off her credentials, I figured out exactly how much freedom of movement I had. By painfully twisting my feet around the legs of the chair, I could very slowly scoot around, and my shoulders had enough flexibility to let me move my hands up or down a few inches in each direction. Those were both very useful tools to have. I just needed to figure out how to use them.
“The Svenhal labs, hm? Animal-human hybridization? You know that all of those subjects are riddled with cancer now, right?”
“Of course I know!” Tersine snarled. The veil of politeness evaporated. “Do you think I’ve been keeping my eye on Doctor Charcharias for no reason?” She stopped, took a breath. “But that was all my predecessor’s work anyway. We have moved long past such crude methods as vitalic stimulation of injected tissue.”
“Right, yeah, of course,” I said. Now that I knew how much I could move, I had to figure out what else was in my toolbox. “What sort of things are you up to these days?” I said, craning my neck around as far as I could go in both directions. “You’ve been smuggling quite a bit of laboratory equipment into the city, surely you’re doing something with all that?”
Falem was still staring at me, or approximating a stare with the lenses of her mask. “You aren’t going to escape.”
“Because you don’t need to escape,” said Tersine. “Please, Emma, I promise that I only want to have a reasonable conversation with you. For example, I will tell you exactly what I am doing with all of my equipment. I assume you have met my wolves?”
“I have, yes. Quite a few times.” Behind me and to the left was a table that I remembered well: though it was out of my field of view, there was a huge machine sitting on it, a failed attempt to create a vitalic generator that Tersine had had to warn me away from on my last visit. A plan formed, but it wasn’t going to be pleasant.
Tersine nodded, ignorant of my sarcasm or ignoring it. “They’re quite difficult to create, you see. A more advanced version of the work we were doing at Svenhal. The bodies are directly synthesized out of raw materials, basic organic compounds in the correct proportions. The tricky part is generating a large enough electrical impulse to convert into the vitalic surge which congeals the liquid components into a coherent physiology.”
“Why go to all the trouble? You have the stonewose working for you, why make a pack of… half-human, half-wolf things?”
“The stonewose are not reliable,” said Falem. “They serve another master. And besides; they are a failed, flawed byproduct.”
“Always so very pragmatic, Falem. The wolves’ loyalty is useful, yes, but it is not the sole reason for their creation. You must understand that the wolves are a key part of my overall project.”
She was going to start talking about her grand vision for the world. I’d met a few people like that when I was still in the university, and I knew that once that kind of professor got started there was almost no stopping them. If I could just figure out how to move without being seen…
“What I told you before, I was not lying about that. I want to create a world without suffering, a world of perfect health and long life, a world without war or death, inhabited by a new woman, whose body is attuned to absolute perfection and empowered by the full strength of the élan vital. But doing so, creating that world, is not and will not be a one-step process.”
Dr. Tersine started pacing. It was a steady, monotonous movement, and it took her eyes off of me for a few seconds at a time. I braced myself, feet firmly planted on the floor, back arched away from the back of the chair, and waited.
“Svenhal was an early, brutish attempt, slamming together traits of various animals in a fumbling effort to create something greater. Since then I have learned a great deal, in particular about the chemical basis of advanced life, and about direct manipulation of the élan vital, meaning that I can approach my goal without such crude methods.”
The key would be to do it silently, or at least without making a noise that Tersine would be able to identify. The best thing I could think to do was flex my ankles, leaning the whole chair back just an inch, and slowly tipping it back and forth. It was slow, it was difficult, and it still produced too much noise, but fraction by fraction I moved back from her.
“Part of the reason why I’ve spent this long hiatus in the rebellious provinces was to refine my knowledge, to engage in the all-important scientific exchange of ideals. I suppose it is a good thing that I did so; because without the techniques I learned in this ungrateful country, I would not have been able to complete my greatest work so far. You.”
My chair fell back to the floor with a loud clack. “Fucking what?”
“I realize you may not remember much,” Tersine said softly. “Your immediate association with the Halflances suggests that you don’t remember me at all. But I am your creator. I converted the raw electricity of a lightning discharge into vitalic energy, passed it through a vat of rendered organic components, and formed you. The alraune, my perfect creation.”
“You… no. No, you didn’t create me, you self-centered dumbass! You took me!”
Her brow creased, and her whole face tightened up slightly. “What do you mean by ‘take’, in this instance?”
“I had a life before here. There was another world, this place called Earth. And you, whatever you did, you took me from Earth, put me in a new body, brought me here. Do you want to explain that, by the way? Can you even explain that?”
Tersine’s expression continued to shift. A wild fire developed in her eyes, something frenzied, at once terrified and desperately curious. “That is impossible. Your mind, your psychology, the mesmeric field assigned to your neural tissue, I developed it myself, in my own laboratory.”
“Did you ever wonder where I got the name Emma Farrier from?” I said with a grin. I enjoyed getting a rise out of her, and I realized that pissing her off could help with my plan. “I assume you know about that name, given you seem to know everything else about me. Even from the moment I woke up on Selene, I had twenty-four years of memories of a whole other life. So either all of that was a dream, and I just invented a hundred thousand details in a second… or you didn’t create my mind at all.”
Tersine sneered. I’d seen this face, this other side of her, peeking through once or twice before, but never for this long. For a second she looked like she was about to strangle me. Instead, she turned to Falem and said, “This changes everything. Do you have any theories?”
“I do,” Falem said.
“Then we need to talk. Figure out another hypothesis. Where are my notes…”
Tersine wandered off, and though Falem tried to remain watching over me, she was soon summoned away. That gave me time. I bent my back, flexed my feet, and made the achingly slow walk toward the table behind me.
It was a good thing that Tersine had complained about the malfunctioning generator on my first visit, because that was the only thing I could think of that stood a chance of helping me out of the bonds, but even then it was only the smallest, most foolish of hopes. That and it was going to hurt like hell. I remembered the overwhelming nausea that wracked my system upon even light electrical exposure, even from something as small as a distant thunderstorm or a piece of lab equipment. I was betting against my own durability that I’d even be able to escape afterwards.
I didn’t make it all the way. After a couple of minutes of hushed, rapid conversation over a pile of notebooks, Tersine and Falem apparently came to a consensus. Falem turned around first, and I was sure that I was done for. Her gaze, silent and still like a security camera at a government facility, pinned me in place. I was inches from my goal.
“As disappointing as this development may be,” Tersine said, “I must still thank you. As the only one of my subjects capable of coherent speech, you were able to correct a severe misunderstanding in my theory of my procedure. It seems that we have not been creating Mesmeric field impressions from scratch, but rather drawing them from across the Void. This is good to know.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, caught between bitter sarcasm and honest confusion. “You really didn’t make anyone else besides me?”
“No. Though perhaps if I had, it would have been useful. You see, I had thought that you were a total instability. When you were fresh and your material still malleable, you kept changing. I thought I had failed, that I needed to try again with something more basic in order to get the craft correctly.” Tersine paused, looking me up and down. I tensed momentarily, thinking that she’d taken note of my change in position. “But if what you say is true... The élan vital and the mesmeric field do interact, especially in cases as strong as yours. Emma, how similar is your current appearance to that you had previously? Ignore large-scale factors, such as height or build. How many of the small details transferred successfully?”
I didn’t like where her question led. And, more than that, I hated the fact that it made perfect sense. All the way from the very beginning I had noticed that I still had, fundamentally, the same body. The same eyes, the same hair, the same nose.
“Too many,” I muttered.
Tersine grinned. “Supporting evidence, then. The mind influences the body! This will make it much easier, Falem, if we ever get to full transference. Even in failure, I am successful.”
I was beginning to seriously hate the sound of Tersine’s voice. With Falem still watching me like a hawk, I didn’t want to risk any more movement. On to the next step. My hands, still secured behind my back, slowly raised up and back. Almost immediately I hit the limit of my shoulder joints, well before I reached where I needed to go. Every inch I went from there on out was going to be bought with a hell of a lot of pain; but it would be worth it to escape.
“As much as I love the scientific process, and I will inform you that I was a physics student before all this happened, I think it’s about time you got to the fucking point, Tersine. Make your case. Convince me of whatever it is you want to convince me. Or admit that you’re just holding me captive here for no reason.”
The good doctor instantly snapped out of happy-scientist-learning-a-thing mode, turning her eyes on me. “Forgive me for lecturing,” she said. “I did spend a few years teaching at the Moudrost, after all. My proposition is simple: if we can work together, properly work together, then all of Amina Charcharias’s hopes for what we could accomplish will be blown out of the water.”
“A world of perfect women, free of sickness and war and old age and blah blah blah.” Despite my best efforts, the pain radiating from my shoulders still spilled into my tone. It hurt a lot, and I still wasn’t at maximum distance yet. “That’s a shareholder speech, Dr. Tersine, not an actual plan of action. What do you want me to do, what do you want me to agree to?”
Both of my shoulders were wracked with pain, pain like there were screws being slowly driven into the muscle. I’d be lucky if I got out of this without some kind of injury. But in spite of everything, my muscles still allowed me to push further.
The line about the shareholder speech definitely got to her, from the way her face twitched. “Stop fighting me,” Tersine said. “Stop working with the Blackbird and the rest of your little gang. They have only slowed down my plans, and if they keep trying to fight it will end poorly for all of them.”
“So if I do that, you’ll stop killing people?” I said. “Stop sending out your little Igor here to murder and intimidate and extort anyone who gets in your way? Stop working with a bunch of fucking stonewose who have been treating this city’s homeless and poor like a buffet?”
“Do not make accusations against me!” Tersine snapped. “I have not seen you trying to change this world for the better, alraune! All you have done is kill, fight, destroy, try to stop me from bringing about the greatest change in Selene since the fall of the Forebearers! I thought you were intelligent.”
I rolled my eyes. “Cool motive, still murder,” I muttered to myself. I must have been so incredibly close to the edge of the generator on the table behind me, but I was nearing the limit of my flexibility. Just needed to keep Tersine distracted a little while longer.
“Do you really think that you’re going to be able to create a perfect world with this kind of cruelty? All that’s going to happen is you’re going to keep getting worse and worse, spiraling down until even the people who trained you condemn you as a monster.”
“They may condemn me all they like, even execute me if it so pleases them; but their world will still be one of my creation, you self-righteous little…”
Falem butted in, interrupting Tersine’s breakdown without even having to raise her voice. “You’re trying to use the metal of your handcuffs to create a contact across the defective field generator and generate a discharge. It’s not going to work.”
That got a chuckle out of me. Falem, the cheeky bastard, had been watching me the entire time, and had my plan all figured out. “Why not?”
“Because you are wearing shoes. There is no electrical contact with the ground, meaning that you will fail to generate any discharge whatsoever.”
I grimaced against the pain, stretching the chain wide in order to maximize my chances. “Are you sure? Do you know the exact voltage on this thing? Maybe it’s enough to cause a dielectric breakdown of the material and induce a current anyway.”
“It will not,” said Falem.
Tersine’s eyes were wide with curiosity, a half-smile playing across her lips. She liked this.
“And how sure are you of that, machine woman? Sure enough that you’re going to stand there and let me make the contact? Personally, I do like the idea of playing those odds, but I didn’t think you were the type to take risks.”
We glared at each other for I don’t even know how long. I don’t even know if Falem was really glaring, or just looking at me; the reikverratr mask didn’t tell much either way. My arms were shaking, and every muscle between my spine and my elbow was wound up like a spring.
Falem broke. She lunged forward, hand outstretched to grab my arm and force me away from the malfunctioning machine behind me. The instant before she made contact, I flexed my entire body at once, straining against the chair and forcing my arms the last few inches up to the edges of the machine.
To tell the truth, I had no idea whether the voltage would be enough to create a current going through my shoes. But it didn’t matter. I had a much better conductor on me: the arm of a nine-foot-tall automaton who had stupidly tried to put herself in the way of an electrical discharge. Dumbass.
There was a crack of superheated plasma, a blinding flash of light, a wave of heat, and the most intense full-body pain I have ever felt in my entire life. Every muscle in my body contracted as much as it possibly could, breaking the legs of the chair and also several of my bones. There was a smell of burnt flesh. I definitely threw up, but I don’t remember throwing up because I definitely lost the ability to form memories for a few seconds. My heart stopped long enough that anyone who wasn’t me would have absolutely died.
Even after regaining the ability to see, and even after all of my bones clicked back into place, I was still left with a pounding headache and the most profound sense of nausea that I’ve ever felt, like a dozen simultaneous cases of food poisoning. But, miraculously, I was alive.
“I love being immortal,” I said, rolling away from the various puddles of bodily fluid left behind by my stunt.
Falem was on the ground next to me, Tersine crouched over her, examining her like one would look at their car after a fender bender. Even in my miserable state, my limbs only halfheartedly following my instructions as I fought to stand up again, I couldn’t help but feel a brief satisfaction at having succeeded. Even if I’d managed to free myself, escape would have been impossible with Falem there.
Eventually I was able to stand up again, after a length of time that could only be described as “entirely too long.” Standing wasn’t easy; my head was ringing and it felt as though the whole world was gently rocking around in a circle.
Tersine slipped her fingers under Falem’s dress in what would have been an intimate gesture between any two other people, and began feeling around for something. A reset button? Either way, I wasn’t going to stay long enough to watch.
I staggered forward, past the two of them, leaning on tables in order to maintain my balance.
From behind me, Tersine spoke. “Storm-child. Sleep now, like—”
The spike of adrenaline which ran through me from the very first syllable was enough to momentarily bring clarity back to my head and some modicum of strength to my limbs. I used that split-second to kick Tersine in the face as hard as I possibly could. It wasn’t that hard in the state I was in, but it was enough to cut off the activation phrase with a sputter, and to make blood trickle down her lip as she recoiled away from me.
I wasn’t going to give her enough time to try it again. I ran. I ran up the stairs, hit the door, bashed the lock off the door with one of the handcuffs, through the empty lecture room. That was when I discovered that it was daylight. Fortunately for my pain-wracked shoulders, the other door was free. I ran as fast as I could, and didn’t look back.
One thing i'm still confused about is how Emma got from the laboratory in new Alderburg, where Tersine presumebly created her body, to some random street in Amrinval?
I think Emma should put her knowledge of Earth's technology to use to help fight the Cassandrans.