A sound thrummed through Joe, something like an engine revving or an orchestra tuning up; a vibration that was not quite technology, instead infused with something more ancient. The doll body stiffened, then relaxed. Suddenly Joe felt the body in a way he hadn’t before; now he could feel each individual muscle moving—and how they moved! In perfect coordination. As if every nerve ending in his new body wired into some greater entity beyond his comprehension.

::: SYNCHRONY USER ELEVATION

::: …INVOKED/SYNC LEVEL :: 2

─ MOTOR CONTROL: 85%

─ SENSORIUM: 90%

─ PROPRIOCEPTION: 67%

Joe hopped lightly backwards from the grasping hands, darted to the side atop the crate, then drove a delicate, metal-shod heel into the centipede-thing’s face as it tried to climb up again. There was a sickening crack, like bones breaking. The creature fell away. Another hand snatched at Joe’s ankle. He jumped over it. The hand swung back towards Joe; instead of jumping clear of it, Joe grabbed it with both of his little hands and snapped off its plastic hand at the wrist. The body still wasn’t perfectly obeying his thoughts, but the improvement was incredible.

“Excellent!” Reshy crowed, as if she were a tiny mad scientist whose experiment had born fruit. “But let’s get the fuck out of here! Up, we gotta climb up!” Joe swiveled his neck fluidly up to stare at the pipe. Jump up, grab, straddle, hop to the netting, hope it holds… he could try, now that the body was under his control.

With Reshy clinging to his side, he leaped into the air. As he did so—with an effortless thrust that felt like nothing he would expect this girlish little body to pull off—his new hands contacted the longest pipe; one caught hold first; then the second hooked on just as the pipe swung on its short axis. Hurrying, he clambered up to sit astride the pipe, which shook slightly beneath him; the vibration running through him intensified for a moment, then diminished. He looked down at the many creatures trying to follow him.

They were slow, clumsy things, these test subjects: too much time spent locked in helpless or broken bodies that couldn’t do anything. A rush of exultation swept through him, though not entirely of him: this body was superior. As the pipe turned, he grabbed for the netting dangling from the wall, trying to grab hold and continue their ascent. Below, the centipede thing was trying to clamber up the fallen crate, which had crashed into a debris pile. Despite its partly ruined face, the thing seemed stubborn.

Joe grabbed at the netting again. It held his weight; a brief surge of joy like a lover’s caress flowed through his core. What were these sensations? He climbed, intent on reaching the broken pieces of stairway along the wall. If this body’s limbs were just strong enough… but he knew that might not make sense. This body was a bizarre amalgam of wood, plastic, metal, and stranger substances, pneumatics and magic. He reached for another knot.

As he climbed, he realized something else—this was not the way he climbed in his own body. In his true body, he’d feel the pressure in his legs against the walls and the tension in the tendons that controlled his fingers.

The readout had said something about proprioception… wasn’t that how your muscles told you what they needed to do next when moving without sight? Joe could feel those fine motor control signals coursing through him like an electrical current. Instead of the feeling of meat moving and stretching, he had the coordinated action of a machine, with sensations of reward motivating it. His heart, or whatever heart this body bore, hammered with excitement as he ascended higher.

Reshy was saying something. “Keep going! That guy with all the legs is still coming!” Joe craned his neck to look down, swiveling it farther than his own body could. She was right: the centipede had driven metal talons into the concrete surface of the wall and was scrambling upwards towards him, its fractured porcelain mouth opening and closing in a relentless rhythm. He was out of time; he couldn’t climb up much more before reaching the top of the stairs and a precipitous drop.

Above, there was a long cable attached to some lights, and on the other side of it, their goal: the ceiling hatch, which he now saw was actually a sliding metal door of the kind found on train cars. How does that thing even open?

“We’re going to have to jump again,” he said in a voice that was still feminine and absurdly pleasant for their dangerous situation, but with more melodic modulation. “Hang on tight.” Joe eyed the cable, hoping it would hold the weight of this body, and hoping the body’s agility was sufficient for the stunt he was about to push it through.

He braced himself against the wall; Reshy grabbed the leotard material at his waist. This time Joe’s arms pushed off like a spring—he flung his legs out behind him and took off running up the remaining stairs, then sprang lightly to the railing. The cable was a thick bundle of electrical wiring—if he could reach it, he could wrap all this body’s limbs around it. But only if.

With a grunt, he crouched, then jumped, pushing against the railing and hearing the metal creak and shear beneath him. The sound of the centipede’s ascent scraped against his auditory nerves, or whatever this body had. Then they were hurtling through the air, towards the cable. Joe flung the delicate arms and legs of his body in front of him to grab on.

Joe’s new hands made contact; two fingers hooked into a frayed portion of cable just as it appeared they might sail past the end like a catapult shot going long. The grip allowed their flight to slow slightly, enough that Joe felt a rush of relief—but he and Reshy were still hurtling forward. He tried to fling one leg back, testing the unnatural flexibility of the doll body, and found he could do it: he used that leg to wrap around the heavy cable and slowed himself down, his head dangling upside down. He could see the centipede ascending more quickly now.

With another hard thrust of his arms and legs, Joe’s body came to rest on top of the cable, which bowed dangerously from his added weight. Reshy was already climbing with ungainly slowness towards the hatch. “Do you know how to open this thing?” he demanded.

“Yes, yes!” she chirped. “Just lift me up to that panel.” As he watched, her tiny torso and legs contorted oddly; it looked like a sack of jelly being wrung out—but after an instant, the small panel by the side of the sliding doors popped open. She hung there a moment, swaying gently until Joe hoisted her over the opening and held her to study the insides. Reshy did something he couldn’t see, and the doors slowly shuddered aside. “We have five seconds to get in there,” she hollered.

As soon as the gap was wide enough for him to slip through, he grabbed the edge of the panel opening and began to swing, aiming for the entrance. There wasn’t enough time to attempt something safer, and this body should be light enough. How did he even know that? Another acrobatic move, swinging like an orangutan of plastic, metal, and wood: then a whoosh of air in his face—and then they were inside! He released his grip on the sack puppet; Reshy tumbled into his arms again. Beneath them, the doors were closing automatically.

Now they stood in the center of a long hallway, with a more polished, futuristic design than the ramshackle concrete basement they’d made their way through so far. The hall was lit with large, dim inset lights. Joe turned slowly to take it all in, marveling at the style. Textured black surfaces and shiny white-gray walls covered every place he looked, with rounded curves that met smoothly. Some sections bore a strange sort of faux-wood paneling.

“I’m really thinking we’re not in Kansas anymore. Or Brooklyn, or Earth.” He slumped against a wall, more in mental exhaustion and stress than anything physical. This body wasn’t sending him any fatigue signals at all, despite what he’d just put it through. The hatch below them was thick enough, and high on the ceiling below, that he didn’t think the centipede could follow them through.

Reshy slid off him like a wet bag of clothes—then she spun around and hugged his knee. Her little hands clutched at the leg of the doll body. “You were great in there,” she peeped. “My hero!”

This isn’t right. They’d escaped together, and the body he perceived the world through was increasingly responsive to his every thought and motion. That’s fine, he thought. But this is all so strange—I can’t quite figure out why I’m so suspicious. He looked down at the body, inspecting it for signs of damage.

Reshy peeked up from between Joe’s knees; her face poked up like an opossum or a groundhog looking for seeds in wintertime. “Joe? What are you thinking about?”

“This body doesn’t seem to feel pain or joint strain enough for me to know if I’m hurt. Have to do a visual inspection.” The arm and foot he’d attached earlier looked all right, but the surface of torso had torn in two places—he saw where one piece of wood-hued material hung loose on his shoulder, while another flopped uselessly against his lower ribs. “Can we find something that looks like a mirror or window somewhere in here?” Reshy shook herself free of his legs and scurried over to examine several doorways, then motioned. It wasn’t a room, but a small alcove with bathroom facilities. A light switch next to the entrance was on, and he flipped it on with the control panel built into his wrist; the lights inside flickered once.

The shower curtain was gone from its rod; a battered toilet sat in one corner. But what he was looking for some way to inspect the rest of this body and… well, he also wanted to get a look at himself. In the far corner, a sink sat beneath a smooth, silvered surface: the mirror he sought. He stepped closer to study himself.

His body—this body—was smaller than he’d expected. Closer in proportion to a girl’s than a full-grown woman—but with breasts like a teenage cheerleader’s. More than big enough to catch attention, he thought. He put his small hands on his chest; the material was smooth and hard, though shaped into round forms. He felt no sensation from the breasts, but the experience was still undeniably strange, feeling spherical protrusions on a small frame where he was used to having pectoral muscles.

As soon as he realized he couldn’t feel anything from them, he ran both palms downwards across the tapered narrowness of his waist—then down farther, to his groin. Another smooth expanse, though curved inwards between round thighs, again… just like a woman’s, or a female mannequin. But not human.

“Are all guys like this?” Reshy said behind him. “Find yourself in a girly body, and you have to feel yourself up.” She let out an exasperated sigh.

Joe turned around. “Not really fair,” he said in a sing-song complaint. “This is the weirdest experience I’ve ever had.” He closed his eyes and remembered his own body, the body that had to be waiting for him somewhere. Heavier limbs, corded muscles. A little thicker around the waist than I’d like, but larger by far than this doll. Stubble, square jaw, close-cropped hair. A heavy face; nose slightly bent from childhood injuries—and more scars than most people gained in a lifetime. Narrow hips.

Now he placed his hands on his hips and felt how they curved out from the slim waist of the doll. Moving his hands behind him, he felt the curve of the buttocks. As he pressed his thumbs to the flesh, he felt nothing: no tension, no give. Like a globe of wood. Or like plastic, maybe. He brought his fingers to his cheekbones and pushed gently, trying to bend his head to the side. Everything was flexible, graceful since he’d turned that dial. And so different from his own bulky body.

Joe whirled and scooped Reshy up. “What aren’t you telling me?!” The words were demanding, but came out as a slightly insistent request, in the doll’s voice. “You know your way through this place. You know how this body works. Who are you, really?!”

Reshy struggled in his arms like she might get away if only her tiny, blobby feet could find purchase in the air. The little stitches that served her as eyebrows narrowed angrily. “What the fuck, man? I get you out of there and you’re going to threaten me?”

Joe tightened his grip—from the look on her toy-like face, he wasn’t hurting her, but she had to know he meant business. “You lied to me, is what you did. You said they hired you for a Halloween party to make leather costumes? I call bullshit. And I’ll tear you in two and throw your bottom half back in that scrap heap unless you level with me.”

Reshy glared. “Fine. Fine! So I’m not that kind of puppeteer.” She squirmed out of his grasp, shifting whatever filling shaped her body to let her get free. “They hired me because I do robotics work, experimenting lately with incorporating arcane techniques, soulcraft stuff. After the team investigating this place hired me, I had to stay on site, instructed not to leave for weeks at a time. It was like being in prison.”

“Wait, wait,” Joe insisted. “Start over. Who hired you?”

“A man who called himself Puppetmaster; turns out he’s just a guy named Don Donaldson, in charge of some startup. He claimed to have been working on an artificial intelligence project, but what he really had was a stable portal into this complex, some sort of pocket dimension.”

She brushed off her burlap arms, and Joe folded his own pair. “Go on. What else do you know about this place?”

“Not much. They had me working on broken dolls in the workshop, mostly. At one point, they took me to see the puppet frame you’re in now; the last time I got a look at that body, it was locked into an operating table on the other side of the complex, just an empty shell. We couldn’t get at the data port on your hip, but I was studying the software on the key. This was all before that thing… came back, I guess.” Reshy paced around on the tile floor, which must have looked like a vast hall from her low perspective.

“You called it a Chaos Demon?” he asked. “You think it’s… native to this dimension?”

Reshy’s burlap head nodded. “It sure acts like it. But I think… I think I might have helped summon it back here. They were trying to activate the testing facility with magic rites. I don’t think the so-called experts Donaldson hired even knew what they were doing. So, uh… you can see why I didn’t want to tell you the entire story.”

Joe regarded her solemnly—that, at least, was an expression this body could make easily. “It sounds like you were just a contractor brought in to analyze whatever these things are.” He motioned to himself, then at Reshy’s doll body. “You weren’t in charge. Not to blame. What happened to your boss, and the rest?”

“You can guess,” Reshy replied. “We saw some of them in that room downstairs. Others… I saw two security guys ripped apart by the demon.”

“And you really don’t know what it wants?”

“Only what I told you. I know enough about soulcraft to recognize that it was ripping an etheric matrix from a human body, then stuffing it into one of these puppets. I didn’t see it doing that to you or me, but we have all the signs.” Reshy patted him on the shin. “At least you have better control over this one now. It’s by far the most advanced thing I’ve seen in here. That dial, as far as I’ve been able to tell, increases your soul’s ability to control the body, to harness its abilities, and that should give us an edge. “

“An edge over what, is what I’d like to know.” Joe demanded. “And how do we get our own bodies back? I don’t really want to synchronize better with this form, seeing that I’m not actually a small, curvy acrobat with blue hair.”

Reshy cocked her head. “The reason I called them test subjects,” she explained, “is because it seems like someone set this place up to test the capabilities of various kinds of soul-puppet, or whatever you want to call us. I only saw bits and pieces, but there’s all kinds of weird stuff in here. Automated trials, some of them dangerous. But based on where they took me weeks ago, before I ended up as an eight-inch-high sack, we gotta make it to the far side of all that. To where they did the summoning.”

Joe picked her up again, more gently. “I appreciate being let in on the plan. Is there anything else you’re not telling me?”

Reshy smiled; she had little plastic teeth when smiling. “Sure,” she replied. “Nobody knows we’re here. This entire operation is so secret, nobody even knew who funded Don Donaldson, and security was strict: non-disclosure agreements, cavity searches, all that. We’re on our own.”

Joe said nothing, just put Reshy on his shoulder and left the bathroom alcove.

***

They came to a dead end—or what seemed like a dead end but had a small section of the wall missing. Joe squeezed through; his lithe body made the process easier than it ever would have been for bulky Joe Craigan. On the other side of some rubble, they emerged into another chamber filled with large machines that reminded him of dock cranes: enormous robotic arms with jointed appendages at their ends.

“This stuff looks like it’s for cargo.” There was no sign of a loading bay or what the arms might have been picking up or manipulating.

“Don’t look at me,” said Reshy. “Not my area of robotics.”

Joe had tried to patch up the hanging pieces of the doll body’s torso, with little luck. He didn’t know how to fix a device like this, and Reshy had only said something about disabled self-repair processes. The damage wasn’t really getting in the way, but his human instincts kept telling him to tend to his body before anything got worse, and Joe supposed that was still true.

“Maybe there’s something we can use in here,” he grumbled, still sounding more like a synthetic AI assistant than a person.

“Shit!” The cute voice emerging from Reshy’s diminutive form continued with a string of foul expletives. She was waving her arms, and it took a moment for Joe to figure out what she was motioning at.

At the corner of one of the huge, armed machines, a sinuous form moved. A segmented body, many legs—and then a cracked porcelain face came into view, leering broken and emotionless as a Halloween mask. The centipede had found another way up to follow them.

Joe dropped into a fighting crouch, thoughts racing. Even with better control over this limber body, I’m not trained to use it. My fighting style is all bruiser: heavy blows, swift incapacitation. Can I fight this thing?

The thing was between them and the exit, and he’d seen how swiftly it could move. There was no choice but to fight. If only he’d repaired the gashes in this body. Fighting with this smaller frame would be like trying to throw a punch with a sprained arm; he couldn’t get much power behind each attack. But he might do some serious damage before the centipede killed him or dragged him down below.

The centipede reared up as it scuttled towards them. Its mask, the eerily perfect face of a beautiful young man, sported a long diagonal crack, and its jaw hung slightly loose. From somewhere within, a voice emerged. “Surrender. Give me the key, and the lower half of the larger doll. You will still be alive.”