The Omega Project (34 page)
In retrospect, the genetic engineering involved in creating the monstrous beings nimbly advancing toward me from across the recharging docks must have been far less challenging than designing a humanoid hovercraft, and yet the interfacing of the two species into this particular brute seemed a far greater accomplishment.
The human element was distinctly Monique DeFriend. Like Transhuman Andria, she was hairless, with white transparent lenses for eyes. Her exposed breasts offered a more brazen look, aided and abetted by her flesh tone, which was a blazing violet hue. What was as impressive as it was sinister was the way her waist melded so easily into the black widow spider’s narrow pedicel—the delicate marriage of the human spine into the arachnoid nerve center, the prominent roundness of the insect’s abdomen and its inspired anatomical placement—creating the sensual if not disturbing illusion of being Monique’s buttocks, albeit a massive one … all culminating in her centaurlike carriage riding aloft and in full command of those eight deadly seven-segment legs, their pointed claws clacking along the hard surface of the transports like approaching steeds.
The two bald, bare-breasted, strikingly violet human arachnids loomed over me, each as wide and as tall as a tank, their dexterous front legs twitching like nervous thoroughbreds. As for me? My mind was gone, my bio-chip fighting the paralysis of fear.
THEY ARE NOT HERE TO KILL YOU.
It was Transhuman Andria, her thought energy probing my psyche just in time to soothe my scattering consciousness—her hand reaching out for mine, warm and moist from the bloody object concealed in her palm.
KEEP THIS WITH YOU. THINK OF ME.
It was her finger. She had snapped the bone, wrenching and twisting the digit until the flesh had torn free … her ring finger!
I suppose there was a message in the gesture, but the circumstances weren’t exactly conducive to deep thought, and so I shoved the bleeding appendage into my sweat suit pocket, just as the spider-woman on my right hoisted me high off the ground into the human arms of Transhuman Monique 1. The female’s incredibly strong upper torso quickly grasped my wrist in her clawed fingers and positioned me atop her insect abdomen as if to ride her like a horse—which is what I did, if you call holding on for dear life “riding.”
But where to hold on to?
As we raced toward the Holy City my first instinct was to reach around her and cup her naked breasts, but that was too repulsive. I thought about grabbing her in a headlock, and she must have read my thoughts because her clawed hands expertly reached behind her back and grabbed my wrists, pulling my arms around her waist as a wet sheet of webbing shot out from the spinneret behind me, adhering me in place.
Pinned by the reeking soured goo, pressed against her lavender-pigmented back, I turned my face away and saw the second transhuman spider-woman trailing us, the pod holding Oscar webbed to the top of its abdomen.
My mount scurried across the photovoltaic backs of the Hunter-Transports, the scarlet eyes of these miserable transhuman sentries sparkling in the rising sun, the advancing daylight burning away the remaining fog to recharge their anatomical solar cells.
Awaiting us was a Manhattan-size cluster of synthetically engineered redwoods, each tree its own high-rise community. The trunk of the tree loomed before us a mind-boggling quarter mile in circumference.
At the base of the tree was a garden of giant carnivorous pitcher plants. One variety was adorned with velvety gold and magenta leaves folded into slippery chutes designed to send any enticed invader plunging into a pitfall trap—a twelve-foot-deep gullet filled with digestive enzymes. Fuchsia-colored flypaper traps belched toxic aromas and butterwort leaves covered in stalked glands secreted a sticky milklike mucilage. Dancing around the vine-covered surface of the trunk was a jungle of blood-red Venus flytraps, their hinged leaves adorned with six-inch fangs.
Surrounding the carnivorous garden, running beneath the pier that served as a docking station for the Hunter-Transports was the lake—a placid looking waterway hosting forty-foot lily pads. Floating along the surface like miniature green islands, these growths camouflaged twisted tubular channels—digestive systems, according to ABE. As we galloped by I saw several of the lily pads twitching with what appeared to be the half-eaten remains of a seven-foot horn-rimmed toad.
And then we were through the garden of snapping plants and climbing straight up the sheer vertical tree trunk, the webbing at my back all that was keeping me from tumbling off the spider-woman’s abdomen. A hundred feet … three hundred feet and my stomach tensed in fear, my mind muting ABE’s unnerving altitude calculations as I whispered the mantra, “Don’t look down … don’t look down—”
Passing seven hundred feet I looked up and saw the undercarriage of a bridge that blotted out the sun—the first in a series of lower limbs, this one looking as wide and as long as the Golden Gate. Its expanse reached out a mile or more to connect with another redwood. And above it were a dozen more limbs that rose thousands of feet, each a living Mecca of genetic engineering that supported an unimaginable alien world concocted by the freakish intelligence of a machine that knew no boundaries.
In a state of near panic, I reached out to ABE, desperate to know if thought communication with this new creature was possible.
THERE IS A DIFFERENT SENSE OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRESENT AMONG THESE SPIDER BEINGS. THEY ACT COLLECTIVELY, THEREFORE ANY MESSAGE DELIVERED WILL BE RECEIVED BY THEIR ENTIRE NEST.
I don’t care. Ask them where I’m being taken.
“Oh, shit!” I squeezed my arms tightly around Transhuman Monique’s stomach as the creature inverted to climb up and around the gargantuan tree limb.
QUERY ANSWERED: ROBERT EISENBRAUN HAS BEEN SUMMONED BY THE CREATOR.
In the last twelve hours I had been clubbed, kidnapped, squeezed to the point of near suffocation, and rendered helpless by human creatures that resembled the women who had been aboard
Oceanus
. As strange as it was, I could deal with these beings (sexual fantasies aside); I could probably even handle the dizzying heights as long as we didn’t invert again. But the thought of finding myself at the mercy of a psychotic computer that now took pleasure in torturing species it deemed expendable seemed akin to being summoned by Dr. Mengele to his laboratory in Auschwitz—a fear that terrified me to the bone.
ABE … engage Superman protocol!
Superman was an emergency protocol that duplicated the brain’s basic response to extreme duress—a powerful, superhuman condition that enabled a panicked parent to lift the rear axle of a one-ton car to free their trapped child or a hiker to run with the speed of a world-class sprinter when confronted by a ferocious grizzly. It was a desperate, dangerous tactic—one I had never used before, uncertain if my biological chip could pull me out of a physical overload on par with a commercial jet igniting an afterburner.
In a microsecond of thought, ABE fired up my adrenal glands, blasting my bloodstream with a flood of cortisol and adrenaline as it simultaneously readied my body’s sympathetic nervous system to accommodate an incredible burst of sustained physical activity. My blood pressure soared, my heart raced dangerously, pumping globs of oxygen-enriched blood in excess of two hundred beats per minute.
My senses focused like lasers. Colors magnified, exotic smells assaulted my nostrils, and sounds crackled in my ears as time appeared to slow down, even as my blood-engorged muscles threatened to tear through the fabric of my sweat suit.
Digging the balls of my feet into the spinal column that fused the spider with the woman, I stood, my quads stretching the webbing at my back, the slack enabling the crook of my right arm to snake its way around Transhuman Monique’s throat. Pressing my left palm to her temple, I twisted violently, snapping the vertebrae in her neck.
The insect screeched its rage into my mind—ABE immediately silencing its thoughts—as the paralyzed being’s legs buckled beneath me. Reaching out to the tree limb we had just scaled, I gripped the closest tangle of vines in both fists and held on as the spider creature tumbled backward into space.
For a frightening moment the webbing held fast, forcing me to support our combined weights, then the silky mass snapped and the violet preponderance of flesh and legs plummeted—nearly striking the second transhuman spider ascending to the tree trunk a hundred feet below.
Dangling a thousand feet above the lake, my overwrought muscles quivering, I quickly scaled the limb’s girth to stand atop the vast horizontal highway. The redwood trunk was to my left, a dense jungle to my right. For a fleeting moment I considered hiding in the foliage—until I looked up and saw the underside of a five-story sphere, the lowest of a dozen hives attached to the tree trunk like giant jabuticaba fruit. Glowing a golden yellow, the habitat bore rows of rectangular brown openings, each a potential sanctuary.
Looking down, I saw the enraged second Transhuman Monique shrieking silently at me. The eight-legged monster was racing up the tree, the pod holding Oscar still held to the spider-woman’s back.
Sprinting to the redwood’s trunk, I grabbed a vine and began climbing, the lower portion of the sphere a good sixty feet straight up. My pulse pounded in my throat, the vine tearing into my palm and fingers as I quickly halved the distance—the second hybrid spider three body lengths away … two lengths away … one—
Reaching the bottom of the hive, I heaved myself headfirst inside the nearest opening as I was attacked from behind by the trailing insect’s probing forward appendages. On hands and knees I crawled in deeper, pausing only when I realized the aperture was too narrow for the transhuman spider to enter.
I was in a tight tunnel, the walls composed of a brown fibrous, slightly sticky porous membrane. The only exit was straight ahead, illuminated by a bright incandescent yellow interior.
With no other options, I crawled toward the light.
Halfway in, I noticed the rush of air at my back, timed with the bellows effect of the membrane expanding and contracting all around me.
ABE, continuous theorization of surroundings.
THE MEMBRANE IS LIVING TISSUE, DESIGNED TO FILTER CARBON DIOXIDE FROM THE INTERIOR.
Are you saying, the hive is breathing?
CORRECT.
Reaching the end of the tunnel, I poked my head out to gauge the new surroundings.
“Holy … shit.”
It really was a hive—a transhuman hive, its dimensions maddening. The concave interior walls were honeycombed, with about a third of the outlets occupied. Dropping down from the heavily rooted ceiling to fill the central chamber was the source of the interior glow—enormous clusters of citrus, each incandescent fruit as large as a basketball.
THE ACIDIC MEDIUM OF THE CITRUS FRUIT IS A CONDUCTOR OF ELECTRICITY; THEREFORE IT CAN BE ASSUMED THE CLUSTERS REGULATE INTERNAL TEMPERATURES WHILE SERVING AS POWER JUNCTIONS, CONTROLLING THE FLOW OF ELECTRICITY TO THE INCUBATORS.
Incubators?
Climbing out of the vent, I made my way carefully over the hexagon-shaped openings to the nearest inhabited portal. Lying inside a clear porous organic container was a human infant, perhaps six months old. Its upper torso was naked, its lower half concealed beneath some kind of sensory blanket. It was hairless, with brown irises and big red pupils, which it used to stare back up at me, expressionless.
Curious, I examined the container lid to see if I could open it.
WARNING: INCUBATOR CONTAINS SENSORY DEVICES.
“Chill out. It’s not like they don’t know I’m in here.” Sliding back the lid, I lifted the sensory blanket.
“Oh, geez.”
There were no sexual organs to speak of, nor legs for that matter. The child’s spine and pelvis simply ended in several bundles of wires and conduits that were plugged into the cradle’s base assembly.
A feed tube was connected to its still-present umbilical cord.
Transhuman Andria … So this is how it begins, your life as a Hunter-Transport.
I moved to the next occupied space and found another infant, only this version of my fiancée was asleep on its belly, revealing a pair of flesh-covered wings protruding from where its scapulae should have been.
Incubator after incubator, row after row. There were more transhuman spiders and bats, a dozen babies with tree roots for legs, a few lizard combos—all thankfully dead, and some seriously disturbing attempts to genetically bond a human with a cephaloped. None of the latter looked like they would survive. Those that appeared to be the healthiest specimens seemed absorbed in watching the inside of their artificial womb, which ABE determined to be a neural projection screen.
Not one of the infants cried.
BABIES WHO ARE NEVER LOVED DO NOT CRY. THERE CANNOT BE LACK UNLESS ONE EXPERIENCES SOMETHING AT LEAST ONCE.
Pretty profound, ABE. Now calculate the best escape route into that jungle we saw and get me the fuck out of here!