Crimson Rain

Crimson Rain

Tex Leiko

Smashwords Edition May 2015

Crimson Rain is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Copyright © 2015 by Tex Leiko

All rights reserved

Published by

Whimsical Publications, LLC

Florida

http://www.whimsicalpublications.com

ISBN-13 for print book: 978-1-940707-48-8

ISBN-13 for e-book: 978-1-940707-49-5

Cover art provided by Tex Leiko

Editing by Brieanna Robertson

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One

Psyker Scream

"It requires a series of injections, five to be exact. The needles necessary for each round are fourteen-gauge; you would think that they would have made them like most bots on the market. Other bots you can just swallow, or inject with something a whole lot smaller, but no, despite all of the modern technology available, they still ask me to skewer some of your larger veins with a needle the size of a steak knife.

Each round of the nanobot injections takes at least thirty minutes of your time still. You can’t move while the needle is in your arm; if it slips out of the vein, then the bots spill all over the dermis, or worse yet, the needle re-punctures you but strikes muscle, or worse yet, bone! Do you know what happens when these bots are injected into your bone? It isn’t pretty, the doctor said dryly to Zarfa. You know, you youngsters don’t think of this when you come in here and ask me to do this to you… Psyker Scream, right? Right? Well, let me see your arms, he said from underneath his white paper mask.

The doctor looked Zarfa up and down his right and left arm. He was spindly; his torso was average, lean, hairless except a small patch that grew between his nipples. His skin was white—not snow white, more of a grayish white. His legs stretched down, the femur much longer than average. Even when he wore jeans it was noticeable. His feet matched his femur in that the meatus of the foot was enlarged, but the toes were average. His arms were long; he had a reach that nobody could imagine. In his years of life, he’d learned a posture to disguise it, but the tips of his fingers came to his patella. His body, though being lean, wasn’t anything remarkable aside from his odd proportions.

He stared into 2 the doctor’s eyes as he made his reply. Psyker Scream. Yes, that’s it… I am sure you are getting tired of seeing ‘us kids,’ but please… Even if I’m the last…I am willing to sign whatever waivers you have. Give me the bots, please?

The doctor took a deep breath and held it; the world could have stopped spinning in the time it took for him to release it. Finally, he did. As his breath extruded from his lungs, the lenses of his glasses fogged from the hot steam being caught by his mask. He paced about two steps toward Zarfa then stepped back, tapped his toe, and spun around, grabbing his clipboard.

Yes, yes. I really am sick of you! I opened this clinic to help people. Instead, I get all of you! the doctor yelled in exasperation.

He didn’t dislike his patients, even if they were silly rave kids in his eyes, but he’d opened this clinic twenty years ago in the hopes of really making a difference. And now what was he doing? He didn’t even know. Sure, he would occasionally diagnose a disease, make a few treatments, or sometimes save a life, but that was rare. Sure, he kept people well when they came in with the sniffles; a lot of his clients were of the lower class who couldn’t afford nanobot immuno-boosts. He would do the rudimentary tests, diagnose what many would refer to as a third world disease, write them an affordable prescription, or if they were really destitute, give them free samples and send them on their merry way. He was making a difference in his community, sure.

But what bothered him were these rave kids. They all had the same story; they all wanted the same thing. The bots he would put into them were a high risk and had no practical application. They were expensive. The first time a kid had come in and asked for them, he’d shooed him out of the office, told him he was here to make a difference, to help, and then balanced his checkbook. By the time the fifth one came in waving a wad of cash in his face, his only reason for turning her down was that he didn’t have the goods; he began to re-think his outlook.

Sure, he was here to make a difference, but if one didn’t turn a profit then one couldn’t stay in business. If a person couldn’t stay in business, they couldn’t help. It was a vicious cycle. So, on the fifth one, he told her, Come back in two weeks and I will have what you need. With a grin and a wink, he took out a loan, and the rest was history.

But that was five years ago. He was still treating the poor and making a difference, but these kids kept coming in, and what for? He’d taken an oath—do no harm. Was he? He couldn’t understand. He hated that they would take the risk. He knew that twenty percent of them had died while his palms were greased with their cash, untraceable.

It was good for him… It was good for his community; he was helping… He was. That’s what his mind told him, but his demons wouldn’t let him sleep. This was the last one, he told himself as he handed Zarfa the clipboard with the waivers and consents all attached. Even if twenty percent died and he felt guilt, he wasn’t stupid; those papers would keep him out of jail.

Be sure to read every bit of both sides, he muttered.

Zarfa, as if without thought, began signing every dotted line with haste.

"Don’t you understand what you are doing to your body? Don’t you understand the pain you will feel as the bots mutate and transform your acoustic nerve endings and rewrite your brain to understand those insane high frequencies? Don’t you get it? That last paper explains if you stop the injections early, you will go deaf!"

Please stop yelling. Zarfa was cool, calm, and spoke as if he had the authority.

It’s so much pain… And what for? A shitty band.

Zarfa began to take deep breaths and tried to shut down his emotions; he tried to go numb. Pain… It was something he was all too familiar with. How was the doctor to know? I am well aware of pain, Dr. Hall. Pain you probably couldn’t imagine, he said as his mind began to wander.

Thoughts of his homeland flooded him—the city of Ilyeion, which had been founded about seventy-two miles to the south of the old world’s Baghdad. Despite the fact that Muslim culture was all but dead, some things remained very much the same. Merchants and vendors lined the streets of Ilyeion, selling their goods and wares.

In the bazaars, one could buy anything from a slave to a molded protein simulation of an apple to the most advanced weapons. Ilyeion had beauty and wonder, but it also had a darkness to it. Despite the darkness, it was Zarfa’s home. He was a long way from it in the city of Alexandria, capitol to the country of Alexarian. His plan was to attend to business then return to Ilyeion as soon as he could.

The night that made him leave, that made him into who he now was—that was the pain he envisioned as the doctor grilled him with questions. On that night, the winds were heavy. No storms were predicted, no orders placed, yet the sky grew black with clouds—clouds of wasps, none of which had ever been known before the era of the Great Extinction. These wasps had been genetically created from the DNA of a common mud wasp that inhabited the Middle Eastern region. However, they were extremely altered.

The average one of these mud wasps was ten to thirteen feet in length. The average weight was four hundred kilograms. The stinger was about a meter in length. If the puncture didn’t kill a person, the venom was sure to. They feasted upon the bodies of those they killed, but worse yet, they weren’t wild creatures that could simply be exterminated.

The Faraza was at the heart of the swarm, or that was to say, the organization known as the Faraza. Their exact location was still unknown. All one had ever heard were vague reports of the wasp swarms returning to an underground entryway, down into the deep labyrinth that concealed them in darkness even during the day. The cult of the Faraza had an unaccounted number of followers and their secrecy was kept so close nobody knew how to join.

Many survivors who had seen some of their families captured, however, reported at times seeing a lost relative as one of the raiding party months after their kidnapping. The raiding parties were vicious; the wasps would swarm in with two to four riders each, dependent on the size of the riders. They would descend, silent wings with great fury, murdering, pillaging, and kidnapping.

These terrible menaces appeared with little warning. There were watchtowers with sky watchers, but they were only minimal help. The intense speeds at which these parties approached made any retreat seem futile. By the time their shadows blotted out the sun, it was too late. One was certain to feel the breeze pass by as one was slain, or worse yet…taken.

Really? What’s a punk kid like you know about pain? All of you Psyker Scream rave kids are all so mystical and totally emo. Give me a break.

Zarfa didn’t say a word, only lifted his shirt to reveal a scar on his left side. A horrendous scar, one that yelled out, I survived. It had glanced him, but it was enough to cause an evisceration. His intestines had flopped toward the dirty ground as he saw his sister taken into the clouds by a wasp rider. He had been coughing out blood and shoving his viscera back inside before he even realized he had just brushed with one of their massive stingers.

Tears had welled in his eyes and he lifted his hands toward the skies. His voice made noises, but the words were inaudible. He had been crying because of the physical pain, but even more so for the emotional blow that had struck him. Sarah! Sarah! My sister! was what he thought as he saw her taken so quickly.

She was beautiful, tall, elegant, graceful, a professional tribal dancer who once reminded their people of the old ways of the land. She was only sixteen when she had been taken. Zarfa, a mere young man, the age of twenty-four, quickly turned to a bitter soul that was ageless as his life threatened to leave him while his last remaining family member was so brutally excised from his life.

They had been in the market. She had been dancing, as she was hired to do by a wealthy merchant. Zarfa was standing by as her bodyguard, as he had always done. Zarfa took pride in being his sister’s bodyguard. It got them by in life, enough to eat and have a home, but they were truly content with each other. His tender sibling love was gone in an instant.

There is a story that goes with this. You are unworthy, doctor, he stated as he felt tears welling up and rolling down his cheeks.

He wanted to forget what happened next. Many times, he would lay awake at night after that awful day, wishing he had died then and there. No matter what he did, no matter how hard he cried, or pummeled himself, or drugged himself with alcohol combined with whatever depressants he could get his hands on, he couldn’t make the dark vision go away. What happened next, he couldn’t forget, and he wasn’t even trying to hold on…

He stood, one hand holding in his organs, and he began to run toward the wasp that was gaining altitude. A rider to his right was coasting in alongside him to make its final strike. The rider made his command and the wasp obeyed. In one quick movement, like a beautiful flash of lightning in the night sky, Zarfa faced the rider head-on. He avoided another sting and clutched one of the paperlike wings of the wasp. Holding on as tight as he could, he began to ascend into the sky.

He struggled his way up the giant insect and to the rider. The rider turned to face Zarfa. He was wounded and certainly no match for a raider, or so the raider might have thought. Before he knew it, Zarfa had closed the gap between them and was struggling to throw him off his mount. The raider took his baton and clubbed Zarfa in the face twice. Bones cracked and blood flowed from his nose. Zarfa, nearly dead, grabbed hold of the raider’s bludgeon and pulled it easily from his grasp. Zarfa had never seen himself as a mere man, but always a beast, and a fierce guardian of the ones he loved. A ferocious guardian fought to his last breath and a wounded creature was more dangerous than a live and healthy one. He was wounded, angry, and more of a creature than a man at this point. Nothing less than death or loss of consciousness would stop him now.

Before the raider even realized he was disarmed, Zarfa had struck a blow to his humerus so hard the bone shattered. As his hand lost hold of the reins, he grabbed for them with the other hand out of reflex. He should have put up a defense, but it would have done little good. Zarfa struck with another crushing blow; the wasp rider’s other arm crippled under the force of his brutal strike. Zarfa then gave a push and the rider plummeted to the ground.

They were about seven meters from the earth when Zarfa grabbed the reins of the giant wasp. He looked around and realized his sister was gone. He also realized he didn’t know the first thing about controlling one of these beasts. Without its rider, it was flying erratic. One of its wings had been ripped in Zarfa’s maddened, adrenaline-filled struggle with its enormous body.

At this point, the blood loss and the crushing defeat had taken its toll. His last thought was an eye for an eye as the world went from color and light to darkness and the giant insect mount crashed head first into the ground. Zarfa lay there as if he were another corpse from the fierce battle. He has lost sight of what had gone on around him because he fought to live and to save Sarah, but there were corpses, both human and freakish insect, innocent and raider alike, scattered across the bazaar streets. He lost consciousness completely as the feeling of total defeat engulfed him…

Zarfa realized he was zoning out again. He often did when he thought about the past. He could feel his eyes dampening with more tears at the thought of his sister. He breathed in deep, then out so fiercely it was as if he was breathing out fire.

He looked Dr. Hall in the face. Can we get on with this or what? Zarfa questioned.

Doctor Hall swallowed as he looked at the scar. Most would have been killed by something so large without immediate medical attention. He began to get a bit nervous and started to sweat. If his patient was walking around safe and sound after such a mortal injury, he certainly didn’t want to be on his bad side. Then he had the strangest thought. Maybe I am helping these kids.

He shrugged it away, cleared his throat, and said, Well, I am sorry for the outburst. I really should work on my manners. If you are ready then, seeing as you have already signed the waivers, allow me to strap down your arm and we shall begin the first round of injections.

Zarfa regained his composure. Though he hadn’t let out a sound, it embarrassed him deeply that the doctor had seen even a single tear roll from his eyes, let alone the many hundreds that now stained his shirt. He sat staring the doctor in the eyes for a brief moment, but one that must have felt like an eternity to the poor man in the white lab coat. His face was still hidden under the mask, but Zarfa could tell he had terrified him, even if he was a sobbing baby.

Without fear, without trembling, without hesitation, Zarfa held out his long, lean, muscular arm. He eyed his own veins, wondering which the doctor would choose. What he was about to feel, he wouldn’t even consider pain.

Make it so, good doctor.

Doctor Hall took hold of his arm and set it on the padded leather arm rest. He then strapped him down to it. The straps weren’t meant to be cruel, but he really meant it when he said it mustn’t strike bone under any circumstances. The nanobots would begin mutating the bone rather than nerve and calcify the brain, killing Zarfa almost immediately.

I don’t know how this is helping any of you, Hall scoffed. Psyker Scream… It’s just a shitty techno, heavy metal fusion band, isn’t it? There is a lot I understand in this world, but that will always be a mystery to me.

Let’s keep it that way.

Two

The Doctor

Thank you, doctor, Zarfa said politely as the doctor pulled the heavy-gauged needle from his arm.

The pain was bad, but Zarfa was somehow more cheery now than he had been before the treatment. Dr. Hall could see it in his eyes; he was grateful. Zarfa then dug into his pockets and pulled out his bank chip. Dr. Hall held his bank chip out toward Zarfa.

Okay, ten thousand credits transferred to your account, doctor. I look forward to seeing you again four more times. After that, no more, he said dryly.

Any time. Give it a week, please, and I didn’t introduce myself properly. Now that I am your doctor, call me Max, please. Max Hall, but just Max will do.

His demeanor had changed from the emotionally charged wreck that had been ranting at Zarfa earlier. It would be an understatement to say that Max was passionate about helping people. He’d really set out as a doctor to make a change in the world, originally. He was approaching his forties now, though, and felt as if he had changed very little. He needed a new scene. Somewhere he could make a difference.

Will do, Max.

As Zarfa left the office, Max got the chills. It was as if someone had blown cold air right down his spinal column. He didn’t understand it himself. He’d always thought these Psyker Scream fans were just privileged rave kids spending their trust funds on some new trendy band, but Zarfa, was different.

He was quiet, stoic, testy, sarcastic, stern, but what really stood out was weathered. His battle scars weren’t fake, not some sort of masochism or self-mutilation. Not some sort of cult ritual. No, it had definitely been a battle.

But from what?

Max didn’t have an answer, and he wouldn’t rest easy until he did. There were no other patients to see him, so he sat down at his desk and pulled up the Synaptix Corp multiprocessor interface. Back in the day, people were okay with calling it the Internet, but these days, it was much more than a collective of web sites; it was practically a world that mirrored the physical world with its every day hustle and bustle.

Some punk hackers figured a way to link the Net with a human brain via a simple, small electrode implanted right behind the optic nerve. To see to it that this chip wasn’t used to hack into someone’s brain at any moment of the day, a safety protocol was put in place so that the chip would only activate in front of a terminal. When the user sat at a terminal and pulled up the interface, they were still aware of their surroundings.

They could see from the eye that didn’t have the electrode; the other eye, however, would see a sea of information. The information was easy to navigate. All one needed to do was think of what one wanted to see. The first few times most people would get on, all they would see were lewd pictures or videos of people having intercourse, or sometimes of a cat chasing a ball, but with some practice and self-discipline, one could find anything in the vast sea.

The other additional advantage of the interface was that the brain could respond so quickly to the written word without interpretation being required from direct visual stimuli. Reading an entire book was nearly instant. These days, to spend the whole night on the interface was considered abhorrent. Nobody needed to be on that long; their brains wouldn’t be capable of storing all the information one would see in an entire eve.

Max took a sip of his cold, stale coffee and began looking for information on Psyker Scream. He waded through information for roughly ten minutes. He had instantly seen four videos, two books, hundreds of web pages, and about a thousand pictures of them performing. However, he was no closer to understanding why Zarfa would possibly want the modifications.

Was he really nothing more than an emotionally scarred and angst-ridden fan of some trendy band? Was he beaten up so badly on the street one day that he became another kid who liked crazy screamer metal and deep techno beats? Max refused these conclusions.

Maybe the answer was in the nanobots, he thought to himself as he twisted his hair in his finger with his right hand, leaning on the desk. He searched and he searched, reading every specification, every design, every review, and all kinds of medical data on the bots. He knew more now than he ever had, but still, it wasn’t adding up.

The unaltered average human could hear in frequencies ranging from twelve hertz or cycles up to twenty thousand. The bots, other than the high death rate due to complication, were rather pointless and benign. All they did was increase human hearing on the low end of the scale, or bass, to hear frequencies as low as one hertz. It also increased the high end of the hearing range to be able to include frequencies between ninety thousand hertz and one hundred twenty thousand hertz.

The bots left out all tones between twenty thousand to ninety thousand. The reason for this was because the tones in between were everywhere. Microwaves, plasma field generators, hovercraft, plasma energy lines, even lightbulbs produced noise frequencies between twenty and ninety thousand hertz, but dropped off significantly at the higher levels.

But why would someone want to hear such high frequencies, or such low ones, for that matter, as well? It didn’t make sense; something still didn’t add up. Max knew there was a much larger picture and he was missing it. Zarfa’s remark wasn’t made as an insult against a musically challenged older man; it was to keep him out of something… Something that he wanted to know about.

Ugh, I’ve wasted so much time, he muttered.

The flow of information began to make his head hurt. He had already reached the limits of what a human brain could take in. Frustrated, he leaned back in his chair and finished drinking his cold cup of coffee that tasted more like battery acid than coffee.

Business was slow today. Sure, he had made more money today than in the last month with the one Psyker treatment, but he was getting bored. He usually saw several legitimately sick patients in his area of town, along with the few stimulant freaks and boost users, but they’d begun to avoid his office because of the reputation he had for the way he dealt with them. He sat there in his chair, zoning out with a mouthful of rank coffee, and let his mind wander.

He didn’t know how much time had elapsed in his daydream before he heard his door slam open. He jumped up, spitting out the coffee all over his desk and floor. The woman who had abruptly burst into his office like she was breaking in startled him in his dazed state.

She was tall, about five-foot, ten inches, and slender. She was wearing a very tight plasti-poly black and pink jumpsuit. Her eyes were striking and almost catlike—she had a dark line of black around her iris, the core of her iris was a deep blue color, and the trim of her iris around the pupil was bright yellow. Her hair was a striking red that contrasted beautifully with her pale, almost porcelain skin.

She wasn’t old, but she wasn’t young either. She looked roughly thirty-five, and her face spoke of experience…life experience, things that would wear a weaker person out. She had deep worry lines at the top of her nose by her eyebrows that told of a lot of heartache and pain. She was, however, beautiful beyond a doubt—a real woman, not a little girl.

Tell me, doctor, what do you know of the Psyker treatments? she questioned with a sheepish grin. Her canine teeth were slightly longer and more pointed than average.

Well isn’t that the popular question of the day? I know everything there is to know about how to administer it, everything there is to tell about how the bots are produced, and what they do. Yet, I still don’t know much as to why everyone is in a rush to get them. If that’s what you’re asking, Max said in an exasperated tone. The adrenaline of the scare was starting to wear off, but a new type was beginning to kick in from her beauty.

Heh, figures. I already know why I want them, but you just might be my man. Tell me, do you have the capabilities to modify nanobots? I need something like them only…different. What I need, they don’t make. I heard you do the treatments, but can you modify them?

Modify an already extremely physically-altering, highly dangerous nanobot? Here? In my office? Are you mad, woman?

Maybe. Of what concern is it to you? I am sorry to have wasted your time, doctor. Good day, she said politely with a curtsey as she began to turn toward the door.

"Wait! You came through that door like you were being chased or were coming to rob me only to ask me a crazy question, and I don’t even know your name. On top of that, you are the second person today to come into my office and inquire about the modifications. On top of that, you appear to be a splicer. Before you go, please, entertain me. What do you want to know about all this for? And why the need to modify the bots? That’s a new one for me."

She smiled at him again and walked toward him. The skin-tight jumpsuit she was wearing was made for soldiers to fight without restraint from clothing. She was gorgeous, and every curve of her body was showing. She was clearly very sleek and muscular and even though the doctor had become accustomed to seeing patients naked, this one made his heart jump.

She walked right up to his desk and looked him in the eyes, let out a little purr, and reached out her hand to stroke his bangs. She took some of his hair and started twisting it in her fingers. Max stood there, annoyed. Despite her great beauty and the fact he was contemplating asking her out to dinner, he truly wanted answers to his questions. Also, he was wondering how much of a lunatic she was. He didn’t even know her name and she was touching him like they were old friends…or lovers.

Max, you haven’t changed a bit. Silly boy, you don’t even know the girl you went to school with? Let’s see, I think we were in kindergarten together. Then again in the third grade and, oh yeah, all of high school. Was it all those years? I feel like I forgot one, she said playfully.

She knew his name. He had gone to school with her?

Uhhh, refresh my memory, he stated.

The name is Crimson. Crimson Rose. You recall everyone made fun of me in school? Said I was insane? Said I lived too much in fantasy and not in the real world? You remember now, right? You even made that little chant about me, she said, not angry, just matter-of-fact, then dropped her hand back down to her side.

He remembered. There was always something amiss with her. She had been strange in school… She was homely and always dressed in an overly innocent motif. He never thought she would bloom into this mature, beautiful woman he saw in front of him. If he had, he maybe never would have made fun of her.

Yes, I remember, he said with a gulp. Please forgive me. I was a child then. I was stupid—

"Hell yeah you were, ugly too, so I didn’t care about your little chant. The reason I am here isn’t because of some score to settle or to rub anything in your face. I happened to be in the neighborhood and saw your office. I came in to ask if you could do the impossible, nothing more. Don’t worry, you aren’t the first doctor I have asked and, with your answer, you won’t be the last. I have to hand it to you, though. Something must have changed you. You used to be rude, self-centered, careless, crass, and well, let’s face it, an all-around ass. But here you are, in the slums, offering free care. You’ve changed a lot, as have I. It’s good to see you, doctor. Who would have ever thought, Max Hall! MD!"

Speaking of change, you got gene spliced with a cat? Really?

Yes, really. Not a cat, though. It took a lot of work, but I got my hands on the genetics of a cheetah. Don’t ask, I know most of them died out in 2064. Anyhow, can I go now? I feel I’ve played your little game enough.

You can go any time. I can’t detain you… A cheetah? How? Never mind. Like I said, you are free, but still, my questions—Psyker Scream, the modification to the bots?

Look, it appears you’ve changed, but people still think I am as crazy as I ever was. You want answers, come to a Psyker show tonight. Come see what you hear. They’re playing in town tonight; not many people know, so the crowd won’t be too big. Show me you’ve got an open mind and maybe, just maybe, I will let you know more.

Come see what I hear? I think you’ve forgotten something. I provide the enhancements. I don’t have them myself.

"And you forget, neither do