fishtheimpaler

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I'M DRUNK, ACT FAST

Robotnikinin. It acts to shut down the SHH (Sonic hedgehog) ligand pathway.

And also prevent autism.

Or, you know, cause an embryo not to develop limbs or a face or whatever. It's biology and these are naturally occurring signal proteins. They have to be balanced.

Reminiscent of the scene from The Awakening in which Charlton Heston is looking for a "lost" tomb and "finds" it like 100 feet tall on the side of a massive cliff

However, this is Mobius, so this is canon-consistent

I don't get how they can do archaeology though, no one has a whip!

Digging characterization on what I assume is Antoine's mom

It wasn't a "hoax" or anything; he was just a flake

Also, Sonic News! ™

Have some more

xxx


248 Kilometers West of Hudson Bay, 26 May 2191
A flash shut Megan’s eyes. Before she could start counting the bang hit her like a punch. The thunder was so loud that it touched some animal part of her brain, dropped her into moment of thoughtless, wordless terror. Surrounded by half-glimpsed monochrome tree trunks and darts of water pelting down from the black sky, a stinking-sweet smell of rotting pine needles in her nose and afterimages in her optic nerves.
Then she started walking again, the suit crinkling with every step. Thin transparent polymer, but tough and nonpermeable, loose and baggy at her knees and elbows, cinched into an airtight seal with sturdier boots and gloves, and around her waist by the exterior equipment belt: utility knife, green bioluminescent flashlight, gas-propellant pistol, emergency sealant patches for tears, emergency protein calories. And then right there at the base of the extrusion covering her head, a hundred Angstrom filter.
It’s broken, she’d said the first time she saw it a year ago, holding the thing up to Matthews from manufacturing and watching the mild satisfaction depart his face in favor of his more traditional stoic underbite. It lets things in. Before Matthews had the chance to get angry, Mike had stepped in, telling her that the suit was okay, explaining. If it had been anyone else, she would have punched them, but Mike had done vacuum work in the belt, and as the chief of the colony’s external security he’d done more trips through decontamination and quarantine than anyone, to fix physical bugs in his optics that couldn’t be handled remotely from the Flight Deck. Just as important, Mike wasn’t an asshole. And Mike said that a fully self-contained, pressure-positive biohazard suit was not a practical option for external colony security work. In ten minutes she’d be dying: at the bottom of the gravity well, it the compressed air tanks would be constantly threatening to pull her onto her back or explode, and if condensation didn’t fog the inside of whatever view-surface she had to impenetrability, it would fog the outside. Protectorate space marines had been seen in what looked like skin-tight vacuum suits in off-world actions before the last war kicked off, but there was more to it than polymer, critically more, Mike assured her. Using external oxygen solved innumerable problems simultaneously.
And a hundred Angstom filter, well. Mike wasn’t dead, yet, and no one else had caught up mysteriously ill since he’d left quarantine.
So Megan had used the suit a year ago to bring in Florence Vache after her hormones had her brain the night watch on the flight deck and head out the maintenance airlocks with her four months of unlicensed fetus. Vache made it about five meters into the grass on the surface before she’d chickened out. Ten minutes in that air, a week in decontamination and quarantine, and they were both fine. Autopsy pulled the fetus apart and there was nothing in there either.
Kinski was another matter. While she was suiting up, Mike told her that the close-range surface surveillance had him cutting right out of range of the lenses without a backward glance. Minutes following his trail had become hours, and the rain had come and become a storm and the storm had gotten worse, and if Megan didn’t find him soon she might not be back to New Lara for days. The internal water pouch might run dry, and she might have to break—
Shut up, Megan ordered herself.
Beneath the cloud cover it was dark as night, and she followed a narrow trail through the trees and ankle-clinging brush more by feel than by eye. Little paths seemed to form naturally in the forest, somehow. She’d been pushing along the broadest, straightest route they offered. Infrared and light amplification were forbidden on the surface because of the EM field they produced, and without them there wasn’t much to do other than hope Kinski didn’t have the stomach to push a harder trail.
She trudged over a small rise, and the rain suddenly sounded louder. Through the spatter on the transparent polymer before her face saw some sort of clearing ahead. It was the first feature in at least a half-hour that had a good chance of being visible on the high altitude map, and with the cloud cover it would be safe to break out the bio-light. If the Protectorate had tech to see though that much mass, everyone might as well give up.
As she trudged forward, her boots slurped down into mud. And then, like someone had pulled the dimmer switch, the wind sputtered and the rain thinned against her hood. A sheet of water stretched left and right before her, meters wide, its surface a shifting, speckled array of momentary raindrop craters. The pines began again a few meters beyond a half-flooded plain of mud and rock on the far bank. Her side of the river was almost the same, with the addition of Kinski two meters to her left, dark, sopping jumpsuit clinging to his shoulders and wrists.
He lifted the shadow of a knife Mike had told her about as Megan extended her left arm, slid her right to belt. “Slow down, Paul. Take it easy.”
Megan could barely see him, but Mike had pulled the admin database’s images for her as soon as he figured out who it was that had gone walkabout. Paul Kinski was in his early fifties, with fair skin and graying blonde hair from the European DNA that made up the bulk of the Hidden Rock Confederacy. His wife had died of leukemia twenty years ago, before they had been licensed for children. Now he worked waste reprocessing and water recovery. He had no disciplinary history in the terrestrial colony, and only minor infractions back in the belt—curfew violaions, illegal distillery, nothing political. His data usage wasn’t out of the ordinary. He had requested assignment to the new colony, rather than getting unlucky in the lottery, but that hadn’t raised any flags in admin; management in Lara had been eager to dump workers in their late forties, before rad cancers and osteoporosis set in. The file said he was harmless.
But still, his age. That should have been a warning sign. The third generation away from Earth still had true believers in resettlement.
“Security Officer Pielczark,” Kinski said, a gravelly voice wet with rain and age. Maybe the earliest touches of lung trouble, if he’d caught a high-energy proton during the crossing from the belt. He lowered the knife to his hip. “Of course its you.”
Megan ignored the tone and kept her eyes on the shadow of his right hand. In microgravity there were more angles of attack, but friction with the ground made for harder strikes. “Alright, Kinski. I’ve read your file; you’re a good man.”
“Why thank you. You’re clearly an expert in good men.”
“You don’t want to hurt anyone,” she insisted.
He sighed, put his arms down to his sides, the shadow of the knife jutting out from his thigh. “Damn right I don’t.”
Megan responded in kind, took a moment to breathe, the air warm and close inside her personal plastic bubble. “You’re lucky we found you so soon, Paul. In this muck you could have been lost before you knew it.”
“Lost,” he said flatly. “Where do you think I’m going?”
“Decon. We’re two kilometers from the colony on a straight shot. I’ve got a map and I can get us back before the cloud cover breaks.”
“Huh.”
“You’re not in trouble Paul, not yet. I carry weight with Graham, and he’s got management’s ear. We can work something out. You’ll lose clearance for the flight deck and anything near the backup oxygen shafts, but it’s not going to affect your life—”
She thumbed the snap open on her belt, but the old man was just laughing, bending over and laughing and coughing, hand and knife resting on his knees. He cut himself off with a phlegmy snort. “But what’s life without the flight deck? The gray floor plating, the gray wall plating, the same damn air as everywhere else. All those nice little displays of the stars and the trees, of course.” He rocked back up, wiped rain from his face. “But I’ve got that right here.”
“Paul—”
“I’m not lost. I’m going out. And I’m not coming back.”
Walkabout was a crime unlike any other. In the belt, once you discovered the infraction, that was basically it. The perp was outnumbered, and there was nowhere to go. And there was nowhere to go here, either, but not for a madman.
“How much food did you bring, Paul?”
“Enough.”
“Enough for how long? And when you run out, what, that knife? Where did you get it, anyway?”
Kinski’s whole body tightened up at that, which was all the answer Megan needed. Friends in the colony, either in property control or manufacturing. Conspiracy—
She was getting ahead of herself. Step one, talk him down.
“You’re going to die out here, Paul.”
“Eventually.”
“Think you’re good enough with that blade to handle a pack of dog soldiers?” He’d never held a weapon before in his life. “How about an alpha particle in your lungs?”
“I heard the speeches back in the belt, too, Officer. They were mandatory.” Kinski ratcheted his voice up to a cartoonish squeak meant to mimic Leslie Krakauer’s boyish tenor. “Over one hundred years have passed since the nuclear exchange. The site for the new colony is over five hundred kilometers from any—”
“Toronto’s south of here,” Megan interrupted. “If the virus goes to spore, they could be waiting for you to kick up a little dust.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
The rain had dropped to a gentle hiss, with an occasional close splack against the polymer on her head and arms. Megan tried to think of the words that would put sense into the man.
Kinski shuffled his shoes in the muck, hitched what must have been the strap of a backpack against his left shoulder. “Anything else.”
Fuck it. “Any human presence on the planet’s surface could be seen as far as lunar—”
“Shut up!” Kinski roared. Megan felt the heels of her boots sink dangerously into the riverbank as she edged away from him, from the knife. “Don’t you know how tired everyone is of your bullshit? Fifty years in a rock eating your own recooked shit is bad enough, but it’s you.” She flinched to the side as he lifted the knife, but he only pointed it at her, a tiny waterfall dripping from the hilt as the rain ran down the blade’s edge. “You and all the management cocksuckers who know what’s good for us. We’re sick of your shit. Sick of it!”
Megan listened. “Us.” After a moment she shook her head, a private gesture if he couldn’t see through the hood. “I don’t see anyone but you out here, Kinski.”
“Give me five minutes and you won’t even see that. I’m done. If the boogeymen want to railgun me from orbit they can do it.” With a squelch he picked up his legs, turned, starting up the bank. “It’ll be interesting, getting screwed by someone else for a change.”
“No,” Megan insisted, following. “Where there’s one human there’s more. They see you and they’ll pave this continent with antilithium.”
“Like I said, I’ll take my chances.”
“You won’t take mine,” Megan declared.
The snap of her holster guard as she unfastened it was higher-pitched than the rain striking the mud and leaeves. Kinski stopped, still facing the encroaching trees. “Well.” He lifted his head to the invisible clouds, and Megan thought she could just see the outline of a bald forehead. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“Drop the knife,” she ordered, pulling her pistol, a long motion to get the bulbous flash suppressor clear of the holster. She braced the butt on her left palm and lined the sights on the center of the dark, shfting space where she thought he was. Even though the gloves were far tighter than the remainder of the suit, the gun still felt small in her hands. “Lift your hands out to your sides and put them on the back of your—”
Lightning raced along the clouds and she had a flash of him turning, half of a taut, snarling face, a steel flash at the end of his arm. It wasn’t the knife but the light, the sudden space that brought the panic, squeezed closed the eyes of a small thing clinging to the skin of an oversized rock in endless space where cruel intelligences watched, waiting to kill, exterminate. She dropped to her right knee as she pulled the trigger, feeling only the kick as the sound was lost in the roll of thunder.
Megan blinked. The knife was buried in the mud to its hilt, pulled down by gravity that the old man’s muscles still hadn’t learned. In between the green afterimages of lightning she thought she could see his shape occulding the trunks to her left, making a break for the treeline.
She’d barely found him to begin with. If the rain picked up, if he lost her in the woods—
This time she heard the bangs with each pull of her trigger, the grip slapping into the reinforced polymer over her palm, just a faint glow from the fat oval at the end of the barrel as it ate the flaming gas behind the bullets. Ten shots before she got a hold of herself and the thunder died away, leaving just the rain and her own close, animal panting.
Nothing moved.
Megan fell forward, her left glove slapping into thick septic muck, crawled to her feet, ran stumbling to the trees where, where—
Face-down, arms at his side, head knocked out of shape by the rock lodged under it like a pillow.
She sat, feeling the dull shape of mud and pine needles move beneath her, and safetied her pistol, cradling it between her bent, spread legs. Lowered her head and felt the individual impacts of the raindrops against the back of her hood.
“Good,” she muttered quietly to no one. “Good.”
The rain stopped in fifteen minutes, but there were still no stars. Lightning boiled above the pines to the east, silent flashes sliding from one bulbous extrusion to another. The bubbling of the dark river and the steady drop of old rain from needle to needle, leaf to ground were the only sounds.
Megan finally got up, her adrenaline rush subsided. Shrugging off her pack and laying it atop the body, she closed her eyes, played the encounter back in her mind. Almost colleded with him on the bank, about five meters away. Knife—she’d fired—shells.
The mud clung to her as she got up, dripping off her backside with wet plops. Footprints—but those wouldn’t last, this close to the river, and humans weren’t the only things that left footprints. Kinski’s blade came out easily; she tossed it up by his body. Then the churned mud where she had fired. She crouched down, performed the ancient mime of a pistol with the fingers of her right hand, aimed at the air above the man’s body and followed the path of her imaginary pistol’s shells with her eyes. About a half a meter to the right, if she was lucky enough not to have bounce.
As it turned out, luck—nothing bounced in the rain-drenched slime beside the river. Five casings showed in a neat cluster as soon as she activated the bioluminescent tube. She pinched their now-cold lips, dropped them in her right side pocket. The others must be sunk deeper.
Rationally, she knew that she didn’t need to pick them up. Even assuming a lens could spot them from low orbit, spent bullet casings were one of the things mankind had produced in abundance before it died out. A few in the middle of the North American continent wouldn’t draw even the artificial eye of a posthuman intelligence. She could just call it, pick up Kinski’s body and lug it two kilometers and low-end error back to the colony.
Megan bet the rain made him weigh more, with the clothes. He looked heavy, lying there.
So she kept at it for a few minutes, until she caught herself almost forgetting, touching the muck near the filter in front of her face.
If there were more shells in the mud, she’d managed to bury them with her clawing. She stood, scraped the mud off of the palms of her gloves and on to her pants, her light picking out footprints that she did her best to—
She reversed the flashlight in her hand and lifted it beside her head, training the beam on Kinski’s body again. The second time there was no yellow, just the black-brown of the mud, the brown of the old man’s jumpsuit, her green pack, and . . .
The records weren’t clear which branch of the fracturing American Protectorate had first weaponized dog hybrids, but well before the Toronto virus and the follow-on extermination bioweaons nearly everyone had been deploying them. All the loyalty and predatory aggression you could want from canines, spiced with primate HOX genes to get them standing on two feet. They were smart enough to understand Trade American and follow directions, tenacious enough to savage enemy territory even once their links to command had been cut. They had hands that could open doors and operate a multirifle, and snout that couldn’t speak Trade American but that would eat just about anything. They were extremely stealthy in natural environments, particularly at night. They smelled and saw you before you smelled them. Their eyes, when expoed to a light source, would briefly appear to glow as cells reflected incoming light over the retina a second time for enhanced night vision.
Only one more thing in common with humans: where there was one, there were always more, whether you saw them or not.
The river, Megan thought. If she could make it to the river, she might survive. Two breaths, and she ripped her gun from her holster, aming it and her light at the trees behind her pack. Two blasts to wound or scare it and she turned to—
The scream pierced her, froze her. It sounded like a baby, like a baby shrieking. Lines and shapes roiled in the beam of her light, black and white and gray.
“Naw chatt!” Megan kept her finger tight on the trigger but listened to what now sounded like a young child babbling in some lost language. “Naw chat! Naw naw naw chatt!” Tiny arms waved back and forth in her light above the edge of her pack, one empty, one holding—
“Drop the knife!” she shouted.
“Naw chatt! Naw chatt.”
“Drop the knife,” she said again.
Both arms grabbed her pack, squeezed it, the right hand still holding the knife. A head poked over the top of the pack, an unsmiling alien, animal face, wide with bristling fur and pointed ears, crazy gaps and stripes and glowing yellow eyes. No mouth opened, but it made an inhumain whistling sound, rising in pitch, fingers bristling with short black hairs gripping tighter on the hilt of the blade.
Without thinking she fired again, wood fracturing in a symphony of brittle cracks. The thing’s eyes disappeared and it dropped the knife, pressing itself flat on top of Kinski’s corpse, behind her pack. “Naw chatt! Naw naife. Naw maiyne.”
Slowly, Megan lowered her gun, not believing it. Dog hybrids could hear orders, but . . . . “Don’t shoot?”
The dog-thing lifted its head again. Its golden eyes shone from pits of deep black fur over a over a squashed, flattened white snout. “Naw chatt!” it chirped.
Trade American. Almost. “Don’t shoot,” Megan said, stressing the vowel.
It made a warbling noise, again without opening its mouth, and pulled at the fur on either side of its head with its hands. “Mans,” it said. Then it pushed on the sides of its face, squeezing his flesh to the front of its snout until black-skinned lips bulged out under white fur. Rainwater dripped from long whiskers as it flapped its jaw: “Wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah.”
Or maybe not Trade American. “Dog?”
“Dag?” the creature echoed.
“You,” Megan tried. “You’re a dog?”
The thing slapped both of its hands down on her pack, wet and muddy. “Naw dag!” it barked. “Feesh.”
“Feesh?”
“Feesh.”
“. . . Fish?”
“Feesh!” It clapped its hands together, rocked back and forth, spread his arms wide and waggled his fingers. “Waddafeesh. Strangswam, ayts feesh.”
Megan briefly played her light up and down the riverbank, but didn’t see any other dogs sneaking up on her. She wasn’t even sure the thing was big enough to eat her if it wanted to. Maybe it was a juvenile, in which case she should probably either kill it or run before its parents arrived. But the thing could talk—it seemed to think it could talk, although its answers wre gibberish.
She put her light back on the dog-thing and lifted her gun out into the beam, to make sure it could see it. “What do you want?” she said.
Without moving its arms, its head tilted to the side. “Waddawah.” The gun didn’t bother it. It seemed to forget to be afraid whenever she didn’t fire it for fifteen seconds at a time.
“What do you want?” What did any dog want. “You want him? The body?”
“Baah-deee.”
“Eat it. Do you want to eat the human. The . . . the human . . . meat.”
It ducked its head, rubbing his chin against her pack, and clapped its hands again, shaking water from limp, dripping fur on its forearms. “Ayt! Naw naw naw.” It looked to the right, to the left, the right, the left. “Man bag, kain smah. Ayt feesh.”
Meg sighed. “Well than what do you—”
“DAG!” The thing’s ears folded back to its skull as its left arm stabbed out, all but one finger pulled into a fist, an unmistakable, instantly recognizable gesture of pointing behind her and to her right. “Dags! Dag small!” Terrified. “Dags!”
Meg spun, tracing gun and light along the river and the far bank. The far bank was empty. The water looked empty—
She turned back and had a brief glimpse of thick, hairy legs, a short striped tail and a round, short body as the creature made for the tree line, her pack rocking wildly on top of it as it ran.
“Mother-fuck!” She took off after it, saw the thing reach a hand out for a treetrunk, swung her arm forward and fired. Another one of those terrible animal-baby shrieks as artificial fibers puffed from the sudden hole in her pack, which hit the ground, rolled, was still.
Megan drew up short, carefully lined both light and sights, and edged forward. Three decimeters. Two.
A rough kick to her bag and it flopped over in the needles of the forest floor. There was nothing underneath it. She snapped her light up into the branches above. She heard late raindrops falling, needles brushing each other. Nothing else.
She was already sure, but picked up her pack and walked a small spiral pattern by the treeline to verify. The knife was gone.
“You little cocksucker,” she muttered, coming to a halt by Kinski, who was looking heavier by the minute. “Least you could have ate him, you piece of shit.” Megan could bury him, like Mike had buried the Empire family, but she didn’t have a shovel, and it would mean digging through the dirt and hoping she didn’t wear a tear in her gloves or sleeves. Just thinking about it made her want to cut off her hands. Leaving the body out meant a lens could spot it, defeating the entire purpose of the mission. Dragging the body two kilmoters through woods infested with who knew what kinds of semi-intelligent monsters and diseases so it could be incinerated in decon was the best she could do, unless—
She played her light over the river. In the night the water was jet black, but where the beam caught it she could see clouds of sediment and algae in the water. The more she played over the dog-things word’s, the better she could grab them. Only a tenth of them made any sense, but tenth that did were helpful.
“Fish.” She muttered. “Eat fish.”
With a grunt, she picked up Kinski by his ankles. “Come on Paul. Fish eat.”