Mask of Humanity

Nicolai struggled pointlessly, his body reacting as any animal would, even as his more rational side kept his eyes and mouth closed and held his breath. The sand was everywhere. Something heavier tumbled against him and pressed tight. Nicolai couldn’t open an eye to try and see what it was, but from the fleshiness and faint warmth he already knew.

All movement stopped and he was squeezed by the sand for a moment until it retracted, though Carl’s corpse stuck with him so he shoved the dead man off. There wasn’t much space and the body only went a short distance, still half on him.

Nicolai sucked in a hopeful breath and there was air. The sand beneath him had turned hard and rough, no longer sand but stone. He opened his eyes but nothing changed. It was pitch black.

He felt around, finding himself to be in some kind of stone box, just big enough for him and Carl to fit, lying side-by-side. He tongued at the Seed, checking it was still in his mouth, and relaxed upon feeling it.

He waited to see if anything would happen but nothing did. Nicolai found he didn’t mind, because it was peaceful in the box. Carl was a quiet and relatively considerate partner, as when shoved the man was happy to make room, though there was only so much Nicolai could do to squeeze him into one side.

Unfortunately, Carl had relieved himself, as was typical in death, and the stink filled the box. Nicolai tried not to let it upset him, recognising that had Carl managed to kill him instead, he would have likely enacted a similar revenge.

It was quiet and dark, and once Nicolai grew used to the stench, he found his thoughts similarly quiet and dark, the endless flurries of his subconscious leaving him be and giving him a chance to stabilise his mind. His fingers automatically felt around, feeling every part of his prison and trying to work it out while his mind reflected over everything that had happened so far.

Replaying the events of the trials, a few moments came to mind. He remembered swimming towards the dead girl, the pathetic fear he’d felt above the lava, and the moments the rage had entirely seized control from him. A litany of failures.

The part that stood out the most had occurred when he was hanging from the monkey bars, when he kicked out like a child at the statue. He was fine with what had happened next when his animalistic fury had powered him through the obstacle, recognised that though he disliked the loss of control, in that moment it had been exactly what he’d needed. However, he felt that the childish kicking specifically was beneath him and he was embarrassed to think upon it.

Not good, not good at all. He tried to recall the clarity of thought he’d possessed so recently, as a part of Zero-Twelve, but the memories seemed strange, gray and insubstantial, almost alien. As though he’d been a different person.

He told himself the violent urges and primitive emotions of his fleshy form should be used as tools, no more than that. They had their uses, but letting them take him over was not good. And some, such as lust, he wished to discard entirely. Nothing but the drive of his genes to make him procreate. He needed to maintain control of his unruly body.

Lying in the dark he began to categorise his mind along the lines he’d learned long ago. Every psychologist or psychiatrist had shared differing views with him, but there were some commonalities he’d begun to piece together from their words.

They’d said he showed several psychopathic tendencies, such as feeling little empathy towards others, and struggling to understand normal human interaction. Nicolai had at one point glorified in this and felt that it made him better than others, a superior version. But somewhere along the line, he’d developed an urge to know what it would be like to be… more human.

Then there was the other issue. He wasn’t schizophrenic. But he was… something. They’d never been able to work it out.

Ever since he’d been young, Nicolai had been seeing things. That had persisted long through his life, though the more he’d augmented himself, the more he’d replaced his flesh with machine, the less it had occurred. Once he was was a part of Zero-Twelve, the visions had faded entirely.

So far as he could tell, he’d yet to properly experience one so far in this new life. But he knew he would, given time. And with those visions, would come the other.

Nicolai thought of it as the bloodrage, the madness, the darkness. Something that rose through him and seized control and reaped bloody work. It had its uses, but he was determined to master it.

This was one of the reasons why Nicolai had begun attempting to simulate humanity. Understanding what a normal human would do helped him to judge the extent to which the madness was within him. Long ago, he’d found that by focusing on being human, on attempting to understand how a normal person would act and mimicking it, he could keep his madness at bay.

For now, he hadn’t noticed anything off. But it would be worth trying to simulate humanity as much as he could, where possible. That would help keep any… instability down.

In the meantime, Nicolai intended simply to enjoy being truly alive for the first time in centuries. Stuck in Zero-Twelve he’d been unable to do anything he wasn’t ordered, but now, at long last, he could return to his chosen purpose.

Nicolai had found his calling early in life. He’d found it on his first battlefield. As the bullets had cracked and snapped around him, as his comrades had cried out in fear and huddled in their holes, he had fired back. Because he’d known his cover was good, and he’d had sight on the enemy. The slow, steady process of aiming, breathing out, sighting down the rifle’s iron-sights at the bobbing head of another man. The thump of the rifle’s recoil against his chest and the sight of his target falling dead, a hole in their head.

Such satisfaction he’d experienced, as he lay there and fired, and in that moment he’d felt as though he could not miss. He had been connected to something greater, something eternal, something that he took into himself and made his own.

He’d known then that fighting and killing was to be his lot in life, and he’d been right. Even now he saw no reason to deviate from his chosen purpose.

Tied into his love of combat was his pursuit of perfection. Nicolai didn’t simply wish to fight, he wanted to fight well. He wanted to express the greatest degree of skill he possibly could.

His second greatest source of joy and satisfaction had been found in the simple pursuit of that perfection. Hundreds of thousands of hours spent in firing ranges, sparring in MMA gyms, exercises in the field. Many people found such activities gruelling or even boring, but Nicolai had always found a deep satisfaction in the gradual improvement of his skills.

The only moments more enjoyable than those spent developing his skills, were the times where he was able to put them to use.

In that regard he’d been encountering a most frustrating issue, one that had never affected him in the past; his struggle to control his body, which was doubly a problem because of how it fed the blood rage. But as he reflected on the latter stage of the Trial, he realised it wasn’t actually a problem any longer. At some point he had overcome that particular issue, and the thought drew a smile from him. His mind had finished adjusting to his restored body.

His hand touched on Carl, and he considered that matter next. Had killing Carl been a failure? It had been necessary, he was pretty sure. Perhaps he could have tried harder to find another solution, but he was almost entirely certain there had been none. He was glad that he hadn't kicked the man's corpse, at least. That would have been unnecessarily rude.

It was difficult to keep his mind on the matter. It bored him. He knew it shouldn’t, knew that he likely owed Carl some kind of… feeling. Regret, or something like that. He attempted to make himself feel bad, failed, and gave up.

His fingers played over the top edge of his prison, where any box would normally open, and he found there was a little gap running all along it. This suggested to him that this box could be opened, with a bit of force.

There was nothing else to do and though he enjoyed the quiet, he was increasingly worried about whether or not the box was airtight, and if so, his dwindling stores of oxygen. Nicolai raised his arms and began to apply pressure to the bottom of the lid.

He went from lightly pushing to straining quickly, and felt it shift, just a little, a faint scraping sound, and as it moved slightly to the side light came in through a gap he’d opened on one corner.

Light, and sound.

‘I heard something, I think we’ve a new arrival,’ said a deep, rough voice.

‘Which one?’ the second voice was a little higher, with a lilting, mocking quality.

‘That one… there, I think.’

There was a rough scraping, and heavy breathing, then more scraping, then the cracking thump of heavy stone on stone.

‘Ahh, god, fuck. Oh, oh, get her off me,’ came a new voice, panting, horrified. ‘Hello? Hey, what is this place?’ this voice was quite high, nasally.

‘You alright? Let’s get you out of there, come on,’ this was the second voice, which now held a smoothness and friendliness that struck Nicolai as entirely false.

‘Yeah, thanks. Where’d you find that?’ the new voice.

‘Oh, they’re all over, come over here into the light,’ the second voice again.

‘Thanks, I-‘ the new voice transformed into a shocked, gurgling scream, and then there was a deal of scrambling and cursing and wet thumps, then a very final sounding, bloody gasp.

‘Got ‘im,’ said the first voice, satisfied.

‘Yeah, very nice. Where is it… ah.’ Second voice.

‘Oooh, nice and fat, give it here.’

‘Fuck off, you had the last one!’

‘Did I? Oh, yeah.’ The first voice chuckled. ‘Hey, hey, alright, calm down, it’s all yours.’

Nicolai listened to all of this carefully and constructed a rough idea of what had happened. He’d decided to wait for a good chance when they spoke again.

‘Only one left, now. Shouldn’t take too long to pop.’

Only one left? That would be him. In which case, waiting for them to get into position wasn’t a great idea. The dark thrill that thrummed through him took him by surprise, shoving aside the ramshackle chains he’d been wrapping his subconscious in and hissing that this time there was no need to worry about justification or normalcy. Then his mind spun on and thought that two against one, if they were good or augmented enough they might be able to kill him, and the tension that thought birthed turned into a consuming, beautiful, glorious rush.

Nicolai wriggled, a snake in a hole, until he had his legs between him and the stone, took a moment to set himself, feet against the lid, then he shoved at it. It seemed light now that he was better positioned and using his more powerful leg muscles, and he felt it rising and rising then it was flung away to crash with a great crack of stone-on-stone somewhere in the room.

He rose from the darkness of the sarcophagus, an ancient evil reborn into a world of dim light and brooding rock. The room was hewn from dark stone, large enough to contain nine more of the sarcophagi Nicolai had been in which were spread around, five on either side. All were open. Light was provided by a pair of metal rods stuck in the wall burning with a dull orange flame.

Two targets were frozen in surprise a short distance away in the space between the sarcophagi. They were halfway clothed in ragged, rotting cloth, and a few random pieces of ill-fitting rusted armour, medieval in nature.

One of them held a short, slightly rusted metal bar that looked good for clubbing people over the head. The other was bent over the person they’d just killed, paused in the act of dragging him to wherever they dumped the dead, staring up at Nicolai. There was a bloodstained knife resting on the edge of one of the sarcophagi beside them.

Club man was larger, a thuggish face with his nose broken and badly reset. The other was a ratty looking individual with ginger hair. Nicolai saw no signs of any advanced augmentations on them, just the standard, though a few ad-tats crawled over their arms.

Nicolai didn’t wait for them to gather their wits, hopping out of the sarcophagus. He was pleased to feel his body move easily, under control, as he darted towards club-thug. Something hungry and eager burned within him, anticipating the violence, craving it.