Sneak Peak: 40k words (Patreon)

Crossed the 40k word mark today!  It's been far too long since I posted the previous chapter, but at the same time I'm feeling pretty good about returning to a solid writing routine.  When I finally finish the interlude and get around to posting it, I'll have at least two, maybe three chapters to publish.  

For now, to mark crossing this completely aritrary line, I thought it might be a good time post the current scene I'm working on, the one that's carried us across the threshold.  It's still in rough shape--I've given it several passes, but it needs several more before I'm happy with it.  Some of it still feels too exposition-ey, some bits have been moved around and don't quite sit fluently in their new place, and three three characters at times feel a little too prone to "frown" or "grimace" or "look away" and basically twitch their way through the scene as a means to control the flow of the dialogue.  All stuff to clean up in the final edit.

Otherwise, I hope you like it.  A few revelations, a bit of character backstory, and some light touches of world-building.  Enjoy!  (Or, of you prefer, wait for the final edit....)

***

The three of them met later that week, Crystal, Jonathon and Katherine sitting down together to decide their ward’s fate. Though they’d met frequently in pairs over the previous days, this was their first face-to-face since David’s arrival. The room was intimate and warm, wood-panelled and decorated with expensive paintings, gifts to the Clinic from wealthy, grateful clients: impressionistic, hazy swaths and swirls of light and dark colours, apparently valued in the millions. A bust of the Greek god Asklepios overlooked the chamber from a high shelf. Overall, the room gave an impression of old university stuffiness, one in which even the walls and heavy oak table were suffused with knowledge and old secrets.

“I hope you both appreciate this,” Jonathon was saying, pouring out some wine, one of several bottles sitting beneath the table. He’d already started before the others arrived and was well into his third glass. “I dug out some of the good stuff.” He held it up to the light. “DeGrave ’33. You won’t taste one of these again.”

“I gave that to you,” Katherine said flatly. “We seized the case from the Neopharm site.”

“Wasted on those bastards,” Jonathon said.

Crystal meanwhile sat in silence, staring into the ruby darkness of the drink. There’d been several more sessions with David and Cindy over the past few days. Her patient had opened up since unburdening himself of the memory of the night at Dan’s. As Cindy, there seemed an almost newfound confidence in how she presented herself—less aggressively, stereotypically feminine; more poised and genuine, though strongly skewing towards what could only be termed ‘girly’, all high heels and bright makeup and vivid colours.

And as for David….

“Oh, lighten up, Carl,” Jonathon said. “We’re celebrating.”

“Are we?” she answered, and she struggled to hold back the tremor of anger running through her voice. “And what exactly are we celebrating, Jon?”

“Success!” he said, raising his glass in a mock cheer.

“Success?” Crystal asked. “Do tell.”

“What else would you call it?” He dropped heavily into his chair, some of the wine sloshing over the rim and onto his lab coat. “Shit.” He rubbed at the stain and shrugged. Feeling ebullient with the initial results of the tests run on their special client, a little spilled wine or a sullen colleague wasn’t going to dampen his mood. Everything, it seemed, was going according to plan—better, even, than expected.

The greatest achievements of the week were of course highly confidential—not the sort of stuff to share with his companions. Carl and he might work for the same Clinic, but in very different divisions. The therapist owed him a certain loyalty, but their over-developed sense of professionalism and annoying ethical dogmatism could also get them all into trouble.

And as for Katherine—well, she’d always been a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. The key for as long as he’d known her had always been her unwavering hatred of Steele, and so long as their interests aligned, she could be trusted. Beyond that? Impossible to say.  Even now she sat at the far end of the table, forcing him to stand to slide the glass of wine to her. Separate from the other two, she watched them both with an inscrutable smile.

No. Best to keep certain details to himself.

“The initial test results on the blood samples confirm what I’d both hoped and predicted: David’s blood shows a greatly reduced levels of the regenerative compound.” He ticked each point off, finger by finger. “Diffusion levels of the Juice across a range of samples—blood, soft and hard tissue, and so on—has reduced by half since exiting the Tank. Consequently, regeneration within the subject continues at an accelerated but non-hazardous level. Changes to the subject appear to be slowing as well, though the ongoing transformation over the past several months, has been nothing short of spectacular.

“As I’m sure you’ve noticed,” he added, grinning and waggling his eyebrows at Katherine. “He’s not going to be able to go around braless anymore. He’s grown to a healthy C-cup; height reduction seems to have ended at a petite 157 centimeters; even his hips have filled out a little. He measured 86-74-81 as of a few days ago, weighing fifty four kilos. Hair’s nearly down to his ass, facial features have softened; even muscle mass and composition have shifted towards female-norm. I doubt there’s a person or A.I. recognition software out there that could link our little Cindy to thirty-five-year-old David Saunders.”

Earlier in the week, he’d asked David: what makes you so special? The question continued to vex Jonathon. The simple truth—and one he avoided raising tonight—was that it remained a miracle that David had not only survived the process but emerged healthy and whole. Even accounting for the tweaks made following running the initial experiment on Fosters, there’d been no reason to expect David would emerge… intact.

Yet he had. Something—unique—to the man, some fluke of genetics, something buried in his DNA, made him the perfect candidate for the process. Finding him had been a stroke of pure luck, a totally unexpected key to unlocking the process—a discovery on level with the harvesting of HeLa cells nearly a century ago. And just as those immortal cells had transformed medical research around the world, so too would Saunders’ cells transform humanity.

Already, a culture of DaSa cells were maturing under carefully controlled conditions in the labs downstairs. Some had already been used to stabilise the extravagance of the regenerative process—to tame the Juice—and tested on both Fosters and a third live subject, successfully.

None of this, of course, needed sharing with the others. Turning to Crystal, he resumed a more serious tone. “He’s emerging from what could be considered a heightened second adolescence and hormone levels are stabilising into those typical for a young woman in their early 20s. Based on some of heightened emotional swings you’ve reported, we may need to consider whether further adjustments are necessary. Overall, however, he appears to be remarkable healthy, stable and safe.”

Unlike our patient in the basement, Jonathon thought.

“Finally, the test results aren’t in yet but I believe we’ll find the behavioural changes have worked out as I theorised. Through the slow-release administration of psychotropics, and the regenerative bolstering of new neural pattern development, the patient’s learning patterns have been self-reinforcing, accelerating the adoption of new habits and knowledge.”

Deep in his pockets, his fingers began to twitch with excitement. The implications were immense. Learning was such a slow process, a painful process, reliant on repetition and rest, vulnerable to emotional swings and distractions. But what was learning but the growth of connections between neurons, the forming of new synapses and encoding of experience into the brain?

Juice levels across David’s body had halved in the past six months—except for in the hippocampus, testing suggested, though it was impossible to verify without putting David under. But in that part of the brain the compound seemed to be enhancing the patient’s neuroplasticity, boosting the brain’s ability to not only encode new information but migrate it to the cortex and form long-term memories. It seemed this might extend even to so-called “muscle memory,” considering the aptitude the patient displayed at moving and reacting in new ways.

The process had not only regenerated the man’s body but his mind as well. Driven by the threat of discovery, the man’s intense focus on learning to behave as Cindy meant his brain may well have encoded the patterns of her life and in doing so, changed him in unexpectedly profound ways.

Another Asklepios innovation he felt no need to share with his companions. “To put it another way,” he continued, “the man’s adopted a lifetime of desired behavioural habits—feminine ones—in a space of months rather than years, thanks to our efforts here.”

They were already working on developing a short-term, focused version of the process. One of his colleagues, Dr Thelma Makris, had already theorised an ingested, short-lived version disassociated from the Tank, capable of boosting learning and retention, even the formation of memories. He smiled, thinking of the ambitious young woman. She’d already formulate a series of tests. His fingers twitched, considering how he might adapt those tests to the prisoner in the basement. What learning could they augment, what behaviours could they encode? What memories could they create?

“All-in-all, I’d say we engineered “Cindy” just about perfectly,” he finished.

By this point he’d run out of fingers on his hands, and so he held up the index and waggled it at Carl. “And if that wasn’t enough, well, finally, the subject’s taken on board every lie I’ve sold him this week. He’ll behave. I told you that showing him Fosters was the key.”

Katherine frowned. “You know I disagreed with you.”

“And you know you were wrong,” he said. He took a long drink of his wine and smacked his lips in pleasure. “Fuck me, but that’s good.”

“I hate it when you get like this,” Crystal said. “Smugness doesn’t become you.”

“It does when I’m right.”

“It’s not right. It’s wrong. Have you considered the cost of what we’re doing here?”

“What we’re doing?” He twisted in his chair to face her. “What the hell do you mean?”

“We’re destroying a man,” Crystal said. “We’re breaking him in two. We’re taking a mentally healthy man—”

Jonathan coughed.

“—a man totally secure in his sexuality and in his sense of his own masculinity,” she continued, glaring at him. “An identity rooted in absolute certainty of his heterosexuality and—tearing it in two. From everything I’ve learned of this man, it’s clear that his relationship with women—and specifically, the taking and giving of pleasure with them—is central to his sense of self.

“And we have removed that from him; made him the woman within that dynamic and forced him into redefining his self through his ability to find pleasure from, and return it, to men—other men.

“He described several times a sense of ‘watching’ from outside himself.” Making air quotes, she frowned. “There’s a sense of growing division between the two halves of his self. First there’s a Cindy half, an amalgam of his own deep-rooted misogynistic ideas of how an attractive young women should act; and his interpretation of the personality forced upon him—she’s a bundle of stereotypical feminine traits reinforced by drugs, hormones and your process, Jonathon.”

He nodded. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

“And then there’s David.”

Katherine leaned forward, intrigued but still with that slight, secret smile. “Yes?”

“This second half,” Crystal continued, shifting her attention to the other woman, “increasingly seems like a distillation of masculine violence and anger. At some unconscious level, he seems to be… isolating these aspects of himself, these essential characteristics, as though protecting some core self from what he might interpret as the corrupting influence of Cindy.” She shook her head. “He is creating his own shadow to balance out the anima of his lived personality. Both aspects of his selves are being pushed to extremes: ever more stereotypical “masculine” balancing out increasingly “feminine” behaviours, or at least as he perceives them.”

Crystal frowned, ignoring the doctor as he poured himself another glass of wine. “Frankly, considering the psychotropic drugs you’ve flooded his system with, the bath of hormones you’ve released in him, it’s a testament to his strength of will that his psyche hasn’t already shattered.”

“A testament to your good work.” Jonathon interjected. “You’ve brought him around. A week ago he crippled a man in that diner so he could reassert his masculinity – that’s what you said, right? And now… well, where is he?”

Katherine glanced at a tablet sitting to one side at her end of the table. “At the pub. Drinking with that physiotherapist. Chad Jenkins.”

Jonathon grinned. “You’ve got him flirting with Chad. If I thought any of you’d take the bet, I’d put money down on him going down on Chad by the time he leaves.”

With a grimace, Crystal looked away and glared at the table.

“He is strong,” Katherine said.

“Maybe. But there’s increasingly evidence of strain. Not just the mood swings or the lashing out. Those are expected.”

“Then what are you concerned about?”

Crystal hesitated, though only for a moment. “You’ve been monitoring our sessions?”

She nodded.

“Now, on the one hand, it is entirely possible that David has been feeding me lies. There is something about him—what he says, or how he says it—that just doesn’t sit right.” She pinched at the bridge of her nose in concentration. “It’s difficult to explain. At times, it feels as though he’s… not so much lying as telling me what he thinks I want to hear.” She looked at Katherine. “Do you know what I mean?”

The other woman gave a slow nod.

“It’s difficult to assess how much of his—anger, frustration, sadness—anything he’s shared is genuine. I can’t quite pinpoint it, but at times it feels as though there’s a… hollowness, underlying what he says. And so, his story about following Dan up to his apartment….”

Jonathon reached beneath the table. His glass was empty, and he pulled up another bottle. “I saw the transcript,” he said. “Steamy stuff.” Working the screw into the cork, he grinned lasciviously. “You think he made it up?”

“No,” Crystal answered. “At least—not all of it. We know he followed Dan up to his apartment. We know when he caught a taxi home. But the details of what actually happened—without interrogating the young man, there’s no way to confirm. And some of the details, they just don’t didn’t feel right. The lipstick in the bathroom. The lap dance. Falling to his knees.”
 “What, you think he actually blew him and lied about it?”

Crystal pulled a face. “No. That part I think was true.”

“Then why doubt the rest?”

“I don’t know, okay?” Her jaw clenched and she counted to five, biting down on a further retort. “I don’t know. But something has felt off every time I’ve spoken to him.”

She closed her eyes, briefly, considering. She turned her attention back to Katherine. “Tell me about this Jeff—this agent of Steele’s that’s been following him since the start.”

Now it was Katherine’s turn to hesitate. With one finger tapping the table, she held back from responding for some time. She took a sip of wine—her first—and returned the glass to the table in precisely the same spot as before.

“I’ve uncovered no evidence of this man,” she said. “No traces of a ‘Jeff’. There was no one in the restaurant footage. There was no one outside the other man’s apartment building that night either.”

Jonathon looked at her. He frowned, even as Crystal nodded.

“Does he exist?” she asked.

“No,” she answered. “At least, it seems unlikely. It is possible that he was able to access the footage from the restaurant and eliminate any trace of his presence. The same outside the apartment. But he would have had to act swiftly before my people accessed and copied the video files. Furthermore, they found no traces of manipulation. The far more likely explanation is that this man does not exist.”

“So he was lying, then?” Jonathon asked.

“No,” Crystal answered. “I think he genuinely believes this man has been pursuing him.”

“But—”

“Consider when he appeared,” Crystal said. “Just as Cindy was about to leave the restaurant, escaping an unwanted romantic encounter. Instead, this hostile presence forced him to remain. Then, when Cindy attempted to leave at the end of the night and thus avoid following her date up to the apartment – an act with only one possible outcome, in David’s mind—this Jeff suddenly appeared again and forced her into that man’s embrace.

“It seems to me that David is projecting this… boogeyman as an incentive forcing him into acts that he can’t consciously commit to; a facilitator for femininity his male ego won’t allow. Jeff manifests an external agency enabling David to submit to the Cindy role he despises but must embrace to survive.”

Jonathon blinked. “So he’s nuts?”

“Quite the contrary,” Crystal said. “But equally, he’s not well.” She glowered and returned her glass to the table, wine untasted. She stood and stepped away from the table.

“So you’re saying, what, that deep down inside he actually wanted to go upstairs with that guy, drop to his knees, give him a blow job?”

“No. What he wanted was to survive. But his survival is contingent on being Cindy. And Cindy—as I’ve told you—in his mind, seems to be this jumble of his own misogynistic expectations of a pretty young woman, and the characteristics we’ve forced on him. You,” and she pointed a finger at Katherine, “expect Cindy to be soft, compliant and dependant—an inversion of David’s own strength, stubbornness and self-sufficiency.”

She sat back down as she continued to speak. “Then in his own mind, a woman like Cindy seems superficial and shallow, sexual and flirty, and focused on men.” She picked up her glass of wine again. “And then there’s the influence of the real Cindy, the girl whose life he’s taken on—and she was an insecure mess, too, obsessed with her own appearance and others’ perceptions of her.”

She sounded sad as she finished. “He could’ve been—something else, I think; but this is what we’ve created.” With that, she took a long drink from her wine, half finishing the glass in one. “That is good,” she admitted ruefully, and sighed.

“It is,” Jonathon said. “And so is what we’re doing here.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not. What we’re doing to him is unethical,” she added. “It’s wrong. I joined this project because you—” and she pointed at Jonathon, who responded with an exaggerated ‘who, me?’ expression—“invited me onboard. You thought I might have some special insight.”

“You both used to be men. Seemed an obvious connection.”

Swallowing her irritation and ignoring him, she turned to Katherine. “And you convinced me that this was the best way to keep him alive. You made a compelling argument for helping this man accept this fabricated personality—”

“Cindy wasn’t fabricated,” Katherine interrupted. “She was a real person.”

“And she died because the Clinic failed her. Because I failed her.”

“And her death provided a lifeline to this man—”

“A lifeline?” she snapped. “A line leading to what sort of life? Even if he willingly accepts to live as a woman—without needing to summon up violent boogeyman to keep him in line—is this the type of woman he’d choose to be?”

“Nobody gets to choose who they are,” Katherine stated.

“I did,” Crystal said, glancing aside at Jonathon.

He smiled.

“Then you are fooling yourself,” Katherine answered. “We are who we are due to circumstance. Of life and chance and adaptation. Formed by tragedy and loss. But so very rarely choice.”

Crystal looked away from the woman at the far end of the table. “What happened to you, Katherine?”

The woman opposite merely returned an enigmatic smile over the rim of her glass of wine.

“You convinced me, six months ago, that this approach was the best chance of keeping this man alive. And so I helped. I spoke with him; I developed a conditioning regime to help ease him into the protective personality of Cindy, something aligned with both the girl she’d been and what this man might accept. I worked with the information I had on both David and the Clinic’s files on the girl. And now….”

She sighed. “Why are we still doing this?”

“Actually, I’d quite like to know that as well,” Jonathon interjected. “I don’t really give a shit, either way. But I’d keep him here if it was up to me. He’s an extremely valuable asset for the Clinic.”

“Locked up downstairs?”

“Under our protection,” he answered.

Katherine leaned forward, and her smile had disappeared. “Because he isn’t safe,” she said. “Because even now, Steele searches for this man. I vowed to keep David alive. And he will live, no matter what.”

“Even if he doesn’t want to?” Jonathon asked. “He seemed pretty

The doctor shrugged. “It’s not like he’s a particularly good person.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” Katherine interjected. “But we have good reason to suspect.”

Jonathon turned back to face her. She, too, had yet to touch her drink, and was examining its crimson depths with a frown. “Got something?”

She nodded. “The first report arrived this morning. There is more due, but already makes for fascinating reading.”

“And….?”

With a grimace she turned to Crystal and said, “There is no David Saunders.”

Crystal blinked. “What do you mean?”

“The identity of Mr Saunders is a fabrication. A lie. The algorithm sifted through a decade of data and found the expected patterns, correlations; every indication of an ordinary man leading an ordinary life.” She hesitated. “A few abnormalities over the past few years worth pursuing. They’ll require feet on the ground, visit to unexpected locations he’s visited; but nothing egregious.

“But beyond those ten years? Nothing.”

Jonathon raised an eyebrow. “No records?”

“A birth certificate. High school and university graduation records. A driver’s license. Scans of physical documents. But beyond that: virtually nothing. No location stamps, no consumption history, no online existence whatsoever. A digital ghost with only the minimum presence required to summon up a liveable identity.”

Jonathon fingers twitched and tapped the table. “So… what does that mean? Someone wiped his childhood record clean for some reason?”

“Possibly,” Katherine answered, “though unlikely. Digital records are notoriously difficult to eliminate so thoroughly. It seems more probably that the man we know as David Saunders previously went by a different name, was a different person for the first twenty or so years of his life. And then, for reasons unknown, he abandoned that identity and began life anew as Mr Saunders. The forgery is skilled, but I suspect the technological limitations of the previous decade limited its digital reach.”

Katherine smiled, turning to Crystal. “In many ways, Cindy Bellamy was—is—a more real person than David. She has a verifiable history, a lived history. Mr Saunders? A dance of light and shadows on the cavern wall.”

Crystal nodded. Katherine’s explanation aligned with suspicions of her own. “So who was he?”

Katherine shook her head. “I do not know.”

“A psychopath,” Jonathon said. “If you ask me. You should’ve seen him. He didn’t flinch. Fosters was howling, swearing, threatening rape, smashing against the wall and David just stood there. Watching.” He took a deep drink of wine, paused, and took another. “Not normal.”

“Police? A soldier?” Crystal asked.

“Possibly,” Katherine said. “Though he would’ve been young. He has demonstrated some familiarity with weapons. And he recognized the tattoo on the man in the diner.”

“Blackwater Phoenix,” Crystal said. “I’d never heard of it.”

“No reason you should have,” Katherine said. “Five years ago. It was a miliary operation out east, in the Crimean Dominion. Mercenary unity contracted through so many layers of secrecy no one ever really determined who hired them. They raided an R&D site—maybe Chinese, maybe Russian, Indian or American—it was never clear. May even have been corporate independent.”

“I heard it was a manufacturing site,” Jonathan interjected. “Neopharm-type stuff, viral engineering and bio-horrors.”

“Like you keep downstairs?” Crystal snapped.

Jonathon glared back. “I’m not going over this with you again. Fosters gave up the rights owed any individual when he decided to raid my lab and hurt my staff. He was a war criminal before he stepped through our doors, and frankly, he deserves whatever we do to him, and more.”

Crystal face flushed red, but she kept silent.

“The few survivors,” Katherine continued, “of Blackwater Phoenix have either been unable or unwilling to clarify what happened there. When hints of this crept onto the internet, you can imagine the field day conspiracy theorists had with it.

“Ultimately, though, the attention died down. Part of that seems to have been active suppression. But the survivors’ own stories never aligned; they themselves never seemed to understand what they were doing there. Most were deeply traumatised. The only general consensus that emerged was that whatever went down there, they averted some kind of major catastrophe.”

She shrugged. “No major government has ever claimed responsibility for the incident, and we may never know. But it seems we all owe a great debt to those who returned, and to those who did not. Like Mal.” She gestured towards Jonathon. “Is he still recovering in the infirmary?”

The doctor nodded. “A screaming nightmare the first few days, but he’s doing better now.”

“David’s recognition of the tattoo may be an avenue worth exploring.”

“He couldn’t have been part of it, surely?” Crystal asked. “Five years ago, you said. He was working at Neopharm then.”

“Also, no tattoos,” Jonathon interrupted. “Not when we put him in the Tank.” He hiccupped and grew increasingly irritated by the conversation. They were there to celebrate his—their—success, and he was determined to get drunk, disgustingly so. With some luck he’d end up in bed with someone and he didn’t particularly care with who. “Several old injuries, though.  Some hadn’t healed well.”

Katherine raised an eyebrow. “You never mentioned.”

“You never asked,” he said, mimicking her voice, “and I don’t report to you. After we stabilised him, we ran a full set of scans, confirmed his suitability for the process. With Fosters in the Tank and David stabilised, we had a bit of time and wanted to get it right. And afterwards it wasn’t relevant. Those old injuries are gone,” he said proudly. “Totally healed.”

“He jests at scars that never felt a wound,” Crystal said softly.

“Whatever.” Jonathon scowled at her. “Jesus, give it a rest, Carl. We’ve done good work here. You,” and here he waved his glass at Katherine, wine sloshing over the edge of his glass onto the table, “managed to keep the bastard alive against all the odds.” He pointed at Crystal. “You’ve got him ready to accept being Cindy for another six months.” And raising his glass in a flamboyant cheer to himself, he finished, “and I’ve just gone and unlocked the secrets if immortality!” He dropped down in his chair and grinned at the others. “Frankly, I think I’ve outdone you both.”

Crystal stared at Jonathon for a long moment, and the sighed. Idiot, she thought. But he’s also not wrong, she admitted. She found her role in all this distasteful and had serious morale qualms about what they were doing to… David, or whoever he really was. Cindy, then. She wanted to believed Katherine’s insistence that this was the best way to ensure the man’s survival, and if it meant helping him accept this new identity—a replacement for one as profound as breath on a mirror—then so be it.