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Scene Eight: 18 Since 2018
The first thing Marco heard was the slow, rhythmic drip of fluid. Then, a coldness spread through him. He tried to move, even twitch or groan, but nothing happened. His arms, legs, and even his throat remained silent and unresponsive. Panic bloomed in his chest as if his body were a locked vault, and he was pounding from the inside. His eyes blinked open, sluggishly.
Overhead, fluorescent lights buzzed, stark and sterile. Steel beams. Concrete walls. A single monitor blinked faintly. The air smelled of antiseptic. He found himself lying on a surgical table, unable to move but not by restraints.
"W-what the fâ"
His voice cracked, thin as a wire. Then, Brian appeared. He wore grey scrubs and surgical gloves and was calm and composed. Unhurried about what he was about to unfold.
Marco's eyes widened with recognition, then rage.
"You bastard! Let me go, you piece of shit."
"You can shout," Brian said, mildly. "But you'll only exhaust yourself. The paralytic won't wear off for another hour."
Marco's head strained against the table. "What do you want?"
Brian didn't answer right away. He walked over to a tray, adjusted something, and scribbled on his data pad.
"A guinea pig."
Marco froze.
"What?"
Marco's eyes twisted in desperation as the room around him came into focus. Tanks, racks, and shadows filled the space.
Floating in a fluid, like cruel exhibits. There were humans, zombies, and something in between. Their limbs replaced, mouths sewn, faces half-rotted, half-healed.
"What the hell is this?" Marco wheezed. "You experimenting on corpses?"
"No." Brian's tone was even, surgical. "Living subjects. And you are subject 243B."
Marco's heart pounded against his numb ribs.
"I'm not some fucking test rat!"
Brian looked at him with a cold smile. It was not cruel, just unmoved. "You'll contribute to humanity now."
"Jesus⊠Jesus, no."
Marco's voice broke into a plea.
"Please. I â I've got money. I can get you anything. You want⊠You want what, huh⊠Ecsta-Z? You want the lab? Anything, don't â"
Brian didn't pause. He injected a bluish bolus using a modern injection device and started to make a note on the datapad.
"You, Marco⊠you're a culture medium."
Marco shouted furiously. "What the hell does that even mean?"
Brian tapped a line of code and turned back to the screen.
"I'm trying to isolate the current strain of the Hollowed organism. It mutates constantly. Every immune signature is a moving target. To track it, I need a live, human-compatible host. Someone who hasn't been integrated like me. Someone disposable."
"You Bitch! Let me the hell out of here."
Molecular chains unraveled and reknit on-screen, a simulation attempting to stabilize the organism in Marco's blood. The cultural growth was sluggish but taking shape.
Brian noted the variable, marked the decay rate, and began pre-mapping potential next-gen counteragents.
On the next monitor, a file labeled Seraphim was hovering.
"You'll help me refine Seraphim."
Marco's voice cracked. "The hell is that?"
"That was the name of the prototype," Brian murmured. "The first one. It integrated with my nervous system when I was eighteen. It worked, for a while."
He approached Marco again, this time setting a scanner near his skull.
"But the problem is, the enemy adapts. Mutates. The organism isn't Cordyceps anymore. Not only does it change the hosts, their behaviors, the Neurochemistry, but even its own form."
A quiet hum buzzed as data streamed across the scanner.
"Every time I create a new counteragent, within months, it becomes obsolete. The Hollowed aren't just infected. They're an ecosystem."
Marco's lips trembled.
"You didn't understand a word of it. Did you?"
"You're⊠trying to cure the disease? I can give you money."
Brian let out a soft, humorless chuckle. Marco could not comprehend what he said.
"I'm trying to keep myself alive. As for the money? I don't want to be where you are right now."
He looked down at his gloved hands, long, pale fingers, veins just a bit too visible under the skin.
"I'm not human anymore, Marco. Haven't been since 2018. And because of that. I can't culture the new strain inside my body. I'm stable. Integrated. That makes me useless as a medium."
He glanced at the tanks.
"The Hollowed physiology is broken. They are beings of pure instinct, pure hunger. They lack the natural pathways needed to mutate the pathogen's structure."
"And humansâŠ" he turned, voice lowering.
"âŠthey build resistance. They can handle the mutation but only with the Hollow's regenerative blueprint, which only they have."
Marco whispered, "So you need both?"
Brian nodded, eyes now locked on Marco.
"Yes, and that's where you come in. My culture's human cell line."
The sedation began to deepen. Marco's thoughts fuzzed, his heart stuttering as a cold numbness crept into his brain.
"I can help you outâŠ" Marco murmured.
Brian stood over him again, calm. "Oh, you are helping."
The tank beside them hissed softly, beginning to fill.
"You'll be helping me synthesize a new serum," Brian said, his voice calm, eyes never leaving the monitor. "I'm what happens when integration works. But if I fall behind the organism's evolution, it outgrows me. My Seraphim 15 is behind the current mutation. The organism in me has evolved. I need the new version."
On the monitor, it displayed:
SERAPHIM - 16X PROTOTYPE
BASE VECTOR: SUBJECT 243B
SECONDARY INHIBITOR STRAIN: TPR-NULL
PROJECTED REJECTION WINDOW: 12â18 HOURS
Marco struggled against the invisible bonds of paralysis. "You sick bastard.
"Ease up. It will be over soon."
Marco's lips trembled. "You can't keep doing this. The police â"
"There is no law past the wall."
Brian returned to his work, unmoved.
The hum of machines deepened, and Marco felt a strange heat blooming through his spine. Something was changing in him.
Brian spoke one final time absentmindedly, noting his conditions.
"Thank you for your service."
The screen blinked.
CULTURE MEDIUM 243B VIABILITY CONFIRMED.
TISSUE ADAPTATION: BEGINNING
HARVEST SEQUENCE: BEGINNING
Marco tried to scream, but his consciousness was fading. Brian kept typing. The lab dimmed around Marco.
Marco's restrained form lay in silence, monitors quietly blinking beside him. His breathing was shallow, but steady. The culture process had begun.
Brian stood from his desk, removing his gloves. He took a final glance at the culture logs. The data climbed in slow rhythms: the neuro-adaptation, lymph compatibility, and vector resilience. At last, the variables were normalising.
He moved into the back chamber, where only one pod waited. A smooth white surface, sealed in biotitanium. Its glass dome hissed open as it recognized his biometric pulse.
The interior pulsed with liquid nutrient-gel and silver-blue interface filaments that responded to Brian's approach.
Above the pod, a screen blinked to life, and a soft chime in the pod's internal interface spoke.
MEMORY IMPRINT VERIFIED
WELCOME USER: moZbie-01
Brian climbed inside without ceremony. The gel rose around him, quickly encasing his limbs, chest, and altered form. The pod's walls lit with tracking points, mapping every nerve, every strain in the cartilage, every incorrect fusion in his broken facial structure.
INTEGRATION STATUS: UNSTABLE
HOLLOW ADAPTATION CYCLE: INITIATED
AUTO SYNTHESIS: SERAPHIM - 16X SUPPORT PROTEINS
A detail Brian didn't mention to Marco was that there were three requirements for Seraphim, not two. The final one was Brian himself. He needed a copy of the most advanced and assimilated sequence of proteins inside his very cells to integrate with the current mutation.
FACIAL MATRIX RESTORATION: PENDING
TIME UNTIL BONE MALUNION: 5 HOURS 27 MINUTES EMAINING
FACIAL STRUCTURE SEQUENCE: Z-SHAPE, SLIDE, TENSION LOCK.
OSTEO RESET SEQUENCE: BEGINNING.
Brian's body twitched once as the filaments sank into his skin, touching bone. He didn't use a sedative. He didn't need it.
The screen displayed molecular chains folding anew â his Hollowed physiology was reacting as the system learned from the human cell line culture cultivated from infecting Marco. Every moment inside the pod, Brian was adjusting.
HOLLOWED SUBJECT 243B: ADAPTING
SYNTHESIZING SUPPORT TEMPLATE.
PARTIAL INTEGRATION ACHIEVED.
AWAITING VIABLE SERAPHIM: SERAPHIM 16X PROTOTYPE
Brian's eyes flickered once, closing. Warped from earlier shapeshifting, his face slowly began to reassemble itself, bone by bone.
Outside the pod, the lab was still.
Marco lay in silence as the tanks, the dead, and the dying watched on. And within the sealed sleep chamber, moZbie evolved.
Scene Nine: A Perfect New Day
The first light washed across the skyline, touching down on the upper levels of glass-panelled towers. Inside Apartment 1704, it illuminated a quiet domestic scene. Dishes were in the sink, vegetable peels were in a strainer, and a delivery box from GrainFarm was crumpled near the trash.
Everything was perfectly messy. Everything looked perfectly human.
Brian moved, pretending to clean the false evidence of the life that he no longer lived.
He poured half a protein shake into the drain, wiped spilled beet juice from the cutting board, and threw a banana peel into the trash â a practiced illusion.
To most, it would look like someone had done many chores around the house, but that wasn't the case. He hadn't slept or tasted food in years. He didn't need to.
Because something inside took his fatigue and ate for him.
He moved to the wide east-facing window. The sunlight finally broke across his skin. Like a low-frequency pulse, a subtle, tingling sensation stirred beneath him. Not in his nerves.
It was the organism.
The symbiote. The invasive presence that had once tried to kill Brian was now thriving within him, integrated. It had become a part of him, just as he had become part of it.
Brian inhaled deeply, though he didn't need to. It was more of a ritual now.
The organism converted solar energy. It was photosynthetic in design and parasitic in origin. It fed itself, and in return, it fed Brian.
His mind buzzed faintly with the symbiote's biochemical signals. He stepped back from the light.
The warmth faded instantly.
But the energy remained, now humming silently through every inch of his altered flesh.
Back in the kitchen, he scattered coffee grounds across the counter and wiped them up. He flushed the disposal. Checked his reflection.
This much pretense was necessary as his nightlife was not forgiving.
Last night's facial reconstruction had held. The sleep pod's bone memory imprint had restored symmetry, vascular tone, ocular positioning, all according to the sequence.
He wore his suit. Clipped on his ID badge. Stethoscope looped around his neck.
Every piece of him looked clean, rested, and dependable. And not the thing that fed on sunlight in place of food, and experimented on men to stay one step ahead of an evolving extinction.
He opened the door and stepped into the corridor.
"Morning, Dr. Mosbey!" called Mrs. Halloran, smiling as she passed with her cane.
Brian smiled back. "Morning, Mrs. Halloran. Beautiful day, isn't it?"
The elevator doors opened, and he stepped inside, still smiling. The moment the doors closed, his smile vanished.