Neon Pentagrams: Strange Tales From The City Of Dust, #4

By Vaz Anzai

A curse has overtaken the inhabitants of Dust.
Selected at random, people have become bloodthirsty, preying on the innocent. Deep beneath the city, a darkness is preparing its armies to swarm the streets.
Dust has been warned.
The Nightfallen are here.

 

Strange Tales From The City Of Dust is a serial story done in episodic "short reads". Each story is a tale of action, adventure, and horror within the city of Dust. Set in futuristic Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it incorporates themes of cyberpunk, artificial intelligence, synthetic beings, sexual themes, horror, occultism, demonology, medical monstrosities, innate abilities, future tech, and LGBTQ storylines. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vaz Anzai
• Release date: Sep 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393473718

Vaz Anzai

I grew up reading horror, consuming books by Dean Koontz and John Saul. Cerebral horror has always been my preferred subgenre. Cyberpunk themes have intrigued me throughout the years, ever since I first saw Blade Runner and The Running Man. "Strange Tales From The City of Dust" is my cyberpunk look at future Pittsburgh. It involves themes of LGBTQ relationships, medical monstrosities, occultism, mental health, artificial intelligence, and more.

Book preview

/Human Heart

1.

Claws tore through her skin, pulling away anything they could find in an effort to maul her body. Anger fueled them in a way she could not fully understand, their misshapen maws snapping at her as she knelt to the floor and wrapped her arms around the back of her neck. Hunks of her synthetic flesh flew away from her, yet Dia, the self-aware prostibot, felt no pain.

She had willingly trapped herself within the basement research facility of the former hospital for children in the abandoned zone known as The Blooming Fields. Everything she had done was to save the woman known as Alice from imminent death at the hands of the mitochondrial mutations that had overtaken the compound. Inside her body, the hybrid flesh and machine nanobots had designed particle cannons within her stomach in order for her to fight off the creatures. In the end, it had not been enough. Seeing the largest of the monstrosities moving towards them, its body resistant to the energy the cannons had been firing, Dia made the split decision provided by the probability matrix Alice had created within her to choose death in order for Alice to survive.

Now on the floor, her components being thrashed and pulled free of her inner circuitry, Dia recalled the file she had backed up the day before at the park in Shadeside. In that moment, she and Alice had kissed for the first time, the moment being both frozen in time by the connection in emotion and when Dia backed up the memory to several folders within her in order to preserve it. She recalled how the drizzle that morning had stalled in the air around them, the droplets falling at a decelerated speed as if the world had chosen to mark the moment by forcing life itself to halt and witness the spectacle.

Deep inside of Dia’s armored chest cavity, the nanobots began a new plan of action. Working around the prostibot’s Axiom battery, they increased the output of its energy, driving the gauge along the core into the red as the device exceeded its normal function of drip-fueling Dia’s normal needs in order to preserve and extend its life. Forcing it into overload, the nanobots then receded into a preservation tank designed to house them in case of an attack.

From below Dia, currents of magenta-colored electricity arced out across the floor, reaching up along the crevice of the two huge doors that had sealed her in with the creatures. Behind her, the largest of the mutations lumbered up, its mouth opening to consume her entire body within the rows of razor teeth it would utilize to grind her frame into tiny metallic flakes.

Dia stood straight up, roaring out as the Axiom battery cascaded into failure and launched massive streaks of purple lightning from her chest, immediately disintegrating the entities around her for several yards. Each blast of electricity lanced out and found something to connect with as if the current itself was alive. Dia felt the eyes inside her metal skull liquefy, the plastic pouring out along her cheeks like white tears down her face. Within the sockets, fire breathed out and licked at her forehead as she turned to face the massive monstrosity that would not succumb to the painful arcs of power that continued to hit it.

One arm raised at the beast. A second later, its body fell into a pool of ash that blew away as Dia’s core expended the last of its energy, leaving her to fall on her back. From her lips, a small wisp of air curled out and then vanished.

Long after the ashes had settled within the half-dark of the sealed research facility, the first of the nanobots migrated out from their protected encapsulation. The others followed suit, marching along Dia’s dead body to inspect the damage she had suffered in her final moments. Within minutes, a plan was implemented among the collective. A larger portion of the throng set out to begin the slow dissection of the depleted Axiom core. Dia’s synthetic skin on the front of her chest had been torn open during the attack. The open flap became a dumping ground for the waves of machines as they deposited the material compounds they had extracted. Within hours, the battery was no more than accumulations of minerals and precious metals.

A smaller section of the bots gathered in Dia’s head, their assignment to begin writing a new program with the prosibot’s central core. Below, the collective began to use components both from the piles they had made and available sources within the chamber her body was trapped inside. The computer terminals where Alice and Dia had acquired their information were infiltrated for its quantities of mercury, silicone, and quartz. After returning with their collections, they set off to the closest of the creatures that still had fleshy compounds yet to be burned to ash.

Inside the chamber where the battery had been held, nanobots had formed a series of  piping that led down inside her chest to the viscous blue liquid the machines had created in order to cool her body. The gel was modified within its housed enclosure to provide more functions than just being a coolant. It was fed nutrients as they were synthesized and injected, along with a new compound they designed from the dismantled plasma cannons in her stomach. The new compound’s main objective was to continuously recycle wasted gel as it sludged with time, turning it back into a rejuvenated gel that kept pumping through her. The materials pulled from the blue blood would be jettisoned down a thin tube that the nanobots connected to her rectal cavity, which in the past was connected to no internal system.

Once completed, the mass gathered in her chest to begin the intricate design of a human heart. Due to the durable housing of the Axiom battery and where it was installed in a prosibot’s chest, her new heart was designed to fit inside the fist-sized capsule. Piping was connected into the appropriate sides, and from there, each conjunction was sealed.

Several more hours passed as the seals were given time to solidify. During this time, the small troop of nanobots inside Dia’s head completed their program titled Heartbeat.exe. Dozens of subprograms were then written to assist the main instructions with the recycling, distribution, and preservation of the substance within the corresponding tubes. Openings began in the ducts to allow the liquid to slide through her, the mixture finally coming to rest when it had equally budgeted into all of the new hardware.

The collective then shifted into the eye sockets, designing new eyes from the remaining materials. Dia’s upgrades that could be switched on and off in order to see further distances and through certain structures were enforced as standard. Once complete, her new violet irises were left staring dead into the ceiling.

Production began to repair all damaged circuitry and armor plating inside her skin. Another day passed before her innards were structurally intact and without flaws. Her skin, while synthetic in its design, could not be pieced together without visual imperfections. The stitched areas were detectable by attentive eyes as lines down the left side of her face from her head to her abdomen..

Once complete, the nanobots recharged their independent energy sources before finding their way to her new heart. For long moments, Dia sat quietly, a mechanical corpse in the silent dark.

Electrical impulses began slowly from the nanobots as they formed themselves into a defibrillator on Dia’s new heart. Minutes continued to pass, and nothing changed. The blood now traveling within her body began slowly cycling as the shocks forced the heart to pump it through and out into the passages within her chest.

Building their energy, a massive jolt impacted her chest, sending her back into an arc as her body tensed. The programs in her head were activated, allowing Dia to begin a slow process of living without the need of the nanobots to continue their AED impulses. Migrating back to their individual duties, the nanobots allowed Dia to take a breath, the air taken in through her one bag-like lung to filter usable materials into her blood.

This pain, all of this Alice, Dia labored to breathe out. I would die, again, for you.

Pushing herself up to a sitting position, Dia felt around the surfaces of her skin at the work that the nanobots had been carrying out over the last few days. Much of her long hair had burned away during her confrontation with the mutations. Her former eyes that had melted down her cheeks had not been cleared away, leaving hardened white tears along her skin. While her chest had been patched back together, she had a visible scar that ran from her face to her left shoulder and neck down between her breasts, ending just after her stomach on her left hip. Her shirt was all but destroyed, the remaining material from the cloth utilized when the nanobots required a threading source. The pants she had been wearing were mainly intact, minus a few tears along her calf.

Standing for the first time in days, Dia held her chest with both hands, her new eyes worried as she detected the rhythmic pumping of her new heart.

What have you created inside me? She asked aloud to the nanobots, knowing they had no means of responding. Do I have a heart?

Stumbling across the room, she kicked ash into the air and found that it choked her throat. Before today, she had not physically taken a real breath, as she had no need for it. In the past, her programming told her to occasionally allow her chest to rise and fall in order to appear as human as possible. She now took note of how her body did it quite purposefully in order to obtain oxygen and other resources from the air around her.

Covering her mouth and nose from the kicked up ash, Dia threw open a locker on the wall and retrieved a researcher’s white jacket to cover her bare upper body. Flinging it over her shoulders and sliding her arms through, she zipped the front and buttoned the lapel over, making it look as if it belonged to her. If she was to leave the research facility and head back into the city to find Alice, she would need to appear as if she fit in. With the jacket fully latched onto her, her patchwork skin was well hidden. After her pants were switched with the locker’s spare set of white slacks that thankfully once belonged to a rather tall woman, Dia made her way back to the sealed doors leading to the upper level.

She knew she could use the nanobots to design a weapon on her in order to blast her way out, yet she wanted to preserve her energy and not damage her new disguise. Grabbing the tips of one door and firmly planting her feet on the cement, she began to slowly push the massive metal hatch, inching it