Chapter 9 - Manifest
<4-9. Conrad and I are going after work. - Meiko Kobayashi, ID:MRG2002322G>
I’m a fucking mess. That’s the only words I have for how I feel as I wait in the staging area at the side of the manifestation amphitheater. Meiko hasn’t responded to a message now for almost a full twenty-four hours.
I barely spoke to Dad when I got home last night. And when I left before him to get the train into the central district. Words just felt ineffective. He hugged me, though. I could almost feel the trembling in his arms when he did. I hugged him back so hard.
I could have been warmer to him and said a proper goodbye. It’s intentional. It’s self-destructive, but it’s also about the only thing I have left when that stranger left me nothing but a card. I can feel pain, or I can feel nothing, and I’ve struggled with feeling nothing for too long. So I’ll choose pain.
“You will be handed a lancet for pricking your finger when you are brought to the stage.”
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I’d considered more extreme options. How far could I get if I ran? Definitely out of the district. Maybe as far as the edge of the greater Central Cooperative City. Once I leave, I’m out of Murasaki’s system - no credits, no food, no water, no shelter. No idea of what even happens beyond the city. The bars on our cages are so strong because we do not know what lies beyond them to prepare for it. When I was a kid, I remember the retired elders who would occasionally come to talk with us in the kindergarten, speaking about the scarcity beyond. To them, this life we live was a blessing. The guarantee of oxygen to breathe and food to eat a price worth paying compared to whatever they remembered from their youth.
And that all assumes that Meiko’s disappearance is a coincidence. I don’t know what Mum manifested, but I bet a hostage would be pretty useful in controlling a powerful host and symbiont.
“You will step onto the platform when instructed and touch your blood to the metal. It only needs to be a droplet.”
The pit in my stomach feels so deep I’m not sure I’ll ever climb out of it. I never knew my mother, but I wonder if she knew what was concealed in her genetics when she was here a little over twenty-one years ago. If she knew at that moment that the birth control had failed and she was pregnant.
“You will feel the bond form. You don’t need to be scared. Symbionts will never harm their host. You don’t need to tell anyone what manifests, the sensors will detect it. For most of you, that will be the end of it, and someone will help you off the stage so you can go celebrate with your families.”
I wonder where she is now. If she’s still alive. If she tried to keep me, or was I taken from her regardless of what she wanted at her new employer. I don’t know how many handlers is normal for this. There are maybe twenty employees waiting to manifest today backstage with me, and not everyone is Murasaki. There are nearly as many handlers on staff.
“For a few of you, recruiters from other companies may be interested in offering you a new contract. If you are a freeman, your current employer will need to release you before new contracts can be offered. The companies will bid on your behalf for release if they are interested, and after termination you will be offered a contract from the winning bidder. I know we have one or two serfs here today. You can relax and just look forward to finding out what your new job duties will be.”
The girl next to me is almost crying with nerves. I’ve lived with these building nerves for so long that I feel well past tears. Another is grinning, his hands clasped on his lap while he waits with excitement. Emotions in the room are as diverse as the people.
“Please follow the instructions of handlers on stage at all times.”
I watch the clock as I wait. It is both the slowest moment of my life, and also passes too quickly.
As I step onto the stage, the faces of the crowd are hidden beyond the bright white of the lights. I can feel the thrum of energy from the metal platform, see the throbbing red forces pulsing through those archaic runes. It shakes me to the core of my body.
And… my fears drain away.
The moment my foot touches the metal, I feel a presence. My heart and mind opens almost like those moments where I blink, then blink again, and suddenly see what no one else can. But instead of my vision, it’s my entire consciousness. I feel vast, disconnected from myself but more connected with the world around me than I have ever felt. I feel blood in my body, rushing in a circuit with the beat of my heart. I feel the membranes of my tissues stretch and contract. Chemistry, complexity, spun together with a thread of something… living. A current beneath me, deep and dark. Visions and smells fill my mind that I’ve never experienced for myself. Fresh humus beneath my feet, smelling of acid and rainfall. Shifting shadows I don’t recognize, passing overhead. It is rushing with the same energy that keeps me alive… yet so far away. Is this what everyone feels?
I’m not even aware that I’ve pricked my finger. But I can see the line of blood I drag across the metal, seeping into the pits and indents of its tarnished, ancient surface. The runes flare crimson.
And a mind touches my own.
Tentative, quiet, probing.
From the blood, a dark shape blossoms. Shapelessly, it swells and blinks open two eyes that burn like fire, the edges of its form ephemeral like smoke.
Then it congeals. For a moment it stands taller than my head, elegant long muzzle inclined to look down at me, eyes burning, dish-like nostrils flaring in a first gasp of breath. I stretch a hand. The form is obviously an Equus, but I have never heard of one described as pure black, and I have heard nothing described as having eyes of fire. At my touch, something passes between us, a connection, and the form withdraws, solid mass dissipating. It shrinks, taking on a more compact form.
It settles on the shape of something vaguely canid in its resemblance, maybe hyaenid, with taller shoulders, a sloping back and a mane of bristling black fur down its spine ending in a drooping tail. It is matte black in a strange, shapeless way, like the slightest turbulence might scatter its mass. Its eyes glow, and I feel its mind touch my own, foreign, but rapidly unraveling to tie itself to me. Within moments I know, just as easily as I can unconsciously command my hand to open, my muscles to move, my lungs to breathe, that this creature is now a part of me - the edges between our consciousness and bodies indistinct. The connection with the below contracts, but I can still feel its ghosts wandering in my mind, fragments of a greater.
The symbiont looks at me with eyes of fire, blinking once slowly, and draws its lips back to grin off-white teeth in a jaw of black smoke. Faint sparks of plasma crackle between its fangs.
It’s a vertebrate, but I have no clue what it is. I’m aware of the change in lighting as the screens above me suddenly dim, blacking out.
The center screen contains only one word.