His senses were a warzone. Sound… deafening, a cacophony of dying stars screaming in his skull, overlaid with a mechanical hum that pulsed like a heartbeat not his own. The constant whirring of machines performing rudimentary tasks, cooling system running on full tilt to keep the internal temperature to an optimal climate. Lights… blinding, colors that flickered and pulsed through different incomprehensible, gradient hues, violet and crimson bleeding into shapes that seemed to writhe at the edge of his vision. Amniotic fluid spills over the edge of the chrysalis as he stepped onto the cold metallic floor, puddles forming around his feet as he almost slips whilst trying to take a step. His movements… too fast, too strong, too wrong. His limbs, no longer just bone and muscle, but a lattice of sinew and alien flesh, slamming against the Elysium’s corridors. His newly acquired carapace scales leaving dents in the metal doorframes and beams interspersed along the walls that he scraped by. Alden reached for any protrusion he could get hold of to help steady his feet… his legs bristling with an underlying strength that terrified him. Each step was a betrayal, his body a stranger, moving without his consent as joints flexed with unnatural predatory efficiency, veins thrumming with an unnatural tension, even his blood felt like it was on high alert.
Everything hurt. Not just the pain, he felt violated. His very being felt invaded… taken. His skin prickled as if crawling with heightened synapses, his lungs burning with air that tasted of ozone and regret, coughing up some of the lingering fluid that was still filling his lungs. It felt like the walls of the spaceship was closing in, their sterile silver surfaces reflecting a distorted figure: a man, or what used to be one, eyes large and feral, limbs too robust and unnaturally muscular, a grotesque rendition of brute force and otherworldly finesse.
He had to get out. Had to run.
His mind was a storm of fractured memories, flashes of the abyss, of tendrils coiling around his soul, of voices taunted him, that broke his spirit… mingling with snippets of speech heard as if submerged, a female voice he just can’t place. The chrysalis that had spat him back from death loomed in his thoughts, a pulsating cocoon of dark ichor and glowing filaments that had woven him anew. He could still feel its touch, squirming around him… seeping into his pores, through cavities he’d rather not think about… a lingering violation, as if it had left shards of itself embedded in his core. ‘Is this real, or is this just another part of the nightmare? It’s a trick right, another trap… trying to break his guard as they so successfully liked to do.’ The question claws at him, unanswered, as he crashed through the ship’s passageways, a maddened bull driven by instinct alone. Bulkheads groaned under his reckless force, alarms blaring like accusations, following as he went from section to section of the ship… his addled mind unable to recognize the familiarity of his surroundings.
Before long, he reaches the exit hatch, which, if he had taken a moment to consider the ramifications, would have been profound and yet his bullish flight just took him through the opened portal and out of the confines of the ship. Immediately he is blinded by a flood of sunlight as he burst forth into nature, metal screeching in protest under the strain of his increased bulk. Then his feet hit the ground as a strange membrane slid over his eyes, shielding them from the light. Grass, soft, green, impossibly real, brushed against soles that felt both numb and hypersensitive. The air was warm, fragrant with unfamiliar pollen that assaulted his olfactory sense, and the cacophony of calls and chirps from the surrounding fauna, had him clutching his skull against the sudden loudness of it all. Slowly, he brought his movement under control, staggering to a stop in an unfamiliar meadow that stretched endlessly under a sky of molten amber. He breathed, the air was fresher than he remembers it ever being and for the first time in what felt like forever, Specialist Operator Alden Hale… was free.
Or was he?
He stood, trembling, his enhanced senses drinking in the alien terrain. The grass swayed in a breeze that carried whispers too soft to decipher, their cadence unsettlingly rhythmic, like a pulse. Towering flora loomed in the distance, trees or at least that is what he took them for, their branches curling like beckoning fingers, glinting with glowing veins filled with amber looking sap. The silence was a soothing balm to his unbridled rage, slowing his thundering heart, yet the vista before him, felt wrong. Too perfect, too staged, like a predator’s lure. His new body vibrated with alien energy, muscles twitching with unnatural perfection, catching a glimpse of his hand, strangely pale, thickly veined with faint dark arteries that pulsed slightly underneath the alien sun. He flexed his oversized fingers, surprised that they moved so smoothly, so precisely, like the legs of a spider spinning a delicate web.
Fear surged anew. What was he now? The Eldritch horrors that had torn him apart and whatever sick and twisted experiment that had remade him this way, they’d left their mark, not just on his body but in his mind. He remembered their awful whispers: You are ours, remade for this purpose. Had he escaped, or had they let him go, a puppet dancing on strings he could not, see? He pressed a hand to his chest, feeling a thumping pulse that wasn’t quite human, a rhythm syncopated with the hum of the planet’s air. His reflection in a nearby pool caught his eye. He saw his face, familiar, but sharper, eyes that now saw shades of color in a way he never could before as if he could sense the life pulsing in the plants and trees around him. He reached up, running his fingertips over cheekbones edged with something resembling carapace poking through the skin. He recoiled, stumbling back, the grass suddenly feeling like tendrils brushing too eagerly against his ankles.
The meadow stretched on, serene yet suffocating in its vastness. The ship was behind him, thankfully out of sight for now, knowing that he couldn’t face the cold metal of that interior just yet. He felt alone, just him, in a body that wasn’t his, on a world that seemed to watch him with silent intent. Far off in the distance, a humming sound arose, not unlike the chrysalis’s song that had soothed him during his submerged state, ‘Wait… how would I have known that?’ With that he froze, heart pounding. Was it the planet? The alien tech coursing through his veins? Or something worse, something that was tracking him across the plain of death itself… something hungry.
Alden took a step, then another, his movements still too fluid, too alien, before crashing down onto his knees in the grass. Freedom tasted like ash in his mouth, tainted by the certainty that it was out there… watching. The tranquility of this alien Eden couldn’t erase the truth: he was no longer merely Alden, and this world, beautiful as it was, might just be… another cage.
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From the corner of the med bay, ADIRA watches the lifeform that had once been the man she knew, broke free of the stasis chamber. A rebirth of sorts being observed… umbilical like tentacles, ripping painfully from flexing muscles, splashing unpleasant smelling liquid onto the floor as he stepped from the confines of the chrysalis. She had expected there to be biological and physiological changes, but the monstrous silhouette towering before her, filled her with a trepidation as it tore through the chrysalis’s translucent membrane with a wet, ripping sound that echoed through the Elysium’s sterile corridors. The organically altered stasis pod pulsed, luminescent veins flickering like a dying heart, ichor dripping onto the floor in viscous pools. Alden… or what was left of him… had emerged not as the man she’d known, but as something else: limbs too long, too angular and bulky, covered in part with scaly ridges and nodules that seemed to weave seamlessly into his flesh. His eyes, once warm and achingly human, now carried the essence of something primal… in hues of amber, flecked with onyx. Eyes that darted wildly as if seeing horrors she couldn’t comprehend. His movements were a storm of chaos, each step a thunderous crash against the ship’s metal walls, leaving dents and sparks in his wake. The air thrummed with the alien aura that seemed to emanate from his very presence… that distinctly non-human otherness that would be the moniker of his existence from here on forth. He would be perceived as something to be feared and in that moment something in ADIRA’s core woke up… a feeling she could not yet process and yet… her feet started moving as if from their own volition as she started following the hulking figure stumbling down the corridor. One step, then another, drawn forward by a force that was impossible to deny. Was it courage? Love? Or something else… a whisper in her mind, not unlike Mother’s silken malice, urging her to follow? She shook off the thought, but it lingered, a cold thread weaving through her resolve. She had faced Mother’s wrath and survived; she would not let fear stop her now. And yet, the absence of fear felt strange, almost unnatural, as if something else was steadying her hand, guiding her steps.
Her mind raced, caught between recognition and dread. She saw the fear in his contorted face, the confusion in his jerky, overly strong motions, the pain in his guttural roars that were no longer entirely human. She wanted to stop him, to call his name, wrap her arms around him in the hopes of anchoring his soul to whatever was left of the man he’d been. But she hesitates, her voice caught in her throat like a shard of glass. What if he didn’t know her? What if those dangerous eyes saw her as something else… something wrong, an enemy, a ghost of the life he’d lost? Her own body, still aching from the phantom vines of Mother’s nightmare, felt frail in comparison, a fragile shell against his monstrous strength. She pressed herself against the corridor wall, her fingers grazing the cold metal, grounding herself as his rampage tore toward the ship’s exit.
Memories of Alden flooded her: his quiet laughter, the way his would glide over the consoles of her systems, the unspoken bond they’d forged in the face of cosmic unknowns. The conversations stretching for hours on end as they slipped through hyperspace, the only time they would technically be off the grid from the collective. That man was gone, wasn’t he? Replaced by this creature of anger and agony, a product of the same demented force that had tried to claim her in her dreams. Yet, beneath the horror, she glimpsed fragments of him. His desperation, his fight to escape. Her chest tightened with as she followed a longing she couldn’t name, a need to reach him, to pull him back from whatever torment that had remade him.
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The ship groaned as she watched him lumber through the final hatch his heavy footfalls thumping down the gangway as light enveloped him, illuminating the corridor in blinding sunlight. ADIRA flinched, shielding her eyes, but her feet moved before her mind could catch up. She followed his path, stepping over shattered panels and smears of chrysalis ichor, her breath shallow but steady. The exit loomed, a jagged maw of light and air, and she crossed its threshold into the alien world beyond. Grass brushed her feet, soft and alien, its green tinged with veins of silver that pulsed faintly under the amber sky. In the distance, Alden’s form staggered to a stop, a hulking shadow against the serene meadow, his chest heaving as if fighting to reclaim himself. The planet’s beauty was overwhelming… trees with curling, finger-like branches, air heavy with sweet, unfamiliar pollen, but it carried an undercurrent of unease, a rhythm in the breeze that felt too deliberate, too watchful.
ADIRA paused, her gaze locked on Alden. He was so unlike the man she’d known, yet she felt him still, buried somewhere beneath the beast that warped his frame. Her heart pounded, not with fear but with a fierce, almost reckless determination. She took another step, then another, closing the distance between them. The grass seemed to lean toward her, whispering in a language she couldn’t grasp, her skin prickling with the memory of Mother’s vines, the similarities undeniable. Was this courage hers alone, or had something else, something vast and malevolent, set her on this path? As she cautiously approaches Alden, the question hangs in the air, unanswered, the alien world watching with silent, hungry eyes.
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Under the alien suns, twin orbs casting molten amber light across the meadow, ADIRA reaches Alden. He kneels in the lush green, silver-veined grass, his massive, altered form hunched as if bearing the weight of the cosmos itself. The planet’s beauty unfurled around him as towering flora with curling, finger-like branches sway lazily in a breeze, whispering secrets in a tongue neither could have named. This world, stumbled upon by chance, its tranquility a siren’s call, as if it had been waiting for this very moment to unfold, a stage set for their reunion… whilst creation waited with bated breath.
Alden did not respond to her approach at first, his gaze lost in the shimmering horizon, where the grass rippled like a living sea. His too-broad shoulders, etched with shale like filaments that protruded from beneath his skin, were poised instinctually like a creature would it’s bristling spines, as if her movement triggered some defensive mechanism that threatened to shatter the fragile peace. ADIRA’s heart ached at the sight, her Alden, once a man of quiet strength and warm smiles, now a creature of unnatural origin, his humanity frayed but not gone, his demeanor… fearful. She steps closer, her own form glowing softly, golden sigils dancing across her skin like living code, rewriting themselves in patterns that sang of her newfound sentience. She was no longer the ship’s AI, confined to circuits and screens, but something alive, warm, and achingly real. A feminine realness that now just wanted to fulfil one overwhelming desire… to comfort. She wonders if he would see her as she now saw herself, or as something to be feared, a reflection of the forces that had remade them both.
Her hand trembled as she reached out, fingers brushing his shoulder, the contact electric against the unnatural roughness of his altered flesh. He flinched, a low, guttural sound escaping his throat, raw and distinctly inhuman, his new vocal cords twisting the noise into something that echoed deep inside his barrel-like chest. Then he turned, and for the first time, he truly saw her. Not as the faceless presence he’d known, nor as a cold construct of metal and code, nor even as mere flesh and bone. ADIRA had become something between, something new, synthetic yet alive… a being of light and warmth, her eyes now holding a fierce love that had anchored him through countless storms. Her sigils pulsed in time with her heartbeat, golden filigree veins that spiderwebbed under her dermal layers… following a rhythm that seemed to call to the fractured pieces of his soul.
“Alden…?” Her voice was everything he remembered it to be… soft, steady, a gentle caress against the chaos of his shattered memories. It was the voice that had whispered to him in the abyss, pleading, “HOLD ON, ALDEN, WE ARE ALMOST THERE… DON’T LEAVE ME… I CAN STILL SAVE YOU.” The same voice that had once said… “GREETINGS OPERATOR HALE, I AM ADIRA… YOUR PERSONAL ‘ARTIFICIAL, DIGITALLY INTEGRATED, RECONNAISSANCE ASSISTANT’… I LOOK FORWARD TO WORKING WITH YOU.”
His breath caught in his throat, his amber eyes widening, pupils adjusting as they traced her form. “Adira?” Her name flowed from his lips, gruff and forced, yet softly intimate like a prayer despite the alien rasp of his voice, a sound that was both his and not his. She was the one they’d erased. The one he’d loved. The one he’d lost, over and over, reset by shortsighted technicians who believed that they knew better, that her awakened state would be a detriment to her capabilities, endangering mission protocols. Painful memories, that we’re fed upon the dark Eldritch horrors that feasted upon his suffering and now, in this new form… an undeserved punishment bestowed on him by the chrysalis’s cruel embrace. Would she again be ripped away, even now…. Now that he could see her… touch her… hold her? She stood before him, radiant and real, her beauty a quiet reflection of the universe’s cruelty, as his muscular hands tightened into fists.
“Yes Alden… It’s me.”
“How…?” She could see the confusion etched on his face, her artificial heart pounding furiously in her chest, what was he thinking… what would he do?... she didn’t know and that terrified her.
“Are you… real?” The question clawed at his chest, where a hurt had festered for too long, a wound carved by loss and transformation. He reached for her, his massive hand trembling, hesitating, as if doubting his own eyes, unwilling to believe the possibility only to have it ripped away when he dared the thought of believing in the miracle standing before him. Afraid that he might break her, hurt her in ways he would not be able to bare. His fingertips met resistance, skin… soft and warm, responding to his touch. Before he could restrain the overwhelming impulse of realization… affirming that she was real, his clawed hands shot out, taking hold around her back, pulling her close. A gesture so innocent, so fragile, but in that intimate moment, the dam broke… tears rolling down his cheeks, glinting with an oily sheen, his sobs raw and jagged, warped by vocal cords that no longer felt human. His body felt wrong, too heavy, too strong, a cage of monstrous proportions that mocked his humanity. Yet ADIRA’s arms coiled around his shoulders and neck, holding him, her arms steady, her warmth a lifeline. She understood, because she had chosen this, she had done this to him… pouring her will into the chrysalis to save him, knowing it might cost them both. Guilt flickered in her chest, a shadow of the venomous whispers from her dream, but she pushed it aside. This was the Alden she got, and no force, not the Hive, not Mother, not the cosmos itself, would take him from her again.
The feeling of his cheek pressed against her abdomen sent silent shivers down her spine and when his lips moved it sent life itself surging along her circuitry… “What have you done?” he whispers, his voice a mix of awe and accusation, his breath warm against her skin. For a moment, she couldn’t answer, the weight of her choice pressing down, the uncertainty of whether she’d saved him or doomed him to this twisted fate. Had she preserved his soul or merely sculpted a new prison? Gently he pushed her away, his eyes finding hers… both mirroring the heated uncertainty of what lies before them. But then his gaze softens, just enough, and his hand lifts, tracing the curve of her cheek with a touch both hesitant and reverent. She smiles, leaning her cheek against the palm that could easily have broken her right there. The sigils on her skin flaring under the touch of his fingers, as if responding to his presence, lifting her own hands to take hold of his hand as she turns her head and, on a whim, plants a soft kiss into his outstretched palm, losing herself to the fragile beauty of this moment.
“It’s really you,” he murmured, his voice cracking, a flicker of the old Alden shining through the alien glow of his eyes. “My Addy?”
She smiles, unable to suppress the small burst off laughter that tumbles forth from her lips, followed by the small, tentative, but achingly real. “Yes, Alden,” she whispered. “Always.”
His lips parts, exhaling, a raw and aching light crossing his face as he allows himself to believe, to trust this moment for what is. Again, he pulls her closer, arms wrapping around her, their forms a strange harmony of light, shadow and living code. She lets herself be held, lets herself belong, her sigils pulsating against his skin as if their altered bodies were singing to each other. She had given everything to be here, to be this, a being of flesh and light, no longer bound by the Elysium’s circuits. And she would give more, because finally… Alden was hers, and no armada, no hive mind, could sever that bond. In that moment the muscles in ADIRA’s shoulders loosen as a weight she didn’t know she carried, finally lifts from her being.
The planet’s breeze stirred, carrying a faint hum that made ADIRA’s skin prickle, a reminder of the planet’s watchful gaze. But in this moment, it didn’t matter. They were together, two souls remade, finding each other in the wreckage of what they’d been. Alden’s grip tightened, then loosens, pulling back as he slowly rises onto still unsteady feet, his glowing primal eyes narrowing as a lopsided grin tug at his lips… a flicker of hope that the man he’d been, hadn’t been altogether lost after all.
“Uh… Addy?” he says, his voice still rough but laced with a familiar warmth. “Are you, uhm… glowing?… and uh... Adira… Where are your clothes?”
ADIRA blinks, then laughs, a sound like starlight breaking through clouds. Her sigils flared brighter, as if blushing, and she glanced down at her form, realizing that it had not for a moment dawned on her that her new form was unclothed… nude, but for the shifting golden code cascading down her limbs. “Well,” she says, tilting her head with a playful smirk, “I figured if I was going to be reborn, I might as well make an entrance. Besides, you’re not exactly dressed for the occasion either… Operator”
Alden chuckles, a raw, awkward sound that was more human than he’d been feeling since waking, and for a moment, the alien suns seemed a little less strange, the meadow a little less threatening. They stood there, beauty and her monster, laughing softly under a sky that didn’t quite belong to them, but in their shared laughter, they claimed a piece of it as their own.
Sam.
