Variant Strain - Epilogue 3

By Scriviner

Miguel O'Hara stalked into his boss's office on the top floor of the Alchemax building. Normally the AI secretary that controlled the elevator and the doors should've kept him out, but O'hara had hacked those to allow him through any time years ago.

Tyler Stone gestured expansively from behind his immense desk, shooting Miguel a smarmy smile. "O'hara! You've somehow let yourself into my office." He paused for a second, just long enough to give the final word sarcastic emphasis. "Again."

Normally, Miguel was happy to trade quips and barbs with the older man, but he was definitely not in the mood. He marched deeper into the room, planting himself in front of the desk, and snarled. "The first batch of Alche-meat is tainted."

Tyler quirked an eyebrow and leaned back in his leather office chair. "That's a serious allegation, O'hara. It would understandably be a concern if true."

Miguel pulled out a half-dozen small ziplock baggies from his coat pocket that each held what appeared to be small pieces of raw steak. Each of which had a printed label to identify each one. He slapped the bags down on the desk. "Oh, it is definitely true. I've been feeding my mice the stuff I produce in my lab setup. But then, I decided to give one of them a bit from the Alche-meat processing plant."

Tyler's expression curdled, glancing down at the little bags of meat. "Those weren't ready for release yet."

Miguel scoffed. "That's not what the production schedule says. In any case, do you want to know what happened to my mouse?"

"Do tell," Tyler said, his voice still smugly condescending. Miguel knew something was off about that. He couldn't quite figure out what the problem was, exactly.

"It died," Miguel said with finality.

"All this over a dead mouse?" Tyler scoffed back.

"If that had been all, I wouldn't've bothered you, but then, its body broke down within a few minutes of dying and basically turned into a lumpy little tumor," Miguel explained. "One that looks suspiciously like what comes out of an Alche-meat biofactory."

"Oh?"

"I checked the samples. I checked multiple samples." He waved his hands over the small baggies. "Tainted. At every stage of production. In every biofactory." He took a deep breath forcing himself to calm down. "Then I decided to recheck the specifications being used for the large-scale devices. The assemblers aren't being removed from the feedstock. They're just being allowed to continue producing and as a result, all the Alche-meat that's ready to go to market is tainted. We can't let any of that get out."

Tyler pursed his lips, steepling his hands in front of him, and gave Miguel a long, considering look, before giving the younger man another condescending smile. "Oh, Miguel, Miguel, Miguel… it's clear you don't understand how business works. That meat isn't tainted."

"Dead. Mouse." Miguel said flatly.

"Legally, it isn't." Tyler pointed out. "We are well below the FDA limits for 'contamination' in a pseudo-meat product."

Miguel gave the older man a horrified look. "That's insane. This stuff will literally kill people!"

Tyler gestured expansively. "Eventually. Maybe. But so did smoking back in the day."

"I have proof–"

"Your dead mouse is tiny compared to a human being and had been eating Alche-meat for months prior. We have no way of confirming that humans would be affected in the same way."

"I have simulations on the effect of the assemblers on living cells!" Miguel argued.

"I suppose it wouldn't hurt to set up a long-term study to see if that will make a difference."

Miguel sputtered.

Tyler continued blithely on, "In the meantime, we save on our manufacturing time and costs as the removal of the assemblers in the Alche-meat is the most expensive part of the preparation process. I'm sure it will probably take years before it builds up to the point where it'll be an issue in humans and in the meantime, we'll have sold billions of dollars worth of product."

Miguel's mouth opened and closed for a few seconds in abject disbelief at what the man had just said. It was absolutely monstrous, but from a certain point of view made perfect sense… especially if one didn't care about human lives. That suggested the need to take a different route to persuade Tyler. He took a deep, steadying breath then said in a much calmer tone, "Killing your customer base is a bad business decision."

"In the long term, perhaps." Tyler said, clearly uncaring. "But for this quarter, at least, our profits will be immense."

He stared. Miguel liked to imagine that he'd worked in big business long enough to develop a healthy callus on his soul, but this was a level of ruthless, heartless indifference that was simply beyond anything he could've imagined.

"... I can't do this."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I can't be a party to this. I helped develop the meat assemblers. It's my work that's going to be going into people. I can't…" His words died out as he saw Tyler's expression shift.

The older man shook his head slowly, with an expression of deep and profound disappointment on his face. "Oh, Miguel… I had such high hopes for you. Truly."

"You can't stop me," he replied, mulishly.

"My dear boy," Tyler replied softly, looking down his nose at the younger man, "You'll find that I most certainly can."

There was a moment of silence, followed by an electrical crackle, causing every muscle in Miguel's body to lock up in absolute agony.

He screamed… Or perhaps only thought he did… then he knew nothing else.

Miguel snapped himself awake to find himself floating face up in a meat slurry. Everything smelled like blood and sewage. He tried to breathe through his mouth, but the smell was just too deeply embedded and his mouth was filled with a taste like he'd been gargling a car battery. He tried to retch, but his body barely got past the point where it could take in a deep breath and he would begin to choke on the cloying scent.

As he tried to deal with the smell, he flailed, trying to set himself upright and find the floor underneath him, but he realized something was very, very wrong.

He couldn't feel his legs or his hands.

He couldn't pull himself free of whatever he was in.

His eyes widened in horror as his mind woke up fully and he knew exactly what he was smelling.

What he was feeling.

He looked around and recognized the semi-liquid material that he was embedded in. The chamber he was in was one of the biomanufacturing vats. It was sealed and should've been dark, but th meat was faintly bioluminescent and painted everything in shades of red.

He was almost completely submerged in what their marketing material had euphemistically called the 'meat assemblers'. In reality, it was an aggressive, complex self-producing molecular machinery that took apart any carbon-based material and rendered it down into… well… the stuff he was floating in.

Meat slurry.

The material could then be compressed down, with the water and meat assemblers extracted from it to produce what should've been safe, edible Alche-meat. Reclaimed biological material rendered into high-protein, high-nutrition food stock.

He was in one of the vats and his clever little molecular machines were disassembling him.

His body was in the process of breaking down into the meat slurry that surrounded him.

It would've been less cruel to have killed him first.

It would have been merciful to have put him into the vat face down. Simply let him drown in it. Let the nano-assemblers get into his lungs and take him apart before he woke up.

He suspected that asshole Tyler shoved him in here face up precisely to make him suffer.

He bit down on his lower lip. Hard enough to draw blood. He knew exactly was happening to his body at that moment. He was being broken down at a cellular level. Fast enough that he could feel it happening. He'd lost feeling in his back already.

He'd kept trying to pull his arms free and eventually, he wished he hadn't succeeded.

His left arm came out of the slurry with a disgustingly wet, sucking sound. There was a sickening squelch and he started to laugh, thinking that his arm was covered in the reddish, brownish meat goop.

He could free the rest of himself before it was too late!

Then he got a clearer look at it.

His arm was almost entirely melted away. His hand was simply gone, the arm ended at a few wrist bones. The muscle in his forearm was just… falling away from the bleached, white bone. Like a slow-cooked barbeque… the muscle was sloughing away, dripping down to join the meat slurry. He could see the process visibly working its along up his elbow and watch the few wrist bones that were still tenuously attached to what was left of his forearm, start to fall off.

His laugh turned into a scream.

He didn't know how long he kept screaming.

His arm flopped back down into the meat slurry, no longer having the strength to hold it up.

There was no point.

Every part of him was falling apart like that. Now that he thought about it, he could practically feel the process happening. He suspected some of it was just his imagination. There was no way he could feel the individual nano-disassemblers chewing through his body piece by piece.

All there was for him was his body parts slowly going numb as the nerves simply stopped reporting back to his brain because they were simply no longer there.

He was down to just feeling his face, part of his chest. Nothing else.

He was going to die.

Į̸͈͚͋̅̽͝ň̴͍͝s̶̝̦̭̘͈͂ţ̶̫͇̩̬͇̔á̶͔̼̈́͑͠l̶̢͈̦̝̓̈́̔͂͑͋l̸̮̖͙͉̇̂́̔i̴̫̜̰̳̓̂̈ņ̴͖̀͊͊͊̀̓g̷̡̗̩̼̳̐̀̊͝:̸̭̘̤͌̑̂͗ ̷̝͕̟̂E̶̲̺̿̒͒̽ͅṃ̵̢̎͗͐̊̒͜p̴̙͌̇̈́͛͑̾r̵̢̬̭̲̟͒̽͛̓̌̇e̵̗͔͐̓͗͝ṡ̴̠̪͖̱̺̫͒͆͒̀s̶̬̟̭͎͐͝͝

He gasped as a woman's voice began singing into his ear.

– Turn away

Another way to be where you didn't want yourself to go

And let yourself go –

The voice was sweet, sweet syrup pouring down his now probably non-existent spine.

You don't have to die.

Behind the voice was music. Synths backing a slow piano melody. He didn't know music much, but it sounded nice. Unfortunately, over that, was a chorus of distorted voices all singing over one another. It was simply there in the back of his head. A soft endless loop of music and distorted singing with only a few words coming through.

His eyes flew open and he looked around desperately. He couldn't move his head anymore. He suspected the entire back of it had melted into the goop around him, but his eyes could still move around… not that he needed to look very hard.

She was standing above him.

She was… there was something just wrong about her. The entire vat he was in was rendered in shades of red from the meat slurry's crimson light.

Not her.

She seemed like she was glowing gold. Her skin was a tawny sun-kissed amber. Her sun dress was a bright lemon yellow and barely adequate to cover up her lush, curvaceous figure. Her hair should've been black, but somehow the way she was lit made it seem like a dirty blonde. Her face was beautiful, with perfectly even symmetrical features. Expressive lips and intelligent eyes. Her face was simply too perfect to be real. Even if she wasn't colored wrong, that would've set him off.

Everything about her was just off in some way, shape, or form, but even so, she reminded him of an old girlfriend from college.

"Lyla?" His voice came out as a wheezing rasp. He suspected he was losing his lungs through his back.

The name came with a hundred memories. A girl he'd shared a room with for a semester. Memories of being intertwined with her in their bed. Long nights over Midori Sours talking about the nature of things. He remembered her trying to throw him out of a window one drunken evening.

Fun times.

The golden girl smiled. It was a pretty smile, but still deeply unsettling in how perfect it was.

Yet, it had seemed sweet and kind and delighted to see him.

The distorted chorus swelled in his mind.

– And I hope it all works out –

"No, silly." She laughed. Her laughter seemed like warm music. "I'm Jessica… but if you want, you can call me Lyla."

He wondered if this was supposed to be his life flashing before his eyes, or the grim reaper taking a form he could accept. He was a scientist, but he was dying. He was past arbitrary skepticism and was prepared to accept any shred of hope he could grab onto with his now non-existent hands.

He'd use his teeth if he had to.

What she'd said first had stayed in his numb, shocked mind. He wheezed out, "What do you mean I don't have to–?"

"Do you want to live?" Jessi– no. Lyla leaned in as she asked. He found himself still managing to appreciate the way her sundress fell open to reveal more of her cleavage despite his situation.

Dying, yes… but some things were still important.

He could no longer form words. He didn't think he could breathe anymore. The only thing he could feel was his face.

He mouthed a single word.

Yes.

She beamed at him with a smile that seemed to say that all would be right with the world.

Great!

Her voice had changed. It no longer sounded like it had come from a living throat. It was a bone-deep vibration—pure meaning running through his body without a physical medium.

A body that he could feel again. He could feel himself pressed up against the walls of the vat.

He could feel all the meat slurry that surrounded him.

He was the meat slurry.

The distorted chorus rose once more.

– A handshake with you, what's your point of view?

I'm on top of you, I don't wanna go

'Cause I really wanna stay at your house

And I hope it all works out –

Miguel O'hara had no lungs with which to scream.

But he managed it anyway.

"What the hell do you mean one of the vats just exploded?! That's–"

He could hear screams in the background of the call.

Tyler Stone was about to have a very bad week.