Clockwork SoulsChapter 1: A given value of Normalcy
It was a perfectly normal house. Maybe a bit on the above average size, but given the income of the primary breadwinner that wasn’t exactly surprising. A six bedroom three story affair, or four with the basement. Neat, clean, and tidy bedrooms made up most of the top floor. With the exception of the master though they were slowly gathering a thin layer of dust. The second floor was work space. An office, a workbench, tools strewn about, bookshelves, and more than a few computers plugged in doing various tasks. The ground level contained a large entrance hall, a fully equipped kitchen, grand dining room and a long all for entertaining guests.
There were a few guests, though only for a given value of ‘guest’ per se. The only real guest was a former FBI agent turned, well, still ‘agent’ but of exactly what was less clear to anyone. She was a cat woman. She wore mostly civilian clothes, except for a long cape like accoutrement that hung off her back oddly like a cape, but was probably intended to look like a trench-coat more than anything despite not covering her arms. It wasn’t quite flat to her back, though other than her two tails, nothing could be seen of what it may be covering.
“Cybele!” A cheerful voice said, “Welcome, or uh. Should I still call you agent Nyx? Uh… My wife made cookies fi you want some?”
Agent Cybele Nyx glanced at the source of the voice, a snow leopard girl she was previously familiar with and was now holding a tray of cookies. Before more than a moment past though, her gaze shifted back at what had been drawing her attention up till now.
Multiple bodies were strewn about in the ‘lounge’. Lifeless and immobile they stared with glass eyes at their surroundings. Some limbs were detached and piled on a chair, and other bits were hooked up to a device that Nyx couldn’t discern. The bodies lacked any clothing, and generally appeared female, but far from lewdness they also lacked most of their skin.
Nyx pushed down her heartrate that had spiked when she had walked in and caught eyes with the one that happened to be looking her direction. “Cybele’s fine but…. You can give some one a real fright with those you know…”
“Oh. That… sorry” The girl apologized and set down her tray of treats, “I was busy and, well there’s space here for the work.”
“I’m just glad that, what I’m assuming serves as ‘muscle’ isn’t red.” Nyx shook her head, “Or one would think you’d been skinning kidnapped girls.”
The show leopard and moved over to her pile of bodies and started to tidy up, but pause at the comment, “Oh GOD is that what it looks…. I mean I suppose…” She shook her head before continuing, “I suppose I’ll take that as a compliment on the realism, Cybele”
“I suppose you are Frankenstein’s heir” Cybele said finally taking a cookie.
“I’m not dead you know” The house interjected, giving Nyx another start. The voice had emanated from small speakers attacked to security cameras but with their distributed nature it make it feel like the voice had come from everywhere, from the walls themselves. Even knowing about her didn’t fully remove the eeriness of it all.
“Only because we’re keeping you listed as ‘missing’ officially. Doctor.” Nyx said calming herself with a cookie. It was rather tasty. Gooey chocolate chips melted in her mouth as she chewed on the morsel. An anchor to sanity in her increasingly insane world. “That said not many would consider you strictly speaking ‘alive’ anymore.”
“Well for a given value of ‘alive’ I suppose” The house said, “With any luck I’ll be out of the walls and back in a more corporeal form before too much longer. Though that has been delayed I hear.”
“Sorry about that” The girl responded, “You know my sister….”
“Oh its fine Atasi.” The house said, “She needed the parts a bit more urgently after she well…”
“Stole experimental tech, crashed into a local business and almost burned to death?” Atasi shook her head, “If she didn’t almost die, I’d have smacked her one for that.”
“That’s actually why I’m here” Nyx interjected, “Both as a regular checkup on your own oddness, but also about the risks implied by a cyborg, and their vulnerabilities to ….” Nyx almost winced. She really hated saying the word ‘demon’ in a fully serious discussion, but didn’t really have a better one. Euphemisms like ‘interloper’ hadn’t stuck as well, especially with the public that did know a good bit about these things despite how officially ‘classified’ it all was. The city became a Warzone not too long ago and the public has video phones after all.
“Trust me I’m taking precautions, Cybele.” Atasi said, “The thaumaturgical runes have been etched onto my processing units, in addition to the more mundane code-based firewalls. My systems are well protected from demonic incursions.”
Nyx sighed as the ‘D’ word was said out loud, “Sometimes I wish we could go back to ‘normal’ normal. Where we don’t have to discuss the tactical application of bloody sorcery…”
“This is normal, for a given value of it.” Atasi shrugged, “Putting almost literal blessings on my tech to keep it functioning correctly is just a thing now. Companies are going to start doing it before long, or should at least, once you hurry up and declassify this stuff.” Atasi waved a finger at Nyx, “Besides it’s not even the weirdest thing in this house.”
Nyx glanced down at her cookie and her thoughts shifted to its source. She hadn’t seen the ‘wife’ that had made them, not that that was unexpected when the ‘entity’ couldn’t be picked up with the visual spectrum. Ultrasonics worked, but Nyx wasn’t a bat, “Speaking of…”
“You can’t have any more feathers….”
Nyx almost jumped again, but contained herself as another unseen voice spoke. This one was more localized though so she was able to face its direction rather than just addressing the house as a whole. A glance down at the plush carpet for foot imprints gave her a more precise location to look, “Uh. Hello. Kate. Nice to se… well speak to you I suppose. I, uh. I’m not here to … get any more of those.”
“Uh huh” The voice said sounding not fully convinced. Not without cause as there had been more than a few experiments on the feathers the ‘entity’ produced. Nyx did not want to say the ‘A’ word, almost as much as she didn’t want to say the ‘D’ word. Luckily in this case there was a ‘W’ word that the entity herself used. Nyx listened as the watcher continued, “I hope you like my cookies, Everyone says I’ve gotten fairly good at making them.”
“They are lovely. Thank you for making these.”
“Quite ‘heavenly’ aren’t they?” Atasi interjected eliciting a groan and an eyeroll from Nyx.
Nyx finished her treat, “I don’t mean to take up too much of your time, but with a possible third… anomalous being… soon to join your household we need to.” “Hey. There’s nothing ‘anomalous’ about my sister. She’s a normal girl who is being fitted with normal prosthetics”
“Made by a technomage”
“Well, I’m not about to hook her up to an unwarded system. That’s what happened to…. The others….” Atasi trailed off lost in thought for a moment, “But for real. This stuff really shouldn’t be secret. Medical Mechanica is not the ONLY group experimenting with cyberware, and if innocent amputees start being hooked up with unwarded systems then we are asking for a repeat.”
“We are keeping any breaches closed. Far more effectively even than when the work was just being done by…. Well by people like her.” Nyx gestured at the empty air, “We can exorcise any… incursions… as they happened, and quickly too.”
“Yes Cybele. And the existence of a good police force definitely means that no one ever needs to defend themselves… Oh wait…” Atasi said with a sarcastic inflection and rolled her eyes, “People pretty much know what happened anyway, and some of them are out to make the breaches on purpose. How long before forum posts on ‘how to open up hell’ start popping up online, assuming they haven’t already”
“I… know…” Nyx had to concede. Machine cults, infernal studies, practical demonkeeping, and more were becoming very real things, and couldn’t just be brushed off as nutters. Religious bullcrap was actual academia all of sudden. Hard to counter that when it worked, but it had the potential to break the world in half even without another Lazarus leading a damned army against the living, “We just need to be careful about how we go about doing it. Mass panic doesn’t help anyone.”
“Nor does blissful ignorance.” Atasi said sounding softer, “But please figure it out soon? This stuff is real, and its going to get rediscovered again and again and again eventually. We have to face it as our new normal”
Nyx nodded and picked up another cookie for the road, “For a given value….”
