Making Contact

Chapter Fourteen

“Come on,” Argyle thought, “what are you doing? You're panicking, as a human would in this situation. Your mind is a frantic mess of confusion. Get your circuits together and think. What just happened? What is this?” He brought a hand to his face, watching black particles flake away from his flow-metal skin like a trail of dust. “Visibility range has been cut down to less than a meter. I've been immersed in some sort of smoke.” He squinted, focusing on the darkness ahead. The density of particles was light enough just before his face so that he could see his hand in front of him clear enough, but there were more particles further out, the thickness of the darkness increased to the point of blindness. Argyle’s visual perception of the world was designed to work similarly to that of a human’s, so it was only thanks to the slight light that his electronic eyes emitted that he was able to see his hand. The light that had filled the room was blocked out by the fog. He reached out into the darkness. It felt like he was pushing into a lake bed.

“Interesting,” he thought, moving his legs around, “but the floor was just below me before everything went black.” He blinked to infrared mode and looked down but still couldn't see the floor or anything besides trails of light along his own body. Argyle switched to his x-ray vision mode which also proved to be fruitless in the search for something other than the dense particles around him. “This must be how it feels to be at the depths of the ocean,” he pondered, “minus the bone-crushing pressure.” Argyle shook his head. “I have to stay on track. It took her right in front of me. How did it get there? How could a machine…” His mind flashed back to the interrogation room, to the shadow that came out of the wall and looked at him with blood-red eyes before cackling, mocking him. Argyle tightened his hands into fists, his joints clanking and popping as if his artificial knuckles were cracking. “The particles are real,” he thought as he examined them as best he could, focusing and zooming in on a cluster. He swiped his hand at the specks and they dispersed, only for more to flow around his arm and take their place like water shifting under his touch. “Substance is unidentifiable though. My best guess would be some sort of manipulation of black matt-” Argyle tilted his head, then his eyes went wide. “All signal to the network is being absorbed by the particles, but there's no trace of electromagnetic interference. It's as if I'm within a black hole.”

Argyle looked around, waving his arms through the dark, trying to make out something through the dense particles, but nothing helped to clear them away. “Let's try this.” Argyle rolled up the sleeve of his left arm. His forearm hissed as a seam formed on his flow-metal skin. It split in two, revealing a spherical device with a nub sticking out of it, the electromagnetic gun that he kept hidden in case of an emergency situation. After he pulled out the gun, his arm swished shut. With a twist of his wrist, Argyle whipped the weapon at the air. The gun’s grip snapped into place and the barrel twisted, locking into position. A low whirring came from the gun, as the force of the movement and snapping of parts gave life to the compact reactor that powered it. Within seconds, blue tendrils of electricity branched out from the electromagnetic gun’s ridges. The trigger snapped out from the weapon's grip. Argyle swiped his thumb across the back of the weapon, setting the gun to its full voltage, then squeezed the trigger.

The barrel thundered as lightning burst forth tearing through the darkness. Argyle covered his eyes from the white-hot light and felt the black fog ripple around him. The smell of ozone filled his scent receptors and overloaded them while he could feel the flow-metal that covered his body harden from the heat that suddenly engulfed him. He screamed as the nodes in his artificial skin were inundated with heat, then all at once he could feel every inch of his body start to disintegrate. Argyle opened his eyes as his limbs twitched wildly, but all he could see was red, as his skin fell away. He shouldn't have been able to feel anything after that, with just his bare joints and mechanical ligaments that were devoid of sensors, but yet he felt the fire swallow him whole, lapping away at his internals. He flailed in the madness of insurmountable and screamed at the top of his voice module, even as it melted away and oozed out of his ribcage. Argyle’s mind was wracked with feelings that were only meant to be felt by organic beings, and the fact that he could feel what was exclusive to those born of the womb twisted his mind further into the void.