Asylonia

1. Welcome Home

I.

The shuddering underbelly of the yellow beast coughed and belched above the cold, steel pedestrian lane.

Slumped inside the beast's comfortable carcass, Noah sank his fingers into his faded leather jacket and pulled out a fistful of dollar bills. His tanned, weathered hand trembled as he reached over the back of the driver's seat with splayed fingers, showering the taxi driver in a confetti storm of crumpled notes. He collapsed, shoulder first, into the door, and fell sideways out of the jetcab.

The cold steel rose up to stab him in the hip. Pain pierced his aching pelvis like razor wire, slicing back and forth between his thigh and spine. He lay where he landed, with his chest throbbing against an old, black T-shirt, and his legs sticking out before him in battered blue denims. Noah propped himself up on unsteady arms and arched his neck backwards, unflinching against the slap of a reckless breeze. He watched the taxi take off, first blistering a trail away from him, then screeching into a turn and hurtling back towards him. It soared high above the tangled strands of cinnamon brown, evolved from what had once been Noah's neat crop of hair, and it travelled up towards the Skyway until a sticky air devoured it.

The sky hung over him like something from his nightmares. A crimson sun leaked onto a palette of deep violets and electric blues, welcoming the birth of a new night. The air hung hot and clammy in the aftermath of rain showers, making breathing something that required effort and conscious thought. Sucking air into lungs smeared with tar, Noah stared into the dying embers of the sun and longed for Earth. His brain throbbed and his veins itched. His lungs relaxed, rubbing painfully against the back of his rib cage. He tried to stand and failed, let down by a gaunt, tired body which had once been defined and full of life. His coarse skin, once wrapped snuggly around solid muscles, fell loosely over flabby limbs which refused to hold his weight.

His second attempt to stand was thwarted by a rush of blood racing through a whiskey-induced fog, disorientating him to the point of collapse. With the third attempt, his arms lashed out at his sides as though with two different minds of their own. His legs bounced, twisted, and slung him into the doorway of Manor SL69.

Noah's quivering hand slid involuntarily along the manor's biometric lock, a square panel screen with a blank face from which an emotionless female voice spoke.

'Unrecognised data. Unauthorised citizen. Access denied.'

Noah felt the same underlying hostility in her monotonous tone that always bugged him whenever he heard her speak. It was if she knew. As if she resented what he had become. As if the unthinking computer looked down on him with contempt. Noah snarled at her.

'Argh! You just, you shut up will ya?'

His voice merged the dialect of his homeland in South East England with the tinge of a Texan drawl, picked up from his time spent living in the Lone Star State to complete his military training. Sober, it was a curious accent which most who met him found difficult to place. Now, it was a sloppy cacophony which came out of his lips in a slur.

Noah thrust his fingers back into his jacket and found nothing. He tried a different pocket, and another one, until his hand rested on the thing he had been looking for.

He took it out and removed the grubby, bloodstained surgical bandage which covered it. The bandage drifted into a puddle, curled about itself, and finally sank. Noah cursed. He brought the cold, mauve-coloured flesh of a severed hand to his chest. Chunky and broad, and with congealed blood matted like dry mud around the stub, the sight of the lifeless appendage before his own bloodshot eyes caused Noah's stomach to churn, and the sides of his brain to smart.