The Craving: Wraith Ship #1

Scene 3: Shroud

Tentative steps were all he needed to keep pace with the scuttling robots. As they led him, more hatchways and side passages slipped by in the half-light. Openings to vague individual blacknesses appeared and disappeared, parading shapeless hints of form or fleeting flashes of a red or blue pinprick of light within. Their contents remained as mysterious as his origins.

He fought a recurring temptation to lag back, to let his mechanical guides go on ahead while he explored this ghostly metal world. But again and again, remembrance of the face, the dirty loathing and the ceaseless whispers: these made him cling to his puny companions as to a rock outcropping in the midst of an ocean storm. He feared to lag behind lest his enemy find him alone, ready to be excruciated again in soul.

How much time had passed since he first received the gift or curse of consciousness? He spared repeated glimpses of his feet, paws that belonged on a quadruped, padding with ticking talons along the floor; and he thought back to the reflection of his own face glimpsed earlier. So like an animal, yet blending traits of the soulish, the expression all too sentient. And there were no answers to the paradoxes of his memory, to the spreading conviction of having lived two lives abruptly checked by a wall of nothingness. Then here. Then now.

He felt impatience swelling in the moment. Tension in his chest and limbs, energy for thrusting aside the veil of enigma. A feeling that rocketed into his forebrain in the form of white-hot anticipation when he glimpsed where the robots were leading him. His hands, both flesh and metal, flexed automatically, wild and eager.

His corridor rapidly widened into some sort of foyer or antechamber, banks of columns on either side with the unmistakable glint of glass bespeaking the presence of row upon row of optics. As he passed, no flash of light or whirr of motors confirmed the itching feeling of being observed. The lenses only stared silently, unmoving.

His faithful companion, the ever-present red box in his vision, flitted among the robots, the lens eyes, the very walls where half-hidden mechanisms rotated and oscillated. All he saw told him that this place, while dark and quiet, was far from dead.

The anteroom terminated up ahead into a very wide set of segmented doors, the robots spreading out as they approached it. Long before they or he reached the vicinity of this portal, the doors began sliding back, rumbling on bearings that made the pads of his feet tingle with sympathetic vibrations. He barely registered the bristles of his pelt coming to attention, saliva gathering in his mouth.

A vast chamber lay beyond the retreating doors, a half-glimpsed scene of an amphitheater of metal, somehow familiar to him but unable to be connected with any conscious memory. It seemed like the interior of a hemisphere, lined with eyes and lit from below by the red and yellow light through the floor slats. Comparisons to an operating theatre or proving cave washed through him, their unequal analogies confusing, like his own mind's contents. All he knew for sure was that this place, more than any other part of his shadowy world, saw. It saw.

The robots scampered to form a perimeter along the circumference of this place, breaking their ranks only to admit him. He walked forward like a robot himself, compelled by curiosity or programming, he could not tell which. He felt a peculiar response within his left arm, the array of metal and polymer in place of flesh. The red box registered something he didn't recognize, and the artificial limb emitted a series of clicks, internal relay contacts responding to some unseen signal.

The doors closed behind him and the robots sealed the circle. He stood centrally, the focus of not only their vision but of what lay behind the eyes. For a moment or two, he found the silence absolute, angle and strain his bestial ears though he might. Yet the quiet hid a patient thoughtfulness. The array of lens eyes stared fixedly down and across, boring into him.

"I'm glad you are unharmed, Zoran."

The voice was a deep and rich baritone, and it sprang from everywhere in the room, perhaps even from inside him, sudden as a spark, solid as the walls from which it emanated. It hit him like the pressing of a warm ocean, filled with acoustic weight.

He whirled in alarm, turning in a complete circle, arms out, talons extended, feet apart. Feeling like the cornered predator that he was. Frustration at not being able to answer this faceless presence. Would it mistake him for a brute beast, albeit one with such obvious technological enhancements?

"There's no reason to fear me," the voice from everywhere said. "You can speak freely."

"I can't speak, damn it!" is what he wanted to shout. "I don't know how!"

Growls, hisses, and spits were all that came from his animal throat, but the voice answered them. "Of course you can. And of course, you do."

He felt himself blink his one flesh eye, his breath increasing in tempo. Several heartbeats pounded in sequence. A disconnect in his mind. The ravings of a monster, and this voice understood.

"Speak again," the voice said.

For a moment, confusion was all. Instinct warred with logic. He felt his left arm emit a short vibration, saw it move of its own accord to touch one black metal claw to his mouth before relinquishing control to him once again.

"Speak."

When the sounds came again, they were those of an untrained adolescent trying to understand the marvels of communion, a fusion of reasonable assurance and blind trust. "I don't understand," he said in those animalistic intonations.

"Much of your body is that of an H'ro," the voice answered, "though a great deal of your brain and nervous system was salvaged from another species. That's the most logical explanation for your lack of familiarity with your own vocal cords and for what I read as your obvious deficiency in proprioception."

More cryptic words. And having them come from an equally arcane source was almost too much to bear. "Who are you?" he said.

"Shroud." The answer came without fanfare or evasion. "And you are Zoran."

"Zoran," he repeated. "It was on the door to my room. I don't remember it."

"A word from a language none of your components ever spoke and one I didn't provide you with. I chose it for..." Here it hesitated. "Reasons of my own. It's a good name, don't you think?"

Zoran. As good a name as any. But what did the voice mean by "components"? A knot began to form in the pit of his stomach. He suspected something. Some awful truth hinted at in dim recollections. But he decided to postpone that revelation for another time.

"You're Shroud. But what are you? Are you a machine? And what am I? You mentioned a..." His turn now to falter. "H'ro?"

"Yes. I am Shroud. My creators' termed me a fabricant. I am the mind that inhabits this ship."

So he was on a ship after all. But where?

Shroud continued. "H'ro is one of two species forming your basic biology. I designed you to accompany me, with suitable augmentations to facilitate -"

He is lying to you...

The whispers. The hatred.

The machines are his creatures. When you sleep, they will slit your throat.

He felt the outrage inside him boil to life again, a magma in his nerves. A remote part of him realized Shroud had fallen silent while the robots surrounding the room shifted in their various places as if perturbed by something he couldn't see.

When Shroud spoke again, its voice was flat, inflectionless.

"It is here."

That was when the walls began to bleed.