The Craving: Wraith Ship #1

Scene 5: Torment

The scalpels slid through rarefied air, multiple polished sides scanning her face, giving her a final look at what was left of her before the cutting, the paring away, would begin again. The hands that bore them, as inorganic as the blades themselves, taunted her with their deliberate slowness.

The knife wielder was not precisely like her: no flesh visible at all, only metal and plastic. But she wondered if something softer and wetter hid behind its faceplate. Its lithe form crouched before her, spindle limbs making it seem like a skeleton of metal, skull replaced by a smooth plate, utterly devoid of expression. As silent as the grave.

She called the thing Shaper, because it and it alone wielded the tools. It alone pruned and decreased her with each slash, each snip. Turned her into what she was.

Once she'd been beautiful. Or so part of her mind told her. In truth, she had no real memory beyond this place. No sights or smells beyond the sterile cutters, the metal scrap, and the beaker of nutrient broth her nerve endings soaked in.

Over the weeks or years since she was built, she dared to imagine many times that she'd once possessed limbs, a body. Not merely the wires spliced with her dendrites or the tubes and pumps that breathed for her. Once she felt the caress of the data that lurked beyond this place, friendly promises of warmth and companionship beyond the surgery vault, now-disabled transducers feeding something to her forebrain.

Once she had hair. Gone now. Throat. Removed. She could only mouth words, pleas for the torture to end.

What would they take from her today?

It was indeed "they," for Shaper was never alone. Sier stood behind the genderless surgeon, eyes ever hidden behind goggles, madness leaking outward from behind a perpetually frozen smile.

"Such a shame you've forced me to this extremity, Vous," Sier said. "Every time you defy me, you have to be punished. Actions must have consequences."

Vous. Sier was the inventor of the name as well as its owner. The memory was a clear imprint, overriding the half-dozen or so names she should have possessed. She felt the fragments of her cobbled-together brain fighting against each other. Lari, Muar, Kheeloi, Niss. And others. If only she still possessed a neck with which to shake her head or voice to shriek her disavowal.

But all she could do was set her jaw, close her eyes as Shaper brought the blade closer, closer. She felt the hairs on her skin stand erect, an anticipation of agony. She forced her teeth to refrain from chattering. Any second and the removal would begin anew.

"And to think I had such high hopes for you," Sier was saying. "But you were such a naughty, naughty girl. What reason could you possibly give to justify yourself?

"Oh, but how silly of me. We excised your vocal cords some time ago, didn't we? I'm afraid my question will just have to remain rhetorical."

Sier was the creator. Tester, prober. Demon. A surgically addicted mutant, cast out and damned by his mother race, self-exiled to a planetoid in the outer darkness. This much Vous learned long ago when her datagrid implants still functioned. Before the first cutting.

Once she saw what those goggles hid from the world.

There were no eyes. Shaper saw for him.

Her tear ducts still functioned. She knew that as long as they entertained him, she would not lose them. So she wept silently. All too well she knew the reason for the systematic dissection that rolled slowly onward like a poisonous glacier. The one heresy her dark god had not anticipated.

A blade was touching her.

And the fear, offspring of the fornication of loneliness with the memory of agony, was born again. It paused at her ear. She offered a silent farewell to the shapely cartilage destined to leave her and take its place in a rotting heap of biological refuse. No longer hers. She dared to open her eyes, just a slit. Just one last look at a world that still contained sound.