He coughed and a splattering of grease coated the mirror – something itched insanely at the back of his throat. How in the hell was he going to deal with it? Part of him was wondering why his nanite back-up system hadn’t kicked in to remove whatever foreign matter nestled there. If something had entered his body without permission it was usually identified post-haste and either coated and expelled or converted into something useful that the body or the nanites could use. This, whatever it was, had been allowed to settle in and, he hated to think it, but the image of something putting down roots came to mind.
His eyes were red and they ached like they had never ached before. Yesterday he had been out in the local Korean Town looking for somewhere to eat – he had been scouting various locations for the visitors that were coming to check out their company for a possible contract producing heart valves for the biomechs that worked in their upper atmosphere off-world. He knew he had an in infection and he was guessing that he probably caught it on that trip. Some parts of the cultural zone were unhygienic but it was also one of the best places to find great food. He had a bio-filter, what did he have to worry about?
Grayson went to the alcove and touched the pad that activated a system-wide diagnostic. Five minutes later and he would have a better idea of what was wrong with him – at least that was the idea; obviously it didn’t always work that way.
The light in the alcove began to flicker and then it died out. That had never happened before and he was not sure what it meant – he knew that it didn’t mean anything good though. How could it? When something that was guaranteed not to happen occurred it meant something extraordinary was at play. His stomach churned – god, that was painful. He made his way over to the couch and lay down. He coughed and once again tasted the grey grease on his lips. What was it? He wiped it off with his fingers and it tingled almost as if it held some kind of charge.
He was getting worried. He walked up to the com-screen and asked it to call his doctor. It flared and blinked off. Burnt out: the screen had actually burnt out. What the hell was going on? He would actually have to drive out there and see if he could get a last minute appointment.
A searing pain shot through his head. It wasn’t a migraine because this wasn’t how his migraines manifested themselves – his were like a blindness that bled in from the outer edges of his vision. This made him feel like he had been kicked in the front of the head. His eyes burned, they felt like needles were being driven into them. Retina spots flashed like the lens flare on a camera. He tried to speak, just to say ouch but nothing came out. He suddenly forgot what he had been meaning to do; everything had gone slightly fuzzy, indistinct – and he couldn’t quite say what it was that was wrong.
He stumbled into the bathroom. Clutched the edge of the bath. Crawled to the toilet. This time it wasn’t grease he threw up but blood, black sickly threads of it, but it didn’t come all the way out – there was something gelatinous about it as if it were being metabolised by something, and then the matter got drawn back inside him. If it were possible he would have said that he actually felt worse.
A memory stuttered in his mind like a blinking exit light – a newsbomb he’d caught passing one of the update posts: Seeds. There had apparently been some kind of outbreak of viral machines that the military had been developing as advance invasion forces for some of the new extra-terrestrial beings that they were encountering. It had been dismissed by their spokesperson as more conspiracy theory rubbish. Like all of that cultural detritus perhaps it too had some small grain of truth in it.
The thing inside Grayson had been using him as a factory. When it had reached a certain point the activity had become more what you might call explosive. Grayson’s death was an irrelevant by-product; a necessary outcome of a carefully organised process. The thing that left Grayson’s apartment looked like Grayson, acted like Grayson, but it was a shell – a vehicle for some other intelligence. Grayson was dead, long live Grayson.
Filed under: Horror, Prose, Short Story, flash fiction, science fiction, update | Tagged: fiction, flash fiction, paul grimsley, Prose, science fiction, seed, Short Story, story, tale, update, writer, writing
