Tiger Madness Loosed

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Tumour-worn diaphragm jerks, flexes, pressing with mottled intercostals to extract a final inhalation. Driven to basal instinct, every fibril tenses in a pitiful death-grip as the body clutches with hapless desperation.

Hypoxia has set in; what blood moves haltingly through narrowed arteries, pooling and eddying, is stripped by greedy tissue of the little it carries towards the brain. The cerebrum is besieged by its own organs, and the starving clutch of neurons deny their bearer all rational thought.

What does it feel?

It does not feel; it sees distantly black tinged with red, indistinct shapes convulsing hazy and undimensioned behind its eyes. A desperate rearguard action by the occipital lobe imposes revulsive form on the perfect emptiness, but panes of geometric nothing restore the visual field to destined tranquility.

Horror, loss, agony, unfounded hope; all these things flowed riverine through its mind, and went, and now its awareness is saturated only by the mocking byplay of image.

With a last whistling hack as it seizes, the body that is O5-5’s expires.

The attendant bows his head. His forehead is furrowed. He turns to the voluminous room barely unemptied by three grievers occupying each wall.

The east and west walls are each taken up by a figure dressed already in funerary wear: twin lacquered oxfords, carefully tailored suits like the Bosphorus on a moonless night, gleaming cufflinks the only point of light on their forms; silhouettes against the sterility of Site-01’s Medical Wing.

Very nearly identically high (the sister, nearer the west exit, just a hair above), their paired elfin features turn one moment to glance at the death-rattle of their father. Perhaps Julian’s smirk flickers minutely. Under duress Vivienne might admit a second of hesitation when she saw him twitch inward and expel his soul. Then they turn cool gazes back to each other.

Between them hunches their mother, twisted in on herself in imitation of his corpse; stoic but for the occasional spurt of undignified sniffling, drowned in a terrible sweater two sizes too big. They look at her, and the attendant, as furniture. Each curls their nose slightly at the rising stench, a relic of archaic ages that twenty centuries of civilisation cannot strip from a carcass.

Vivienne Basile turns on one heel and leaves the room. She is the very picture of self-assuredness, because she is now O5-5.

Julian Basile smirks at her as she leaves, then slouches himself toward the door, stopping one moment to embrace his mother and lug her with him to the exit. As he drags her through the threshold he flips a single coin at the silent attendant: a drachma dredged from the ruins of Tenea. It is pure and glittering gold; a gift fit for a king to give. Julian must become used to a royal bearing for he, too, is O5-5.

------

Overwatch Command cradles the world in its spiderish fingers, and so it moves with great force, and with great consideration. Every word of the Council is scribed, scripted, ordered. Very rarely is anything decided at the table. Their business is too important (so goes the wisdom) to be left to squabbling in the moment. Site-01 was constructed with the intention it have all the vitality of an archive in its regular operation.

Today (here is a phrase to strike dread into every Director, every researcher, every agent and functionary and janitor) is not regular.

O5-5, Theodosius Basile, has been assassinated.

It was a slow murder: when on the morning of ‘86 he plunged into the deep of an active metapurgatorial rift and repelled the entities therein, he walked away that evening hale and heroic. It took thirty years for the virulent pseudocancer that took root -- not in his DNA, but the //idea//, the information that it carried -- to smother every aliquot of life in him. He spent the last five with use of only random halves of his body. Some mornings he found he could contract his arm but not extend it again, and spent a day with it clawed at his shoulder and laughed.

They were inspired (is what they will say, to the Foundation at large, when they speak of his monstrous deformity, his contemptible weakness, the childish way he clung to his life and endangered every vital function of the wardens of the Veil) by his dedication to Normality, and his determination to live.

Now he is gone, and it is time for a throne to be filled by a more vital subject.

Julian Basile stands above the fifth chair at a tastefully gilt mahogany table, which is lit to give the appearance the illumination comes from the roaring fireplace by the far wall, and not meticulously-placed electric lamps. The furniture looks as if it were stolen from the Winter Palace, though in fact it was effectively the reverse. The Overseers were not bored enough to illuminate every wall with detail on their exploits, and instead kept themselves restrained. Each wall is unadorned marble, and on the ceiling is a sun whose thirteen rays illuminate their places, and in its blazing heart their motto: LIVE IN THE LIGHT.

Vivienne enters very slightly late to the forty-ninth Overseer plenum of 2016. She has prepared her ground.

“I do think,” says Julian in a gradually steadying voice, “That we have an intruder.”

None of them turn to take their look at her. Three, in her hideous Christmas getup and tied-up bun, might have, but she’s too busy weeping openly for the passing of the old Five. The horror of it is that she feels every ounce of her sadness sincerely.

Seven brushes a phantasmal finger against her face and whispers so only she can hear: “He has an in with Four. They gave him Alpha-1 as a favour. I can’t help you unless you have a way to disable them.”

Vivienne doesn’t need secrecy. As she waits warily just past the entrance, she grits her teeth into the empty air, and bites out “Of course you can //help// me. Just peel his face off.”

Julian grins at her boyishly. “You haven’t become a better sport since you stopped trying to make it in polo, hm?”

To shudder with repressed rage would be to bait a shark. So she contents herself with a slow breath, and an unclenched fist. That whisper back again, which even without any human tone drips with condescension, tells her, “He has found a ward for himself from Eight. The dead cannot touch him.”

Which renders useless the poltergeist Overseer she spent last Friday promising access to her father’s intelligence on Nine. Damn. Julian, the unbelievable braggard, actually snaps his fingers as he looks towards the empty door, which she’s inched away from, closing the distance between them.

“Come on, Alpha-1, we don’t have all day. If she doesn’t resist, then a LETHE wash should be sufficient,” and then flicking his gaze back to her, “I’m not unreasonable, Viv. Just give it up and we’ll find you a nice manor to debase.”

Behind her stroll in two unremarkable women in stylish suits. They extend their hands towards her; each bears a pistol at her hip.

Contested ascendance to the Council is always a diceroll. She knew this when she stepped foot in the Site; that perhaps she’d simply guessed whose help he’d seek incorrectly, and find herself outmatched. Her strategy was the correct one with what she knew, and it failed. There’s no shame in it, and a life in some obscure Ligurian villa holds no terror for her. A rational woman knows when to admit defeat. So she says:

“Ten!”

As short a cry as she can make it, and already the women are raising their guns, and she closes one fist at last. As her thumb meets her fingers the circle etched invisibly there completes, the fireplace screams jetlike and out of it leaps a sopping wet frog heavy with natal slime. Its tongue flicks out twice, matter of fact, and --

(//plock, plock//)

-- off come the women’s heads. Their bodies do not fall but thrust forward their firearms which thunder and saturate the space Vivienne just was with lead. She dives to the floor and scrambling toward the back of the enormous room, toward Julian, screams “Six! Please, it has to be now!”

Six booms across the table, in her giant’s voice, “First and //second// born, then.”

It’s all she can do to yell her agreement as a dozen more Alpha-1, these rather better-armed, rush into the room and banish the hastily-called ranaic demon with half a hundred spelleater rounds. Six gestures and thunder sparks down from the ceiling and cinders half the taskforce. Even their grasping enchantment cannot keep a body moving when it is only char.

The other half turn toward her and the void that is Nine’s seat speaks a command. She cannot describe it, but the taskforce begin dismembering each other with their practiced efficiency. Overseers are not charitable, so, think --

Nine is the Overseer forgotten, who figures into no plans until they are seen. She could not have approached them, so they approached her, necessarily recently. Because (duck the stray gunfire, keep below the table) they knew that Five had been building a profile through careful implication, and they wanted her to burn it. They had foreseen Julian’s ward, and this is //still the plan//.

But she doesn’t whoop in triumph like an idiot and continues to worm towards her prey who was too proud to show up armed. He’s finally looking a little worried as he too ducks behind the monumental chair old Theodosius erected and cries over the fire:

“You can’t be serious! What are you trying to prove?”

And calls out something unknowable.

Eleven speaks a Word, and Vivienne is thrust back into herself, and loses all coherence. She sees in brief flashes, viewing another life --

> Ten crowds the table with chittering avianoids that nip at her flesh,

> Twelve’s servers whirr and two dozen weapons systems emerge from carefully-hidden slots to exterminate the intruding vesperians,

> Julian drops whimpering to the floor, stray fire taking him through the gut, and screams “YOU WIN” in a voice too fraternal for her to hear,

> Seven slaps her into a wall hard enough to shatter her ribs --

> and Three proclaims an incantation of banishment to remove it from the room,

> (Overseers are not charitable);

> Struggle on towards her stricken brother, blood bubbling at his mouth, and

leap atop him, push one hand into his perforated gut and laugh at the pleading on his face as he cries at last desperate “Viv, we --”

And bring the knife in her jacket, the thing she was not too proud for, down into his mouth, split his lips and watch his teeth fold inward and the knife comes down again and his cheek ruptures so she sees the tongue writhe wretchedly and again and the eye bursts so he won’t be charming anyone ever again; split the forehead until the offwhite cranium barely cracked peers through and the chin goes with a cartilaginous crunch and the ears have too much give to come cleanly and pull off like cardboard; up through the jaw impale the flopping muscle, drive further and pierce the palate as he gives the short yelps that are all he can manage until she feels the jellied resistance of the brain and he is still.

He’s finished. She can face whatever comes, but not him, not ever again.

She stands up shortly and glances around at the table. Everything has gone suddenly and awfully still.

Then she spasms --

-- sighs --

and groans in dismay as she looks at the carnage around her. When she speaks her voice is different. Slower, and the posture she carries herself with is no theatre.

“What a clusterfuck,” notes O5-2, indistinguishable in literally every way from an ordinary human woman.

“Normally,” adds O5-1, who has a face, “They settle these things //outside// Overwatch.”

“I miscalculated,” says O5-5. “This batch weren’t raised quite right, and I couldn’t course-correct by the end. I did try to direct them towards the family home, but they were dead-set on this place. Kids, eh?”

O5-6 notes: “You absolutely must find a better method soon, Five. The messes they make are always such a headache.”

“At least this time they weren’t //triplets//,” O5-10 laughs.

“I did //so// dearly hope they’d unmade you,” hisses Seven, “For I would truly have taken those files, if either of them won.”

O5-9 says nothing, grouchily.

Theodosius’ wife emerges from the door, past the spattered homunculi (as if the real Red Right Hand would fall so fast). She looks positively matronly in the awful sweater she likes to wear around the children. She trots up to O5-5 and pulls her into an embrace.

“Don’t go so fast, next time,” she says. “Replacing you never gets less boring. They always try the same tricks to get one over each other!”

O5-5 laughs with her wife, witch-queen of lost Samarkand, and curtly nods to the rest of the plenum. They accede to her placement among the council 12-0.

-----

But is it ever enough?

O5-5 very long ago discarded the notion any level of paranoia could ever be //sufficient//. She thinks only in terms of minimal worst-case loss; bounds on variance and expectation. What did she give away this time? Every resurrection is fraught.

Already, Three, Four, Five, and Eight knew. Nine was surely on her trail. And of course One had been read in at the start, and almost certainly therefore Two. Did the other six have any clue?

Here is the story of O5-5: That with the help of her wife, she spawned endless generations of children, arranged them to hate each other, and fed on their ritual fratricide to call back her spirit from death. She moved through the years and the bodies like a hermit-crab.

It was very nearly bulletproof. But the others knew enough thaumaturgy to realise it was nonsense, and they knew enough about the database to realise there were a dozen easier ways to live forever. They snooped relentlessly at the edges of her territory, and she kept her distance. But in the moments of handover, it was impossible not to leak information.

She steps up onto her helicopter, preparing for exfiltration from the Swiss Alps and back into mundane society. As she boards the craft, O5-5 performs the final safety checks to clear her launch. Her pilot brings her up, directed on the ground by the air marshal, who is O5-5.

At Site-01, the O5-5 that was Theodosius Basile is cremated, the O5-5 that was Julian Basile is hefted off the ground for autopsy, and the O5-5 that is the witch-queen vanishes in a spear of alien light. Under the Pacific Ocean, O5-5 notes a sonar intrusion at his station onboard USS //Seawolf//. In orbit, O5-5 gazes down at the Earth from her personnel capsule, while O5-5 prepares dinner for his wife in downtown San Diego.

As she leaves the Site, three million bodies do not simultaneously sigh in relief, because then the game would be up.

//Here’s to another year.//

Tiger Madness Loosed

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