Nights of Villjamur - Mark Charan Newton [33]
They were disturbed people, the mental patients, the radically disfigured, the severely disabled—people that Villjamur and the Jamur Empire did not wish to acknowledge, let alone look after. They had no opportunity to contribute to the Imperial system, and up until recently, they constantly stalked the backstreets with haunted looks on their faces.
He could imagine nothing worse than being forgotten about, than being shunned by every face that he ever looked at. One of the batch told him that when people would not speak to them, would not even look them in the eye, they may as well have been dead already. Do we rely on being noticed by other people to confirm that we are alive?
Dartun wanted to experiment on them: if he was successful, it would offer them a way out—if they could not die, would they be alive in the first place? He wanted to see if they could have their lives extended with his newly developed techniques. Then he could try them on himself.
Chemicals smeared the air.
Blindly, he lit a blue-glass lantern in one corner. Modified relics were submerged in each of one row’s tanks, a faint purple glow shimmered above them: it meant they were ready. Riddled with pangs of anxiety, he walked over to the first, raised up on a waist-high platform, and the light on his face made him quite aware of his reflection in the thick fluids. Bombarded with test formulas, these bodies faced toxic chemical structures that no ordinary person could survive a minute of, let alone several hours.
Turning off the relics within, one by one, the fluids began to drain through thick pipes, polluting somewhere deep within the city. As the liquid levels descended, a male body was revealed, glossy and slick, naked and scarred with traces of minor operations and major rewirings—Dartun’s attempt at preserving it. He plunged a syringe into its chest and within seconds it lurched and began to shudder violently. Its eyes opened and the figure clutched the air above its head, then gave a perversely bass baby’s cry.
Dartun was ecstatic, drunk on optimism—had this attempt been successful?
It suddenly collapsed back into the tank, shaking silently. Then ceased to move at all, as lifeless as a pre-op undead.
Another failure.
He sighed, and repeated the procedure with the five other Shelley tanks on this side of the room, each one eventually falling uselessly into death. They should have been preserved, their internals had been rewired to prevent decay. He could see nothing but the futility of life in his experiments, and again he became depressed and sad. These people had no other choice and surrendered their lives to him, and he had let them down.
He could not even tell if it was good enough to convert to one of the undead.
Dartun was enraged. With only the dead for company, he kicked things about the room, and when someone from his order came in to see what was going on, Dartun indignantly shoved him back out again. He knew he was being immature and unstable, but that’s what failure did to him. He hated it, hated that his own life was failing him.
Did anyone even think of their own death, or did they also assume the day would never come?
The days now seemed merely a heartbeat long.
All these failures had removed most of his options down to just the one. One decision, then, in honor of his recently acquired mortality: to push the limits of Dawnir technology to its fullest. If he was going to die, he wanted to do so as a legend—a name to be remembered—as a pioneer. There is so much in the world that he had spent his life detailing, and now he was going to put it into practice. And not only that, but he needed to find some supreme relics, some intense piece of technology. Because any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic—and he had run out of technology.
At least in this world.
CHAPTER 6
INVESTIGATOR RUMEX JERYD SAT AT HIS DESK, FEELING LIKE A VICTIM. Already he had suffered from the first snowballs from the