The Heart of Darkness, chapter 7: Getting into women's genes

    “Normally, interplanetary cross-breeding is exceptionally rare” the Librarian explained to the gathered Legionnaires with clinical detachment. “Which explains its popularity among, shall we say, the ‘more adventurous’ space travellers. Statistically, it’s nearly impossible for two separate species on opposite sides of the galaxy to evolve in such a way as to facilitate reproduction between them. Of course, given the tendancy of the Parodyverse to match the needs of the narrative, not to mention the surprising prevalence of what on Earth would be termed “humanoid” body structures, such elaborately improbable coincidences are not completely unheard of…”

    Dancer blinked as all eyes in the room turned to her. “Hey, whoa… Don’t involve me in this one…” she complained, “My spark scores are bad enough.”

    “Yes, well… regardless of whether such things can happen naturally, in this case the evidence strongly suggests they did not.”

    “So you’re saying Miiri’s having another Caphan’s baby?” Lisa asked.

    “No... not at all. Rather, I’m saying there likely was little natural about this conception.”

    “So it was Vizh and his amazing artificial sperm!” CrazySugarFreakBoy suggested with enthusiasm.

    “Again, that’s not exactly what I’m trying to say…”

    “I kind of wish no one had said that” Asil concurred.

    Lisa rolled her eyes in impatience. “Out with it already Giles… Just what, exactly, are you saying about Miiri’s pregnancy?”

    Lee Bookman frowned in distaste. “I’ve been digging into the records of Frammistat 8. It seems the Lovetoad had gained access to certain genetic technologies…”

    “Miiri is having a clone child?” Asil asked with interest before she caught the look from Lisa. “Um… sorry. Please continue.”

    “No… not cloning. It seems that a procedure was developed to, well… genetically confuse the eggs of one race into accepting the DNA of another… within reason.”

    “A confused egg would be a good match for Visi’s DNA” Yo nodded approvingly.

    “Er…yes. In any event, rich interplanetary couples had long been searching for ways to conceive, and when a market like that exists it’s only a matter of time before it is filled. The Lovetoad, however, found a different way to make money off of such breakthroughs.”

    The First Lady of the Lair Legion frowned. “Blackmail” she guessed.

    “Indeed” the Librarian confirmed. “During the Transgalactic Challenge, the Lovetoad hosted a wide variety of dignitaries and royalty from many powerful races… races, and royal families, which would consider a ‘mongrel’ child to be the ultimate humiliation.”

    “And since one doesn’t pal around with a slime like the ‘Toad for the pleasure of his company, it’s a safe bet some of those visitors were introduced to Miiri” Dream suggested darkly.

    “Quite. Unfortunately, due to the circumstances of the Caphans’ rescue and the events of the challenge, any specific details of his plan were lost with the destruction of his ship… notably who was the target of the blackmail and the likely father of Miiri’s child. However, in my assistance to Dr. Gale in treating Miiri’s condition since WeirdSciCon, I can confirm that she was unknowingly subjected to such genetic treatment sometime just prior to when we first came in contact with her.”

    “So Visionary isn’t the father then?” Asil asked softly.

    “That… is undetermined. Dr. Gale’s best guess based on the timetables available can only narrow the conception timeframe to a near Earth month. The genetic realignment and combination of the disparate DNA adds considerably to the gestation period of the child. Miiri’s… um… experience with Visionary would fall just barely within Gale’s proposed window… Add that the procedure is far from guaranteed to ever result in a pregnancy and it’s possible that the original plot with the intended father was completely unsuccessful. Ultimately, it may prove to be impossible to determine paternity without a genetic sample safely extracted from the child.”

    The Manga Shoggoth gurgled ominously from the corner as all eyes turned to it. “And that will not be happening” it proclaimed resolutely.

    “Standard hospital procedure…” Hallie was saying sadly, “Is to draw blood for testing from everyone admitted. Samples are sent to the labs, typed, and kept on record if anything remarkable is found.” She stood forlornly before Dominic Clancy’s desk as she explained her intrusion into the government facility. “Five full vials of my blood were drawn while I was at Phantomhawk. Type O negative… the universal donor type. Except that my blood was green.”

    The other man in the office, Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Range, snorted derisively, but Mr. Epitome kept his eyes on the image of the young woman before him.

    “Four vials of it were stored for study, until last month, when they mysteriously went missing” she looked directly into paragon of power’s eyes. “Taken by your agents. Taken because of what it can do to the Fairly Great Old Ones… what it can do to the powers of the Necronastycon. The same powers that are eating out Visionary’s heart.”

    His face didn’t betray any emotion. He just watched her and waited.

    She met his gaze with shining eyes, but the tears refused to fall. “I could call Lisa… we could fight you over it...”

    “Please do call that lawyer woman” the Secretary sneered. “The Attorney General has had teams drawing up arguments against artificial intelligence and so-called ‘robo sapien’ rights since the administration first took office. They’d love a test case…”

    Her eyes never left Dominic’s face. “What do you want?” she asked in a small voice.

    Range sneered. “You have nothing we want. Legally, you have… you are… nothing.” He scooped up the files the two men had been studying and stuffed them into a satchel. “But if you’re so keen to, feel free to bleed some more.”

    Hallie’s face twisted in outrage, and she snatched up the letter opener from the opposite edge of the desk, causing the Secretary to lurch back in fear. But instead of gutting him like a trout, she slammed the back of her own hand down on the desktop and proceeded to viciously stab through it repeatedly, sending splinters flying from the desktop. “Don’t you think I’ve tried?!” she snarled, not stopping the attempted self-mutilation. “Don’t you think that’s the first thing I’d do?! But the damn house won’t let me bleed again…!”

    Dominic was around his desk in a flash to disarm the distraught hologram. “Don’t do this” he said, not unkindly, as she buried her face in his chest.

    “I’ll come work for you” she said quietly, ignoring him. “I’ll leave the Legion and do anything OPS wants me to do. Just let me save him.”

    He sighed. “You’d never be trusted inside a secure mainframe” he noted matter-of-factly.

    She reached out a hand and laid it atop the computer on his desk. Algorithms filled the screen like electric rain in a downpour. “My code” she said in a numb voice, the tears finally running down her cheeks. “Rewrite me… make me into whatever you want me to be. Make me into something you can trust.”

    Dominic stared in quiet shock at the screen and forced his body to remain stock still. Despite her embrace, he refused to give her any comfort that would prove false. “There is one of those things… What your files call a “Fairly Great Old One”… under Parodiopolis. Under U.S. soil.”

    “Just one vial…” she pleaded. “Just one vial could be enough to save him. He's saved us... He's saved his country... Please… please... give me back my blood.”

    “I’m sorry” he stated emotionlessly. “I can’t help you.”

    She shuddered once, then merely cut the power to her image emitter without looking at him again. The tiny insect-like drone that allowed her to project her holographic form silently departed out the door from which she had come.

    The Secretary of Homeland Security scoffed and shook his head in disbelief. “The reports don’t do that thing justice…” he sneered. “Shame we had to turn it down… it’d make a hell of a theme park attraction. I thought the tears were an especially artful touch…”

    “Mr. Secretary…” Epitome noted in a tense, flat voice, staring at the empty doorway. “I need you to leave. Now. Before you accidentally get hurt.”

    The man looked at him incredulously, but upon seeing his face decided that it might be best to take that advice.

    Dominic Clancy turned to his desktop computer where the cascading algorithms had frozen onscreen. He didn’t stop crushing it between his hands until he had reduced the hard drive to a fine powder.

    The young woman sighed. She’d had this conversation before. “Uncle, I do not wish to be mated with the Unholy Brood of the Septic Spawning. I don’t want to go out with Daimon Soulshredder even if he does have a six hellsteed racing chariot. And I really do not need setting up with Drusus Apocalypse. He’s all tentacles.”

    “But my dear,” answered Bogdan Vladivock, slithering his hands together in the fashion of 1920s movie villains who have just tied the heiress to a railway line, “You have to get out. Mingle. Meet people. Spawn an antichrist.”

    “I really don’t,” his niece assured him. “If I want a date I can get one for myself. Somebody who doesn’t appear in the index of the Necronastycon or Gribbons Guide to Unspeakably Loathsome Night Stalkers.”

    “What about that nice Abyssal you were seeing. I thought he had prospects.”

    “I was not ‘seeing’ Rasputatious,” Urthula Underess answered definitely. “At least not if I spotted him coming. Anyway, he’s vanished and good riddance to him. His eyes followed you everywhere.”

    “But he always put them back in eventually,” Vladivock pointed out.

    “Uncle, I’m over two hundred and seventy now. I think I can sort out my own dating life.”

    “I heard the Sage Grimpenghast was seeking a new consort.”

    Urthula resisted the temptation to hurl something. Her uncle took a dim view of people messing with his lab, and there were quite a few bits of people who had made the mistake of doing so still twitching in various jars around the workshop. Some of them were still screaming. “Uncle, you’re tried to manipulate my unlife ever since you turned me into a ghoul on my sixteenth birthday…”

    “Most people would appreciate a thoughtful and unusual present.”

    “That’s it,” the undead damsel snapped. “I’m going back home. I only abandoned the Zoloti Volota in Kiev to get away from Luminosus’ attentions. And now you’re trying to set me up with anything that doesn’t have a pulse.”

    “The Abyssal Luminosus has prospects too,” Vladivock considered. “After all, he’s the supreme leader of the Ghouls Under Chernobyl.”

    “Yeah, he’s real bright,” Urthula scowled. “Look, I’m going out for a while. Do not set me up in obscene necrophilic rites with anybody while I’m gone. Do not send a shadow messenger to tell Luminosus that I’m in the New World. And do not even think about breeding me with any of those things you built in the cellar.”

    “The one with the tongues is very fond of you.”

    “Do. Not.”

    Urthula flounced out of the lighthouse then, and over the causeway towards the little fishing village beyond. Bogdan Vladivock watched her go, then held out his hand for a little winged shadow messenger. “I want you to make a quick trip to Chernobyl…” the Necromancer General told the fiend.

    “Well, that went well” Lisa noted acidly.

    “Cute Shoggoth is just being especially protective of Miiri’s child-to-be” Yo argued. “He was not to be ruling out testing Visi for fatherhood after said child is being born.”

    “I’m pretty sure Miiri already took him for a fatherhood test drive” the lawyer shot back. “So he has no idea about the genetic make-up of the father, despite having known Miiri was pregnant longer than she has?”

    “Is what he is saying” Yo confirmed. “But at least he is also confirming that Miiri is to be the only cute Caphan to be having a mystery bun in the oven.”

    “Ah. Well, that’s something at least” Lisa said with a sigh. “When DBS finally stops running someone will have to tell him that. But it doesn’t do a hell of a lot of good for Vizh. A worsening heart condition, an impending sham marriage, visiting inlaws-to-be, an AWOL Kerry, suspension from his teaching job, his suitability to be a guardian under investigation, a smear campaign against him and now possibly knocking up an intergalactic sex slave. Does that about cover the tally so far?”

    “The video store is also calling” Yo added. “His copy of ‘Shaun of the Dead’ is being past due.”

    “Right” Lisa nodded. “Good catch.” She added ‘piling late fees’ to her Not to be discussed in the presence of Visionary under pain of even worse pain list which she intended to distribute to the rest of the Legion. “Isn’t that always the way…” she sighed, imagining the teasing opportunities that were slipping by. “Water water everywhere...”

    “Actually, cute Liu Xi is saying that she has successfully removed the swimming pool from Visi’s bedroom” the thought being interrupted happily. “And she believes the toilet should no longer be intersecting his headboard by morning.”

    “Aesthetically, probably the better way to go… despite the trade-off in convenience.” She leaned over in her chair and rubbed the back of her neck. “See there? Things are on an upswing already. Hallie, Xander and the others will come through with a cure. We just need to give them more time, which means keeping Vizh completely stress free. We need to make his life as boring as possible… which, considering that it’s Vizh and he’s about as exciting as wallpaper paste to begin with, shouldn’t be too hard at all.”

    Yo nodded. “Are you really believing that?”

    Lisa slumped her head down on the table in defeat. “Did you miss the part on the list about knocking up the intergalactic sex slave?”

    Urthula’s rage took her right into town. It was well past midnight, so the only people around were some late-night drunks and a few refugees from the clubs and discos that lines the harbourfront. She cloaked herself in a minor glamour so they’d see nothing remarkable about her. She’d learned a few things from her uncle, even if he was a disgusting old warlock with the personal habits of a warthog and the morals of a real estate lawyer.

“What I need,” the ghoul said to herself, “is a proper date. With dinner that hasn’t been buried for two months, and candlelight that isn’t in a pentagram formation. Somebody who doesn’t just want me for my immense occult potential to spawn nightbreed.”

    As if on cue her mobile phone began to buzz.

    “Hello?” Urthula said, cutting off the Chopin’s funeral march.

    “Hello darling,” came back a cheeky Cockney voice. “How’s my favourite ghoul queen then?”

    “Johnstantine! I thought we’d agreed that if I ever saw or heard from you again I’d be ripping out your spleen to use as ear-rings?”

    “Yeah,” the irritating Englishman answered with a little snicker. “But you had a twinkle in your eye as you said it. I knew you couldn’t stay mad at me about that little thing with the Hand of Glory forever.”

    “I could tell it was you that had made that particular Hand of Glory,” Urthula accused, “on account of where it kept trying to crawl.”

    “Anyway, now that I’m all forgiven I wondered if you could do me a little bit of a favour.”

    “Forgiven? Favour? Johnstantine, I’m still trying to get the holy water stains off my red dress.”

    “See, there’s this bloke I know and I think he needs to meet with you. You’re still talking with your uncle the Necromancer General, right?”

    “Well the words I’d use are bickering constantly, but I’m staying at his tower while I’m visiting the Americas, yes.”

    “Great. So you’re probably ready to get out for a spot of dinner and a pleasant chat with a guy who’s dying to meet you.”

    “Lots of men die to meet me,” Urthula pointed out.

    “Well this one’s still got a pulse. And he’s very keen to have a chat.”

    “Is he a cultist, a wizard, a witch-hunter, a psychic, a new age guru, or a real bastard?” the ghoul demanded. “What’s wrong with him?”

    “He’s none of those things. In fact I don’t think he’s a real anything. And I really don’t know what’s wrong with him.” That’s why Johnstantine was referring him to Urthula, who was certainly the most accessible of the practitioners of necromantic elder magics that now suffused the possibly fake man’s heart. “So will you meet him?”

    “Is he like you?” Urthula demanded warily.

    “Not in the slightest,” Con Johnstantine assured her. “He’s kind of the anti-me.”

    “Then I’ll meet him. When and where?”

    “Say nine o’clock? Luigi’s Pizzeria in Paradopolis? Just off Thomas and Seventh, above the spawning node of the ur-crawlers…”

    “I can find it. Okay. Tell this guy I’ll see him tonight. How will I recognise him?”

    “Yellow coat, whiney attitude, stench of loser,” suggested the Englishman.

    “You sure know how to talk a guy up to me,” Urthula noted. “Okay, tell him it’s a date.”

    “A date? Wait, you don’t…” But the ghoul girl had cut the line.

    “I need to try something new,” she told herself. “Meet new people. People my uncle doesn’t want to breed me with. Make new friends.” She smiled to herself. “This could be the start of a whole new undeath.”

    And at the other end of the line Johnstantine shrugged. “Ah well. He’s seeing her. They can figure the rest out for themselves.”

to be continued...

Post By Visionary offers the long delayed next chapter with special guest collaborator The Hooded Hood Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 11:19:24 pm EDT	Subject The Heart of Darkness, chapter 7: Getting into women's genes

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