When the room went dark, she heard her name. But it was not her name anymore; not a name she could remember, at least. In that same crude fashion, she heard her name again, and again, and again. The darkness screamed her insides out and made them sputter with a sea of identities she housed in her oceanic mind. Every name had its own smile, its own memories, its own life, all playing out instantaneously and drawing her awareness. The plethora of reincarnations gave her a taste of every detail of their intimate sensory lives, bombarding her with her own inflated consciousness. Her muscles twitched on the surgery chair as an awful sound began to crawl out of her mouth, impossible for her to recognize as her own. Ruslan Zeytsev quickly balanced her hormone levels and fine-tuned her neural pathways before grabbing a little stool and sitting in front of her, lighting a cigarette as her animal growls became weak moans.
“Are you there, God? Somewhere in the warm rush of blood and the soft hum between the synapses? It’s been a long time since you’ve invaded by eye. I don’t replace it because I want to honor the moment, the memory. My wife had the most stunning eyes: it looked like a forest bathed in gold. It doesn’t compare to the dark dirt brown of my own. But now, every time I look at people, the world and all of its broken promises, I see you. It disgusts me. You disgust me. We need to carry the weight of the infinite and the finite because of your failure. But I won’t fail; I will accomplish what you never dared to commit to.”
Under the sterile white lights, the skin of the woman he codenamed Legion shone with the pallor of death. The layer of sweat clinging to her pale skin gave it a sparkle that mocked sunkissed dewdrops. A purple color tainted her lips and eyelids, giving more emphasis on the celestial blue of her eyes. Those oceanic depths of her soul froze in her lifeless eyes, arousing a bitter feeling in Ruslan.
Smoke danced between the sea of wires connecting her to the room and to the machines reading her brain and the spirits of the others. But even with all the technology he could acquire, he was still tormented by the hidden god. Out of impulsivity, he crushed the cigarette between her eyebrows, only seeing his own lack in the wicked absence of answers. Legion had no reaction to the harsh stimulus as the silence voiced the beeping of the machinery around them and the sizzling of flesh.
°°°
Investigator Esfir Khairova drew on her cigarette, hearing the sizzling of flesh through its crackling paper that repainted the images of the crime scenes she was researching. Even though she took a break to wipe her mind clean of it, it still stained every thought she could produce. She blew smoke like a silver whip while looking from the balcony of the office building, watching how the snow danced and fell like the ashes of her cigarette. The deep red ember perched now of her cigarette hummed with the heat of the mountain of bodies she had encountered and researched. Saturated with memories, she saw them dance and flow in the velvet rivers of smoke.
Having explored and solved so many cases, she could only see the spiritual mold and mildew festering in corners of the city’s majestic architecture. Even the architecture of people did not escape that perspective, as she was particularly sensitive to the shadows of the heart. Feeling the weight of their darkness crushing her light, she couldn’t remember why she chose to do this job in the first place. All she did know is that she was exceptionally good at what she did despite hating the filth she had to interact with. What made it worse was that each murder she had to analyze made her reflect and see the connections between the killer, their actions, their past that blurred her images of any of them and anyone. She took a sip of her coffee and one last sip of her cigarette before flicking it far away, seeing the vermillion stars twinkle unto the falling snow.
An ocean of articles and printed documents infested her personal office’s walls. She found a strange comfort in the presence of words all around her, as if each letter sang the note of a lullaby powerful enough to caress her turbulent heart. Especially while she was working, she needed all the soothing she could get to get her through the description of every crime and its images along with the process of them all. She found another form of self-soothing in the organizing, filing and categorizing the details of every investigation, playing with perfection itself. And to save her from the suffering of lack, she treated the gaps and mysteries of them as the flowers that blossom in a fertile and fruitful garden, as expressions of hope even in the raw baseness of it all. But of all the files she fixed, there was one particular set of files that never left her mind.
There were no obvious connections between the victims, as their ages and lives ranged from primary school student to a teenage drug dealer and a CEO. Whether in the shadow or the light of society, the only connection between them is that they were all women whose bodies were made into simple yet brutal visceral canvas. But that’s how far it went on surface level correlations. However, when she inquired deeper into particular cases of that hypothetical series, the faintest link was made between some. Those closest to the victim would describe the victim using similar words, giving Esfir the inspiration to label the mysterious killer “Sweet Tooth”. That was one of the few pleasures she derived from her investigations as no one was able to make progress on the killer.
Not even one week, and there was a report of another murder. The tears, the blood, the display; it was all present again, arousing Esfir’s intuition to tell her that it was Sweet Tooth’s work. Another point of correlation with the killer’s targets was the strange sensation she would get whenever walking through the rooms the victims died in. There was a disturbing comfort ravaging her nerves throughout the whole process. Its paradox sizzled beneath her skin as the grotesque nature of this one made her mind spiral with awful visions of the culprit bashing a lamp against the victim’s skull. Gray brain-matter and a copious amount of dried blood smeared the floor like a nightmare’s sunset. Esfir wrote everything she could of the scene, sketching the layers of the event in a little black notebook. While she would normally use another book for all murders, she was positive that it was him.
With all the best forensic technology her department had, it was as if a ghost had done it. She was so determined to look for any signs, even android ones, that she was willing to fight through the stench assaulting her senses. The murder would correlate to the artificial strength of the assailant, making the case ever more difficult. Being the only one left in the room while the others were interviewing neighbours and investigating the premises, she leaned on the closet. She couldn’t take her eyes away from the pale neck of the victim that remained almost beautifully serene even with that grotesque crown above. Before she let herself spiral into an all-consuming despair, she noticed something strange about the woman’s breastpocket. With the utmost care, Esfir opened the pocket and plucked a folded piece of paper from it. All it said was “thank you” written in ink which was enough for crystals of ice to form in her spine. Blood-coated fingerprints gave her the impression that the murderer wrote it, turning the ice into a fire.
But the fire turned into a destructive restlessness once she heard that the bloody fingerprints were from the victim herself days later. After that incident, the late nights grew longer as the days became blurrier. All she confronted was a sea of pointless research results she tried to call important and the punching bag she tenderized in her apartment. The more she tried digging into the Sweet Tooth case, the analyzed his twisted artistry to find some correlations in the hopes of locating that one point of origin that inspired the person. A sea of untangled and woven viscera swam in her skull together with an ocean of masks people bore either like mountains on their shoulders or wings on their back. Even when she tried to numb the fanged memories with her brain chip, they still continued to ravage her mind as she scavenged for whatever information she could find on him
Another victim was found nailed to the wall above their bed. A perfect circle was cut on her stomach, leading Esfir to think that it really could be a rogue android. Later on, the forensic team told her that they found a small metal pouch with a note inside. This time, it said “save us.” Every word of the message gutted her. She hadn’t felt such a visceral feeling since her first exposure to such work, leaving her stunned to the core. In all the absurd horror of this case, she couldn’t understand whether she felt animosity or guilt and how those feelings could become guilt in the first place. While her colleagues tried to console her, telling her that they’re all in this together and must carry its weight, that feeling still didn’t want to leave. That voice screaming to her that she had to do more became deafeningly loud, slowly cracking the barrier that protected her from her darkest self.
While she was experienced enough to know that it took fortitude and patience to track one of them down, she couldn’t make herself believe the same thing with this once. Something about the painfully specific nature and the messages of the crimes never escaped her, staining her thoughts permanently. Even when she tried to pulverize them through her punching bag, the thoughts would only grow louder, breaking that barrier more. After unleashing a savage flurry of blows, she collapsed to the floor with cold rivers flowing through her nerves. With dark empathy, she managed to understand the satisfaction of the murderer’s savage expression, participating in the abstract immortality of the murderer’s volatile rage burning within her. Upon relating to the unknown killer on such a deep level, wishing to express to him what he expressed to the victims, she could only remain paralyzed to the ground, frozen as time and space faded in her fractured inner universe.
One night, Esfir’s restlessness reached its peak, exiling her from sleep. In a state of half-consciousness, her spirit boiled incessantly, never seeming to calm down. On the verge of finding a key to her death, she grabbed her coat and took a night walk. She was at least grateful for the nanotechnology that protected her from the harsh coldness, but she wished it went beyond the skin and fixed the marrow of her being. She wished to fundamentally rewrite her mind and cleanse herself of the mold it had been accumulating for so long. No matter how she tried to appreciate the beauty of the snow twinkling under the fluorescent street lights, she could only link it to the grotesque murders of Sweet Tooth and those with similar styles. No amount of technological advancement was able to hide the nightmares festering within, she thought as she saw junkies pumping themselves with a drug flooding into them from their headsets. While a part of her just woke up to realize where she was, another part knew exactly where it was going and what it wished to do.
Warm blood dripped from her knuckles, waking her up enough to hear the groan of one of those junkies on the floor, their head drenched in their own blood. In a thunderclap, she ran away, finding little piles of snow on the parapet of the ghetto she lurked in to clean the blood from her hands before flowing with the swift wind. In a strange light, she was able to see her mind unraveling in the erratic descent of the snow. Whatever thoughts drifted through her fell from its structure and melted in the wild ocean of her heart. That same ocean animated her muscles, breathing a fire into them that made her want to leap out of her skin and bones. Even when the coldness of the air cut through her lungs, that dark fire was strong enough to ignore the cold but ultimately weak against its own destructive nature. Being so occupied with her body's untamable desire to dissolve like snow, she only now noticed that her feet carried her to the dark and quiet living quarters of the city. When she stopped and finally catched her breath, she found herself leaning on the front door of one of Sweet Tooth’s previous victims.
Its overgrown, sinewy ivy undulated in the cold night wind, protecting its withered exterior. The victim there was an old woman whose final scene in this world mirrored an autumn tree of organs. Even when she passed through the creaking door, she could recall the memory of her first time here on a silver morning. The once lively interior of the house was now just an ever darkening shadow of her once rich life now caked with dust and cobwebs. With an obsessive grace, she carefully planned each step she planted on the noisy floorboards so as not to disturb the memories replaying in this room. Each step felt she was playing an instrument perfectly, giving her a hint as to where to go next. The song she heard and wished to recreate led her up the dark staircase and into her room, where it occurred. The killer nearly always ended their lives in the most serene places in spite of its brutal fashion, Esfir realized as she studied it again, clean of blood and bits of flesh.
The song emanated from the headboard of the bed frame. With a loud but hidden reason, Esfir grabbed the top and pulled it, trying to rip one of its three highlighted segments off. They were fused with one another, giving her less and less hope of it breaking and more doubt as to why she was doing that in the first place. But as she heard the headboard creak from its pale wooden joints, Esfir heard the music screaming in her skull. Just as it was about to deafen all her thoughts, the headboard snapped with a harsh tearing sound and landed on the mattress. Her intuition guided her to a small pocket in the second digit of the headboard that carried a rolled up piece of paper. When she unfurled it, her mind went blank as her body melted into the shadows of the room.
“Thank you for saving us.”
It only took those five words to pulverize her psyche. From then on, the investigations on the Sweet Tooth case continued with more rigour, predominantly on her part. In every case she studied, she could only see traces of Sweet Tooth, as if that killer spread its spirit like a virus to the festering sinfulness in all people. The next few weeks became a haze of hatred and paranoia as she lost track of her body, being unable to recognize certain limbs as being her own. When studying certain victims of Sweet Tooth, she saw her finger in a photo covered in dirt, her lips purple and dirt-dusted with diamond shaped cuts on her leg. Unable to bear the pain they all experienced, a terrible voice compelled her to stab her hand and eviscerate her limbs. One of the strange but welcome blessings she had received in that period was to have found the number and location of a specific surgeon in her coat pocket. That same dark voice compelled her to go to an underground cybernetics surgeon, one she didn’t recognize but simply knew many things about, as if from an old dream. He flicked a syringe in his hand whose contents reflected in his glass eye that cradled a gold-bathed forest.
“Your mind is starting to wake up as it realizes that your flesh is nothing but an empty dream. Your body cannot contain the storm of your mind, always trying to extend outward to devour the stars. With my cybernetics, you will finally know what it’s like to be kissed by the stars.”
From a hand to an entire arm to her whole body, she became a being beyond flesh, a spirit cradled in an obsidian temple. She was already used to feeling alienated from her colleagues, and the cybernetics merely aided her in its full justification. Now all she had to worry about was for the implants to properly work together with her mind so as to tame it and not agitate it any further. After a few days, she accepted her body as her own and all its robotic limbs as a part of her. Since the cybernetics agreed with her cerebra, she was finally able to dream again.
Only, they weren’t the dreams she wished she would have, but rather horrible nightmares of adopting the point of view of the Sweet Tooth victims and feeling her limbs being torn off by him over and over again. In spite of her supposed ability to cancel or manipulate her dreams, her mind exhibited such a strength that it managed to override the circuits woven through her brain. What disturbed her the most about those was that they were the only times she truly felt like herself.
Her next dream, however, she dreamt of a completely new person, one that she thought was merely an amalgam of some of the previous victims. She adopted the point of view and was on top and straddling the bloodied victim who uttered their final words before she clobbered their skull to a pulp with her ebony fist.
“You’re so close to saving us. Remember us, Esfir.”
The next day, there was another report of a murder.
A dark desensitization washed over her as she finally understood that the intuitive connection of Sweet Tooth’s victims led to her. It explained why she felt so drawn to them, why she felt as if each killing spoke to her like a painting. Since her revelation, she couldn't protect herself from the cacophony of voices blaring in her skull. The voice of each victim bounced in her skull, threatening to break it like glass the longer it continued. Not even the artificial manipulation of her brain processes could protect her from herself. A force far too vast to fathom colonized her dreams, painting an image of a woman strapped on a throne of wires, circuitry and viscera beyond life’s imagination. When she woke up from that dream, a cold veil of sweat covered her head, the only part of her that was still flesh. It was a dream that completed her existence, reinvigorating her with a wicked fullness of life.
With the awareness of being the killer, she allowed herself to continue committing the crimes with the intent of discovering herself through the victims and saving them in the end. Now, she saw them in a light that was always there, but a light she finally recognized; as chapters in the book of her soul. In order to not have to see another victim beg for their death, she conducted intense research into their lives for many sleepless nights and restless days. A nearly invisible thread revealed itself that connected all of them perfectly.
In those who have interacted with others just before they died, there was a strange shift in their personalities as addressed by those last interactions before the victims’ deaths. Only Esfir, in her darkest dreams, was the final witness to that shift in tone that carried the tone of a martyr meeting their god for the first and last time. Smoke filled the room as she studied the corkboard infested with pictures, pins and all connected with threads that led to what was her all along.
Out of a powerful gut feeling, she took the paper with the one-eyed cybernetic surgeon’s note and pinned it in the center of the web, letting it simmer there as her mind overflowed with thoughts. Pieces of her dark self which lurked in her shadows came to the light, pummeling her with visions of her dark self already having figured out that he was at the center of it all. When she delved deeper into his part in the whole thing, Esfir received a lightbolt of a memory of the woman with wires and tubes interwoven through her where he saw him performing on her from the perspective of the ether. While it all had the impression of a wild dream, it felt far too visceral to be just a fantasy to her. Like the golden sunlight bleeding through the green forest of his glass eye, the mysterious woman illuminated all, cleansing her mind of the mysteries and showing her where all of the people connected to her are and where he was.
As she personally investigated the mysterious man further with both her persona’s, she was finally able to make a plan and head to his secret base of operations. Entirely trusting her shadows, she explored the abandoned district now used as a graveyard for old automaton models as memories began to fall like soft rain. She had plenty of interactions with him, plenty of agreements with him, and even knew where most of his operations transpired. Apparently, while she was receiving his services often, her other half went to another cybernetician from the underworld to cleanse her of tracking devices and memory blockers the one-eyed man had put on her. With his help, she got the best quality without falling into failure, arming herself to the teeth.
With this, she snuck her way through the graveyard and descended into a crypt overrun with extensively long wires of all kinds of width. Every bit of knowledge fed her hatred’s fire and made it grow into a raging sun. Her mechanical fist plugged through the lock of the door, bursting open to show her an office full of papers, desks, computers, and devices constantly blinking and beeping to relay a sea of information. The man with the glass eye, hunched over one of those many devices, turned around and saw Esfir, welcoming her with a smile.
“I see that the cybernetics have been kind to you. That’s very good to see! Only, do be careful with your strength; there are still limits, you know.”
As he casually conversed with her, even he noticed the different look in her eyes. Before he was able to realize that it was not her alter ego and react accordingly, she lunged towards him and grabbed him by the neck, squeezing the muscle and cartilage in her iron grip.
“How… How could you know? I programmed it in such a way that was supposed to shield you from-”
As he tried to talk, his hand reached for something in his pockets. Before he could get the time to get it, she delivered a swift punch to his ribs and threw him across the room. Papers and pens flew as his body thunderously collided with a large machine. He fell on the shards of the screen that was cracked and saw the taser near him. All of her instincts caught fire as she leapt over the large desk between them to crush his skull beneath her foot. To avoid this, the man had to sacrifice the taser and instead took advantage of his serendipitous position to roll to an automatic door. She chased him as he ran, but stopped once she saw the hallway of glowing tubes carrying people of all ages and sizes, formed and deformed beyond nature’s design. All the organs cradled in her black armor churned at the awful sight.
“The cybernetics should have disconnected you from Legion instead of bringing you closer to her! Damnit, when I noticed her traces in you, I thought I was able to dull them out. You were supposed to be free! How can I fail and still have you trapped in that shell?”
Against a large door, the one-eyed man could only stare at her in confusion, frustration, disappointment. But when he saw the depths of the fire in her eyes, how eerily still she stared at him truly like an automaton, he understood the larger picture.
“It was you. You killed them all?”
The green glow emanating from the tubes danced in his eyes, showing the stark difference of how the light played with each eye. They only seemed to absorb more light as a fragile smile grew below the piercing gaze.
“You are Legion.”
Every glance she made of the hall cemented her convictions, almost hearing the cries of the deformed viscera fused with technology floating in those tubes. Every passing second pinned Ruslan to the ground in fear and disbelief, utterly confused as to why she carried such a vehement hatred for him. Having nowhere to run, the man stood in front of another door that remained sealed shut as he stared at the reaper and his last echoes in this life in the machines.
“But why? I did my best to free you from your condition. I saw so much potential in you and I saw the possibility of not only healing you, but healing humanity. You of all people know how cruel the mind can be. So imagine a world where our greatest gift doesn’t have to be our greatest curse. Isn’t that a wonderful world? With enough research, death can rest and those who have passed in unfortunate ways can live happily again. In delving into the vast depths of the unconscious, then the incandescent core of consciousness can show itself and maybe we can find ultimate fulfillment. Isn’t that amazing?”
Bathed in the green glow of the fluorescent lights, she studied how every word was drenched with the fear of death, losing all of its significance. Images of smiles lost in a sea of blood twinkled on the crimson surface like an echo of sun glitter, drowning them in the abyss below. To resurrect such grace would be a miracle to rival all miracles. Even she herself and all the parts of her that composed her felt united by that sweet wish to overcome a cosmic grief. But just as she saw the images of bliss ebbing and flowing with the bloody waves, she recognized her own blood and the blood of many others that have been used to aid the one-eyed man’s research. In the end, she found no justification to give someone or a plethora of people a second life or even a myriad of lives at the cost of another life in eternal torment.
“I-if you give me the time, I can finally reach that goal! I’m sorry that you had to suffer much more than some of the other persona’s of Legion, but I swear I can redeem it if you help me. There’s still a chance.”
With a few blinking lights on her ebony collarbones, she ordered the nanotechnology to bind his wrists, ankles and neck to the door behind him, freezing him in place. There was a poignant patheticness to his position, especially when posed as if nailed to a crucifix. His words penetrated her more than she thought they would, becoming the only thing echoing in her skull. While he continued to perspire as if his life depended on it, she lit a cigarette by flicking the knuckle on her thumb to awaken a little fire. Once she flicked it closed again, she blew smoke in his face as the memories of Legion became pouring in. After his coughing fit, he tried his best to convince her again, even from such a hopeless position.
“Legion would have still been locked up in that room full of her own scribbling if it wasn’t for me. You wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for me! Okay, maybe my system is not perfect and I could have given all her reincarnations a better life, but it’s a work in progress. I’m so, so close to perfecting it, to giving all of you the lives you deserve. When that works, others can have reincarnations with pleasant lives! I, I, I gave you freedom, I gave you choice, I…”
In less than two puffs, Esfir turned and slammed her black fist through one of the glasses, freeing the amalgam of flesh from endless agony. She continued to do the same with every tube, striking the thick glass until it cracked and shattered with all her enhanced might. Even when her hair and cloak was drenched with a sort of translucent and turquoise amniotic fluid, she continued to smash the glasses to pieces as he begged her to stop with all the strength of his lungs. A profound weight plummeted in his chest when he saw his past efforts break like the glass and his future vanish like her smoky breath.
“You will be the cause of the suffering of many more people than me. If you do this, you will leave people with an aching lack for the rest of human history all because of your selfishness. Can you really live the rest of your life like that, being the cause of everyone’s pain? You will rob the bereaved of being able to see their dead loved ones? You will snuff out the light that people have hungered for for generations? No human being can live with guilt like that, no matter how much you modify or enhance your faculties. Nothing can touch the heart the way such acts could. Nothing!”
As the ashes of her cigarette fell like the snow of so many dark nights, she buried the burning tip between his eyebrows and into his forehead. The hiss of flesh was complemented by his visceral howl of pain as his body twitched uncontrollably in his shackles. Tears streamed down his glass eye, giving her a view of the sunbathed forest’s river and sparkling dew. No matter how much he screamed, it could never compare to all the times he made Legion howl with horror, filling her with the guilt of unfulfilled revenge. Legion’s voice resonated from her mind to the entire laboratory as if it was one whole, giving her the strength to control it all. She studied the doctor’s face for one last time before his body became torn in two, producing the most awful sound she had ever heard.
With slow, deliberate steps, she walked over the man’s tattered flesh and on the growing pool of blood, leaving behind her kin. The stickiness of her red footsteps echoed as she descended the metal stairs, growing louder as she delved deeper. The wires on the walls were tied together and became a mixture of muscle tissue as she made her way further down. When she made it to the bottom, there was no need to open the door, for Legion had opened it for her with the ease of eyelids flashing wide.
A tapestry of wires, circuitry and viscera welcomed her as she entered a sort of grotesque temple, entirely decorated with and colonized by Legion. Even with her heightened sense of sight, she was unable to calculate the depth of the hall and its walls filled with wires and machines as far as the eye can see. There was no woman to be seen like the one in her dreams, but instead an endless cathedral of flesh and black alloy. Like visceral ivy, red meat clung between the circuitry and shaped the machines as the machines shaped the multitude of fleshly bodies. With reverence, she scaled the staircase composed of teeth to walk closer to a sea of Legion’s stomach acid. Whatever remaining skin she had was able to recognize how humid it was, as if hot breath constantly blew on her and through her. A meadow of flowers with tongues for petals and a cluster of eyes for the pistils turned and studied her every action as she slowly stepped into the liquid, dissolving herself in the stomach acid of a dying deity.
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