Age of Ruin

Bryce Chesterton took a moment to catch his breath. Strangling someone to death was hard work, even if they couldn’t put up much of a fight. After he had some air in his lungs, he got to work. Bryce pushed Richard Maseuchy’s bloated, doughy corpse out of the way. He reached into his bag and retrieved a microcomputer and connected it to Rich’s workstation.

While the computer did its work pulling as much information off the company’s network as it could, Bryce pulled a small energy pistol from his bag, confirmed he had a full charge pack, and put it back. He then pulled out a handheld video recorder and captured as much information about the room as he could, providing snippets of commentary about what everything was and how it worked he’d heard from Rich.

In just a few minutes, Bryce’s microcomputer had done its job and loaded its internal memory buffers with all the information it could retrieve and store. He wasn’t sure if any of it would be useful on its own, but there were a dozen other League of Man agents like him gathering information about the operation the maribo were cooking up on this planet, and every piece of intel would help to solve the puzzle. Bryce disconnected the computer and put it back in his bag.

The last piece of unfinished business was the dead body on the rolling office chair. Bryce dragged the body off the chair and across the floor to the office coat closet. He removed Rich’s belt, and hung him by the neck from the doorknob. This trick would never fool a medical professional, but an apparent suicide would raise much less panic than an obvious murder. Before leaving the room to venture further into the facility, Bryce smirked to himself as he appreciated the symbolism of hanging Rich’s corpse just outside of a closet.

Bryce left the office of the late Richard Maseuchy. As he walked down the many hallways of the facility, he saw signs that pointed down this corridor or that, with vague, euphemistic labels. “Incubation.” “Calcification.” “Energizing.” The section Bryce was in was labelled “Implantation.” He followed the signs to the “Incubation” wing.

He was surprised to find that none of the doors that would have otherwise required the swipe of an access card refused him entry. The Incubation wing was a large, open warehouse space occupied by clusters of what looked like metal coffins. The largest cluster of hundreds of coffins he saw were open and empty, pushed into one corner of the warehouse, presumably awaiting an occupant.

He walked over to a cluster of occupied coffins. A sign standing nearby had a batch number and date on it. The lids of the coffins were transparent. Bryce could see the bodies of elderly and invalid patients laying supine within. Most were still, but some writhed pitifully in their coffins, clearly in pain. He could see a faint blue glow coming from each of the patients’ sternums. Bryce was sure to capture everything he was seeing on his recorder.

Each grouping of coffins was labelled with a batch number. The further into the warehouse he went, the earlier the date became. It looked like this step of whatever was going on took about a month. As patients were moved further along the process, they became more gaunt, writhed less, and the blue glow in their chests subtly intensified. It seemed like whatever was implanted in them was eating them alive from the inside.

Satisfied that he had seen enough, and very much wanting to move on, Bryce followed the signs he had seen in the hallway previously to the “Calcification” section.

Between the hallway and the entrance to Calcification was a cleanroom featuring decontamination showers, chutes to deposit used outerwear, and rows of heavy full-body protective suits hung on racks. Just what is going on here? Bryce thought to himself. He donned a protective suit, slung his bag, and continued deeper into the facility.

Rather than the clusters in Incubation, Bryce saw that the coffins here were upright and locked into monitoring stations. He could see tangles of wires running from the equipment to the coffins, and half a dozen monitors and displays arranged over each. Graphs, readouts, and notes cluttered the screens.

The notes read things like “Optical nerves completely hardened and showing signs of function.” “Patient expired before grey matter conversion. Another of RM’s failures.” and “Bone calcification proceeding smoothly. Will be ready for degloving ahead of schedule.”

The patients inside the coffins were in much worse shape than earlier in the process. Their skin was drawn tight across their withered bodies. They lay in their coffins stock still, and all of their eyes were shrunken into small, glassy black beads at the back of lidless eye sockets. And the blue glow in their sternums was stronger and sicklier.

Looking closer at the bodies, Bryce saw the skin torn and pulled back around the patients’ joints. The bone, and muscle — what little was left of it — was a blackened metallic color. Were these people being eaten alive from the inside, and their bones somehow turned into metal?

Bryce pulled his video recorder from his bag and began trying to record everything he could. As he got closer to the coffins he saw the viewfinder start to distort with digital artifacts. He pulled back and the distortion stopped. Something about this process that was consuming these people was generating some sort of interference, and Bryce hoped that the microcomputer in his bag hadn’t been inadvertently damaged.

He stowed his recorder and turned to make his way further through the facility. As part of his information gathering, he knew the layout of the outside of the campus, and knew it would be easier and faster to push through to the other side to make his getaway rather than retrace his steps.

In the distance, he saw the last thing he wanted to see. A man wearing a protective suit just like his holding a gun. From the way he walked straight towards him, Bryce Chesterton knew that that man had seen him too.