The Factory

After the first conflict, The Liberty Lions raided several Kurdizov hospitals, stockpiling drugs and medical supplies. And in their raids, they stumbled upon experimental bio-printers. A revolutionary piece of technology, especially during wartime. They started small, printing fingers that’d been blown off, or grafting skin. They tried printing more complex things, like organs, but they shriveled and died before the print finished. It became clear that for a print to take, it must be printed directly onto the recipient.
But, they weren’t limited to human biology. They could print anything. Short on arms and ammunition, someone had the bright idea to print a gun right onto their hand. It was a messy clump of meat and metal, and the recipient couldn’t pull the trigger without dislocating several fingers, but in this mangled creation, the Lion’s saw opportunity. Sure, the printers needed raw biological material, but there was no shortage of meat, blood, and bone. They scavenged bodies and broken weapons from the battlefield. They made ammunition from bone fragments, and concrete. Barrels and firing pins from rebar and ligaments.

The men and women interwoven with their weapons were simply known as The Grafted.

Miranda hated the MK-89s. They weren’t as boxy, or stiff as the hazmat suits her coworkers in the swamps had to wear, but it was weighed down with a random assortment of sensors. Everything from a heart rate monitor, and barometer to a Geiger counter. There were half a dozen tubes running in and out of her rubber suit, and a heavy backpack complete with more sensors, and a D tank of oxygen, which should last her about eight hours.

As much as she pitied herself, she pitied her two escorts even more. In addition to their own heavy suits, they each carried rifles and a heavy suitcase with even more sensors. But that was fine. Today’s expedition was supposed to be a short one. They were investigating an abandoned factory at the edge of the Old Docks. Supposedly it had been untouched by the conflict, and should yield the desired samples. Miranda was to take a handful of samples, test their air, and swab surfaces for trace amounts of chemical residue. Once that was done, one of her escorts would radio someone, and a car would come to drive them back out of the city, through the swamp, and to the safe confines of Kurdizov’s campus. It’d been six months since the cordon came down, and while Miranda wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of venturing into Palmyra, she was excited by the change of scenery. Her life had fallen into something of a routine. Waking up, breakfast in the messhall with the same five people, workout in the communal gyms, research and reports, lunch in the messhall, a short walk around the campus, more reports, dinner in the messhall, and then two hours of leisure time where she mostly stared at the ceiling, waiting for an appropriate time to fall asleep. Though, sleep never came quickly. Miranda would often lie in her bunk, listening to the hum of the HVAC, or the buzz of fluorescent lights outside her dormitory door. When sleep did come, it was fraught with dreams of desolate landscapes, and a creeping lichen. The sleep was always short. And the routine always waited.

But ever since she’d been handed this assignment, it felt like the world was full of novelty again. Food tasted better, colors were brighter, and she felt lighter - until she’d gotten in the armored truck and driven across the city like a bag full of cash on its way to a bank. She couldn’t see much of the city through the grated windows on the back of the truck, but what she could see matched the rumors she heard. Ongoing fighting has shredded most of the city. The pockets that were largely undamaged, were desolate. Her hometown had been turned into something of a liminal space. Even the birds had flown away.

Miranda’s escourts climbed out of the truck. She waited for one of them to offer a hand and help her down, but neither moved to do so. Instead, they swept gaze across the docks, looking for movement. But all was still. The air was quiet, save for the water lapping against the docks. Miranda climbed down, and took a small leap to the ground. She felt her harness raise momentarily, before pressing down on her shoulders as her feet hit the ground. She became cognizant of a dull ache starting to rise in her back. No matter, the faster they got in and did the job, the faster they could leave. The escort on Miranda’s left closed the trucks door, and knocked on it twice. Without hesitation, the driver pulled away, and disappeared around a corner. And just like that, Miranda was in the middle of a warzone, and suddenly very far from the comfort she’d known almost her whole life.

She thought this might be when one of the soldiers she was with would make some quippy comment, or welcome her to the “other side,” but they were steadfast in their silence. She could barely make out their faces behind the tinted visors, and snug gas masks they wore. Miranda stepped towards the factory, and wordlessly the escorts fell into position ahead of, and behind her. Something about their formation, her orange hazmat suit, and their blue uniforms made her feel less like a distinguished scientist at the top of her field, and more like a prisoner on their way to death row. Miranda tried to suppress a shudder as the escort in front of her pulled open a heavy rusted door. The metal grated against the concrete, screeching and alerting everyone and everything to their whereabouts. Miranda jumped back at the noise, suddenly aware of her heavy breathing and elevated heart rate. She waited for some response to the noise, but the only response was a distant echo off the water. The escort in front of her nodded his head towards the door. She swallowed the bile rising in her throat, and walked past him, into the factory.

When Miranda was younger, she‘d been obsessed with the idea of urban exploring- Urban X the kids had called it. She’d watched countless hours of Ghost Adventures, and ogled the strange and esoteric buildings they’d explore. Her favorite episodes were always the abandoned asylums. She could almost imagine the daily commotion of doctors rushing about, treating patients with antiquated medicines. And to see, now, the aftermath of all that activity - It sent a thrilling chill down her spine. As if the impressions of people, the daily rituals they went about, would have carved their presence into the halls of the asylums like water through a canyon. She wondered if some day, in the far future of 50 years, if someone would walk across the Kurdizov campus with night vision, looking for the echos of her presence.

She focused her mind on the campus, on the surprisingly mediocre food that awaited her after this expedition - because if she let her concentration slip for even a second, she worried her mind would turn to the factory around her. Worried it would conjure stories from the long dead about the history of this place. She tried to take in her surroundings as objectively as she could. It was a large empty room, a box really. She could see the whole of the factory floor from her vantage point in the doorway. Heavy machinery, as rusted as the door she entered, lay scattered about. A fragile catwalk loomed over her. And all around, big iron girders held everything up. Graffiti coated the brick and plaster walls, tributes to those who’d passed through here more recently. But none of the amateur art looked fresher than a couple years. Which was good, it meant that this place likely had been untouched by the events of the last six months.

Miranda made her way into the middle of the factory floor. There, her escorts set down the two heavy silver suitcases they carried, and she opened them up. She uncovered a small centrifuge, over four dozen vials, and a couple bottles of chemical agents that would react in the presence of the right contaminants. Miranda instantly felt calmer, having a task at hand. After sorting everything into its proper place, she grabbed a handful of vials and individually wrapped cotton swabs. She wandered around the factory, looking for a variety of different surfaces that she could test. In her first lap, she picked half a dozen. Most were the same surface, plaster, brick, or steel beams, but each was closer or further from the windows. Some were behind walls, in unfinished offices that clung to one side of the factory floor. Even as she set about collecting her first handful of samples, she eyed the dark hallway at the back of the factory. She knew eventually she’d need to venture into there too to collect more samples, but she wanted to avoid it for now. The air felt heavy back there, and too cool. She’d stepped into its shade briefly, and shrieked when one of her escort’s boots crunched on some rubble. She turned to him, relieved and slightly embarrassed, and was met only with a nonchalant shrug.

Miranda got into a comfortable habit with her samples. Open cotton swabs, discard wrapped (really who’d care about a little extra trash in this place?), swab surface, and then deposit sample into vial. She labeled each tube as she went, and mumbled the sample number and location to herself, just loud enough that the suit’s built in voice recorder would capture it for later. Maybe the MK-89 wasn’t all bad. Her escorts watched on, unhelping, as she cataloged one dozen, and then two dozen samples.

Finally, it was time to venture into the dark hallway at the back of the room. This small feat, and then she could return home and boast of her adventure to the five colleagues she talked to everyday. None of them had stepped outside of the campus yet. Surely they’d all herald her as a brave adventurer, putting her very own life on the line for science!

Okay, maybe not. But it was a pleasant enough fantasy, and it gave Miranda just enough courage to step into the shadowy hallway once more. This time she didn’t shriek when she heard the footfalls of her escort’s boots crunched behind her. She pressed further into the hall, as it was a lot longer than she thought it was when she canvassed it earlier. She walked. And walked. And then stopped.

This was too long. She’d seen the factory building from outside, had measured it’s relative length before she stepped in. And then compared that mental image to the floor she saw before her when she first entered. And this hallway was too long. One of the escorts, the one who’d followed her while the other kept watch near the front door, spoke for the first time. He asked her what the hold up was. There was an edge to his voice, like he was compensating for something. Maybe he was scared too. Miranda held up a hand, and stared down the hallway. It continued for another couple yards, before terminating in a T junction. She turned around, and looked back the way she’d came. The entrance was right there, just a couple feet away. But she’d been walking for maybe a minute.

She walked back towards the entrance, past her escort. She told him to stay put while she checked on something. She took a couple steps. Then a couple more. And when she finally reached the edge of the hallway, she turned around.

The hallway was impossibly long now. She could barely make out the shape of her escort in the dim corridor. She yelled at him to come back, probably louder than she needed to as their suits were all connected via walkie-talkie. He started to say something, but distortion broke up his words into errant syllables. She told him to come back to her now. She saw movement in the distance, a silhoutte bobbing in the shadows. But it was like an optical illusion, with every step the escort took, he seemed to grow further away, like he was walking backwards into the darkness.

She called for the other escort - Embarrassingly she’d gotten both the escort’s names but didn’t know which one was Kurt and which one was John. It didn’t matter, she summoned the other one to come help her. Immediately.

She didn’t want to take her eyes off the shrinking silhoutte in the distance, but John/Kurt was taking too long, and Kurt/John needed help now. She tore off her eyes for one second, only to see that she was now deeper in the hall. No longer at the entrance like she thought, as if the hall itself had stretched itself thin just to pull her in. Panic rose in her chest, and she bounded towards the light, but with each step, the floor beneath her feet seemed to bounce like rubber, only pushing her backwards, further into the hall. She watched as John/Kurt reached out into the hall, and became further with each of her strides, until he too was reduced to nothing but a pinprick of light.

Now, in the darkness of an impossibly long hallway, Miranda stopped her ascent. She’d known she was trapped long before the light ran out. She turned back to the T junction, wondering where Kurt/John might have gone. Was this hallway some sort of blackhole? Had it spaghettified him? Was she nothing but a pinprick of orange for an observer on the outside?

Seeing no other way out, than in, Miranda started walking towards the end of the hall. It seemed far, but she was surprised to find herself there in just seven short steps. Unfortunately, the entrance behind her was still impossibly far away. The light from the factory floor barely a pinprick in the dark. This left only Miranda with only two choices: Left, or Right.

Peering down either hall was fruitless, in the dim light from her suit’s flashlight- another built in feature- she could only make out a few feet in either direction. Miranda chose the left hall. And after taking a couple short steps, quickly verified that it was a one way trip. As soon as she’d turned around, the junction started growing more distant. And rather than fighting against the grain of reality in this place, she decided to go with it.

Much to her chagrin, her thoughts turned back to those old episodes of Ghost Adventures. Her flashlight‘s beam was weak, and in it’s dim light everything seemed desaturated. The red bricks just looked like shades of black, and the occasional workplace safety posters (which seemed to repeat every dozen yards) were equally drab. Miranda wondered idlely if maybe this wasn’t a blackhole, but instead some horrible hell she‘d wandered into. Well, if push came to shove, she’d run out of oxygen in about 5 hours, and could just leave herself to suffocate in her suit- A realization jumped at her. Miranda stopped in her tracks and started pulling at the sensors and knobs embedded into her suit’s torso. She checked everything she could, praying for some hint to help her out. The geiger counter was nominal, and the O2 sensors seemed in the right position (so even if she did run out of air, she could always just pull off her helmet), in fact across a dozen or so features, the only one that gave any inclination that something had changed- was the barometer. It was dropping, slowly.

A human, it turns out, can live mostly comfortably between 950 and 1050 millibars of atmospheric pressure. The most comfortable range, right around sea level is usually 1000 millibars. Palmyra being set on the great lakes usually sits at 1020. At least, that was the pressure when Miranda checked on her way in. Now, her suit was telling her it was 1010 millibars. On any other day, Miranda might assume that a storm was rolling in, but on any other day Miranda wouldn’t be walking in an endless hallway. Well, not a paranormally endless hallway. The Kurdizov campus felt endless sometimes, but Miranda knew how to get out eventually. Here, she was less certain.

Miranda walked for awhile, longer than she’d expected. Maybe an hour. She’d stopped a couple times, tried her radio, or turning around, but as each of those options gave no results, she returned to following the hallway towards its intended destination. She thought that this walk would be faster, that the liminal space wanted to deliver her to the eventual end, like it had at the junction. Now, she hypothesized that perhaps it was about duration. The first hall had been short, and she fought against it for almost 15 minutes. Perhaps the corridor she currently walked down was just longer. Miranda felt an uneasy nervousness settle in her gut as she eyes the barometer, slowly dropping just below 1000 millibars. Still well within acceptable ranges, almost perfect actually. But if it continued to drop, she'd start experiencing headaches, nausea, joint pain, dizziness, and fatigue. She was fine for now. Or at least, so she had hoped.

After more countless minutes of walking, full of uncertainty, but successful, Miranda was finally brought to the end of the hall, which terminated in a doorway.

This better not be locked… Miranda muttered to herself. The door, fortunately, opened. Inside, the darkness stretched out. Miranda scanned her flashlight across the expanse, revealing a wide basement, with concrete columns every dozen of feet, like dots on a grid.

Miranda sighed. She couldn't see the other side of the room from her vantage point in the door way. She stepped into the room, feeling her joints stiffen as the pressure around her suddenly changed as a gush of wind pushed her further from the doorway. She turned, finding only inky abyss through the door frame.

There goes my exit.

Miranda walked through the endless columns, first in a straight line, then in a diagonal cross. Like the hallways, the basement seemed to squeeze and stretch itself randomly as she walked through it. She idly wondered how much time had really passed, or whether her relative time inside this liminal zone was different than the passage of time outside. Maybe it was nearly paused, and only minutes had passed. Maybe days had gone by. For all the MK-89's doodads, apparently a clock or timer wasn't one of them. She'd fruitlessly searched through the pockets, and satchels strapped to her body, and found nothing. Save for a voice recorder built into a black box, and a pencil stub attached to a notepad. She supposed she could always scrawl her last message, maybe some cryptic warning, on the note pad if she had to.

Miranda tried to stifle the chill running down her spine, and shook away the thoughts. Panicking down here won't do you any good. And neither will staying in place. She upped her pace, walking in a zig-zag now, she turned and peered around every column, her drooping flashlight bouncing off the thin green carpet beneath her boots. Miranda turned around one column, then another, and another. Her steps started to fall faster, her thumping boots starting to send echos off distant walls just out of her flashlight's beam. She started to lean around another column, when she stopped in her tracks. There was a desk. A tiny little cubicle sitting in the middle of four columns. And a tinny wheezing noise.

Her heart was beating faster now. Surely some internal monitor was tracking that. Was it from the light sprint, or the new scenery? Miranda swallowed dryly. She tried to pull a steady breath of air, but it was broken and sharp. Her hazmat suit felt heavy on her shoulders. The arches of her feet ached dully. She wanted to badly to just sit down. Light a flare, and hope someone competent found her in this infinitely repeating basement. But she'd read the logs of lost expeditions, and the remains they'd left behind. At best, she might suffocate, or starve to death. At worst, her body might be ripped apart by the latent energy of Palmyra. Her corpse could be the growing beds of some new fungus, or maybe the molecules that made up her body would liquefy into a black ichor, and seep out of her suit.

Somehow, this awful city took away even the peaceful respite of death. Miranda resented that. Resented this job. This basement. Most of all, she resented this awful desk that shouldn't be here. And the terrible whistle of wind whipping around it. She'd read a report once, about a team that had made it out of an anomaly. Perhaps it was just dumb luck that pushed them through a non-euclidian space. Perhaps they were just stupid enough to not give up, and get spat up by the trap they were stuck in. The team lead said some trite thing about the only way out being through. The whole report was drenched in machismo.

Miranda had to approach the desk and investigate it. This was inevitable. She was sure, deep down, that if she kept walking, she'd be brought to this desk again and again until she chose to acknowledge it. She wanted to believe that some alien logic ruled this basement, and if she could just guess at the rules right, it'd spit her out too. Miranda lifted one leg, and gingerly placed it in front of the other. Easy enough. She only needed to do that a dozen more times, and she'd be at The Awful Desk of Certain Doom.

Fuck.

The whistling wind sound got louder. It sounded more like... Someone wheezing. That possibility was incredibly upsetting. Miranda looked over her shoulder, wondering if she walked straight away in the other direction if she'd loop around to the other side of the desk. Or would the basement just turn her around and put her right back in front of the desk again? It was incredibly enticing to test this theory out, to push back at the rules. But what if the basement didn't bring her back? What if instead she only grew further and further from the wheezing entity? Would the not knowing haunt her more? Would she spend the next hour walking through this wall-less labyrinth looking over her shoulder?

She took another step. Closer now. Miranda could make out the papers on the desk, a cup of pens spilled out across the desk, and a small bowl of paper clips. The wheezing - she was certain it was that - was louder now. Almost like the haggard breath was right next to her ear. She pushed down the instinct to turn to her right and peer at the seeming source of the sound. Logically, she knew the sound was coming from the backside of the desk. Hidden by the mid-height walls of the cubicle. A bit faster now, eager to uncover the source, Miranda turned the corner, her light falling on the source of the noise.

Even though she had mentally been steeling herself for this, the ripple of pinkish red skin shocked her. She let out a yelp, and jumped back. The momentary lapse of light on the source of the sound was somehow more haunting than the flash of flesh she'd seen. Slowly, she raised her flashlight. For a moment, Miranda thought she might be looking down at herself, the remnants of what Palmyra had left behind. Crumpled behind the desk was a body in drab green fatigues, much like the one's she donned earlier this morning - an eternity ago. But as her eyes flicked across the shape, she realized it was a young man, wearing a respirator and covered in bandages. An empathetic part of her brain urged her to lunge forward, and help the crumpled heap, but a colder logical part of her brain screamed out not to touch the thing - what if it infected her?

A choking voice squeaked out of the respirator, and two blue eyes looked up at her. She didn't catch what the young man had said, her eyes were still fixed on his molten skin, crisscrossed with scars and dark scabs. It took Miranda several seconds to recognize the Liberty Lions emblem painted onto the shoulder of the man's fatigues.

Was he caught in the crossfire? Did he get burned?

The man reached up, and Miranda jerked back, shoving her flashlight between them, as if it might deter him from attacking. He stopped, and slowly put up a palm, then with the same hand, slowly tugged at the respirator. He was just a kid, still pockmarked with acne and thin stubble. Miranda winced as he took a deep breath of the basement air.

"I think it's safe to breath." Miranda didn't move, just watched the young man.

"I'm not going hurt you." Another long pause hung between them, and the man spoke again, "We were fighting- and it got bad, so me and some other guys ducked into a nearby building to get away from the action, and I took a wrong turn and got stuck... Well, here."

"Where?" Miranda choked out.

"Like, where are we?" The young man furrowed his brow, "'Cos your guess is as good as mine..."

"No, where did you come from."

"Oh. Uhm, we were fighting downtown near Civic Center Park. I don't know the address or anything, but it's the skyscraper that looks kinda gold when the sun is setting? Always blinds drivers, y'know? Wait, are you from here?"

"I know which building you're talking about. It's the Hawking Center. Kurdizov owns it. Or, owned it."

"Ah, sorry about that. It's mostly rubble now, the Feds were-" He stopped, and looked Miranda up and down. "You're not gonna kill me 'cos I was fighting the Feds right?"

"No." Miranda lowered her flashlight, and relaxed a little, "I just want to get out of here. Same as you, I reckon."

"Absolutely."

"How long have you been down here?"

"Maybe a couple of hours? I was trapped in a long hallway for awhile-"

"Me too." Miranda said. "Just kept going and going until it lead to some stairs?"

"Same, yup." The man coughed, which made Miranda wince. "It's nothing, I promise. I've had the cough for a bit, I don't think it's from the air here, my lungs just kinda suck now."

"Did you get hurt?" Miranda motioned at the man's arms.

"Oh- Um. Sorta. These are old. Well, older. Couple of months now."

"You should see a doctor, we have skin grafts-"

"No." The man said, a bit too quickly, "I... Don't really like doctors. Plus, there's no relief camps on my side of downtown."

Miranda started to choke out a sentence, but stopped herself. She wanted to offer some relief, or some solution. God knows how much medical equipment they were just sitting on back at campus, but she'd be lucky if her escorts, or whoever came to pick her up, didn't shoot the young Lion on sight. Better not to promise anything.

"I've been walking in diagonals. I don't know if it's moving me forward, but it got me here, so..."

"Yeah, okay. I was just kinda wandering around in the dark, until I hit the desk. Don't really need a flashlight in the middle of the day." The young man reached out his left hand. Miranda tilted her head, did he want her light? She wasn't going to give that up. No way was she going to stumble around without a light.

"Not a shaking type? That's alright. I'm Ben." With that, the young man- Ben- got up to his feet. He held his held his body at a diagonal from her. Was he hiding something? Miranda flicked the light across Ben, towards his other hand.

"Whatcha got there?" she asked. Ben swallowed, and closed his eyes.

"I'm going to show you- Slowly. Alright?"

Ben slowly turned his body towards Miranda, and raised both of his hands, palms out, towards the center of his chest. There was more scarring, and mangled skin, and dark knots of thick hairs- no? Wires? Protruding from Ben's right arm. He held a pistol in his hand.

"Drop it." Miranda said, harsher than she meant to, "I won't hurt you but I gotta trust you're not gonna shoot me in the back."

"This... Is awkward..." Ben said, still holding his hands in the air. Miranda felt icy tendrils of dread rush through her. Was he going to rob her? Take her flashlight? Make her take off her suit? She wouldn't risk being compromised- Not after what she'd-

"I can't drop it." Ben said.

Confusion flashed across Miranda's features. She longed for a weapon of her own, something she could use to protect herself. If only her lousy escorts were any good at their job, they wouldn't have let her get sucked into this terrible-

"It's grafted onto me."

Her mind stopped reeling, and digested new information. She looked over the gun again, and the thick hairs, and the mangled scars. The gun wasn't a gun. It was a gun- but... There was no separation between Ben's hand, and it's grip. Hard jagged metal blended into vein-y pale flesh. Dark black pustules poked out of Ben's wrist, and jagged bits of bone, almost like teeth protruded from the base of the gun.

"I don't like doctors." Ben said, almost sheepishly. "I'm sure there's some way to pry this off of me, but I'm sure it's gonna hurt like a mother fucker. So, if you don't mind, I think I'll hold onto it for now."

"Fine. But you walk ahead of me."

"Sure, yeah, that's fair."

They walked for awhile. Much like Miranda suspected, they crossed the desk several more times before it was removed from the loop. Eventually, they could see a distant wall start to grow a little closer. Miranda tried to count the iterations between changes, but it was irregular. Sometimes in intervals as short as 3 consecutive loops, sometimes as many as thirty, or more. Ben would point out little things he'd notice, like a notch on one of the pillars, or a bit of torn carpet. Miranda chided herself for not looking for patterns like that when she first entered the basement. But logic didn't flow continuously here. Sometimes, a dozen iterations in, they'd see the desk again, or a distant doorway, presumably the one Miranda come through. It was like wandering through an infinitely complex kaleidoscope of drab concrete columns and green carpet, waiting for some unseen viewer to shift the shapes around.

"Why'd they graft a gun to your arm?" Miranda finally asked. Ben was silent for a moment, walking through the pillars. Miranda worried she'd overstepped.

"It's not going well up there. Like, the Feds aren't doing much better, but downtown is littered with soldiers from both sides. And with all the weird shit seeping into the city every night... I think there's a lot of people who are really scared, and willing to do anything in their power to make sure they come out on top. I dunno. That's all above me, I'm just trying to make it day to day. And it turns out I need to go back to base every couple of weeks or else my body might start rejecting the modifications. And that's a pretty damn good way of compelling young guys to stay and fight for you."

"What happens if you don't go back?"

"Pain." Ben walked silently for a moment before continuing, "like a fire inside your nervous system. Starts as an uncomfortable itch, and just gets worse and worse. Heard stories of one guy who tried running away, and came back weeks later, covered in wounds because he'd been clawing away at himself."

"And did they fix him?"

"No... I think they just shot him for deserting."

They walked in silence for awhile after that.

Ben starts to get loopy, and tries to go to sleep.

Miranda must use a flare to burn at the basement. That causes the stomach to spit them out