Point of Delirium - SCP Foundation

Anorrack

SCP-7890

Author: Anorrack

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His brain was spongiform, more memes than gray matter, filled with Foundation deep-cleaners and aggressive Sov-agitprop eating away at the cerebellum. High-level Scarlet Hammer lieutenant, tattoos marking experience in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Georgia. Military training, with the buzz-cut to match, defected after the Berlin Wall into more stable employment in a criminal syndicate. Formed a gut in the interim, but still more muscle than fat, built like row of brick shit-houses.

The man was a part of the Hammer’s Berlin branch, pawning off GRU-P stockpiles of military-grade amphetamines and psychotropics. A single milligram of either would make you see gods, them see you, and pop the heads of anyone within a block of your visitation. A single link in a massive titanium chain net cast over Central Europe, a parasite on the corpse of the Soviet Union, passing off its anomalous arms and drugs to the common proles. In a word, scum. Veil breach in two.

Another person entered the blinding-white room, in coghaz gear and reflective sunglasses. Looking more like a metallic insect than man. This wasn’t the first time it had been here. The blue plastic clipboard in its grasp was the only hint of color in the monochromatic room, bee-buzzing light strips lining the walls washing it out.

Black headphones were strapped to his head, the man suffused in disabling/warbling coghaz. His nervous system shook under the strain. The interrogator probably looked like a frightening, abominable sight to him through the smoke of his burning synapses, but he hadn’t soiled himself, yet.

”Are angels arriving in arduous agony?” The chrome beetle intoned in a perfect monotone. The headphone’s volume were lowered just enough for the man to hear them.

The man almost instinctively arranged his tongue and teeth in a way to speak the trigger-phrase in a language he was not entirely familiar. ”Beauteous burning babes beckon by bonfire-light.” The burbling in his eustachian tubes increased for a moment, and then relented. The fog in his head began to clear as the deep-cleaners rearranging his cerebrum completed their task, dissolving into base syntax.

“Good. Now, state your name, age, and place of birth.” The insect shivered underneath its silver coghaz gear as the room’s sub-woofers layered the undertones of its spoken word with subsonic cognitoplexes, wriggling into the ears of the man strapped to the metal and leather chair.

The man weakly shook against his padded restraints, before relenting to the carefully induced swarm of memes rewriting the neural architecture of his subconscious. He spoke carefully in his native tongue between panting breaths that tasted of copper, sourced from a burst vessel somewhere in his skull. <Kyrylo Petrovich. Forty-seven. A crowded hospital of bare concrete and cracked linoleum.>

The bug glanced at a large glass wall to its right, the color of a thallassian abyss. It looked back at Kyrylo and scrawled on its blue clipboard. “Good. Barnyard. Railroad. Torch. Liquor.”

Kyrylo’s mouth and throat once more found animation without his consent. ”Neural construct in place. Maintaining integrity.”

Another jot on the blue clipboard. It tilted its head slightly, the distorted reflection of Kyrylo in its sunglasses stared back at him. “Kyrylo Abramov, aged thirty-five, born in a wooden cabin, please deliver us the location of your superior.”

The buzzing of the light strips seemed to intensify, mixing and morphing with the coghaz from the headphones, making it feel like a hundred-pound coin was placed in the center of his forehead. His reflection in the sunglasses was red and bloated. He gasped as his throat swelled. <Kyrylo… Petrovich.>

The insect frowned, a parody of sadness. “I’m sorry, that’s incorrect.” It twitched a knob set into the base in the chair, and the volume of the headphones rose to peaking levels for fifteen seconds before lowering back down to baseline.

Kyrylo felt an itch in his amygdala. He didn’t remember his mother’s face.

“Now, state your name, age, and place of birth.”

His tongue felt numb, a lump of meat in his mouth. He tried to chew it to give it sensation, but choked on blood. <Kyrylo… Abramov, thirty-five, a small cabin in a pine forest.>

The pen scraping on the paper on the blue clipboard sounded like a fork on glass to him. “Good. Factory. Loft. Flashlight. Cola.”

His torn tongue danced in his mouth, his teeth playing along. ”Connectivity overload. Personality matrix destabilizing.”

A twitch of its hand, the volume of the headphones lowered a touch. He could breathe again. The lice in his amygdala stopped burrowing for the time being. “Kostyantyn Abramov, aged fifty-six, born in a penthouse, please deliver us the location of your superior.”

The man’s eyes twitched, his torn fingernails rattled on the armrests in well worn grooves. How long has he been here? <Kostyantyn Abramov… fifty-six…>

The frown reversed itself, teeth matching the sterile walls of the room. He wished the frown would come back. “Good, Kostyantyn. Pozhaluysta, the location of your superior, an Alexsei Ilyin.”

He lurched upwards at the sound of that name, his bruised and contorted hands reaching for the chrome beetle's neck, but his restraints drew him up short. The smile remained.

He pulled and strained, hearing the sound of more vessels within his head popping like grapes, until a snap of his wrist, and the searing pain made him settle down. The smile remained.

With his good hand, Kostyantyn reached for the rosary that used to adorn his neck, seeking some solace between his shredded thoughts. But it had long been confiscated, his god not belonging in a place like this. The smile remained.

Kostyantyn’s head lolled backwards and sagged against the hard and cracked headrest. His heart played a thready, arrhythmic tribal drumbeat on the inside of his eyes. He inhaled, pushing against the iron bands encircling his ribs. The lighthouse of pain in his wrist gave him enough bearings to gather his tattered web of memories together to form a sentence. <Prague. In the basement of a basement of a warehouse.>

The smile widened, more teeth than proper. “What is the address? How many guards, Kostyantyn?”

Too many questions, too many warring, splintering thoughts. Some his, some foreign, forcefully and violently injected into his brainpan. Identity overwritten, personality bent and twisted until nothing original remained. Blood seeped from the corner of his right eye, as he tried to reconcile those thoughts, tried to make any sense of it all. His brain raced faster and faster, until he smelt acrid smoke. Kostyantyn exhaled, and died. Nothingness made more sense than anything at all.

The interrogator leaned back in its chair and sighed, the smile gone. It took off the sunglasses, the coghaz gear. No chance of mental infection now. She gestured towards the dark black window, and two assistants opened the door.

They wheeled in a squeaking metal trolley carrying a chunky, boxy computer and a single liquid-filled syringe. The swirling, scarlet serum inside whispered to them empty promises, but they tried their best to ignore it. The two assistants stuck diodes across the man's head and chest, all leading back to the computer. The interrogator swabbed the dead man’s inner arm down with stinging alcohol, and injected him with the fluid.

When the plunger was fully down, and the syringe was fully empty, Kyrylo/Kostyantyn’s body began to shake. The fluid percolated with purpose through the stagnant blood and plasma of the corpse’s veins, energizing dead nerves and muscle with its mere presence. After a minute, two, it finally reached the brain.

The nameless demon—too weak to deserve a name in any meaningful sense—grabbed the reins of sentience from the dying man and subsumed his consciousness under itself. There was a hint of Kostyantyn left, a small spark of his being, and the demon used it to center itself in the amygdala, smothering the spark inside of its exterior stomach. It tested muscle groups and memories, finding both pleasing. Hesitantly, it turned a stiff neck towards the interrogators and began to speak in a quaking, scratching alto. “Same deal as before?”

The wretched creature was deaf, even with borrowed ears. So the interrogator typed. The demonic circuitry inside the computer conveyed her meaning to the body-snatcher with an inhuman tongue of electricity and scratching thought. {Yes. The location/address of Alexsei Ilyin && number of guards && protective countermeasures.}

The borrowed body shuddered with glee. The demon turned its attention inwards, and trawled its way through slight Brownian flow of cerebrospinal fluid and its borrowed memories. The being of pure chemicals and concepts sifted through neurotransmitters tainted by psychotropics and nicotine, and tore apart hostile plexes that thought their subject was still alive. It disliked the department’s information extraction methods—as much as a being of fluid and thoughts could conceptualize such an emotion—for they made its task so much more energy intensive.

It burned away the false memories and histories crudely implanted by the interrogator. It patched the brain damage from hypoxia and over-exposure to the interrogation regimen. It rigorously tested the connections and catalogues of tree-like dendrites and hair-like axons until it found what it sought. Inferences, half-told in-jokes, the smell of a nearby bakery, mental maps, all pieced together—in a moment for the humans, but an eternity to it—its effort more of a beautiful and disregarded art than a science.

The corpse’s vocal cords buzzed again. “Borsov 3/440, a gray warehouse of crumbling brick and mold. In the eastern side of Prague. A half-dozen guards, though many traps and leashed unseenlie hounds.” With a whine, the computer displayed low resolution photographs and scans of blurry faces, half-remembered blueprints.

The interrogator nodded in confirmation. She closed her eyes and chanted a snatch of prose in a near-dead dialect of Aramaic, part of the binding tort. {You may feed.}

The body once again writhed as the thing inside extended tendrils through the width and breadth of the corpse, and took what it was owed. The computer whined again, the demonic circuitry inside yearned to feed as well. The corpse withered and flaked, as the bonds between cells were siphoned into the parasite’s greedy maw. Neurotransmitters and DNA and tendon and cartilage, all consumed and broken down into base forms by the demon, until what was formerly Kyrylo or Kostyantyn or any other name forced upon him was not recognizably human. Only a clump of dry ash remained, as a fattened but still hungry red fluid roiled its way back into its awaiting syringe.

The interrogator and her two coworkers sat there for a second, in silence. Not out of pity, but maybe some other indescribable emotion, perhaps. Maybe no emotion at all.

What a waste of a potential informant.

Then, a red light flickered on her pager, breaking them out of their silent reverie. Without speaking, the diodes were collected, the syringe was placed back onto the trolley, the ash was swept into a bin, the interrogator donned her coghaz and sunglasses, becoming an it again.

They exited the room, and entered a hallway filled with blank white doors, similar to the one they just egressed.

A door opened, and the interrogator stepped through, its head cocked towards a Kyrylo Petrovich. ”Are angels arriving in arduous agony?”