Crux

83 DADDY DEAREST

Saturday November 3rd

Ling stepped silently into her father’s room. The house closed the door quietly behind her. The curtains were closed tight here. There was practically no illumination in the room, but her posthuman eyes needed next to none to make out his form. The bed was ahead of her and to the right. Her father was sprawled on it, face down, his limbs akimbo, his body on the side closest to her, his head turned towards the center of the bed.

Ling moved forward slowly, quietly. Her feet made no sound on the thickly padded carpet, but the urge to cry, to sob, was strong. This was so hard. So scary. Her father frightened her now. He was only a human, but he’d hit her, burned her.

Ling’s face scrunched up as she took another step, she felt tears falling from her eyes, felt a sniffle rising, felt cries rising up inside her, threatening to burst out.

She moved forward faster, her sight blurring from the tears. She was past the foot of the bed now. Her father’s hand lolled off the left side of the bed. She stepped around it, past it, until she was just before the night stand, her body against the bed, inside her father’s reach, his head just within reach in front of her.

Ling’s face was hot. Her heart pounded as the tears fell from her face. She could barely see, could barely think. This was her father! But if she didn’t do this her mother would die, die forever.

Ling raised the injector with two trembling hands, pushed it forward until the tip almost touched the back of her father’s neck.

He heard something then, or felt something. Her father stirred, made a noise, started to turn his head.

Ling jammed the injector forward, squeezed the trigger for all she was worth with both her index fingers.

Within the injector, a circuit closed, a battery delivered current to a superconducting coil, magnetizing it, activating a Lorenz-force motor that drove a piston forward. A fraction of a millisecond after Ling pulled the trigger, the injector shot a supersonic stream of nanodevice-laden fluid into the skin, muscle, and blood vessels of her father’s neck.

Chen yelled in pain, lashed out with one hand, knocking the injector away, out of Ling’s grasp, sending it flying through the air to land across the room. Then he was up on his feet, and his other hand came down, smacking Ling across the face, driving her backwards and off her feet, onto the carpet.

“Lights!” her father bellowed, and the house illuminated his bedroom. He had one hand on his neck, where the injector’s high-powered jet had penetrated his flesh. He looked at his daughter in horror, then pulled his hand away to look at it. It came away bloody.

“What have you done?” he yelled at her. “What have you done?”

Then his eyes scanned the room, and came to the injector. The ampule of silvery fluid, still half full, loaded into it.

Her father roared and came at Ling. She raised her hands to protect herself and he kicked her, hard.

Ling screamed in pain as his foot slammed into her midsection.

“You monster!” he said. Then he kicked her again.

Ling screamed louder. “No! No!”

Her father lifted his leg again, to kick her a third time, and now Ling could feel just a tiny bit of mind around him as the nanites bound to his neurons, exposed the innards of his brain to her.

Her father’s foot came at her and she reached out and twisted what she could feel in his mind. His foot slammed into her again but this time he stumbled, wobbled after he kicked her, as her thoughts pushed against the neurons of his motor cortex.

Ling screamed in pain. Tears were falling down her face freely. She had never hurt so bad before in her life. But she reached out and pushed on her father’s mind and now she could feel even more and he staggered backwards.

“No,” he said, trying to get his balance. “No.”

He tried to kick her a fourth time but this time she shoved with her mind against his, against the nanites latching onto the neurons of his motor control centers, and her father fell backwards instead, fell against the bed, his head cracking into one of the upright posts. Ling breathed hard, but her father stayed there, stunned by the blow to his skull and by the events in his brain. Already his eyes were going glassy, his mind going wild as more and more of the nanites latched onto his neurons and launched into the calibration phase.

Ling reached out, and clenched around the parts of his mind she could sense. She could feel his disorientation, his confusion at what the nanites were doing to him, his terror of her.

Good. Be afraid, little human.

Ling crawled, centimeter by centimeter, away from him, and towards the injector. When she had it, she came back to him. She crawled, and then she grabbed the bed and used it to pull herself up, up so she was above her seated father. He turned his head and looked at her, his eyes wide with fear, his mind a riot of dread and horror. He tried to struggle, to control his body, and she pushed against his mind, holding him in place.

“No,” he said, struggling still to get control of his body. “Please.” Tears fell from his eyes. She was huge in his mind, a monster, an alien thing, a posthuman looming over him, a creature that had surpassed him. Doom permeated his thoughts where Ling could see them.

“Please,” he said again. “Daughter…”

Ling Shu pressed the injector against the side of her father’s neck, and fired the rest of its contents into him.