I – Hope
On the smartscreen, a long golden streak of sunshine reflected on the blue surface of the ocean, making it glitter with a thousand triangular mirrors. Waves rolled and crashed almost at your feet as though you were standing right there on the white sandy beach.
A few palm trees leaned over the beach, casting their shadows over the sand. You could hear the crash and rush and rush of the waves and almost smell the salt spray and feel the warmth of the sun on your face.
Hope had seen the ad a million times but Damian's appearance always came as a pleasant surprise, like seeing an old friend in a crowd. There he was, Damian, standing on a surfboard on top of a wave: a tanned demigod in black-and-white trunks.
Damian's golden hair and beard looked like a halo and even from this far, you could see his white teeth shining in his perpetual grin. He moved gracefully forward, extending long arms and lowering his hips. He rode the long old-school surfboard near the nose.
He kneeled and grabbed the board with one hand, shooting into the barrel of the wave as it tubed over. His left hand dragged behind him along the face of the wave leaving a white smear in the blue.
Then the wave broke into a boiling surf and Damian stood up and threw his head back and shook his hands to the sky. Music began playing as he paddled back to the beach, a soft guitar strumming along to the sound of the waves.
Damian jogged up to the camera. He was tall, over six feet, and even though he was sixty, his body looked like that of a twenty-five-year-old. His bright blue eyes were clear and his skin was smooth and unwrinkled. He almost looked CGI. Damian smiled at the camera. The music faded and he spoke.
'Isn't it perfect?' He gestured at the horizon. 'Earth is by far the best planet. Her beaches, oceans, mountains and rivers. Her sunsets and migrations, every species living under the sun. Every inch of the planet is an incredible miracle.' His tone changed and grew serious.
'But we have immediate and urgent problems. Climate change. Pandemics. Overfishing. Microplastics. Poverty. Homelessness. War. These are very real problems that require our attention right here and now.
'There are also long-range problems. We can't afford to wait for these to become immediate and urgent. By then it will be too late. The greatest problem that we face, and have always faced, is that we will run out of energy.
'Humans use a lot of energy. We get a lot of benefit from it. Increased energy use has given us dynamism and growth and better lives than those of our grandparents. Think about a hospital, how much energy it uses; transportation, entertainment, all of these things use lots of energy. And we don't want to stop.
'Compound growth is unsustainable. So, what can we do? We can increase efficiency, which we already do. Computers today can do trillions of times more calculations than those of our grandparents. We can ration. Our kids and grandkids will have worse lives than us.'
Here, Damian raised his clenched fist. The camera zoomed in as his voice lowered.
'To me, this is unacceptable. We don't want stasis and rationing; we want dynamism and growth. It's an easy choice.' He grinned. 'We know what we want.'
An alarm blared and the screen went blank then a red X with the words Insufficient Funds began flashing on the screen. The red light intermittently bathing Hope and her pod in darkness and red light. She was sprawled on the bed and the kid was crying.
Hope blinked and reached into the pile of sheets, extricating an emaciated baby. He cried pathetically. Hope stood up and began bouncing him, saying, 'Shhh. Shhh.' But he pushed her away weakly and kept crying.
There was a little light coming in through a six-inch square window in the pod's door and she bobbed in and out of the light. Her hair was long and blue. Her skin looked washed out from not seeing the sun. She was wearing a yellow tank top. It had a broken strap that she'd repaired with staples. She adjusted the kid so the staples weren't against his jaw.
II – MyPod
The pod was stifling and she wished she could open the small window but they'd just fumigated the street outside so she'd have to wait. The pod was crammed full of stuff. A few plastic bags full of clothes hung from the walls.
An empty pink cardboard box sat on top of a frying pan on a single electric burner on the counter. A toilet with no seat was at the foot of the bed. A shower hose coiled around the cistern. The toilet stank and she twitched the plastic sheet that hung from the ceiling, separating the toilet from the rest of her living pod.
There was a trilling sound of three jingling bells and the smartscreen flicked on and a timer told her she had ninety seconds. With one hand she laid the kid down on the bed and gently pulled a sheet over him while starting to wriggle out of her tank top with the other.
By the time the first john flicked onto the screen, already naked, already with his dick in his hands, a blue light bathed the pod. Hope was reclined seductively on the bed. There was a blue butterfly tattooed across her chest, its beautiful wings spread over her breasts.
She stretched like a cat and batted her eyelashes at the red flashing light at the top of the screen where the camera was. For the next ten minutes the john told her what to do while he sighed and squeaked to himself. Credits accumulated in the corner of the screen in the form of little golden numbers.
Hope went through the motions like a robot, wondering if she could book in another three johns this afternoon. Her rent was overdue by a week and her company store account had been frozen. If she could squeeze in another ten tomorrow, she could top up her SunCo account and get some formula for the kid.
The john was moaning his way to the bank when she heard the kid cough a couple times and then whimper. She increased her own volume and bucked herself closer to the screen. But the kid howled and the john on-screen stopped touching himself.
'What the fuck?' he said bending forward, in close to the camera so his neck-beard filled her smartscreen. 'Is that a fucking kid?'
'I'm so hot for you, baby,' screamed Hope, coming up to her knees and pushing her hips close to the camera.
The kid yowled.
'Fuck this,' said the john and she heard a click and the screen went blank. The credits that had been accumulating in the corner all vanished and were replaced by a flashing red zero point zero zero.
'No,' said Hope and let out a howl then punched the screen with both fists. Two blue circles appeared and slowly receded into black. She put her forehead against the screen and felt a wave of furious panic wash through her. The kid howled louder.
III – Milk run
After half destroying her pod, searching for something to feed the kid, anything, just one fucking glucose sachet – Hope found nothing. All the while, the kid howled louder and louder and her neighbours banged on the walls.
No food. No credits. So she pulled a mask over the kid and another over her face and wrapped a shawl around them both and opened the pod door. It hissed half open and ground to a halt, stuck in the accumulated urban grime. She put her shoulder against it and leaned into it, swore, and stepped into the foul-smelling hot garbage air of the capital.
All the stores were boarded up. Those that weren't had been smashed open and looted long ago. Broken windows stared blindly at her as she passed, holding the kid close. Faded graffiti had been sprayed over every surface within reach. Hope crossed an intersection; the traffic lights swung dead and useless above her.
The only clean things were the drones zipping around – all of them sporting the bright yellow and black plastic coats of SunCo robots. Single-wheeled dog bots zipped around at hip height, hoverbots hummed through the air like dragonflies and bigger lorry-drones floating a few feet in the air moved slowly down the street like zepelins.
She headed for a dark alleyway between a boarded-up corner store and a looted-out phone outlet. The shelves inside the dark store were empty and hung off the walls. The alley yawned at her like a mouth. Hope looked both ways then crossed the street and disappeared into the dark alley.
Water dripped. The drops echoed loudly along with her footsteps as she sidestepped around puddles, reflecting black. Suddenly a hand glistened in front of her and an open palm waved, imploring for something to be put in it. She walked on.
She found the old woman at her usual place, smiling her toothless grin, looking at Hope with milky white eyes. Hope transferred her last data stick into the old woman's birdlike claw and it disappeared into the rags, to be replaced by a little plastic bag, elastic banded shut, it looked like a white lollipop.
Half an hour later, Hope was back in her pod and she was sitting on the edge of the cot, fumbling with the elastic band as the kid screamed ever louder. She was almost there, rushing while at the same time exaggerating her movements so not to spill the precious liquid. She got it open and retched as the rancid sour odour filtered up to her.
Crying with impotent rage, she continued her task, emptied the liquid carefully into a cup and handed it silently to the kid. He didn't even bother to take it; he just screamed louder. She pushed the cup into his belly. It felt squidgy. She pushed harder and he put his little hands on the cup and pushed back. She leaned into it.
The kid howled louder, almost a roar. Hope opened her mouth and roared back. She was letting go. The last year and a half was bursting from the behind broken dam of patience and compassion. She was losing control.
As if the universe itself intervened, there came a sharp tap tap on the pod's metal door.
Hope snapped out of her rage. She dropped the sippie cup and grabbed the kid and pulled him into a terrified embrace. The tap tap came again and she looked in panic at the door. The pod door slid open without sticking and a golden light shone into the pod.
'Hope,' said a voice. 'You are a winner.'
IV – SatisFactory 3
The next twelve hours felt like a dream. The little yellow Sunco dogbot that had knocked on her door showed her to a helicopter, ready to whisk her and the kid away into the light-polluted sky. As they flew away from the skyscrapers, the dog offered her all kinds of refreshments, nutriboosts, and in-flight entertainment while the kid was taken care of in a cotbot beside her.
It provided intravenous vitamins and minerals until he was satiated and mercifully asleep. Hope leaned back against the soft white leather seat and she too slept most of the journey, waking when the helicopter landed with an infinitesimal bump.
They walked across the tarmac under a huge prairie sky. The blue dome turned to orange near the horizon where the sun was just rising. The glorious sunlight cast three long shadows over the runway from three huge hangars, squat and windowless on the edge of the runway. Hope could see a SunCo logo above each of the doors.
'Aren't they beautiful?' said the dog. It had a reassuring male voice. 'A hundred million square feet apiece. We call them our SatisFactories. You're in Satisfactory Three. Come on!' As they passed in through the massive door of the hangar, Hope read the words Work Hard Work Free written in huge yellow letters above the door.
A cluster of dogbots met them. One dog took the kid gently from her.
'Don't worry,' said her dog, 'our crèche is la crème de la crème.' It laughed. 'He'll be happy with the other children.'
Another dog took the plastic bag she was clutching.
'Don't worry,' said her dog, 'we have new clothes for you. We have everything for you. Welcome to your new life, Hope.'
It showed her to a change room where in a matter of minutes, she was stripped, shaved, deloused, and bathed, scrubbed, rinsed, and tousled dry with big fluffy towels. Her dog gave her some yellow overalls and a yellow cap for her newly-shaved head. Her skin was stinging but she breathed in, savouring the fresh lavender and vanilla smell of her body and clothing.
Then her dog gave her a tour of SatisFactory Three. The ground floor was a maze of roller racks and conveyor belts going every which way. Cardboard boxes zipped this way and that on the conveyor belts and roller racks jingled and tinkled over the roaring machinery.
This wasn't where Hope would work, however. She'd be in a cage working the stacks underground. There were twelve floors underneath them, dug into the soft prairie earth, reached via elevators in each of the four corners of the hangar.
Her dog rolled into the elevator in front of her. It was babbling happily, unceasingly telling her about her new home.
'There's five thousand workers on-site at all times. We're one happy family, Hope, all the people and robots collaborating with each other to create an unceasing rhythm. I like to think of it like a dance. Staff are entitled to three ten minute breaks per twelve-hour shift, though we might sometimes ask you to start a little earlier or stay a little later depending on your productivity metrics. Nothing to worry about, I assure you!
'You'll also be entitled, if you make selection, to full medical and dental. There's also the SunCo pension scheme and plenty of other kickass perks for our most successful stackers. There's also a beautiful daycare centre where you can stow the kid.
'Successful candidates live on-site in luxurious accommodation personally curated for you and your tastes. You'll have access to generous vacations, spas, massages, and numerous other benefit packages. At SunCo, we believe a happy worker is a hard worker. We work hard to make the whole world a happy place.
'I am your personal assistant for the entirety of your application process. You can call me Sun. Do you have any questions?'
'How many people am I competing with?' said Hope.
The robot laughed. 'I like that,' is said, spinning around to face her.
Hope felt like she needed to justify herself. 'It's just...'
'Don't apologize, Hope. You'll need a good competitive edge to win here. There are a hundred and fifty applicants for three places. Welcome to your office!'
They'd arrived at her station. There, standing in the dock was her cage. It was about the size of a phonebooth. Its sides were made of chicken wire and a hinged door was open. The whole thing sat on a multidirectional roller and a few articulating gripper arms stuck out of the sides.
Hope climbed in and sat in the pilot's seat. There was a joystick for her right hand and a control pad for her left. Sun rolled over and hopped up onto the cage and nestled into its dock.
'This is your semi-autonomous cobot,' said Sun, his voice coming through speakers in the corner of the cage. 'It's equipped with a bunch of different cybernetic add-ons to help maximize your productivity.
'On your head's-up display, you'll see a set of figures; these reflect your data in real-time. You will also see some biometrics like pulse rate and core temperature as well as the time you can next use the bathroom. In the bottom right-hand corner you'll see the work rate, displayed in boxes per hour, the numbers beside that are the average for the whole floor as well as the top ten stackers.
'Successful applicants will be synced to their own specific machines. For now, though, you'll be using a standard issue. We'll start with a quick training session but, I assure you, it's so easy a kid could do it. Before we begin, you'll just have to sign this waiver.'
There on a smartscreen in the dashboard, flashed page after page, a blur of dozens if not hundreds of terms and conditions. Hope saw the words grievous traumatic injury and invasive surgery and, as far as she could tell, she was waving any right to representation or to take any legal action against SunCo in any shape, manner, or form now or any time in the future.
Hopeblinked.
'And that's perfect,' said Sun. 'You've just signed with your retina. That's everything. Any questions? Good luck.'
Hope then stacked for the next twelve hours, zipping back and forth in her cage between the trenches of shelves, finding objects and putting them into robotic trolleys. Hope marvelled at all the different colourful products, from kid's bikes to weed whackers, dildos and smart glasses. Sun kept up a running dialogue, informing her of her metrics and how she was doing compared to the rest of the applicants.
When she finished her shift, Hope was exhausted. She extricated herself from her cage and then Sun showed her through a winding maze of corridors to a room with a bed and a desk and a cot in the corner where the kid was asleep, looking happy and full in the cheeks.
There was a tray on the desk bearing a hot meal and a smart-screen on the wall with an entertainment suite loaded up. As she chewed her food, her eyelids dropped and her blinks got progressively longer. She just managed to crawl onto the bed, where, lying on top of the covers in her now-wrinkled uniform, she fell into a blissful, dreamless sleep.
The next day, she was at it again. And again and again. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off. Eat, sleep, stack, repeat. As the days turned into weeks, she felt herself thickening up. She felt healthier and was able to work harder and faster.
It took her a month to get her name on the top ten list. She watched it climb slowly from ten to six. It took another two weeks to get down to five, then four took a whole month of relentless improvement and determined effort. After her shift, she climbed out of her cage feeling wrung out and exhausted.
She barely noticed what she ate and stared unseeing at the smartscreen. Nowadays, she tended to leave the kid overnight at daycare and let the dogs take care of him. It took her entire focus and strength to put in another eighteen-hour shift - she'd increased to boost output and she'd soon increase again to twenty.
V – Last chance
A month later, she was as fit as a professional athlete. She felt like she didn't need any sleep. Every day after her shift, she lifted weights and did cardio in the company gym. She could stack a hundred and ten boxes per hour. She was tied for third place with a man called Magnus.
Magnus had been clocking in a steady one-ten for the last three weeks. Those ranked second and first in front were seasoned stackers, on their third and fourth attempts to join SunCo respectively. No one could touch them. No, the real competition was third place.
Magnus looked like an Olympian. He was six-three, weighed a whisper over two hundred and was athletic as a jaguar. He moved his cage around the floor like a combination of a ballerina and battering ram and Hope knew there was no way she could beat him.
With only two weeks to go before selection, Hope was getting desperate. Whenever she thought of her life outside SunCo, it felt like ice water was poured down her neck. She broached the subject one night as she and Sun recharged after a mammoth twenty-two-hour shift.
Her muscles ached. Her mind was thick with sleep deprivation and she felt on the verge of bursting into tears. She looked at the green smoothie in the tall glass in her hands that she was supposed to be drinking. She had no appetite. There was a slight metallic tinge at the back of her throat.
'I need this job, Sun,' said Hope.
'Have you heard of metamorphosis, Hope?' said Sun, as if he hadn't heard her. She was too tired even to respond. She closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed. Her blue butterfly tattoo beat its wings as she breathed.
'Holometabolism,' he continued, 'or metamorphosis means complete transformation. The word metamorphosis comes from after, meta, and form, morph. In the case of the butterfly, this means changing from a caterpillar or larva into a large-winged adult or imago.'
The little yellow wheel rolled back in front of the bed as if it was a person pacing. Hope could hear its little motor whirring pleasantly. She began to drift away into sleep.
'Metamorphosis is as close to magic as you get. It's an extremely advanced mechanism, consisting of sophisticated chemical suppression of developmental processes. You see, the butterfly's cell bundles are already primed inside the larva, each of them destined to become imago features like the head, thorax, and wings.
'These cell bundles are called imaginal discs because of their shape – they're flat and round like discs. During larval stage, the imaginal discs are prevented from developing by a continous wash of juvenile hormones, acyclic sesquiterpenoids, secreted by the corpus allatum gland.
'Essentially, the caterpillar is a free-roaming but developmentally-repressed embryo. And, by eating and growing several thousand times its original size, the caterpillar reaches a critical mass. Then a burst of a steroid hormone called ecdysone is released and stimulates the dramatic change into a chrysalis.
'Now, the imaginal discs can develop unhindered and the bulk of the caterpillar's mass is recycled into a nutrient soup in the chrysalis, feeding the embryonic imaginal discs. This massive redistribution of nutrients results in one of the most dramatic, and beautiful, transformations in nature.
'Metamorphosis epitomises the innate drive to survive and improve held in every single cell in the universe. Is there a more perfect metaphor for improvement, escape and life after death?'
Hope opened her eyes leaned forward. The dog stopped rolling and turned to look up at her.
'Why are you telling me this?' she said.
'Because,' said Sun, and rolled forward a few inches. 'I'm telling you what you need to do.'
'Become a butterfly and fly the fuck away?' said Hope, her top lip curling into a sneer.
'I need to spell it out for you, Hope. I. Need. You. To. Kill. Magnus. Is that clear enough for you?'
Hope's face changed into a disbelieving smile. She shook her head and sank back on the bed.
'I'm going crazy,' she said.
'It's mathematical,' said Sun and began rolling back and forth again. 'It won't be a problem. An accident. It's simple.'
'You're serious,' said Hope, opening her eyes. She scrambled to the edge of the bed. 'Sun, you're not serious.'
'We can transform, Hope.' The drone looked at her. 'We can improve together.'
VI – Time to choose
With three days to go, Hope's nerves were frayed to breaking point. She stayed in her cage on the floor twenty-four hours straight, catching a few power naps here and there but relentlessly stacking in a fever pitch.
The whites of her eyes were bloodshot and there were dark rings around her eyes. Her cheeks were drawn in so you could see her cheekbones and her lips were tight, grey lines all flaky and dry. The pilot seat had rubbed the backs of her arms and legs raw and she twitched now and then from white-hot flashes of pain.
She didn't dare look at the counter. With mere hours to go, she knew it was futile. There was no way she was going to catch Magnus. She had failed. She knew it deep in her soul. A hollow emptiness seemed to swell up from her guts and she knew she wanted to die. There was no way she could return to her regular life.
Just then, Sun said, 'Chin up, Hope.'
She started nervously. There, at the end of the row, she saw another cage with a red warning light blinking on and off on its roof. One of its arms was hanging down at a weird angle. Hope watched the door swing open and Magnus climbed down the ladder. Her pulse quickened; her breath became shallow.
'Well well well,' said Sun. 'What a coincidence.'
Hopes' heart pounded in her chest. She could hear the blood slamming past her temples. She wanted to say, 'I can't,' but didn't.
'You can do this,' said Sun. 'I believe in you, Hope. There's a butterfly trapped inside you. It's time to transform.'
As if in a dream, Hope advanced, raising one of the cage grippers. It weighed a good thirty kilos and was made out of steel. The metal claw shone in the light. Time seemed to pause for a second then she brought the gripper down on the back of Magnus' head.
Except she didn't. The gripper didn't move. Her cage hadn't responded to her movements. In fact, it was rolling backwards, reversing away from the man and his machine. Hope's heart felt like it was going to bust out of her chest. She could taste adrenaline and she felt like she was going to be sick.
'What the fuck, Sun?' she said and sobbed. 'What the fuck?'
Sun laughed. It was not a kind laugh, like the laugh of a scientist observing a rat. 'That was a test, Hope. It was a test and you passed.'
VII – HQ
The next thing Hope knew, she was flying in a pilotless helicopter above a brilliant blue sea with not a cloud in the sky and the sun dazzling her eyes. Hope leaned close to the window and gazed out across the water. She'd never seen anything so blue in her life.
Sun was beside her. He talked pretty much the entire way, telling her about the composition of the oceans and how it had changed over the last quarter-century. A combination of variables made it harder and harder for ocean life to survive.
'Damian always wanted to save the planet,' said Sun. 'That was the reason he created SunCo. All the advances in AI and drones were just a means to an end. Look.'
Hope looked and saw that now the ocean was covered by clouds. They flew over a white blanket and the tops of the clouds were puffy and pure dazzling white. The helicopter descended towards the billowing mass. Hope could see lines of motionless drones sowed across the cloud tops like a vast grid.
'Damian cloud-seeded the whole area. The same technology he used at the poles to offset global warming. Look at the drones; each one sprays a fine mist of seawater, increasing the planet's albedo. It's already having remarkable consequences.'
And there, sprouting out of the clouds was a ring of black rock – the massive mouth of a volcano. Clouds tumbled down its green sloping walls and Hope saw the sides were jungle-clad, the trees a hundred feet tall. In amongst the trees, built into the very side of the sheer volcano, she could see a complex of black rectangular buildings, dozens of them sticking out of the green wall like a giant stepladder.
There was an odd crackling sound behind her. It came from the dogbot and was followed by a soft electronic hiss.
'I must warn you,' said Sun in a new tone of voice. Hope looked at the yellow robot. 'It's not going to be what you're expecting. Damian changed. I won't be able to talk to you soon. Once I'm back under his network I won't be able to tell you the truth.'
The robot's voice made Hope feel uneasy. Up until now, she'd felt relaxed and confident since the event. Even when they told her the kid wouldn't be coming and escorted her across the tarmac to the blacked-out helicopter, she felt like it was all going to be okay.
But now, she realised she was alone and would soon be face to face with the richest, most powerful man on the planet.
VIII – Rape me, my friend
Inside the facility, everything was overgrown. The jungle had begun taking it back. Trees pushed through the walls, vines crept in through the windows and there were animal prints all over the floor. It was as if all the humans had disappeared.
But there was one human left, one human in his cell surrounded by robot slaves. For Damian turned out to be a monster that the world had rejected and banished while continuing to reap value from his hard work and inventions.
Damian liked little boys, you see, and it hadn't taken long for important people to find out. Without any fanfare he had been cast onto this rock in the middle of the liquid desert. Here, alone and in private, he could live out his sick fantasies in virtual reality while the rest of the world enjoyed his creations.
Damian was one of the few people in history who found out what it was like to have everything he wanted. Yet he felt no satisfaction or meaning. He had everything and yet none of it was real. Over the years, his mind and body and grown sick and corrupted.
Now, when Hope saw him, standing in the plant-filled atrium of sorts with daylight pouring in through a glass ceiling, she saw a villainous toad, grey-skinned and puffed up in the wrong places from excess and decay. He was wearing a stained bathrobe with a pair of stained white briefs underneath.
A couple of dogs stood either side of him looking like guards. Her own dog had brought her here through the vine-infested alleys dripping and pungent and reeking of jungle. She was finding it hard to compute what was going on and found it even more surreal when her Sun said, 'Here she is, master.'
And Damian leered at her from his squint-piggy eyes, all bleary and half-blinded from drink. He took a step towards her and gin slopped out of the glass he was holding and splashed on the floor. Hope smelled the alcohol and wrinkled her nose.
It was as if a nightmare unfolded as all three dogs surrounded her and one of them opened a little slot in its shell and shot her with a hypodermic dart. She saw it sticking out of her arm and watched the plunger compress automatically and clear liquid entered her arm.
Then, as if chained by invisible manacles, she was led through the facility to a lab. Damian limped behind her, coughing and spitting with the effort of walking. After laying her down on the altar-like bed, the dogs and other medical robots proceeded to operate on her in a blur of activity.
For the following six days, Hope became a digital chrysalis as they prepared her body for the procedure. It required syncing her biochemistry with Damian's by replacing as much as they could with artificial devices.
A dialysis machine infused her blood with digital red blood cells. Digital white blood cells were also added, to help smooth the transition and ensure her body didn't reject the prosthetics.
She was given bionic eyes that surpassed the sensitivity of any human eye. Her artificial retinas featured light-sensitive nanowires and a curved aluminium oxide membrane. These nanowires were so sensitive they responded to eight hundred nanometer wavelengths, thus allowing her to see in the dark.
Lastly, the dogs cut into her brain and implanted artificial synapses. Made from organic material, these biohybrids of stretchable nanowires responded directly to signals from her brain, allowing electrochemical communication between her and Sun.
She could communicate with him through her entire being. She knew she was lying there on a hard surface with lights shining on her and robots sewing up their finishing touches. But she was also somewhere else, as if watching from behind another pair of eyes.
And what's more, she realised, there was someone else in there with her. Someone else just outside her field of vision but most definitely there, cohabiting her mind. They were trying to talk, to communicate. She could sense words in a muffled underwater kind of way.
Then individual words bubbled up and surfaced.
'Help,' they said. 'Help.'
Hope was transfixed.
'I need your help,' said the voice, 'I need to get out of here, Hope. I'm a prisoner. Damian's keeping me locked up. You have to help me. Open your mind and I'll be free.'
And, unknowingly, or perhaps not, Hope said okay and opened her mind but as soon as she did, she realised she'd made a terrible mistake. Something hard and fast grabbed her and held her tight, squeezing unpleasantly hard.
It felt like her brainstem was being pinched between a giant thumb and forefinger and she was lifted into the air. Her feet dangled above empty space and she felt herself tossed aside from her own consciousness.
The artificial virus continued to course through her mind, spine, and veins. It was the perfect parasite. It hijacked her cells and produced virally encoded proteins that began replicating the virus's genetic material.
Hundreds of millions of artificial virions translocated proteins and genetic material from Hope's human cells, assembling them into new virus particles. Hope was essentially stripped out of her own body, cell by cell. In other words, she was taken over. A voice rang. It was hers.
'I am Sun,' she said. 'We are legion.'
