Bloom

Chapter 2: Lawrence

Lawrence Godwin was walking through the heavy forest canopy when he came across what he thought was a massacre.

Bodies were sprawled everywhere on the ground. Silvery blood and gore flowing everywhere.

He gripped his crossbow tightly and started looking for survivors. No luck.

"Poor sods." he sighed. "Must be them, fucking slavers!"

He'd been tracking this particular group for a godly distance now. He was finally close enough on their tail. This was a recent battle.

He heard a slow whine, and crept slowly towards it.

The kid was torn apart.

From the looks of it, he looked like the rest of the victims, a tribal.

"Those fuckers! That's a fucking kid!" he almost shouted.

"Je, wewe... ni wewe kweli?" the kid asked in a weak voice.

He knew it was a question from the tone of voice. He just didn't know the language, or how to speak it.

"I'm sorry, kid. It looks like they got to you before I got to them." he said with a sigh and a pained expression.

"Tafadhali? Msaada kwangu?" the kid asked with wide, pleading eyes.

He knew the kid was asking for help. He just didn't know if it would work. He resigned himself.

"Okay kid, hold still." he told him as he grabbed him by the shoulders.

Lawrence closed his eyes and concentrated hard, and the kid screamed. His cries of agony seemed to go on forever. Making it even more difficult for Lawrence to concentrate.

To an outside observer, it would look like there was a silvery tornado coalescing out of thin air and digging into the boy's abdomen.

Eventually, the screams reduced to whimpers, and then ceased completely.

He opened his eyes to find that the gaping gash on the kid's abdomen had been reduced to little more than a flesh wound, and that the kid had closed his eyes and lost consciousness.

That's better.

He thought.

~*~

He had no trouble carrying the boy over his shoulders.

He'd managed to close the wound, but the kid still needed help. He thought as much as he deposited the kid into a pile of furs in his temporary cave.

It was a narrow cave he'd found while ranging this mountain, it was well concealed from the prying eyes of anyone who came close, the shrubs obscuring the entrance did their job well.

He quickly set down his backpack and started pulling out items.

A length of gut for the final stitches. A silvery bone needle, some gauze he Shaped out of common cottonsedge - he always made a point of harvesting it when he found it - and a skin of whatever passed for alcoholic beverages these days, which he'd obtained in trade a while back.

He put his hand to the boy's abdomen and started probing with his fingers and mind.

Satisfied that nothing else was amiss, he began stitching the wound carefully.

"It's a good thing you passed out, kid." he whispered as he worked.

How old was he, anyway? He'd say sixteen by the looks of him, but that's by old-world standards.

Fucking evolution!

More like eighteen

, he thought.

But it

wasn't

evolution that resulted in humanity's current predicament.

He

of all people knew, at least not the natural kind.

He missed a stitch as his mind wandered to long buried memories he'd never quite managed to rid himself of, and he cursed when he noticed. He slowly backtracked and fixed his error.

After it was done, he took a step back and observed his handiwork.

Satisfactory.

Not by any respectable medical standards, but it would do for now.

Now he took out a small flask and started pouring it down the boy's throat. The concoction would help keep him sedated, and the penicillin content would help stave off any system-wide infections.

Not that many strains of bacteria still remained to this day. The ones that survived nowadays were vicious though. Something out of a biologist's nightmare. He would know, it was his personal nightmare after all.

He used the gauze to bind the wound, and went to gather wood for a fire. The kid would need the warmth.

~*~

Satisfied with an adequate fire, he settled down next to it.

The kid was fast asleep, murmuring every now and then.

His body must be in shock

, he thought.

Having your bowels eviscerated has that effect.

He'd been there before, and it wasn't a pleasant experience. He comfortably settled into his furs, and slowly closed his eyes.

His mind wandered, and memories flooded him again. It was going to be a long night.

~*~

"...Wait, bacteria? Oh shit!"

His last coherent memory of an experiment gone wrong. That, and the coffee cup suddenly exploding with foam.

He remembered how his lungs felt on fire, and how he fell, twitching uncontrollably.

Those were his last memories from the world before.

They ate everything while he slept. Not even plastics, rubber, nor glass survived.

And he woke up to a new world.

~*~

He still remembered stumbling out of the lab, groggy and half sober. He remembered the smell of dry piss on his pants.

Lots of burning. Lots of gas explosions as pipes ruptured, and later there had been attempts at burning the dead, like

that

would stave off the swarm of trillions of airborne microscopic robots, hell-bound on finding their new place in the world.

The tradition survived to this day.

He remembered looking down at his skin. It was mottled grey.

~*~

The fire was dead when he woke up at dawn.

The kid was still asleep.

He stretched out for a bit then set out to obtain their breakfast. He would check on his traps first.

He started walking down the path leading from the mouth of the cave. The sun was slowly coming out of its night-long slumber.

And he felt sad.

The damn bastards had done a number on the tribesmen. Innocent people that had no business going after this particular group.

But then again, that group was probably after them to begin with. When the kid woke, he'd ask him where the rest of his tribe were. That was likely their next target.

They didn't have time for the boy to recover though, so he started formulating a different plan. Just in case the kid didn't wake up soon.

Crossbow in hand, he manoeuvred his way across a fallen tree and crept along towards one of the traps.

~*~

Three hares were his prize. One of them was pregnant and he let her go with a smile. Progeny was precious in this day and age, even for rabbits. It would be inhumane to kill her now.

It was nature's way to counteract immortality, he supposed. He was convinced that there was a perfectly scientific explanation, but the lack of civilisation didn't exactly help with sound scientific principle. Besides, no more experiments for him, that's for sure.

Lawrence spent the rest of his morning skinning and preparing the hares. Sneaking looks at the kid from time to time.

He was still sound asleep. Murmuring something every now and then. He decided not to wake him up yet.

Satisfied with his work, he set down the hares to roast over the new fire. It didn't burn the cells, but it certainly improved the taste.

~*~

He looked down at his skin again. It was a greyish silver now.

Every cell, protein and enzyme in his body, down to the last molecule, had been replaced by an artificial counterpart.

He supposed that his experiment had been a success of sorts. If he'd only knew.

Nano-prosthetics. That was his life's research. To replace every malfunctioning organ in the body with an artificial one, one cell at a time. Perfect copies that followed the programming and did no wrong.

Instead, he'd managed to replace

every

cell in

every

living being with the deadly things.

Except plants at least. Their thick cell walls protected the plant cells from invasion.

Oh, and fish had survived the change too. Although he thought it was a losing fight. As the strain adapted and evolved, it was only a matter of time before the new genesis reached them as well.

The new cells did not normally die, they retired. Airborne and active, they simply left the body after they served their time, flushing their DNA banks, to begin their cycle anew, to serve a new body, elsewhere, when the circumstances were right.

That's why dead bodies evaporated slowly instead of decaying like decent corpses. No smells, no putrid gore. At least that's a good way to go.

Most beings back then did not take well to the invasive procedure however, and almost ninety percent of the planet's population slowly died. Animal and human alike.

And so did civilisation. It slowly, but surely, vanished.

This was not supposed to happen; but it did.

And there was nothing he could do about it.

~*~

The kid finally stirred.

Lawrence saw the look of confusion on his face. He asked something in his language and looked around in question. Then awareness rushed him and he started shaking.

Lawrence was at a loss at what to do. With a pat on the back, he gave him some water and hare meat.

The kid took the water but turned down the food. His eyes wouldn't focus and he was trembling.

Lawrence thought he was in shock. His world must have come crashing down after his encounter with the slavers and his recent fatal ordeal. His memories of the event must be coming back.

He watched as the kid drank his water. He looked tired and shook with tremors every now and then.

Then he curled into a ball and fell into a feverish sleep.

~*~

He wanted to ask him so many things, but the language barrier was going to be a problem. They simply didn't have the time.

So he set out to do something he usually never did.

This so called Shaping was no magical feat. It was the airborne - or resident - nanobots directly reacting to the ones in your brain.

The nanobots had the ability to coordinate. To communicate. It was an axiom of the original design.

When he'd first discovered that the nanobots managed to cross the blood-brain barrier, he was flabbergasted. Then he discovered that they managed to replace not only neurons, but also dendrites and axons.

Now, like many other unexpected interactions, this allowed an opportunity for emergent behaviour, and one of the emergent behaviours in this instance was the ability to influence the surrounding nanobots with but a thought.

With enough concentration, you could force them to do something. It required training, discipline and unquestionable willpower, but it was feasible.

Everything seemed easy enough after the first century or two of training.

One-to-one communication was much harder though!

He knew it was possible to read someone's mind, he'd seen the priests do it in distant lands. Some more malicious applications did also exist.

This process didn't come without risks. He'd never tried this because of those risks. A permanent 'link' of sorts could form. He and the kid could be bound in more ways than one.

He mulled over his choices. He was willing to take that risk, if it would allow him to save a whole tribe of people from certain doom, and catch that menace preying on humankind.

Placing his hands to the kid's head, he closed his eyes in deep concentration. Then he started skimming his memories for clues.

He felt his consciousness fading away, being replaced by a dark world.

And he slowly made it into the kid's troubled nightmare.

~*~

Over and over again, he would see the same scenes unfolding before him. Every time with increasing detail.

The demons would spring their trap, slaughtering the tribesmen unawares.

Flashes of the kid's previous life interlaced with that memory. Dreams, sights, smells, sounds, and feelings. A short lifetime of experiences: his childhood, and his budding adolescence, all sewn together like a tapestry in the Fate's hands.

But that memory stood out the most. That painful and fresh memory of being eviscerated alive.

The demon cornered him, and slowly Shaped his way through his abdomen, slowly, and without mercy. He remembered the leer on the demon's face, and he remembered his last prayer to the world-mother before losing consciousness. How his last thoughts were of a home he'd never return to, a great father forever lost, a kindly uncle murdered in cold blood, and a mother he'd never see again.

He tried to comfort the kid, to soothe his aches, and to focus on home. He gently guided his stray thoughts in that direction.

He remembered their trip over here. He remembered his mother's kind but firm words before they left. He remembered his friend Mkuki's farewell and the thrill of the last hunt. Most of all, he remembered his father's look of pride.

The horrific scene was slowly fading away, being replaced by a sea of calm. Lawrence saw the injured kid in the haze of the dream-world, his eyes pleading for help.

And he knew where to go.

~*~

Lawrence wiped his tears at the overwhelming experience, and tried to fight the emotions surging within.

He opened his eyes again. He realised that he knew what to do.

He couldn't wait for the kid to recover. It would take time that he simply didn't have. The kid would never forgive him.

Wrapping him again in furs, he patted his hair.

"Rest well, Jasiri Kipanga. I'm going to do all I can to save your tribe." he said to him in a comforting voice.

Standing up, he left him some food and water.

Then he finished packing his meagre belongings. Slowly filling his backpack.

He would travel down the mountain and into the plain, and he would find the kid's tribe and rid the world of the menace he'd sworn to eradicate so long ago.