Alex Mercer sat, gloomy as a thundercloud, up to his neck in the swamp mud, diligently pretending to be a hummock. The frog, nestling on his armored forehead, was already tightening its evening roulades with his companions, and the damn pony still did not want to leave.
How's the pony? The set and general appearance of the zoomorph in her, perhaps, corresponded to the previously encountered individuals, but the coloring did not make me think that everything around Mercer was the fruit of a powerful acid hallucination. Most of all, she resembled a dwarf zebra with a mohawk of a white and dark gray mane. A belt with baskets was thrown over the back of the aboriginal life form, in which it folded some local plants. She seemed to be humming something to herself - in her variation of the local language, a poetic syllable was clearly traced. Hydra, on the other hand, did not pay the slightest attention to the herbalist.
Yes, when Dr. Mercer poked his head into this place, he was not in for a warm welcome. There were no problems with finding the swamp, as well as with a leisurely walk along its outskirts, which looked quite, um, comfortable. That is why Alex decided to get away from the paths and wooden walkways trampled by strangers. The man moved into the depths of the bog, stopping from time to time to collect soil samples... The place was not the most pleasant: the bubbles of gases, nitrogen and methane harmless to Alex, swelling on the surface, were flavored with a cocktail of complex compounds of carbon dioxide - his something beryllium from the point of view Mercer's component and was poisonous even more deadly than the atmosphere of the new world. Alex decided to grit his teeth and endure. He should have had no difficulty in creating a local extractor using the technology he had spied on from Green. Providing himself with a solid form of an oxidizer suitable for breathing, the evolved one saw as a matter almost already accomplished...
The local nature, meanwhile, again had its own vision of how many obstacles to load on Mercer's shoulders, sprinkling the next portion of poison from above. As soon as Mercer figured out the territory in which he should deploy vigorous activity, how to see who came to visit him, a natural dragon climbed. And, unlike the image of a winged colossus, which is familiar to many, the creature's neck was a considerable length of its body. Alex involuntarily backed away and fell back into the mud when heads with a clearly unfriendly expression of bony muzzles loomed over him, cutting the muddy water. Long necks bent with astounding agility for their size, in the blink of an eye encircling the evolved, still prostrate, ring of predatory eyes framed by spiked ridges. The look of one of the heads, however, quickly changed from decisively threatening to some kind of discouraged, as soon as she took a noisy breath. Expressions of facial expressions on a seemingly lean, not provided with intelligence muzzle, only aggravated Mercer's confusion. The sight of a monster able to squeeze out something besides growling and hissing was incredibly alien and repulsive for a person. Probably, Alex reacted more calmly to the first meeting with the hunters in Gentek than to the next proof that the local fauna possessed some rudiments of intelligence. When other heads, with some confusion, began to circle around Mercer, he, unable to bear it, jumped to his feet and rushed to break the distance as usual.
Well, no matter how you look at it, it wasn't the wisest decision. Maybe the creature possessed some kind of pursuit instinct in the image of a dog "run - catch up". Maybe if Mercer had remained motionless, she would have decided that the gray movable stone was not of interest to her, and would have gone to fill up the quagmire, as Zeus ignored the scorpion. Or maybe, if Mercer had hit one of the heads properly, processed it to a crushed skull and scraps of flesh, then a creature that suspiciously resembled a hydra from Greek myths would have decided that it is more dear to associating with a brave midget, and would also prefer to fuck off. Be that as it may, it was not possible to find out, since the dragon rushed after Mercer.
Roars and whistles swept through the swamp, and waves swept through the water as the creature tore its massive body out of the swamp and rushed after it, stomping loudly with just one pair of paws. This is truly a godless mistake of nature, reluctantly, unkindly emerged from the dark abyss of Darwinism. Fortunately, even in the absence of normal traction, Mercer remained faster than the agile-headed, but clumsy body of the monster. He was pulled out only once with a blow from a massive jaw, but Mercer's bones extinguished not only compression when falling from a building, but in general almost any crushing force, so this only forced the mutant to make a couple of shorter jumps and set the elbow joint on the run. As a result, Alex flew up to another spreading tree, something resembling a willow, jumped to another and got lost in its crown. The hydra raged somewhere off to the side, stirring the water, crushing with a crash the innocent tree that Mercer had climbed a dozen seconds earlier. The creature turned its heads in an attempt to find a nimble bipedal intruder so suddenly disappeared from the field of vision of as many as four pairs of her eyes, but she did not want to pay attention to the neighboring one.
How much longer will I have to run from all the unimaginable bullshit here? Alex thought dryly, watching the monster keep trying to find the stranger that had wandered into his territory and crush him. It was only annoyance and Alex decidedly refused to call his actions cowardice. Wielded by Mercer, fear, and he would have run headlong further, or would have wanted to hide under the ground, between the roots of swamp trees, and not watched the hydra with a nasty suppressed disgust. Seriously, anyone could call Zeus' actions overly cautious?
A dimension where the laws you are accustomed to do not operate is a poor place to test the limit of your own capabilities. Who would ever think of throwing a blade at any object that seemed dangerous to you? Mercer was only trying to prevent mistakes that could end in the death of the most enchanting and stupid. With a minimum amount of energy, attack a creature that is quite small in size to Elizabeth's alpha hydra? Please dismiss. Maybe the local dragons, by all the rules, exhale a mixture of combustible gases, which will thoroughly roast Zeus through the joints of the armor. In the battles with all the new types of mutants, Mercer had no choice, the question stood squarely: either they would pull Zeus apart in pieces, or he would take them away. Here the choice was... even though it didn't get any easier.
Yes... The irritation seized Alex not at all because his fists were already itching, and not because some survival instincts told him to attack any creature that poses the slightest threat to life. The evolved self-preservation was really at its best - but at least he did not allow the cockroaches in his head to control him, until his reserve of mass became completely empty. Mercer hoped to assess the situation in the most sober way... if this concept is generally applicable to local realities, of course. What really bothered him and raised waves of discontent in his soul over and over again was mental exhaustion.
God, Alex thought out of place, a couple more days, and it will be three weeks since he slept. No, mentally his mind was in order. Reassembled with viral encodings, his brain evolved showed exceptional stability and efficiency no matter how long he went without sleep. Perhaps his gray cells now did not need to rest at all, as Mercer's body worked tirelessly... But Alex felt the tension accumulating during the epidemic, this brazen itch oppressing him. Mercer is corny tired. He simply did not have the opportunity to change his field of activity during these weeks. The threat to his own life and the safety of his sister exhausted his mind, forced 24 to 7 to keep himself in a state of complete concentration. Here... yes, exactly the same thing continued, only there was (so far) no need to snap back with the most destructive consequences.
Was the risk of being destroyed by the witchcraft of the locals worth it in order to immediately resolve this dilemma, to get the long-awaited rest - that is still a question. With a pretty straightforward answer, actually. In general, it was never worth it! Seriously, how can this be imagined? Come to zoomorphs and crumble in gestures like "Hou, mine is friend", which they will not be able to understand, even being as friendly as possible, due to the same fundamental differences in biology and the culture that flows from it? And there will be no notorious mood... Remind me what people usually do with such entities as Mercer? He didn't forge some stupid banknotes or stole a car, he just doesn't look like other reasonable ones!
Xenophobia, group isolation at the slightest difference is a very powerful property of the psyche, lying deep in evolutionary roots. Colored horses looked, of course, seemingly harmless, you can't say directly that they can turn reality upside down with an effort of will! They resembled something like big-eyed plush toys, but no one promised that it would work both ways. Alex would not be surprised if, after meeting with him, the ponies began to make a scarecrow in the form of Mercer, so scary in their vision that the crows would definitely have returned the lack of harvest for the past year. Considering that birds, too, seemed half-sane, the stupid joke took on a tinge of truthfulness...
Mercer chuckled mirthlessly. And turning into one of them is not for turning secret affairs under everyone's noses, but for the sake of establishing contact, trying to go "behind"... This would undoubtedly be even worse. People hunted a seemingly ideal Zeus just like that, and the man whom he trusted, who not only did not threaten him with a word or deed, but also, as Alex thought, provided security along with Dana, betrayed him! Parker needed only to find a reason, McMullen's unverified statements that Alex Mercer died, rotted from the inside, and his shell ku was busy with something terrible.
Something that behaves like the past Mercer speaks like him... but if you disturb him a little, the creature will pounce on its ally and devour him alive. The director, of course, did not forget to spice things up with stories that it was Mercer who set up an epidemic, allegedly he had been planning to do it for a long time. And Parker immediately chose to forget about all the materials that expose Gentek, which Mercer showed her. After all, McMullen is the most familiar, "pure" person, and people should stick to each other in the face of a biological threat. After all, there has never been such a thing that a person could wish harm to a representative of his species, right?
In fact, Zeus had only one chance from the very first contact to establish friendly relations with the natives: the very fact of his appearance to signify something positive. For example, like Dorothy(1) hitting some particularly vicious local sorceress with a helicopter. But, obviously, this did not happen - Alex had already exhausted his lifetime limit of luck, when in an incredible way he managed to fall out of the epicenter of a nuclear explosion into this... place. The option for the uninformed to stagger in order to find out how the zoomorphs can be liked by natural reasons disappeared. All that Mercer could now count on was not to rush headlong into the thick of things... Forget about his biological immortality (ignoring bullet wounds even in the brain was the best confirmation of this) and rely not on the resistance to adverse factors that "Black light”, but on the ability to survive in any situation. In two and a half weeks, his muscles became like bundles of steel ropes, and his step remained just as light. The shots were well-aimed, the scars from even the most terrible injuries disappeared without leaving a trace, like the marks from the very first fatal wounds received at the Penn Station. Resources are running out, there are no familiar technologies, there is not even a suitable atmosphere, from all the equipment - an already gutted emergency package, a signal pistol and a machine gun with one box? Just think... someone else here would have suffocated in the first minutes, and Mercer, you see, by Thanksgiving will be at home already...
Probably, the evolved safety factor will be enough to overcome any length of the road paved with yellow bricks. Probably, all this listing would pass for the mantra of the inter-world Robinson, if you considered yourself Alex as such. Nothing... Mercer had never felt well before and was generally discouraged when he had nothing to recharge with. Here it would be banal to throw at anyone out of hunger, if the virus turned on its intelligence jammer, and the information systems would sooner immerse the evolved in the conservation mode, but after half an hour or an hour the situation should have changed.
The hydra, which finally turned part of the thickets into a windbreak, finally calmed down. Her unsettled necks, with the loss of purpose for some reason, at once lost their awesome solidity, rushed in vain between the trees, interfering with each other. The quintessence of the rampage of the beast was that one of the heads brought down the barrel straight onto its companion, which immediately resulted in squabbling and hiss at each other. Another head looked at the started quarrel with an expression of rare contentment on the muzzle, which disappeared only when the creature headed for the bog, disappearing with noise and chomping in the swamp slurry. Mercer remembered from a past life that Siamese snakes also often did not get along with each other and died, despite the tricks of the staff who looked after them... Well, this dragon-like monster did not give the impression of a young individual who had not yet had time to gnaw its own throat, not least because of its size. If the monster has been in the vicinity of the settlement for a long time, and the natives do not react to this fact in any way...
Perhaps their dealings with the hydra never crossed. An excellent reason not to transfer the installation of the extractor somewhere else, but to stay here, with the monster by its side, just without attracting more of its attention. The very presence of the hydra should have discouraged the cat horses, unless, of course, Mercer did not reveal his location directly like this. Alex set the machine gun in the split of the trunk of the same tree, properly securing it with a belt. He was not going to spend ammunition on every little thing, but he took the signal flare gun with all the remaining ammunition with him, almost silently descending to the wet swampy ground.
“Everything gets better with a sip of oxygen!” Alex coughed, melting the top of the squib. “The clever guy found out, kha, hunter grab him!”
The thing was this: having visited Rome, Alex Mercer somehow did not notice the Pope. For some reason, the seasoned biochemist (as he remembered himself), for some reason, in a fit of inspiration, it struck in the head that as soon as he set up production of an oxidizer acceptable to him, all problems would be miraculously resolved. But oxygen isn't everything. He is only a mediator in the synthesis of energy, which Alex, as befits a decent aerobic, was forced to obtain from the outside.
Mercer could definitely launch some kind of substrate phosphorus analog. lation to a much wider flow than in ordinary erythrocytes, but he did not know how to recreate complex molecules out of nothing for this process. And even though at times it seemed to him that the building substances in the evolved organism were taken out of nowhere, they still had to be driven into this invisible reserve first, having appropriated, again, foreign organic carriers. Local sulfur, judging by the data from the samples, could be converted into an emulsion suitable for assimilation by a very simple and cheap process in terms of calories. But with the matter, things were... Well, not that Alex would take on faith the infallibility of viral postulates and the fact that the technologies of the "Black Light" would never let him die. Rather, he proceeded from what he had previously seen that in other areas the virus is capable of miracles no less that can be used to help the carrier. What is, after all, organic matter from which the evolved one extracts energy and building materials?
The essence is exactly the same: the solar energy stored in complex molecules, which has gone through more than one technological chain, in order to "revive" inert matter, ultimately transform it into the top of the food pyramid. And the sun here, I must say, communicated noticeably more energy per unit area than the earth's - Mercer deduced this from the same numerous receptors in the eyes. It did not fit into the temperate continental type of climate...
Alex could not explain much of what surrounded him, although he honestly tried. He had the impression that as soon as a moderately reliable concept was formed in Alex's head, according to which this world worked, some new fact popped up from nowhere and the whole scheme was scattered to shreds. Probably, this is how medieval astronomers felt themselves, creating cosmological theories, forced to rewrite them on the fly due to all the new discoveries made with the help of more and more advanced observation means...
And now Alex only sighed, absolutely not realizing why the local sun was already broken hour sticks out in one point of the firmament, and why, if it is so customary, this world is not a scorched desert. Perhaps these thoughts should have been abandoned for a while, referring to their own ignorance.
Mercer equipped the pyro cartridge with the infovirion concentrate he created and, having thought, again put the blank into the opened emergency bag. It was nevertheless necessary, first of all, to erect a small terraformer, and then to shoot into the sky, trying to accumulate a cloud of at least a million or two joules of energy. Most likely, the collector of nutrients will act as a storage device, and virions will only be transmitters...
He did not think about why the ecosystem of the virus launched in Manhattan Green should show the strictly expected qualities by Mercer. Alex saw patterns, and like a talented self-taught person, not yet grasping the essence of things, he could already figure out how to apply them in practice. He suspected that the mysterious abilities of the virus extended to many other aspects of biology... In addition, the "Light" proved to be an extremely stable system, so that out of the blue it would be so easy to bend over, too clinging to life, in contrast to the fighting strains burning in a bright, suicidal outbreak... And if Mercer succeeds in assimilating this energy, he will probably be able to collect organic molecules from much simpler ones, thus storing calories in them, and not taking them away from mutants and people - who, in turn, took transitional forms from the terrestrial flora and fauna.
Alex had already noticed, looking for a swamp, something similar to a huge apple orchard on the other side of the river. He saw much larger than all the fields and vegetable gardens that Mercer managed to see during his work as a special tactical scout. There should have been what the mutant was going to look for as soon as the action with the fallen helicopter was carried out. At high pressure, noble gases are capable of forming stable compounds with a number of elements, including magnesium... this inspired hope that Mercer would still be provided with organics. With a creak, but it will be.
A couple of hours later, sitting up to his neck in a quagmire, these thoughts echoed in the vaults of Alex's skull with dull irritation. Hope is a bad thing... Not only is it not known whether the expected result will be obtained, but it also forces us to go further, to wade through more and more obstacles, to expend even more energy, and it was almost impossible to replenish them “in the open field” here. Mercer's excuse was that he had no alternative. The evolved one managed to recreate something similar to a tumor, a hive chrysalis, which was now pulsing in the thickness of the swamp water, and which a dwarf zebra was about to stumble upon. The extractor spread his net, separating sulfur from the peat, and Mercer was now supplied with oxygen, which would allow him to spend his reserves more efficiently... only a pitiful stub remained of the reserve itself.
After several hours of work - coding, debugging a new structure mode, adjusting to a form - Alex felt more angry at his new state than satisfaction. Long since aveIt would seem that when you get the opportunity in the field to do what your former fortune considered the best of vocations, when instead of equipment worth millions of dollars and countless reagents, everything what you need for this - your own body and your will, understanding how it affects the body, and knowledge of the laws by which biochemistry works... it would seem that you need to rejoice and praise the providence that turned you into a superman, and not into a mindless walker. In the end, all the time until now, Alex has been deprived of this great joy - to learn something new on his own (and not stealing ready-made information from other people's brains, only by adapting it for himself) and delving into the human genome, creating something that should never have existed. A week ago, already in despair, it seemed to him that the battle would be eternal, hopeless - and he would lose more and more comrades-in-arms, like Alex had lost Karen's trust and how his sister had disappeared; will over and over again surrender the positions reclaimed from the virus. Mercer, in general, coped with defeatism. Only he did not take into account that this fight could continue on a much smaller scale; the fight will be with a virus that has already occupied its insides, and not the city's dungeons.
Mighty Zeus was now a sad sight. In order to isolate cellular tissues for the terraformer, they had to put under the knife... but a good half of the body went to the neoplasm, to tell the truth. It was not easy to convince my mechanical firmware that the only correct scenario was not to fall asleep until better times, but to continue acting. It is not easier than to discourage Azimov's positronic servants seeking to prevent harm to the owner, even if the infliction of this harm is the only chance of salvation. Some changes in the design, Alex turned into an eerie parody of a person, an even more unsightly version of a new self with dystrophic-looking muscles covered with plates of the lightest armor, with a narrowed chest and a stub of a head equipped with a single optical sensor... from nightmares.
Mercer's legs were now missing in the calf - instead of them something rested against the ground that human mechanics could call running prostheses. Created from a composite of cartilage and their own shin bones, they had equal elasticity and strength so that the mutant could move at the same speed. The grip dropped, you could forget about the long run on the walls, well and the body weight also seriously decreased, so as not to worry about skidding when cornering; and skyscrapers, in order to jump on them and dive on the heads of enemies, in the foreseeable future was not foreseen.
On the hands of Mercer, one could also easily issue a certificate of a disabled person of some degree... Not only did the volume of muscle tissue give him a victim of severe exhaustion, so there were three fingers left. The very minimum, so as not to bring the crustacean to the claws - two holding clawed phalanges and one opposed... Mercer's abdominal cavity was now absent as a class - only the spinal column protruded from the empty pelvic cup, covered with a corset of the dorsal muscles and vital conducting systems like the circulatory system.
What about? Intestinum prehensile went to feed the terraformer, because there was simply no one to hunt and devour. And the reserve of mass and other organs modified by the virus, each of which began to perform a number of completely new functions, may well make room and go into the chest. Moreover, there was only one lung left, and even then for a while. Filling the vocal cords with sound could well be needed within the framework of Alex's new idea. For the same reason, Alex kept his left hand with him for a while, and did not dispose of it right up to the elbow, attaching a machine gun to the joint with a descent option. He also depleted the heart muscle, which in its characteristics in a standard form came close to a powerful pump that pumps blood extremely evenly. Now, with the reduced volume of hemosurrogate, it began to resemble much more a human... Finally, Mercer's head lost its lower jaw, nasopharynx, scalp, all facial muscles and most of the neck; from a light armor shell, which gave the skull a flatter shape, a single right eye, eaten away by a cobweb of capillaries, frowned outward. The second eye socket was occupied by a thermal fossa sensor, similar to the standard helmet.
You can't say anything, well-written handsome, Alex snorted to himself, going over his new design features in his mind. If tactics of terror and intimidation are suddenly needed against the locals, it will be enough to pull on one of their skinned colorful skins, and you're done: with one appearance, the zoomorphs will vomit without exception, pee under yourself and turn gray in front of your eyes. If for them the listed reactions are considered a manifestation of horror, of course. Something similar to faded to gray hair... even the same old people were not noticed for a short time of espionage. Although... Maybe the natives float them to some local nursing home. Or simply, in the midst of a different world invasion of all sorts of old women, relatives forced them to stay at home.
For humans, the skinny, awkward Zeus would now undoubtedly also look extremely creepy. Dana alone could understand him... just as she took the Mercer hypostasis, renewed after Penn, and agreed to help him. Maybe she would give out her trademark "Yeah, you look shitty", as she reacted to the cancer serum, which brazenly burst into the chimerical balance of the evolved organism and then Dana would send him off on another assignment. Wondering what your sister would cook this time? Probably, with a whistle, she concluded: "Well, now you look like General Gravius!" Or what was the name of the cyborg from the prequels, which Dana lashed out at when Mercer was still in contact with her, absorbed in working on the Black Light project? There were times when they were much closer... when they both watched films in the nineties as teenagers and listened to music from one battered player. And now... now Alex was not even able to find out if Dana had woken up, if everything was all right with her. So much time has been lost, so many events have taken place that cannot be rolled back...
Mercer let out a short breath as he triggered vision calibration. Wilds of nostalgia and regret will not take him anywhere, only they will make him wander in circles, like this damn forest, at times, like animals, which began to seem reasonable, in its own way alive. It was necessary to soberly look into the future, without blurring gaze with a fog of sentimentality... Alex's new eye was also a simplified version of his old pair: eagle vision, an IR filter and the same ability to monitor data from organisms saturated with infovirions, he turned off as unnecessary, but still clearly distinguished details and had the ability to focus on them. It was only necessary to adjust the spectrum to the local color scheme - and to adapt the hearing to a more rarefied atmosphere, which would be very useful for a future action.
Mercer hadn't really relied on his sense of smell before, preferring to act on a tip from the infosphere, which has never let him down in terms of choosing victims - although the standard design included a heightened sense of smells. On this “planet”, the sense of smell would not be useful to him at all, let alone the identification of individual scents when they merge into a single bouquet. So Alex took down the entire nasopharyngeal complex without regrets... practically.
He thought with sadness that he had not experienced the pleasure of high-quality food for a long time, which Gentek ordered from fabulous earnings to the Renalia apartments or tasted at official receptions. Here the chance to remember your human habits will stand out, God knows when. It was possible to engage in self-criticism in more, hmm... civilized forms, as he did now, and not bother with cooking. From the memories of food, Mercer's spines ran spines of phantom cold, which indicated imminent energy starvation. There was still more than a day left for the icy numbness, but the reserve of fatty acid salts had to be replenished as soon as possible. Alex was about to take out the rocket launcher again and shoot upwards in order to link the cloud with the terraformer... when the local nature presented the evolved one with another surprise.
“You must be kidding! Kha-kheh...” Alex croaked with only his vocal cords, like a parrot.
If everything around Mercer really was the fruit of a powerful hallucination, then all that remained was to marvel at the gloomy genius of the subconscious, capable of generating such high-quality delirium. If everything around was set up in order to convince Alex of surrealism, but, moreover, the reality of what is happening, then the architect of the local matrix successfully failed. Mercer would rather believe in the existence of a secular paradise for atheists, where the greatest geniuses of humanity enjoy a carefree afterlife at will a deity they never believed in. For what was unfolding over his head could not happen in nature. The sun, which had previously calmly stood in the sky, moved from its place and crept towards the horizon! A little more and it would have given a completely convincing sunset!
"Alice in Wonderland seems to have believed six impossible things before breakfast." Mercer thought with a sort of hopelessness. I think I'll have to push the limits of this limit here. And how to push it apart!
Such an astronomical phenomenon Alex simply could not tamp into his long-suffering cranium. What could so easily turn an immovable planet so that a 23rd order thermonuclear reactor would stop irradiating one half of it, and the coolness of the night would come into its own? Why is everything on its surface not letit with a terrible speed away, simply swept away by a truly monstrous difference in moments of inertia? The scale of this phenomenon plunged Alex into a stupor and confusion, and no “magic” of the natives could satisfy him as a justification. Zeus stood there, watching the sunset, scrolling through one version of the madder than the other in his head, with a rocket launcher in his hand, while the night birds sounded around and the chorus of marsh amphibians sang. And then, yes, this pony disguised as a zebra came, and Mercer was forced to urgently pretend to be a mound, right with a sealed emergency package, went into the muddy water.
Alex now watched the aborigine with grim determination. He did not expect that locals would come here - probably few would dare to meddle in the possession of the hydra, since she is still not dead or at least driven away by the same guards. Even if Mercer jumps out of the bog, like a swamp troll, emitting a frightening roar, and the zoomorph runs away in panic... she, waking up from horror, will certainly rush to report "where it should", and Zeus's rookery will be revealed. Alex was not going to lose the source of the oxidizer, and the dwarf zebra was about to stumble upon the terraformer, which would lead to the same report to the local authorities. Mercer had… few options.
Zebra, meanwhile, moved through the swamp not just like a quadruped. Adjusted for zoomorphism, her movements could even be called graceful... she maneuvered between deep reservoirs, as if dancing, barely touching the water with her hooves, so that even circles on the surface did not diverge. Mercer thought that she was collecting the bundles of herbs she needed in such an extravagant way, so as not to attract the attention of the hydra, but the monster still heard her... a couple of heads crawled to the surface, blinking sleepily. To Alex's surprise, the zebra continued to slide like a drop, smoothly descending from leaf to leaf on a young shoot, and the appearance of the four-headed monster did not bother her in the least. In turn, the hydra also ignored the native. Only issuing a deep roar, pulled both heads back into the bog. Nothing hinted that the zebra was using something that would resemble the abilities of the horned... Mercer slammed his one eye in bewilderment. The gray herbalist evoked thoughts of shamanic mysticism her jewelry and coloring also smelled of something burning, unusual even by the standards of this world, a kind of African exoticism. If she had walked past the structure erected by Alex, without even looking at it, Mercer would have let the zebra go in peace out of harm's way. However, the aboriginal life form interrupted its viscous movements exactly opposite the reservoir with the tumor, and it was undoubtedly looking through the surface of the water exactly that at the terraformer... and by spreading out instead of one limb a narrow, short blade, it should be considered a dagger.
“Ahvaala re nootto prooruma iirte?” Suddenly, with complete calmness in her voice, said the zebra, turning in the direction of Mercer.
The expression on her face shook Zeus's confidence, kept him from immediately dashing forward with the blade raised to strike. The newcomer did not seem frightened at all and these creatures were capable of expressing fear through facial expressions, Mercer already knew that. Her big, clear eyes glittered with cunning, her lips were folded into a kind of expression that could be interpreted as a polite smile...
Zebra again expressed something to Alex in a clearly poetic syllable, to which the man could only squeeze out of himself that meaningful "Hm". Obviously surprised by the only sound, the herbalist, nevertheless, did not wait for the continuation, but laughed melodiously. She said something else, but the evolved one did not even try to delve into the regularity of the structures of the local language.
Tight knots of thoughts began to twist in Mercer's head again... If the zebra knew from the very beginning that he was here, then why didn't she run away at breakneck speed? Why, after all, didn’t she pretend she hadn’t noticed Mercer? And her reaction... Could it be that it was not the first time she met a person in this place? In general, a humanoid creature, for Mercer now resembled a person except that he was upright? Was Afro-pony not in the least afraid for her life, so she immediately made contact with a stranger from whom it was not clear what could be expected? Mercer could not understand what the striped Equiid was guided by, and it somehow erased all destructive thoughts from his head at once. After all, he was from a caste of highbrows, not crazy warriors, and included a local genocide regime only when problems began to threaten directly his life and the lives of people close to him. Whatever guided the zebra... it looked harmless. And she, having given out a couple of couplets to Mercer, took it out of a free basket... a deflated hot-pink balloon, put it on the ground and nodded at him, clearly hinting that Alex should take the rubber product - which spurred his brains Mercer finally freezes.
While the man was trying to combine the details into a digestible whole, the zebra, considering its duty fulfilled, went away. Zeus regained consciousness only when the reed thickets closed behind the native. He picked up an indispensable attribute of most holidays, examined it, stretched it out in knotty fingers. If the evolved memory did not fail (the last thing he would have thought of complaining about the "Black Light" infection), the inscription on the balloon was suspiciously similar to the one that Mercer had found on his spent fireworks.
“Huh... Okay, that was weird. Not weird enough, cough, to be in the top 5 craziest things today, but still.”
Alex narrowed his eyes as much as his sinewy eyelid would allow. This is what came out... Zebra decided to help him? She hinted, somehow having found out about the new inhabitant of the swamps, that he could find what he was looking for in the same place where the firecracker came from? How could she even know about his needs, damn it?! However, Alex might have thought about this later. It was necessary to track down the candidate for replacement before dawn, when the most persistent of the soldiers begin to nod off, and at once carry out their plans... If the zebra had an idea of being evolved in the swamp and wanted to cause him trouble, I would, undoubtedly, inform the local law enforcement agencies, and did not come here in person only to distribute balloons to all mutants. She, too, looked very faintly like the dancing clown Pennywise.
Or, as a last resort, did she want Mercer to think so?
Alex, somehow shaking himself off the dirt, quite quickly for a prosthetic man moved towards the river, he was now running that very strange "invalid" gait, as if not finally deciding whether to move further on two legs or fall with his nose into the ground, on all fours. The man firmly decided not to be distracted by events of varying degrees of strangeness, making the tasks of survival and, in general, normal functioning as a priority. Although on the road, I must admit, some thoughts still haunted him.
Zebra somehow passed the forest, not possessing outwardly outstanding abilities and fighting qualities... it moved through the swamp as if it were a continuation of the local nature, and the same hydra did not pay much attention to it. Could it be that Alex's unconfirmed theories that the local nature as an entity had some kind of response to the actions of the rational are not so crazy? Mercer burst through the thicket, sweeping away everything in his path. Maybe that's why nature, figuratively speaking, tried to poison him with rat poison? Could it be that the local orderlies of the forest, these dog-like Pinocchios, attacked him to drive him out of the protected area?
Too bold statements, although not without grounds, Alex had to admit. The same wolves did not look like a tree form of life, which had sap instead of blood, and sap instead of lymph - so, a self-propelled heap of branches and vegetation, which, due to a misunderstanding, was given an animal shape. The "artificiality" of the creatures, however, did not really fit in with their behavior: the instinct of self-preservation they still had in a simplified form, which was evident from the first encounter with them.
And the forest... although it was pretentious and surreal to the point of permissiveness, it still remained a forest. If Mercer were an ordinary person, he would use the usual rules of behavior here: do not meddle in where you can break your bones, do not touch unfamiliar flowers, mushrooms and berries, avoid animal paths and be attentive in order to notice a threat in time. True, the inhabitants of the terrestrial groves in most cases would have avoided a person themselves - but here, on the contrary, they had to twist their heads so as not to fly into some too brave living creature.
And if in the continental strip of the Earth from the "suicidal" threats it was possible to stumble upon only a fox or a raccoon infected with rabies, then there were creatures from which you just couldn't climb a tree: they would easily follow you. Such as a hybrid of a chicken and a lizard the size of a good turkey that swooped down on Mercer's head from the crown of a tree. Emitting a grinding scream, something covered in dirty green scales with its paws grabbed Mercer's bony neck, trying to hold on to an impromptu perch due to leathery wings crowned with small claws. In the next instant, Alex's view was obscured by a chicken head with bloodshot eyes; he saw sharp teeth in a smooth, neat beak. And... nothing happened.
Mercer looked with some curiosity at a representative of a species, an equal to which he could only recall a platypus (his stuffed animal at one time made a natural sensation in scientific circles), and he, in turn, stared at Zeus with such stubbornness, as if in this there was a higher meaning. He clearly did not intend to peck out an eye or otherwise torment the infected flesh. It's a pity - Mercer has already hit in the head to check how the local predator will react to his bio and chiincompatible flesh. It is desirable such that he could not swallow the evolved whole, like a hydra.
“Look, it won't take long for your eyes to burst!” Alex shared his thoughts with the creepy chicken in the intonation of an old turntable.
The gaze of the creature faded now only bewilderment was read in it. The creature jerked, spreading its honeycomb wings, and unclenched its claws, clumsily flying away like a chicken smack. Making a sound like an excited cluck, it disappeared into the thickets of bushes, deftly skirting the scattered trees and bending its tail like a snake. The creature was flying, probably badly and not far... Behind Alex, another hybrid landed on the trail, dousing the mutant with a stream of sudden wind, tilting its head to one side and revealing its beak studded with small teeth. He blurred, let out an irritated gurgle... But when he saw that Alex was not impressed by this, he probably decided that it was more expensive for himself to get involved with a lanky stranger, and he also promptly fled into the bushes. Alex only fought the urge to spit.
Madhouse. Definitely a mythological madhouse.
Past Mercer, in an absolute sense, did not particularly like nature, the man did not intend to give up the comfort of the urbanized zone and the benefits of civilization in general. He spent at least half of his free time from work and holidays in increasing his own knowledge, and not at all on country trips. Sometimes he and Karen sat up late over the materials and documents of Gentek, figuring out how the few surviving developments of the Carnival series (3) could help the main project. The rest of the evenings Alex spent in a place that he still considered his home, reading scientific publications, more fiction literature, listening to music... jogging in Washington Square, going to cultural institutions in Manhattan, to its most expensive restaurants, to meetings of others. luminaries of biological sciences.
When was the last time he got out of town there? Long, too long ago, and did not regret it at all. Mercer was not particularly enthusiastic now either, especially considering the assorted beasts that made up the local fauna. However... as soon as he passed a strip of forest, narrow by the standards of geography, some twenty kilometers wide, and went to the river, as nature somehow lost its fangs. Mercer heard not the gnashing of kuro-lashers, but the singing of night birds, quite similar to earthly ones, the splashing of fish in calm water, and not some kind of kraken, or what else the reservoirs here could swarmed with. A family of hedgehogs slipped past Alex, who was trotting at a wrong gallop, like crutches throwing back stiff prosthetic feet. One individual turned a funny face towards him and puffed trustingly with a wet nose.
Some kind of peace spread in the air. It seemed that all of Alex's hardships, which did not fit into the usual everyday, were left behind: government conspiracies, bio-weapons, Hope's secrets, shock groups, almost a million human deaths... reflecting the darkness of the starry sky and the light of the full moon. Across the hills where two streams flowing from the mountains merged, there was a small dam of a power plant. The houses of the town protruding from the night fog at its foot seemed very tiny. The windows only here and there were full of warm lights - the inhabitants indulged in serene sleep, gaining strength for another measured summer day. Reasonable creatures, into whose life he so unceremoniously burst... who probably grew fruits and vegetables, treated fellow citizens and bargained in their doll shops, built new houses, sewed clothes. They all did not even suspect that a creature who was responsible for a terrible catastrophe that befell a much larger city.
Alex, grimacing inwardly, went down to the water, slipping his foot on the clay with a spoon. No matter how pacifying this landscape may act, from the need to survive and the corresponding goals, the evolved had nowhere to go. Influencing the local population was essentially a one-off task, aimed only at getting hold of the equipment from the Black Hawk Down. Without the memory of the carriers and their mechanism of growth of the construct written in the genome, this was expected to be a difficult task, but feasible.
It was only necessary to reach an individual who stood above the rest in the hierarchy there, like the commanders of the guards - who would be ready to look in their mouths no matter what stupid things they did. The ability to imitate sounds, regardless of whether they made a conscious sense to Alex, should also help. Mercer climbed into the water and began carefully scraping his shell. Despite the other chemical effect, the properties of physics, local water showed the most common on the evolved: regularly performed the role of a universal solvent.
Alex didn’t want to spend grains of reserve to lick off all the impurities with the usual release of phagocytes (after which he could patch up the wounds)... and immersion in the image should be as capacious as possible, without any spots that appeared in the chews format. The evolved one will undoubtedly be revealed, but not immediately. By the time the locals realize that something is wrong with one of them, Mercer will expropriate the materials he needs and, without saying goodbye, will leave at dawn. Alex was not interested in outboard machine guns and rocket launchers, of course, which must have fallen into disrepair. What he needed to take away was the helicopter's radio station and its navigation module. Well, what else for little things from the troop compartment, if the locals have not yet stolen the alien shaitan machine for souvenirs. The navigator, combined with the on-board computer, is probably dead and cannot be restored... but it should have been snatched from under the hooves of the aborigines purely out of principle. What if their telekinetic abilities can somehow reconstruct complex electronics and extract information from them? It was impossible in any case to allow this to come into full contact (not like today with this mystical zebra). If it takes place, Mercer will decide for himself what information to provide to the zoomorphs and what information should be silenced.
But the radio... something could have happened with it. Tearing out the simplest contours from an advanced army station, combining them into a single whole and making them work. All this is possible, the knowledge of the pilots to repair the Hawk in the field was disposed to this. As well as piloting below the level of the rooftops, only this bird will never take off... Unless, of course, the local intelligent suddenly discover a wonderful ability to restore it. Mercer snorted as he climbed onto the sandy bank and turned to peer again at the distant silhouettes of houses on the other side of the river, upstream.
“I didn't even have time to really get acquainted with the other world... KHA! or what other race that most of all looks like horses subordinate to mankind, as I’m ready to consider them reasonable and somehow, hehe, with a creak, but reckon with their lives.” Grumbled Mercer, drying out under the night gusts of wind. “I wonder how these people, bigger than me, would react to them? Ahem... Ahem. Did you rush to establish contact with joy, or would you start to act in the spirit of those orators, according to which “man is a beloved of God's creations, created in the image and likeness”? If a person is objectively the only worthy bearer of reason in the universe, can you do anything with everyone else?” Alex paused briefly, recalling the details of "Carnivals" and "Crusader", which he managed to find out during those two and a half weeks of endless battle on the streets of the dying city.
Sighing, he concluded, “Probably. Kha-ha. Since even with their own people can do... that. Maybe it's even good that now I can classify myself as a member of this race with a huge assumption?”
The star-shining, serene moonlit night gave no answer. Mercer, having estimated on the ground an approximate route by which he intended to get to the bridges, sighed even more bitterly, and, hesitating to be sure, dropped to all fours. “Reasonableness by rationality, it's all clear,” his grumbling came through the rustle of the primary transformation, “but, kh-h-ha, I feel that for my completely human ego, this new experience will still be a humiliation.”
If one of the ponies or people could see that night the aberration that stood in the place of Alex Mercer ten minutes later, and then creeping over the grass, fingering his thin paws like spiders, disappeared into the shade of the coastal trees, he would probably say, that it would be better if he had never seen it.
The lone changeling just marveled at the radicality of the changes in the internal structure of the biped and, probably, even put in his memory a couple of especially sophisticated techniques.