It Slices! It Dices!

It was war.

War was never declared, never spoken in a, "This means war," sort of fashion. No gauntlets were thrown, no politicians made speeches creating enemies of the wraiths of slavery and allies of the golems of solidarity. No leader spoke of righteousness. Only the uniforms and the casualties that paraded across the screens were given words by those of shallow celebrity status. It was war, never declared, but known by all.

I served. All of us did. First my laboratory was raided, and my knowledge was requested by the autarch in power. His name was known but meaningless. I was given the sublime carrot, the ability to practice on subjects that such things as law and humanity would not allow. I would be able to get meaningful results, if I could provide what my leader required.

My leader required soldiers. Soldiers without the will to protest their enlistment. Robots with the processing ability, the survival ability, of the human brain. I was to twist desire into loyalty and provide pleasure for it. It was an easy task. One that allowed me time for my own projects.

It was a terrible war, and there was no one to stop it.

I remember going into the Pit, the pen where they held the prisoners and volunteers for my tasks. At first I was scared of the men. I feared the hatred in their eyes. It always smelled like blood and the stink of human fear. After a while, the fear died in me. They were only puppets. A simple dart of this or that chemical cocktail rendered them powerless. That was my ability. I was no leader, but I had power over them.

The women scared me less. They smelled more feral, but they were predictable, as if because we shared genders we shared the same insights. I saw very little other similarities. Their flesh hung off of them in thin rolls and strips. Their long hair matted, while I had the benefit of the finest quarters the autarch would allow. I was a pampered pet. I had created what he desired. I called it Medusa.

Medusa. The name took longer to develop than the adrenaline compound. It worked directly on survival impulses. It was short-lived, as were the subjects, but for the limited time (a month? a week?) it was active in their system, they were the best fighters to which humankind could aspire. They would systematically use whatever they had at hand to the best advantage over their enemy. Weapons, random objects, fingernails, hair...until someone developed a better human being, I had developed the elite warrior of mankind.

It burned them out. The lucky ones died, and in their berserk stage, many took a while to realize their wounds were, indeed mortal. They lost the ability to regulate how much damage their muscles could take, extending their strength many times over what a sane human being could allow. Many died simply unable to move. That was of no matter: they did what they were supposed to do. They killed.

We played games with them. We turned them into rats, monkeys, the rare wolf or cat. We placed them in cages, armed some with weapons, watched them fight each other. As we had created the penultimate berserker, so had we devolved humans into their basest instincts. Cults grew and died, like strange cultures in the petri dish of the Pit. Some began marking themselves, strange rituals of sex and pain between the genders.

None ever gave up hope for freedom. Some bargained for power, but it was always power that lead to hope. As if we would reward some gang leader for his bedlam. Freedom was granted; freedom to try another vial, another colour of serum. They always took the gamble. My psychology department was thrilled. We could force them into obedience, but the design needed to be held or we would once again here a plan for escape. A red pill. A blue pill. Whichever one they hadn't tried.

Chaos. It came in two varieties. Black and White. I had called it Opal, for the strange colours which bubbled up in the liquid capsules. There was a red, but it was more dangerous. White was perfect. It was the ultimate in marketable substances, providing euphoria and pleasant hallucinations, without any physical addiction. Black was perfect, seemingly innocuous, but affecting the subconscious, making suggestion a viable tool. Red created violent fantasies, but too often the afflicted caused themselves so much pain that I passed the compound to the interrogationists.

They paid me for White Chaos. I do not know who it was with that I made the bargain, but my earnings were protected from the strife. I used it to buy some of my pets freedom. I bought many, men and women, but I used the women up and spent too much time afraid of the men. I stalked them, never sure of their loyalty.

Medusa worked differently on men. Most of the women reacted badly to it. It took so little to make the perfect soldier the enduring lover. "Just a change in the chain," as we often joked in the lab.

When the order came to destroy the lab and its contents, I did it myself. I shot my assistant in the back, and I made sure to leave the cage doors unlocked before keying in the sequence. I watched the station implode as I left it. We were losing. I was to be tried for crimes against humanity. I was not to be found innocent.

Is it that I found having a soul inconvenient? I do not remember giving it up, but I do remember losing the will to live. I am not sure if it was the surrender of the laboratory, or the acceptance of their bargain. I dreamt of Faust as my tiny capsule sped towards a world where I could be anonymous.

I once thought that there could not be art without a soul. Chaos was my art. I took the first of the white capsules as I watched the shattering of the outer lock windows from space. I took the first red one while watching the hanging of our leader.

A small home in the suburban areas. I had renamed myself. I had sought out a girlfriend, a diplomatic translator. I was a gifted artist with an indulgence in pharmaceuticals. A minor celebrity, maybe even a war hero. Chaos was spreading itself across the galaxy, and even the small percentage made me wealthier than the leader himself.

I gave much of it away. Widows and widowers, orphans, rebuilding and terraforming expeditions. Wealth is hard to track between the planetary systems, but my friends (and I referred to them only as such) made sure I had my share.

The dreams started. It was never the same dream, but it was the same nightmare over and over. The same fears given body and form in my subconscious. It was the faces and the lab coats. It was the look of madness on the rat man as he drew blood from the neck of his fellow human, his brother. It was the sound of the cages as the doors rattled open. It was a neverending parade of syringes and patches, in all the colours of the rainbow, a symphony of screams, a twisted dance floor of subjects destroying themselves in spasms. It was my assistant's betrayal, betrayed. It was the flow of red blood against the white of her coat, and the gun she held in her right hand. It was the silence, the terrible silence of space.

Chaos kept them away. White in the morning, to soothe the waking. Red in the afternoon to give me peace of another kind. Black at night.

I don't remember starting the black. It was the black that calmed the dreams. It was the black that was changing me.

I had to produce things that looked like art for my status. I began to paint. At first I used brushes, but it seemed too limiting. I started using my fingers. At first I tried to do it sober, but I was always disappointed with the results. I began to do it under the influence of White. I was too blissful, and rarely got anything done.

With Red, I remember ripping my arm with my teeth and getting blood over the canvas. Emergency services could not match my DNA with anyone in their system, so I was given triage and accepted as someone new to the system. I remember thinking that Black could do that... but I no longer had my tools to measure its potential.

Black gave me the best paintings. My work was all for charity. I had some local exhibitions and some even made it to Prime and Tertius, until I decided the scrutiny that was to follow would be too dangerous.

I started taking two Red in the day. Delightful torture, as every nerve screamed at the slightest impulse. The girlfriend left. I allowed her to live for another three weeks before I gave her a lethal dose of Red. Terrible thing, that. I was very broken up for the funeral. I wore red and black. It made me giggle.

I fled the world not too long afterwards. Art was not my province. I needed to get back to something that used my talents. The Psionics Institute of Ifie needed a skilled biochemist, and I knew that field.

The previous regime had persecuted psionics. I, like every other bureaucrat, had been grafted with a psi-dissolving neural net. I hadn't thought of it in years, and it had not occurred to me until the interview. It was an interesting evasion, but I had tested at a low enough level of psi potential to make the results inconclusive.

I took the job. They didn't ask enough questions, and what questions they asked were easily manipulated. I had a long history of it. They could take my flesh and blood, I decided, but if there was naught on the inside, nothing more could be lost.

Then came the dreams that not even Black Chaos could hide.

It was the same dream.

She was there. She was beautiful. Her skin was so white as to be like snow, and her lips were red as blood. Her hair flowed about her shoulders like some sort of golden mane. Her eyes were ice blue, and yet, they glowed with an inner fire.

She was imprisoned. Sometimes she waited patiently, staring at me, sometimes she paced like a lion back and forth in front of the invisible wall of her cage. She made no noise, said no words, but somehow I knew she wanted me to free her. I was her savior. She implied promises of what her freedom was worth to her. She made suggestions without making a sound. Her eyes spoke the way eyes can if you listen.

Every night I hesitated. I knew all it took was an act of will, but I could not make myself do it. There was a reason...there was always a reason for someone to be in a cage. Someone had imprisoned her. Someone had a reason to keep her under lock and key.

I had other dreams. I dreamed of the animals. I dreamed of dissecting them, my knife slicing through flesh and pulling out words. Letters stretched like ligaments. Some of them snapped at me. Under the influence of Black, the dreams wrapped my days in a fugue. Reality was flexible, and Black a glass through which I viewed the world around me.