The Wild Ba’Neesh Chapter One

©2019 Fay Thompson All Rights Reserved

“You must help me, now!”

The unpleasant summons pulled Kiena from her peaceful contemplation, igniting her temper. There was just enough Vrill edging the demand to compel her into a full manifestation inside the bedroom of the fifteen-year-old Soek boy who called himself WareHawk in his online electronic games. As expected, he lay belly-down on a filthy floor littered with fouled clothing, empty food containers and plastic trash. She could barely tell where boy ended and trash began.

He glared up at the blue-edged apparition with its wedge-shaped face, vertical eye slits, antelope-style ears, twisted dual-horns and almost-human naked female body. If he squinted she might almost look cool or even sexy, except for too many joints on her fingers and ugly-as-hell elongated feet. He reactively flinched, as he did each time she manifested, a reminder of her reality in his preferred world of gaming illusion. “It’s killing me.” He yelled, jabbing his right index finger toward the new wall-sized screen where a multi-colored, near life-sized monster threw bolts of flashing light toward his virtual gaming character.

The display had holographic dimensions and she could see an electronic halo surrounding his chest and hands. Unacceptable. It made the online monster’s bolts appear to cross the space between the wall and the boy in a realistic attack sequence. Unacceptable.

She looked at the paper-thin screen coating the entire inside wall, a new gift from the Soek boy’s foster parents for his birth memory. She spat to one side, an arc of blue-white energy flashing from her mouth to the floor leaving a real-life burn hole in the fire-proof carpet. It smoldered in the plastic entrails of the carpet fibers.

Mick lurched to one side, yelping aloud. “Hey, don’t do that, my mum will skin me when she finds another hole.”

Kiena could smell his unwashed musk and near biological readiness for mating. Mick Huxley, a one-time abandoned infant boy found in a fire-station baby safe box in a distant village, an infant quickly passed into the adoption process of a nearby city where unblemished male infants were valued.

He squealed again as the online monster continued its attack. He didn’t like looking at her, it always made him uneasy.

Fostering, she thought, what a joke. It was easy enough for her to follow the electronic network flowing like a cobweb inside the wall structure, through dozens of other devices in the home, most lurking in watching resting mode. She traced the feed outward to a junction box into a larger network built into atomic electronic pillars that branched spherically into collection stations and generators. The air hummed with off-key harmonics she found dirty and annoying. Humans.

He demanded she help him. The Vrill touch in his voice made that demand an imperative she was forced to accept as part of the bargain between them. She located the largest collection generator and gestured with her Vrill hand, sweeping through billions of connections and blowing the mechanical support devices within a mile radius. The bedroom went dark. She sniffed, the smell of burning electricity spreading like a virus as devices connected to the blown system acted like electronic dominos blowing out in a wave-like cascade effect. The controller in the Soek’s hands flashed, burning his fingertips and palms where the glove-like device fitted to his body. He screamed, clawing the device off to shove his fingers one after another into his mouth trying to ease the burn pain.

“Yeow!” He scrambled to his feet revealing he was wearing his typical slender black pants and sloppy black t-shirt embellished with faded lettering in a language she couldn’t read. He wasn’t an unpleasant looking Soek to her eyes. He had regular features, long, thick dark hair hastily restrained in a hair tie, angular facial lines with prominent cheek bones and the light amber colored eyes of the Pasht peoples. He was long past old enough to be learning real skills. She snorted. He danced away from the sound, now wary.

“What did you do?” He yelled at her.

“I helped you.” Kiena said, her English rusty but understandable.

“What do you mean? My controller is fried. How is burning my hands helping me?”

“It was necessary to remove the dirty electronic halo trapping you to that wall device. I have eliminated the problem.”

“Dirty electronic halo? Do you have any clue how expensive this top-of-the-line Mark 9 controller system is? My parents will remove my privileges for life when they discover what you’ve done.”

“Likely they will have to, as you say, stand in line.” She answered.

Rubbing his hands against his pants he realized she was the major light source in the room. How was that possible? It was the first time he’d ever seen her stand still long enough to radiate light. “What do you mean? You were only supposed to help me kill that game monster.”

“I have tired of your play monsters young Soek. Real ones wait and those who know the difference will be attracted by the destruction of this electronic network. I suggest you pack some clothing so we can leave, unless you want to explain why this act of terrorism initiated in your bedroom?”

“Terrorism?” Mick stared at the apparition, realizing it was actively talking to him, like an adult. It hadn’t done that before either. Usually it just appeared and helped him win his games. His stomach tightened, something was terribly wrong. It was acting like a person.

“Yes. Humans will identify the abrupt removal of an electronic network as evidence of warfare. They will be correct. They are a fearful race and will seek a source. Your birth records will be explored with more care, your blood work run, your identity scrutinized and you will correctly be identified as an enemy of the state, a non-human Soek.”

“What do you mean a non-human? What is a Soek? Being adopted doesn’t make me non-human.”

“No, but digging up a cemetery on a moonless night to recover old bones when you were thirteen suggests issues, don’t you think?”

“You made me do that.”

“Yes, I did.” Kiena acknowledged. “Pack, I can smell ripples even now.”

“Ripples of what?” He asked his anxiety expanding.

“Disturbances in what humans call their electronic shell. They are tracing you even now. You should bring portable food and good shoes. You are too clumsy to be a successful thief. Extra socks and underwear too. You can learn to wash them for awhile.”

Mick glared at her, what was she saying? She was just some kind of holo thing he had made up in his head. He thought he probably suffered from some new schizophrenia associated with online gaming mental illnesses because she was clearly outside his gaming environment and that wasn’t possible.

“Move.” Her voice altered, some new edge prodded his mind and he watched himself moving, stuffing clean and dirty clothing into his best school pack including socks and underwear. He had a pair of good hiking short boots that he pulled on over his dirty socks. He grabbed a jacket, outdoor gloves and a snuggy cap and his multi-functional pocket knife and then he was hurrying down the dark stairs to grab a few handfuls of packaged nutrient bars and his mother’s favorite portable waterclean jug. He stepped out the side door and into a world of chaos, discovering his neighbors yelling at each other, electric vehicles stalled out in the street, phones not functional, everything electrical was dead.

He instinctively tucked his head down and hurried away, heading toward the edge of the neighborhood where a greenzone wove through the entire city. He no longer saw Kiena but the compulsion of her words continued to infect him, he kept moving, wondering what she meant suggesting he wasn’t human. It felt like a game environment in a way except he didn’t feel in control like he should. He wasn’t surprised when his footsteps led him to her hiding place. It was nearing night when he stopped by the shrub-covered rocks. He didn’t want to dig it up again. Terror oozed into his mouth with a bitter taste. Most of the time he managed to forget about the entire incident, like it never happened.

He forced himself to climb a nearby rise, a vista viewpoint that overlooked the city. He expected to see lights, what he saw was only a few dim lights from small generators, the city was dark. The enormity of the size of the blackout sank in. Was she right? Would they trace the outage to his bedroom, to him?

“Kiena?” He gasped out her name.

“Yes?”

He jumped sideways and turned to find her barely visible in the fading glow of the last of the sunlight.

“What did you do?” He gestured at the dark city.

“I told you, I swept one of their larger connector generator centers. Now, you will empty your pack and recover my bone sack. They will be tracing the molcom implanted in your brain and that locator your parents implanted in your shoulder when they adopted you. The locator first as you will be seen as an immature adult for a short time, the molcom after that. First, my bones.”

“I’m going home. You are full of shit. I didn’t do anything wrong but play my video game.”

“With me in the room.” Kiena was enjoying being away from the electronic prison of the neighborhood and city. It would be even better once they got further away, into the quiet and clean of the real world.

“You aren’t real.” Mick said it aloud. “You are just a figment of my overactive imagination. Everyone says that’s my problem, I hear and see things that aren’t there. That’s why my mom took me to that psychiatrist so many times. He told her as long as they limited my games to RPG and three hours per day I would be fine.”

“And, you are going to say you adhere to those limits?” Kiena asked, using ring waves to check for approaching human signatures. So far, the nearby area remained clear. This close to her bones her abilities were strong. Still, she knew time was short, they needed to find a good graveyard before cutting out the Soek’s locator.

“So, if I am not real, you can’t be juiced by me. Right?” She continued, hardly listening to his chatter.

“What do you mean, juiced?”

“I gore you with what you call energy. If you are correct, if I’m not real, nothing happens. If I am real, you will writhe in pain and delay us.”

“Gore me?” He didn’t like the sound of that, not while looking at her twisting horns that seemed even brighter than before, as if they really did conduct energy. He shook his head, he had to get a grip.

“I do have horns.” Kiena gestured with her head as if enjoying his thoughts.

“You aren’t real.” Mick insisted. “You are blue like a blue holograph.”

“You see poorly due to sloth and lack of training.” Kiena swung her head again. She was enjoying the thought of goring the boy, it would be fun.

“My eyes are perfect, the eye doctor who checked me said so.”

“For a human, your eyes are minimally average. For a Soek, your eyes are barely able to see me so you equate that minimal vision to what I am. Fool. Like all Soek, you are stupid.”

“I’m not stupid.”

“You know next to nothing. You are weak and give in to your inner desires when you know they are faulty. You lie to yourself. Weak. Stupid.”

Mick recoiled. He sometimes did have thoughts that everything around him was sort of like his online games, a layer of illusion. No one knew that. She didn’t know that. She couldn’t know that. She wasn’t real, she was just a figment of his imagination. He repeated it over and over in his head as if to make the thought become solid.

“Gore or not?” Kiena was ready to get her bones and move on. He remained younger than she might wish but he was minimally functional, her own impatience would wait no longer for him to mature.

Mick shook his head. He was remembering the half a dozen holes in his carpet that his mother demanded he explain. Kiena holes. He couldn’t explain them and he also remembered his still tingling finger tips and palms, burnt from an electrical surge that looked like it took out the entire city. Her words of ‘juicing’ him scared the crap out of him.

“No goring.” He said aloud, swallowing his desire to make her prove she existed.

She snickered. “Coward.” She said, almost dancing on the ground. It was the first time he’d seen her move as if she could run, jump, climb and maybe do things he couldn’t imagine. He felt like he was just noticing things, like she had hidden herself from him. He puzzled over how he had seen her now for what seemed like more than an hour.

“My bones.” She said, pointing toward the pile of rocks covered in the thorny bush.

He frowned, he had to fight this and go home. With the city dark security would go to a curfew and he couldn’t be found outside after curfew or he would be in serious trouble. As a hallucination she would have access to everything in his mind, he guessed, so that explained how she knew where the cemetery bones were buried, the ones he’d dug up and stolen almost three years ago.

“My bones are real enough in your plane of reality.” She seemed to answer his thoughts.

“They aren’t yours. They are just random bones from an unmarked grave on the edge of that cemetery. I made up the story that you exist. That’s all.”

“Let’s recover them now. I have let you leave them here long enough. Disrespectful you are. You will do a better job this time.”

He shook his head.

“Do you wish me to exercise force?” She asked.

He could see her features, see her mouth bending upward into a ferocious grin, one with fangs. She had fangs. He licked his lips. “You can’t make me. You are an illusion.” He tried to sound firm, strong.

“Stupid Soek. Recover my bones!” She coated the second words with Vrill into compelling Speech. She laughed as he staggered forward, fighting every step, heading directly into the thorny bush where it scratched at the skin on his exposed hands as he pulled it away from the pile of rocks.

“I hate you.” He yelled at her. He couldn’t stop even when he was bleeding. He cursed under his breath. Why had her tone sounded so different on those last words, the ones he couldn’t escape? He felt like he could physically feel the words creeping through his brain, killing his efforts to resist. Sweat bloomed on his forehead.

She laughed, enjoying his blooding and struggle, wishing she could lick. She missed the taste of fresh blood, even Soek blood. It was beyond time to find her way back into a fur sack for fun. Wrecking havoc along the way would also be enjoyable. She was too long forgotten and those who had allowed this to be so, she would find them and mete out equal vindictive pleasure on them. Isolation had altered her, forced her to become resourceful. She would carry that knowledge into her next full life cycle. The prospect pleased her. She allowed the Soek boy to move more slowly than he should until finally the ragged sack holding her boiled bones was pulled free of the stony shelter she had made him make years earlier. Intact. She grinned.