Tales From the Mosspark Universe: Vol. 1 to 5: Tales From the Mosspark Universe

Suggested Reading Order

Chimera Syndrome Era (A Day After Tomorrow)

CHILD_2.0

FIRST TOOTH

SUPPORT GROUP

The Black Anomaly Era

SHIPWRECKED

TRAPPED

LAST OF THE LIGHT

The Black (Novel)*

REFUGEE INTERVIEW

SITE 315

ITEM A21-R83.03

ROOM TWO

Neo Tech Era (Dystopian Cyberpunk)

FRIENDS

JOB OFFER

JUMP DRIVE

FIRST DIVE

NEGOTIATIONS

ANTIHERO

MEETING GABRIEL

TEST FLIGHT

Dark Crypto (Novel)*

The Great Exodus Era (Space Opera)

CRASH

LEAVING EARTH

BAD SWAP

Infected (Book 1)*

Hunted (Book 2)*

Released (Book 3)*

SECOND CONTACT

Post Human Era (Post-Apocalyptic)

South of the Spire (Novel)*

Spear’s Journey (Novel)*

NAMING DAY

THE TRAIN

The Forgotten Earth Era (Space Opera)

MEAT

ROOM TWO

A ‘Thorne Inc.’ Short Story

THIS BATCH IS RUINED too, Janice stated, pushing back from the electron microscope’s monitor. Her hands came up to check the tight bun of dark hair on her head before adjusting her glasses. She recognized it as one of her obsessive compulsive tics. She realized she was doing it again, thrust her hands into the pockets of the pristine lab coat and scanned the shelves of alien artifacts and equipment.

This batch of extracted nanobots had been scraped from the inside of some container labeled D92-J73.92. It had shown no signs of life; no coaxing with electricity, radiation or gasses revived them. They were the same as D92-J73.91: dead.

The electron microscope sat across the room from the only two desks, one of which was occupied by her lab assistant, Yorick.

So what do you want me to do about it. He leaned back in his chair. His lab coat was covered in stains and smelled somewhat of body odor from lack of washing.

Dump it. We’ll start all over again in the morning.

Yorick leaned his head back and groaned. Really? That’s going to take all night to decontaminate the chamber.

You don’t have to. In fact, you don’t have to come in to work tomorrow. There are a lot of other janitors I can train to sterilize nanobots.

He grumbled a profanity and stood. Can we just do it tomorrow? I mean, it takes me an hour to get into the hazmat suit, and another two to do the cleaning.

Now! she stated, pointing across the room to the airlock door.

It’s New Year’s. I have a party to go to, he pleaded.

All the more reason to get this done now, rather than later. The previous offer still stands. Someone else can do the job for you if you want to clear out your desk.

Fine. Yorick peeled off his lab coat and tossed it onto the chair. His jeans and t-shirt were a statement against Janice’s professional attire.

Yorick shuffled across the floor, walking past the shelves of objects, boxes, and containers. It wasn’t that he hated the cleaning, it was that he disliked being near the ‘aquarium.'

Steeling his nerve, he stepped up to the airlock door and swiped his card. The panel on the heavy steel flashed green and he pushed inward, sealing it behind him. The small antechamber was populated by rows of large yellow suits, each with a large clear face-mask. Grudgingly he pulled one down from the wall and pulled it on, his shoes fitting into the oversized legs and attached rubber boots. Pulling it up his body, he thrust his arms into the sleeves, pressing his fingers into the thick rubber gloves.

Cursing, he reached back for the leash that attached to the long, vertical zipper. The heavy rubber of the gloves seemed to not feel the fabric. Frustrated, he took a break and sighed heavily before trying again. With renewed effort, he twisted and plucked the strip of fabric. Grasping it, he yanked hard out of frustration, pulling it high. The zipper stopped for a moment and his anger grew. Sweat beaded on his brow.

With a heave, he pulled past the sticking point of the zipper and completed its long journey across his back and up to his shoulder. Sealed in, he looked at the roll of yellow tape sitting on the nearby bench.

Screw it. The safety protocol was to tape all zippers, but Janice had long ago stopped helping him. Much of his frustration with the job stemmed from her day-to-day whining. She hadn’t helped him with taping for the last week or two, and it was impossible to reach over his own back.

For a moment, he looked back out the airlock door through the small window. Janice was taking her lab coat off and hanging it on the back of her chair. Her purse was already hanging off her shoulder.

Really? he called out. The airlock was sealed. He knew she couldn’t hear him. What a bitch.

Not wanting to pour salt into the wounds, he turned away to avoid watching her walk out the door. Angrily he shuffled towards the interior door. With his rubberized gloves, he clumsily lifted the door lever and pulled it open.

A yellow glow, like that of a fireplace, lit the far end of the short hallway. Three doors stood at the far end. Each contained different samples. The one which bothered him the most was A04-R33.8. He had nicknamed it the aquarium despite Janice’s pleadings not to call it that.

Yorick stepped down the hallway and peered inside the right door’s window. A clear, six-foot cylinder swirling with yellow particles stood in the middle of the room. It reminded him of a tornado made out of sparks or fire.

His thick glove reached up and tapped on the tiny window to the room. His knuckles rapped out a rhythmic beat. As usual, the swirling mass stopped moving and locked itself into a pattern.

Can’t get me out here, he said aloud. The confidence wasn’t strong in his voice. He cleared his throat. Lifting his middle finger, he waved it outside the glass at the tube.

The swirling lights resumed their tornado-like effect.

Pulling back, Yorick focused on the task at hand. The middle door: door number two. He had sterilized the room enough times that it was second nature. He could have done this in his sleep.

Lifting the lever and pushing inside, he closed the door behind him. The bright white light of the room highlighted the work he would need to do. She hated when there was residual carbon on the walls.

Walking to the center of the room, he reached up and lowered the electrical arcing arm, a long carbon filament with multiple pins coming from the bottom of it. The device reminded him of a meat tenderizer or a pair of golf cleats.

An electrical discharge would kill off all of the nanobots. He would then have to scrub the walls and spray them down with cleaner kept in room one. Mopping and drying the room would take another two hours. He hated the corners.

He complained to Janice that the room was way too big for the project, but she objected, stating it was what they had been given to work with. She had quipped that he was also all she was given to work with as well. He hated her.

In the interior, there was a large glass pan of metallic gray fluid. Janice had tried everything to get them to react. Nothing she did worked. Yorick realized he would probably have to clean this room another hundred times before either she used up the samples or she finally got something to work. The former was more likely than the latter.

Locking the arcing arm into place, he looked into the bowl right below it. The material seemed to shimmer when he stood near it. He had told this to Janice and she had just scoffed at him, telling him it was a trick of the light.

He dipped a finger into the mercury-like liquid and it rippled. Pulling his finger out, a tiny droplet remained on the gloves. She had told him the material was inert.

He brought it close to his face and peered at it. The gray-silver sheen seemed to vibrate for a moment. He wondered if it was because his hands were shaking.

He brought his finger to his thumb and tried to flick the material back into the bowl. It remained on his glove.

Yorick flicked again, but it stuck fast.

Dammit.

With extra wrist effort, he flicked hard. His arm collided with the side of the bowl. It resonated and the vibration exploded them into motion. They lifted and reached like tiny tendrils, before lowering.

What the hell?

He had never seen them move.

With a gloved hand, he rapped on the edge of the bowl. The tendrils shot up higher this time, looping, and lifting in the air against gravity.

Yorick laughed at the display.

Banging repeatedly against the bowl caused the tendrils to lift out of the bowl, raising up in a single pillar of material. The more he banged the edges, and the more consistent the sound, the more structured it became.

Janice is going to freak out. As he banged the edge and encouraged the resonating sound, he wondered if he would get a raise for this. Maybe she would treat him with a bit more respect.

He doubted it.

He banged hard on the edge with the expectation of just leaving them and heading home, but the bowl resonated for a moment. If Yorick had understood resonance theory, or the fact that the bowl was simply a disposable glass and not heat-treated glass, he might have been concerned about how strong it was, but with the final impact, it fractured. The safety glass exploded into tiny cubes.

Yorick watched the material raise one final time into a metal pillar, locking into place as though it had been poured into a tall glass and frozen.

Dammit. He looked around at the glass below him. The crystals had spilled across the floor. Bending down, he hastily swept them into a pile and then realized he would only cut open his gloves. There were cleaning materials in the other chamber. A quick sweep with a broom would sort out the mess. Yorick stood and shrugged.

He could blame it on the nanobots: tell Janice that they broke the glass.

The chamber didn’t have cameras and he looked around the top corners to confirm that she wouldn’t be able to see his folly.

Turning back to the material, he realized it was gone. His stomach lurched. The bowl that had contained it before had been shattered. He looked at his feet. It hadn’t reverted to its liquid state and spilled down onto the stainless steel floor.

Only the crystalline glass was at his feet.

He shuffled around the central pillar where the bowl had sat, looking for the pillar of metal. Had it evaporated?

A pressure on his shoulder made him pause. It was like a hand squeezing. Reaching up with his opposite hand, he felt for what was causing the pressure. Through the gloves, he felt a slug-like lump. It flexed in his grip and his hand retracted out of fear.

Immediately his face flushed and his heart began to hammer. His clumsy fingers tried to pull at it but the slug began to crawl down his back. Reaching around the back, he couldn’t touch the shifting mass. His throat hitched as he realized he hadn’t taped the zipper.

Panicking, he clutched and reached. Lowering himself to his knees, he leaned against the central pillar and grunted with frustration as he tried to scrape the offending mass from his back.

Inside the suit, he could hear a hissing noise.

Rising to his feet, he bolted for the door. The sterilizing spray would kill off any nanobots, but he needed to make it to the shower.

The itching started in the skin of his back even before his hand reached the door handle. It rose to a tingling pressure along his left side as he threw the door open.

It was inside the suit, he realized. Stumbling into the hallway, he reached up, yanking with black gloves on the zipper. Dry air rushed inward. He clawed at the suit. He peeled it off of his body as his left side began to go numb.

Looking at his hands, he couldn’t see any of the gray liquid on him. Suspecting that it was still in the suit, he threw it inside the chamber and yanked the door shut with his good arm. The fingers of his right arm danced across the control panel, entering his authorization code for sterilization.

Confirming the command twice, he watched as the room arced with the electrical discharge. Soot and smoke swirled inside.

His arm was still numb and it was spreading up his neck toward his face. Limping with a barely moving left leg, he forced himself toward the emergency shower in the hallway. The yellow cord dangled and he stepped underneath.

Peeling his shirt off, he could see his skin had darkened to a sickly gray along his left side. His heart skipped a beat and he felt a pressure in his chest. Crashing to his knees, he grasped the line pulling hard. The stench of the cleaning agent washed over him. The sulfur stench filled his nose. The numbness reached his face and he touched it with his good right hand. The skin felt clammy and cold.

Yorick's heart thudded in a two-step before stopping.

He crashed to the floor with his hand still wrapped around the emergency shower.

After a minute, the yellow liquid’s flow diminished. His gasping movement began to abate even as he fought the fading of his life.

The yellow light dancing through door number three built to a crescendo. It heard the microscopic machines communicating. The yellow, flame-like particles swirled and thrashed against the glass, sensing a long-forgotten presence. Each listened as the tiny particles invaded Yorick's dying flesh.

The lifeless body lay on the floor for an hour, graying as the alien nanobots explored the tissues, learning what they could of the new environment. Without instructions, they simply circulated, taking no action.

The yellow diluted acid began to soften and dissolve the skin. Hair dropped away to the metal floor. Cellular decay began quickly.

Amid the silence of the hallway, tendrils of energy reached out from behind the third door. They had been probing for a crack in their prison since arriving. The death of the man seemed too good to waste.

The complex message broadcast through the glass was weakened by the steel door, but it found its receivers. The nanobots halted their exploration and listened intently for instructions. Hours passed as they each heeded their new master’s commands intently.

The corpse’s finger twitched subtly as tight joints flexed. Degraded muscles argued against the contractions, but word spread throughout the body that repairs needed to begin. The softening skin slowly brightened from a dull gray to a white sheen. The damage from the acid had bleached out the color, but its integrity was reconstructed by the microscopic workers.

They flooded the brain, repairing what they could, but after hours, nothing remained of the man. The information stored on the pathways was barely enough to command the heart to begin to beat.

Neural pathways were rerouted, altered, and damages bypassed. The white, hairless body that had once been Yorick pressed from