Caustic. Chapter One (Draft)

0.1 BORN DEAD

I was born dead. Doctors would’ve preferred to use euphemistic terms like stillborn or DOA. But those epithets would’ve apposited the arrival of my festering flesh about as aptly as asbestos swaddling would have been suited to smother and abort a supposedly newborn savior. That’s not to sound sacrilegious. It’s simply a way to underscore the severity of my traumatic introduction into this wicked world.

My neonate cadaver was exhumed from the womb/tomb of my mother’s corpse as a mere formality at Mezhgorye’s local military hospital. She’d already been summarily assessed as DOA herself, and by the time doctors had performed a c-sectioning excavation of my unresponsive carcass, it wasn’t even alive enough to warrant wiping off before placing it back atop her rueful remains like some bundle of befouled and wilted funeral-flowers. However, they had seen fit to drape a burial blanket over our gruesome gurney before wheeling it all down to the hospital’s dungeon-morgue.

There was no interest or impetus to necessitate an autopsy either. So, our familial filth was directly discarded like a dead man’s losing hand and discretely filed back into the deck of a neatly numbered cryo-cold cabinet. We were meant to await administrative approvals for the water-cremation (aka resomation) of our quickly freezing remains in accordance with those neoteric Kuru mandates that had just been made in response to an emerging outbreak which would later come to constitute an apocalyptic epidemic in ways which I will chronicle in due time. But by some morose miracle, the mortuary’s mutinous employees had decided not to fulfill all their official duties before having left early that night.

Then, some hours after having been interred in that infernal freezer, the sordid sounds of infant-screams had suddenly and inexplicably erupted from my cryo-crypt. An anonymous janitor had been mopping up nearby with loose earbuds blaring away until she’d inadvertently shaken one out of her left ear and heard my horrid cries echoing down the desolate hallways like demonic tremors rippling through accursed airs. A cold chill had shot up her spine and she’d crossed herself before fleeing in frigid fear. She’d kept praying and screaming in stupefied syllables, intensely imploring her glorious god to help her find someone valorous enough to vanquish my horrible hollers from her unconsolable ears while her feet had slipped and slid all over the soaking wet floor, sending her heaping mass continuously crashing into everything around her.

This jumbled janitor had managed to make it as far as the foot of the elevator before she’d finally fainted at the sight of its doors yawning open to deliver the hospital’s blood-soaked Commander directly into this confounded catabasis. The Commander had remained frozen like a motionless monument of maternal mourning, holding her own blanketed heap of lifeless flesh in her emaciated embrace as she’d stared through sorrow-saturated eyes at the confused chaos of the collapsed custodian. A long and mummified moment festered before her muted mind could make any sense of what her normally brilliant blue eyes were seeing. She’d been well known as an incredibly discerning and decisive leader, but the tragedy she’d just endured had effectively eviscerated and emptied out every thinking and feeling part of her.

A mere moment before she’d entered that morgue-bound elevator, the Commander had suffered her own most mournful miscarriage. After having been informed of her infant’s instant and inconceivable fate, she’d stubbornly insisted on delivering her devastating bundle of stillborn sorrows to the hospital’s morgue by herself. She’d somehow hoped that this desperate act would’ve afforded her stillborn’s soul at least one, singular, loving embrace before its indelicately mandated immolation.

That’s why the sight of this collapsed custodian could barely even register behind her sorrow-soaked eyes which were still desperately drowning in an ongoing deluge of delirium and despair. And just as the Commander’s eyes and mind had adjusted themselves enough to properly perceive this sordid scene, a subtle snippet of sound had softly swept against her unsuspecting ears as my recently reincarnated cadaver had managed to reanimate its mouth around yet another inarticulately agonized annunciation.

My cryo-afflicted cadence had already become quite dull- decaying and diminishing exponentially as I’d weakly waged an already waning war against death’s cold and tightly clenching clutches around my critically hypothermic cadaver. My ever-weakening whimpers wafted through the hindering hallway like a faint and fading fog, drifting just far enough to haunt the edge of the epidermis around Commander’s ears. And though they were not robust enough to enter her higher mind as intelligible sounds, my tremulous tones were somehow able to speak directly into the soul of her skin, commanding it to shrivel and shudder in a sudden plague of pallor as my morose message was miraculously manifested in the subdermal layers of her instinctual skin.

Her mouth autonomously grimaced with an impossibly greater grief than she’d already been afflicted, and she’d gasped at the abominable epiphany her skin had indeed just absorbed and encrypted in the blood that rushed to flood her mind. She’d swiftly and instinctively snatched up the elevator’s phone with an automated motion and kicked one of her reflexing feet forward to trip the safety-sensor, keeping the elevator’s un-dinging doors from slinking shut.

As she’d waited with frozen ire for the hospital’s gauche, gargoyle-like guard to awaken and end his derelict delays to answer her call, the insane imagery of this collapsed cleaning-lady had become clear enough to elicit a slight sense of active annoyance, as she’d noticed that this fainted face had failed to comply with the nascent mask-mandates.

At the death of the dial tone, her almost pre-recorded voice didn’t waste any time waiting for the guard to wake his tongue. She’d promptly interrupted his pre-syllable silence and ordered him through her own minutely muffled m-95 mask to dispatch a doctor directly to that dungeon. She’d proceeded to somewhat shakily step out of the elevator and check the janitor’s jugular to find a faint pulse. Then she’d inexplicably reached into her pocket with one hand to procure an extra mask and carefully place it over the custodian’s face while clinging quaveringly to her limp bundle with her other arm’s unwavering love.

The Commander’s feet had foolishly fought against the frictionless floor, attempting to scootch the custodian’s hindering heap against one side of the hallway. She’d soon realized the futility of this fight and made an impromptu decision to swing her smooth-soled feet over this human hurdle. But when her soles had surmounted that inanimate encumbrance and landed on the other side, she’d instantly swirled and slid atop the mop-slickened floor.

Her balance barely remained upright as streams of spasmic maneuvers toggled her between flailing footsteps and skittering surf-slides. Without ever fully recovering a favorable footing, she’d desperately surged toward my morgue-based moans. She’d barely managed to avoid bashing her own burdening bundle of stillborn sorrows against the bland beige walls as she’d continuously teetered on the edge of a constant collapse, perpetually postponing a planting fall with unconsciously controlled contortions. When she did finally find her way to the morgue’s derelict door, her bundle had somehow remained safely buried in her immortally enduring embrace.

Her infant-free hand had flailed to find the doorknob and she’d tried to lean on it enough to steady her feet as she’d grasped ahold of it. But the door had been left carelessly unlatched, forcing her to sling it violently inward against the wall as she’d stumbled into the morgue, and finally unfolded herself upright enough to find her first stable footing there. This intolerable infraction of the unsecured door had stoked a stinging sense of outrage in her. But she’d refused to think of anything more than where my now almost imperceptible infant-sighs might still be summoning her suffering skin.

She’d slung cryo-cabinets outward wildly, leaving them open when nothing more than frail and frozen fatalities slid out to stare lifelessly back into her bulging blue eyes. When she’d finally traced down that icy slab from which my sparse and subtle squalls still just barely seeped, she’d almost skipped ahead to the next cryo-cabinet, as my susurrus murmurs had fallen mute and my incessant stirring had become frozen stiff at the sudden shock of her hand ripping back the burial blanket to reveal my blue and bloodied baby’s body.

She’d been forced to place her own stillborn bundle right next to my own barely undead cadaver, resting it atop that same aborted abode upon which I’d recently been interred. Then she’d raised me from that macabre burial mound and baptized me in the morgue’s sordid sink where so much blood had been scrubbed and drained away by those now absent hands which had habitually held death as its casually disgusted couriers. The freshly flowing water had slowly absolved my forsaken infant skin of that bitter-most cold and the brittle crystalline blood which had half-petrified my bones like fossils trapped within my near-fatally afflicted flesh.

The Commander’s own emotional state had instantaneously become numbly frozen by my filth-frosted flesh when she’d first hoisted me into her hands. She’d been utterly dumbfounded at the impossibly icy chill of my frozen infant skin and the even more chilling silence of my black but blinking eyes which stared straight back into her soul. I’d sustained my disquieting calm even as vital signs so slowly seeped back into my slothfully thawing skin. According to her later accounts, those cryo-cold cries I’d proffered in the penultimate moment to her most admirable arrival and rescue of my inconceivably cold cadaver had been the only occasion she’d ever witnessed me announcing my own agonies.

But then, why should I? What could ever be decried aloud by any soul that had been so silenced by death, before being resurrected back into any realm of blood and breath, however horrid? And in a world which echoes nearly every cry to and from an endless audience of unhearing ears, what use is there in bleating such babble into any breath anyway?

I must admit that this terrible tale of my befuddled birth was never told to me by anyone alive. But I eventually inherited the truth of this tale in sealed confessions and relayed professions of those that could not allow these facts to fester inside their fading and formerly conspiratorial corpses. It would become incumbent upon me to piece the total truth together, yet certain details do remain unresolved even now.

One such indeterminate detail has to do with the shared fate of the janitor, security guard, and doctor that were all called to respond to my morose miscarriage. They were all officially designated as deceased on this same sordid night. The janitor’s cause of death had been denoted as complications due to cardiac arrest. Presumably, she’d had a slew of preexisting conditions that’d made my haunting cries too horrific for her ailing heart to handle. Either that, or her lack of mask-compliance had surrendered her to a rare and rapidly progressing strain of Kuru.

Strangely, the security guard had reportedly responded to that dungeon with his revolver drawn and his finger at the ready. He’d accidentally discharged a round directly into the doctor’s defenseless skull as he’d stumbled out of the elevator and onto that insanely slippery floor. Then, this disturbed guard had indiscernibly decided to drag both the dead doctor and unresponsive janitor down the hallway to that door on the outer edge of the morgue.

The Commander had heard the guard’s gunshot erupt and echo some redundant number of recursive returns into her ringing ears. She’d instinctively rushed to lock the morgue’s door while letting water continue washing over my still thawing skin and she’d returned just as promptly to ensure my salvation. By then the filth had been rinsed away from my flesh quite cleanly, and she’d swiftly shut off the faucet to silence any sound from seeping into that haunting hallway and surrendering our presence to any unseen predatory threat.

Her hands had patted my pallid and shivering skin dry with paper towels. Then she’d secured me against her own skin and blanketed me in her still maternally bloodstained blouse. She’d placed her lips at the entrance to my ear and softly prayed an arbitrary shush into it. I’d remained almost ominously hushed and buried within her embrace as the dragging sounds of the disgraced guard approached and ceased at the very edge of the dividing doorway.

The Commander tightly stuffed my eyes against her skin and squeezed my ears in a burying embrace, trying to muffle my infant senses from what was about to ensue. The gauche guard moaned several times in inarticulate despair before he’d yawped his equivocally incoherent, final valedictions unto either the Commander or some equally unresponsive god. And upon uttering his last languished laments, he’d sent another violent gunshot’s shockwaves throbbing through the door.

A tense and trembling moment held like the dead hands of a broken clock. The Commander waited for the silence to surrender a sense of static safety before extending an un-cradling hand to slowly switch the lock soundlessly open. She’d surgically severed a slowly spreading sliver from the doorframe so her eye could steal a glance. On the floor outside, she could see blood hemorrhaging from the guard’s head and flooding down that heap of bodies beneath him. She’d carefully avoided disturbing any of the evidence left in the wake of this inexplicable mess and crept back to the elevator’s phone to ring the appropriate authorities, which in this case was quite the opposite of the police.

Of course, the official records of this wreckage all had to be made and mended as carefully as any mortal wound to protect the hospital, the Commander, myself, and even the befuddled bodies in the basement. The Commander had to ensure that all official records corresponded to the proper conclusions and not necessarily the ones I’ve already illustrated thus far. However, an unreliable source would later claim that these three departed souls had actually been exterminated to eliminate any administrative complications at the conspiratorial behest of the Commander herself. But I can neither objectively attest to any veracity within this claim nor honestly admonish it in full. Thus, I’ve reluctantly resolved to include this inconclusive and personally inconceivable accusation as an offering of transparency unto truth.

What is quite clear is that the Commander had confidently concluded at some point that neither my mother’s DOA corpse nor my own excavated cadaver had any claims to any form of a father. According to the Commander’s later accounts, this had caused her immense distress at the time, as she’d known all too well that this fact would’ve prevented anyone from adopting me outright. At that time, all orphans without directly surviving ancestry were required by law to be placed into public custodianships. And she’d known firsthand what atrocities awaited all those souls that were shunted into such sinister agencies of child services.

So the Commander waved her powerful pen over the pertinent paperwork like a magic wand to mend my name and cleanse her soul of an unbearable, extended, maternal morning. She became my mother of record, and her own miscarriage was forged into an effigy of my own undone extinction. I was given a name I shall never give you, as it never truly belonged to me enough to rightly offer anyone. And as for this saint that saved me as no other miraculous mother ever known, I shall protect the sanctity of even her sobriquets and strictly refer to her here with great reverence as my Mother of Record.

Make no mistake. I have no claim on her, no misgivings, no malign. She’d made a pure-hearted claim upon me, but I still have no right within my own mind to call her mine. As magnificent of a mother as she always was to me, and as I still remember her to be, I’ve never felt as if I were a proper son or person. And it would be an unbearable blasphemy to even insinuate otherwise.

Before I’d assembled all these facts about my entry into existence, my Mother of Record had always refrained from detailing anything about my origins. She would only occasionally answer any questions of my father’s identity by subtlety insinuating something to the effect that he was not with us and would not likely be present at any future point in my existence. There was a certain woundedness in her voice whenever she’d professed this truth, and I’d always assumed that my father had either died tragically or despicably departed before my birth. Even after all I’ve gathered, this is the truth I still choose to hold above any conflation of facts.

Ultimately, these details of my birth are largely irrelevant and have only become distressing to me now that they’ve been foisted upon me in the aftermath of so much else. Although, I must admit that I’ve long suspected that some part of me may have never been allowed to properly form due to the lack of some nutritional truth which my soul had been deprived of at some point in my development. The omission of my origin’s full disclosure is obviously one potential proof of such a suspicion. However, I still wonder if my soul was disfigured in some other manner during its development, as even after having considered all these notions, I still feel a sense that my spirit had been further flawed in the way of a flower long deprived of certain nutrients or a tree whose growth was greatly stunted by tightly shunted roots.

Although, even if my spirit had been starved or scarred through this confused conception of mine or any other confounding chaos, I would really be no different from every other entity that was ever born upon this earth. I mean, who in this horrid hell has ever formed any identity on their own that hasn’t festered in falsehoods and insufficiencies? And don’t we all suffer from an immense if not infinite confusion as to what role the forces of fate impose on us through the infectious nature of this malnourishing and maliciously deceitful world which tells us who we are and what we must become at every inciting, instigating, or impelling turn, even before our very inception?

Of course, it’s my contention that the invisible essence of these things that manipulate and mangle our souls into confused and contrived misconceptions of what we truly are, can in fact be understood and explained. However, I must take care to ensure that the light I intend to transfuse into your awareness and understanding is allowed to seep into your sentience slowly rather than blinding your mind with blunt bursts of explicit explanations. So, forgive me for refraining from further stating my epiphanies at this early onset.

Anyway, I believe I’d merely mentioned the fact that I’d been born during the early days of that now infamous Kuru epidemic somewhere before my last digression. This epidemic had motivated the Globally Organized Republics’ Executive Directorate (GORED) to enact a series of emergency mandates. One of them had required all newborn babies to be isolated in incubation chambers until it could be ensured that they were not already infected or at any increased risk of becoming infected with Kuru. This meant that I had to be kept in almost complete isolation for no less than the first full year of my existence.

This mandate was so strictly enforced that it had caused me to be transferred almost directly from that cryo-cold crypt into an isolated incubator, like a corpse transplanted from one secluded casket and into another. From my lifeless entry into this wayward world and throughout much of my lonesome endurance, I was forced to struggle within some shell or cell just to exist. Although, my own incubator was not such a restrictive place when compared to those protective tombs so many of my so-called peers were shunted into at that same time.

My incubator had been specially equipped at the behest of my Mother of Record and with assistance from the Odarenny Operatsiya, aka the OO or Double-O. They’d been conducting classified research on the optimization of infant aptitudes at that same time, and my Mother of Record had been selected to peer-review many of their studies. She’d already known both the powerful potential of this project and the devastating developmental damage likely to ensue as an alternative result of the maligned mandates on isolated incubation. And there was no way she would ever leave me so alone to cry unto the unhearing ears of oblivion like so many other infants of that time.

So, my incubation chamber was well-appointed with auditory and visual apparatuses that allowed special programing and educational content to stimulate and shape my budding brain. At times I was blindfolded with hi-fi headphones secured to my ears which piped in binaural beats, kaleidoscopic soundscapes, and meditative voiceovers which spoke to me in multiple languages. These assorted sounds were specifically calibrated and orchestrated to organize my emerging mind like an auditory mold around the biological assembly-ooze of my materializing mind. Essentially, these sounds functioned in the same way as pre-hypnosis techniques which had been further designed to scientifically stimulate developing brain cells, optimize intelligence, and promote cognitive coherence.

The existing research had already pretty much concluded that these auditory efforts could ensure the development of higher IQs, perfect pitch, and an increased aptitude for creativity. They’d also shown significant statistical correlations for increased synesthetic associations in many of the subjects exposed to these visual and sonic structures. It had been strongly hypothesized that by exposing infants to a progression of deliberately controlled stimuli which were arranged in orders of clearly logical progression and coherently increasing complexity, the infants could effectively be pre-programmed into having an increased aptitude for complex pattern recognition and a more generally well-organized coherence of thought.

In any case, I was sent to soak in my special incubation chamber with such strangely calibrated sounds while the whole outside world was kept as far away from me as slumber from an insomniac. My reality began as a series of carefully constructed dream-prompts which guided my mind along a predetermined and optimized path while my budding brain was glued together like some sort of popsicle-stick kingdom of conscripted meditative consciousness.

The sounds of seascape waves, windswept skies, and the cacophonous creatures of some generic jungle were the only natural world I was allowed to know. Their order was ordained to me with hypnopaedic precision, so that there was no doubt in my developing mind that the true chaos of nature was no more than a misunderstood complexity which was incumbent upon me to master and organize in accordance with some stronger sense of lucidity.

I may have learned more in my first year of formulated lessons than most minds could manage to make sense of in their first few decades. In conjunction with these auditory prescriptions my ears had absorbed, I was made to witness an endless stream of visual presentations which effectively injected correlating content into my eyes. My ability to perceive the most miniscule color variances was refined beyond the typical range of trichromats through these vividly defined visuals, and my eyes’ perceptual acuity developed into the upper extents of testable tetrachromacy. I was also programmed to apply this trained-in talent to master and memorize things like the periodic table of elements, the various classification levels of biological organisms, and the geological eons, eras, and epochs of our earth’s stone-layered history.

My mind was so hyper-stimulated by such an endless stream of information that it was as if entire encyclopedias of knowledge were constantly being injected directly into a series of ever-deepening aquifers of intel beneath the soils of my sentience. Before my mouth could even manage most words, I could instinctively spell almost any word in no less than eight unspoken languages. I could balance complex chemical equations in my head, and I could imagine myself humming or whistling along to entire classical compositions from an extensive cannon of notable musical masters. By the time the Kuru mandates were finally modified to allow me access to reality, I may have even accumulated more factual knowledge of the world than many acclaimed academics.

Additionally, my limbs were wired into an array of apparatuses which helped me develop gross, complex, and refined motor skills and reflexes. This taught my body how to move and balance long before I was given enough space to test my actual ability to walk on my own or explore the outside earth. Such coordinated motions were also installed into my incipient muscular memory before I’d developed much of an independent will to initiate them or establish much dominion over them. This was akin to granting my limbs a mind of their own and an incredible autonomy of motion, like an appetite originating in the mouth and commanding the jaw to bite before a mind can even become aware of the act, much less consider the nature of such cravings.

I was also kept on a carefully formulated diet which had been proven to increase muscular development, build strong bones, and promote overall physical health as well. All these things were intended to contribute to the creation of an optimized specimen in which to house whatever human spirit I could bring to haunt or inhabit it. Essentially, I was scientifically designed to be everything humanity aspires to be.

I don’t say this to brag, even if my Mother of Record found every opportunity to do so on my behalf, especially before she was allowed to interact with me without a divisional layer of glass between us. In fact, I tell you of my training and subsequent sentience as much more of a cautionary concern. You see, when I was eventually evicted from my incubation chamber and cast out into this wicked world, it was perhaps even more chaotic and tragic than my initial inception into that cryo-cold cadaver-cabinet could have ever been.

I’d had no real-life experience or exposure within my blood to flow between my pre-programmed mind and the inherent chaos of the world which slithered against my no-longer-secluded skin. Everything that had happened after my extended incubation was experienced as an incomprehensible trauma for more years than I can accurately attest, as I wasn’t even able to sense it all as such. My knowledge of the world was so much more advanced than the actual state of the world, that I’d found myself stumbling through life as if my head were stuck in some second-rate augmented reality helmet that refused to release me from its demented death-grip.

And that’s not to mention all those continuing conditions of the Double O’s other educational experiments conducted on me throughout my young years. Nor is it to convey the impossibility of slumber it all induced on me as a result of this hyper-hypnotic over-simulation. But of course, I will explain all of that in due time.

After the Eschaton...

Shadows swing where kids once lived before the eschaton. The darkness reigns where light is now unbroken by bodies turned to ash and dust. The winds no longer roar against the ears that never listened to their warnings anyway. Radiation mocks the sun that rises without witness here beyond the days now lost. 

The dust can't care about the space between the dust to dust or ashes to ashes where men once lived now that hands have left their garves unetched forever. The cockroach struts where shoes can't stomp him. Sewers turn to ponds and streams where creatures with dual heads open their third and fourth eyes to behold a beauty lost since Eden. Confusion has no host to lie in egotistical denials of its existence where the proud are shamed unto the same extinction as the humble dead. 

This is where the first chapter of another tale begins. The story now forgets of man and all his loss. It knows no joys or sorrows of his departed mind. His dreams sleep only in the minds of those who will not wake upon this plane. Here the life remains as prey and predator without gods to ask or answer for the blood they shed nor swallow. Intelligence is in the jaws and claws that conquer every cleverness the skull cannot command to slash or bite more aptly than some other.

This is the world that always was without the world man thought would be and imagined as if it truly was. Here is what our kind betrayed while betraying itself and so much else, but what remains as true as always to all things. Nature never cared for man, but never feigned to either, even as men sought to change it, tame it, or transcend it. 

The game goes on, unplayed. The war rages on, unwaged. The silence waits without a word to say. The nights and days go on unmarked and unmeasured by clocks whose hands point to numerals as nonsense and quotas whose tallies all sumed unto nothing all along.

What other end could there have been and what is it that begins beyond? The question is not asked. The answer is inherited by oblivion. And that is all there ever was to be now that our kind is not to be...