Chapter 111: Chapter 107

Experimentation got us further than I expected. A Sentinel in the Fallen River containment bunker made the delivered prisoner from Tleilax touch the marble altar, and then kept the man bound as I kept track of his mutation in the console. The new stats appeared like before, though no immediate change took effect. 

 

Good news for the prisoner, the stats could be deleted.

 

Bad news for him, I made him get the stats again before putting him in a cell.

 

I had the conscripted test subject enjoy a few nights in a comfortable cell prepared in the bunker, and kept my eye on him. It took two nights before he reported having nightmares.

 

“They’re looking at me…” he stammered, still sweaty from waking up with a scream. I had quickly gotten to his cell to interrogate him, wanting my source fresh and clear considering how we’re dealing with dreams here. “So many missing faces, all looking at me…”

 

The terror in his eyes as he looked wide-eyed at me actually surpassed the usual fear of enduring Blacksite Tleilax’s tests. I remained quiet as he gathered his wits, ignoring the trembling on the former raider and concentrating on his recollection and his console stats.

 

“So many faceless heads. So angry…so hateful…so angry…”

 

“What are they angry about?” I asked after it was clear he was clear he was about to go on a loop. The afflicted man just shook his head frightfully and buried his face in his pillow.

 

It went on for a few more days, and I almost felt pity for the test subject after watching how he failed to enjoy sleep for more than five minutes. Not that he wanted to fall asleep, despite his exhaustion. He’d wake up screaming every time, and every time it was the same deal of being stared down by countless faceless things.

 

The console showed him slowly progressing in some of the Faceless stats, though I didn’t know whether the cap for them ended in tens, hundreds or even thousands.

 

Did I have the patience to wait it out?

 

At the rate things were going, no. Precious days were being wasted here, so I acted on a hunch to try speeding things up.

 

That the ex-raider was screaming as the Sentinel carried him over to the altar was a good sign, if you looked at my way. From the safety of an adjacent viewing room, I watched the man’s stats rocket up as he was dropped onto the marble block. He screamed in agony, despite no clear sign of pain, physically or console wise.

 

Then I noticed the “Faceless=True” trigger as various stats hit a hundred or a thousand, and the man’s screams got drowned out by his own mouth literally melting away as his jaws were forced shut by the growth of new bone. The Sentinel was already wrapping its tentacles around him to keep him from acting out, so I got a clear view as eyeballs and nose sunk and smooth skin replaced them, and the room’s microphones picked up the soft, cracking sound of bone growing and fusing.

 

As the now fully Faceless man writhed violently in an attempt to break free. I noted how a lot of the exotic stats disappeared from console, leaving only a few of the Faceless variables for display. Not exactly sure what that means, but it’s clearly not good.

 

With the struggling figure still tightly contained by the Sentinel, I gave the order for the bot to send the former prisoner for dissection. 

 

I was there to watch every step of the careful dissection of the Faceless-afflicted that Cabal had selected. Even watching from a distance, I could feel a wrongness trying to seep into me when I stared too long at the featureless face.

 

As the skin of the face was peeled back and the bony plate slowly cut apart, the whole deformed head structure became clear to see. X-rays and scans gave a decent picture, but seeing the wet, glistening organs for real was a completely different experience.

 

The poor sod’s jaws and teeth had fused up to join with the rest of the face plate, but his tongue had enlarged and completely filled the cavity that appeared where his upper palate once was to divide mouth from nostrils. With the discovery of new receptors on that swollen tongue, Eva speculated that the organ served as a sensory replacement, detecting vibrations from the face plate it was pressed against.

 

It made some sense, but it didn’t explain how these Faceless could tell robots and humans apart if all they have to go by are vibrations, especially when it was confirmed that the ear canal was also sealed up and the hearing organs were missing.

 

Other than bone and tongue, the head also contained the utterly fucked up brain. Carefully cutting away the top of the skull to expose and extract that organ, I thanked my console for being able to lock my stats, otherwise I’d be puking my guts out at the sight of the thing. It looked like a brain-shaped sponge, except that it was pulsing in a sickening way, with a viscous, pink-tinted goo oozing in and out through its countless pores.

 

After testing the brain matter, I could picture Eva’s confusion as she reported that the spongy structure was made of some foreign carbon makeup, devoid of the usual brain cells and blood vessels. It wasn’t even connected to the spinal cord. The goo was another unidentified mess, though according to the microscopes, Eva said that there were analogs to cells in it.

 

Doesn’t help the nightmares, but sure.

 

Beyond the face plate and strengthened bones and muscles, nothing else looked out of place for a human body, though the blood test came back with an anomalous result…something about unidentified antibodies. The rest of the dissection was not noteworthy, and the operation finished with no issues. 

 

Since we didn’t know the biological dangers of the mutated brain stuff, I had the corpse Death Gated instead of the usual waste removal processes.

 

I held back a sigh and called Eva to send in the next test subject. This time I had him pressed against the altar, and it took only a minute of contact before he screamed and lost his face. No changes to the altar, no new development to the faceless. As before, once the transformation took place, the Faceless stats couldn’t be deleted. I tried having the Sentinel let go of him, and he ran straight at the observation window, somehow detecting me behind it as he flailed away like a madman.

 

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Faceless lines popped up on my stats, which I immediately deleted as I kept staring at the subverted prisoner. 

 

This sucks. The eldritch bullshit being undetectable by conventional means is going to be a massive weakness for my Nexus unless I can figure out a way to correct it. 

 

And I know that there’s more than this Faceless whatever thing out there to deal with.

 

How do I screen for sleeper cultists and the like? How do I stop them from wreaking havoc within my borders? How do I stop them from harming my people, and more importantly, my girls?

 

I called for the Sentinel to bind this latest Faceless, then entered the altar room to join him. This time, I had the bot force him onto the altar again, and then I spawned a blade and tried the classic ritual of cutting the former human across the throat and letting his blood spray onto the marble slab.

 

Of fucking course the altar glows with a baleful red light. Of fucking course it now has new stat lines.

 

“Faceless.Awake=0.015%”

“Faceless.Str=15”

 

Seeing those lines, and seeing the fading glow pissed me off for some reason. I was angry at the time already wasted, angry at the time and energy that would be wasted just to keep this thing from causing further trouble, and I was ultimately angry that this stupid world contained such bullshit.

 

We had here a fucking stupid altar that required a lot of sacrifices before the fucking stupid thing in it awoke, and it would then proceed to probably ruin the world with its fucking stupid eldritch powers. 

 

Fucking great.

 

I was tempted to break the damned thing, but the possibility of causing further harm by having whatever’s within escape or flee to another hiding spot restrained my impulses. Eva interrupted my silent raging with one of those rare high level overrides.

 

“Mama Murphy has requested to contact you.”

 

Huh… Oh yeah, I had an active psychic with me, how come I didn’t consider going to her for some potential insights? Fucking too many options to consider…

 

I left the containment bunker and set up the call. “Please tell me y-”

 

“The Faceless,” the weathered voice of Mama Murphy cut me words, “You’ll need to look into the bodies, cut what they have and paste it to yourself.”

 

I blinked in surprise. “You’ve got a vision?” She was supposed to be clean and sober for a while now, so her psychic gift shouldn’t have triggered.

 

“My last. Something as big as this, it burnt up every bit of my sight. At least I think it did.” I could almost hear the smirk at her last words. The future is a bit mutable, after all.

 

“Anything else I should worry about?”

 

“Break the altar before it does it by itself. Hmm… And when opening the third eye, use…” Her voice became highly puzzled suddenly. “Use…toggles, not numbers…? Huh. First time this didn't make any sense to me.”

 

Well, it did to me…somewhat.

 

After thanking the lady, I had the sacrificed Faceless on the dissection table and was standing right by it as the Sentinel went to work peeling away skin and bone again. I made it pause every now and then to pore through the console, making sure I didn’t miss any changes in even the most mundane stats.

 

No luck there, but I trusted the former druggie precog, because it’s about the best option I had right now, and called in the third test subject.

 

Third time’s the charm as they say, and I found the line not on the former raider, but on the altar itself as he was forced to make contact with it. It was a line that flickered so fast I would’ve missed it if I hadn’t gotten more used to the stream of lines that spouted out from the man that almost smothered its very brief appearance.

 

“Validate.Eldritch.True=True”

 

Validate?

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