Into the Nightmare

[Alex Mercer]

Jacob was out of his hair for the time being and his wounds were slowly stitching themselves together. Now was the perfect time to try and dig into the new memories, sort through the trash and the treasures. He only hoped that the simple civilians had any useful information at all, or else consuming them would have been for naught. He felt no sustenance from them…

He had long since forgotten about sleep. His body no longer needed it and even when he dared attempted such a thing, his dreams were naught but nightmares of all those he had ever consumed. Their voices were muted since coming here. He only heard screams and crying, but the individual voices, jeering him by name, had faded – much like the memory leading up to his, for lack of a better word, obduction into this strange world.

The Prototype allowed his eyes to close and listened to his heartbeat. It was not something he desired, but it was something he needed, for once: to sleep. It was less restful and more a search of the subconsciousness he had collected, walking through the minds of the consumed entities now within him. 

It was like grabbing a live wire each time he found something he wanted to know. Glimpses of memories forced to the forefront of his mind, causing him to writhe both in this realm of subconsciousness and his body in the real world. He saw everything through a veil, and things seemed to flow with an element of random.

“Daddy, I want to be a Prime when I grow up!” Says the spawn of Badrun. Mercer can see, through Badrun’s memory, the way the little girl’s face should have been. He could also see, from his own memory, the bloodied stump of a neck and flattened skull laying beside her from his own.

 “I’m afraid you can’t dear, you have to be born a Prime!” Badrun explained with a soft voice. He could see, through his daughter’s memories, Badrun’s strong jaw and neck, the way his eyes had a vibrant life to them. He could also see the tendrils ripping at his flesh, tearing him apart cell by cell and mutating each one into pure biomass.

The young boy appeared, as if walking into a room his subconscious had only just invented. There was another overlaid layer of gore upon the boy’s pristine features. “That’s stupid… Anyone should be able to be a Prime, its not fair if we can’t be Primes too…”

Suddenly the scene shifted to the family gathered on the couch. Jacob was there – but he did not have the same substance the others did. Jacob was a memory of a memory, mourning with his family of their loss.

Control was being pulled from the Prototype. He was slipping deeper, drifting from deep meditation to sleep, where memories turn to nightmares. Silhouettes filled in, weaving a wall of faceless, wailing people. Minds decayed by time spent scrambled in Mercer’s head. Even the Prototype’s original memories, the memories of Mercer, stood there amidst the sea of outlines. 

Alex Mercer stood there, staring the sentient virus down across the blank canvas of their combined subconscious. The mind of the Blacklight virus, stolen and compiled from so many consumed, and the original host’s consciousness, fragmented from death and pieced together only in part by the Prototype’s life after his apparent reincarnation as Codename Zeus.

Alex Mercer felt ashamed… In life he was a spiteful, arrogant, borderline sociopathic bastard, but he was not this horrid. “You took my life away… I CREATED you to HELP, and you KILLED hundreds – THOUSANDS of people.”

Zeus felt confused. It could hear the screams of so many, and the turmoil it had caused, but all it knew how to do was survive. It did not need comfort, it just needed a food source and information. It had taken the body of its creator, created in the fresh corpse a living cancer, a carbon copy with nothing but improvements. “But we are alive…”

“Are you?”

“I … I think….”

“I think, therefore I am… but you don’t think. You have others do it for you. Even your mind was once mine.” Alex stepped forward, laying a hand on the mangled skull of Badrun’s little girl. “I wanted to cure cancer… not become it.”

The virus-mind felt that blur wash over the crowd. There were so many forgotten faces; lingering images of things like ghosts of emotion. It was an oxymoron, a reminder of what he had forgotten. Mercer’s hand rose, and upon it sat a crow. It had been there the whole time, and yet the subconscious only just now manifested it.

Its eyes were so dark, so hungry. It looked at the virus as it would have looked at anyone else: as food. It had the same eyes the Virus had. Suddenly, the world was seen in shades of gray and the virus was looking at Alex from its perch upon the host’s arm. It tried to speak, but only squawked.

No longer did Mercer walk through memories. He dreamt. He just another facet of the greater subconscious, lost in the tides of the lament of so many. He squawked as Alex vanished and a sea of blank faces closed in. Their rigidity was lost and so many forms splash together like tidal waves, surrounding the crow in a whirlpool of anger, fear and woe. 

Nothing of the memories physically touched the crow, and it could not understand so many minds at once all it knew was the pain of trying. Glimpses of something, of nothing, of everything pry into the forefront of the bird’s brain but nothing was its own. The only crisp and clear thoughts he could see was that of Alex Mercer, the true Alex Mercer, standing within the torrent.

[Okor]

None were ever truly alone in the Omniverse. Omni watched over all, his puppets dancing on shining strings of Omnillium. Not even dreams could free one of his prisoners from his attentions, the Smiling One’s eternal grin shining down on them even when one fled to another unreality for refuge.

Not even dreams offered safety. If Omni could find his fancies within the aether, then Okor  would do the same. He walked the land of the unwaking, a wraith forged of corpse-gas and corroded steel. A gauntlet animated by ethereal flesh dragged through the stuff of dreams, leaving the aether tainted and twisted in his wake. The Astral ‘verse reeked of corruption and cancer, an aura of pestilence not perpetuated by the plague marine permeating the atmosphere.

The ravenous wraith glided over a collection of crystalline orbs, each demi-dimension reflecting a dreamer’s thoughts; scenes of passion, nightmares of blood and fire, surreal landscapes. All the madness and ambition a being could muster were poured into these spheres, fears and triumphs recounted eternally. Corrupted claws slid over these spheres, a fiery eye staring into their depths as he sought the one that had caught his attention.

It lay before him, a black pearl filled to the brim with black tumours and dreams turned dark and sour. His claws ran over it, carving leylines into the surface of the globe, unhallowed markings marring its sable surface. Green flame burned across his armoured visage, fangs of fire blossoming into a smile. His ephemeral form dissipated, wisps of tainted energies slipping inside the dreamer’s mind.

***

Whatever Okor had expected when he entered this strange realm of unreality, it was not this. A tide of lost souls surged forward, men, women, children, each of them bearing the wounds that laid them low. A carrion bird squawked and screeched, desperately keeping itself aloft over the unliving tide, pitch-black pinions flapping frantically. A single figure stood stoically amidst the endless horde of the fallen, hooded and hidden amongst the thousand fallen surging around his stationary position.

What kind of mind was this? It was diseased, sick, ravenous with hunger. Yet here it was, assailed by those left in its ruinous wake, a mere scavenger surrounded by… guilt?

Okor descended in a stream of sickly smoke, green wisps of toxin seeping into the corpses stumbling towards the raven. Some of them were already bleeding together, vague memories of fear, hate, and pain amalgamating into abominations of grief and agony. Flesh and bone was forced together as this immaterial invader made his presence known, the tide of guilt-induced nightmares stalling as they were pulled back towards the gangrenous giant, absorbed into its growing mass.

Fingers formed of the flesh of the fallen grasped at the earth, a torso stitched together from a hundred corpses rising from the ground, a single horn rising from a cyclopean visage as it stared out at the two entities who had resisted its arrival. Raw Omillium and force of will had drawn the dead together, and in the darkness, it had bound them together into a form worthy of Okor’s arrival.

The raven and the man glared at the newcomer. The scavenger was a beast for whom fear was a foreign concept, while the man was long past the point of fear. For the moment, they were united in annoyance, curiosity, and confusion: Something had breached the sanctum of their mind. Okor paid it little notice: Gods know he was in no state to mock another’s mental state.

The gangrenous giant’s jaw opened, flaps of festering flesh barely holding together as it spoke.

”Oh, bubonic beast, end of men, death of civilization. You, who are entropy in an ageless land.” The amalgamation leaned forwards, white vitae spilling forth from between teeth forged of errant, shattered bones. ”I am Paleblood. And you are so delightfully sick,” he spoke, raising a palm towards the sky, corruption and contagion alike coalescing in his hand.

His malformed maw, assembled from an amalgamation of the fallen, split itself into a sickly smile. [b][i]”Precious few come to this Prison so blessed with blight.” He spread his arms wide across the nothingness.

”Ask your questions of this cursed realm, new-blood.”

[Alex Mercer]

The crow and Alex peered at one another, then at the monstrosity both familiar and foreign to them. They both knew well the signs of sickness; infections and cancers and rot and decay - these were all concepts that had become almost a kinship with their united existence in the physical world. 

The carrion bird squawked. It was allowed no words, not in this dreamscape where it had no power. Alex, on the other hand, could speak with ease. "You don't belong here..." It was abundantly apparent that this mind was the driving force behind this world. The true mind of Alex Mercer, Patient Zero and progenitor of the Blackwatch Virus. The bird cawed again. It attempted to spread its wings, but in the moment of its attempts, feathers fall. Its wings were clipped and it did naught but flutter to the ground. Alex Mercer gave the beast a look of both disgust and malice.

It was easy to see how this dream had skewed. Okor could hear the whispers and cries of so many minds, decayed but still very much alive. This was not the dream of one man, but the dreams of many. Though he took the apparition's bodies, Alex merely waved his hand to manifest many more at his side. "You were in search of questions, and here I am ready to offer answers. Are you sure you want me to leave?"

The crow cawed, but Mercer stood his ground. His expression was unyielding. "Where are we? What happened to Manhattan?" Even in a dream, his words were like daggers. Okor could feel the forces of Alex's mind pull at the grand corpse form he had created for himself.

"This is the Omniverse, my cancerous friend... Manhattan is a figment of your past now." The words were as sickly as the decayed tongue that formed them. "You've been chosen... I'm sure you met the faceless man?" For a moment, Alex turned his attention elsewhere. The memory streamed by like a roll of film. The plague monger's decrepid lips pulled into a smile. "Yes, that one. Omni..."

"Why?"

"For his entertainment, of course." He did not hesitate, nor did he sugarcoat it.

Alex grimaced. The idea of being a pupped yet again did not bode well with him. The crow squawked. As bothersome as it was, the dominant mind released his hold on the virus. It became as if the crow never existed. Instead, the Prototype stood there. It was not a carbon copy of Mercer, as his body was to the outside world. The Blackwatch virus' body was a wriggling mass of cancer and tendrils, shifting biomass that squirmed trying to find a stable form. It could find none. Words spilled from the creature, the sound disembodied with no mouth to call an origin. "What happened to me... Why am I so..." 

"Weak?" The Paleblood finished the question for the creature. The hulking behemoth of corpses laughed, a horrid sound that had Alex's imagined stomach turn.

The host of the Blackwatch Virus shook his head at the two monstrosities conversing. "Disgusting..."

[Okor]

The abomination laughed, a sound that shook the earth. ”Straight to the point, aren’t you?” Cancerous claws clasped themselves together, a gangrenous grin staring down at the Dreamer.

”Omni remakes all those that he takes into his realm. He strips your strengths, wipes away your weaknesses, and leaves you with…” A hand unfurled, iridescent ribbons roiling as they coalesced into a solid orb. Potential. Raw, untamed potential. Did you think I could always do this? Trespass the Aether, invade the dreams of mortals?”

Okor shook his head, chuckling darkly as a slab of repurposed flesh sloughed away from his skull. ”He breaks you down, and watches you as he builds you back up, smiling all the way.”

The crimson eye of the cyclops turned towards the man within this demented mind, a miasmic stench flowing freely from tainted teeth. ”Disgusting, are we?” The grin looked less like a smile, now. It was bared fangs and insatiable hunger, primal instincts lurking beneath the surface brought forward by the slightest lapse in concentration.

”Look around you, untested, untempered, unproven one,” spoke the astral invader, casting an arm laden with stolen flesh over their surroundings. ”This is your dream, plagued one. You were beset by your guilt, surrounded by your sins, drowning in your past.” Those teeth bared themselves once more, skulls, ribs, humeruses, burial cairns forged into jagged canines. ”And then I came, to stave off the mental degradation for one more night, to grant a glimpse of your future.”

The festering flesh of the skull cocked itself, single eye staring into the Corvid and the Man. ”But it never ceases, does it? Night, after night, you remember. The dying screams of a hundred worlds echoing through eternity, every mistake seared into a mind that can no longer anticipate the sweet release of Death.”

The abomination shook its head sadly, all the pain its tortured body was unable to feel reflected inside its psyche. ”You are an immortal, trapped in a world of expendable men whose broken bodies can be consumed and reborn with all the ceremony and ritual of a hive-city ganger unwrapping a corpse-starch ration. There are no true ends here. Omni only offers us a thousand new beginnings.”

”He will break you with a hundred heroes from a hundred worlds that embody all that you are not. He will deny you your hatreds, you weaknesses, every scar upon your shrivelled soul that you once tried to scourge from yourself.”

He blinked, looking off into the distance as he tried to find his place in this demented realm. ”Perhaps Omni would let you satiate your hunger, sacrifice that element of who you are, heal the corruption and contagion that has become part of yourself. And what would be left?” The abomination sighed deeply.

”You will have to forgive an Old Soldier’s ramblings. It has been too long since I have seen another Prime so plagued.”

[Alex Mercer]

The man that had been Alex Mercer once upon a time stepped back. He seemed to stand in a constant state of cringe at the intruder's very existence. The wriggling mass of volatile infection stood firm. Its faceless head was lowered as it absorbed these words; consumed them for all of their experience and knowledge. It did not mind the beastly titan's form, it did not have the hangups of Alex Mercer - not when its own true self was an ever shifting mass of cancerous flesh.

"Reborn..." The disembodied voice drifted. The mindless virus was oddly mindful of that word. In the moment of thought, Jacob appeared from the mist of faceless consumed, his appearance vivid and complete with the same claws Mercer himself would wield in the real world. The creature with no eyes turned towards Jacob.

Alex steps between the sentient Virus and the infected lad. "No... You cannot just infect civilians with your sickness!"

Just like that, Mercer was back. The Mercer that awoke in the morgue; Codename Zeus. Away went the faceless virus. "Why not? You wanted to save people... Why not share this? Share ME with everyone! We could infect the world!" The Blacklight Virus, even given its own mind, was naught but baser instincts. It knew how to feed above all else, to survive and grow and mutate... but when feeding was not an option, it could also spread. "It could be just like saving Jacob!"

"You infected him!"

"EXACTLY!" Alex was conflicted. Okor could see it written across his face. "You created me as a cure... let me cure humanity of itself. I could evolve everyone!" In this dream, there was no balance. With the two personalities split in the Astral Verse, Alex was against the spread of the virus and the virus itself was untamed and wild.

Alex's scowl wore away at the facsimile. Slowly, the Prototype was being reverted into its primal form. "I will continue to fight you every step of the way... You became weak, but Omni made me stronger." Once just scraps of memory, his entire personality had returned, full force, to torment his failed experiment. The man's eyes turn towards Okor, his expression of malice for his counterpart. "And you... This is the worst place to talk... The more you inspire this thing, the less control I will have in the real world. Unless you want every corner of your world trying to consume one another, then I suggest you leave. There is no reasoning with it..."

"We could cha--" The crow returns to squawk without words. It hopped about where the virus had once stood, wings fluttering and feathers ruffled. It settles only when Alex glares into its beady black eyes and the wails return in full force. The sounds were like nails on a chalk board, drilling into the bird's skull.

"There is no reasoning with Us..."

[Okor]

A rumbling, low chuckle answered Mercer’s dire warning. Jowls long since divorced from the flesh and bone beneath flapped as festering fangs bared themselves in a gangrenous grin. ”Look at me, dreamer. Do you think this is the face of a man who would stand against such a thing?” The rotting flesh barely adhered to the abomination began to liquefy, running down to the aether beneath them as the erratic amalgamation of bone beneath was bared, hundreds of skeletons entwined together in a macabre embrace to form this carrion-creature. ”Does it look like something that still deserves to be called a man?”

Claws dug into the etherium that forged this nightmare, skeletal talons sinking themselves deep into madness. The dream was falling apart, descending into irrationality as the Dreamer’s minds turned against themselves. Smouldering green flame coalesced in the cyclopean skull’s empty socket as the invader spoke.

”Your mind is a strange and splintered place, Dreamer. You war against your own self, torn between your blessings and your own desires.”

The sepechural skeleton loomed over the warring personalities, hungering instinct matched against the morals of a man. It was an age-old struggle, the nature of humanity being to deny it, to quiet the beast within and to look down upon the strange and savage, thinking themselves above it.

But that was not the path Okor trode: the filth, the disease, the festering cesspit that was humanity, he embraced it all. And here it was; a broken, maddened man at war with what he had become. This was his flock, the lost and the damned bereft of guidance, of purpose, of hope.

What kind of Believer would he be if he did not extend a helping claw to those in need?

Boiling blood bubbled out from a bony jaw, streams of translucent vitae pouring down his calciferous chin as the carrion bird’s claws met the man’s muscles, fists pitted against a cruelly hooked beak.

”Pale Blood will guide your way, dreamer,” pronounced Okor as the two cohabitants of Mercer’s mutated body continued their eternal struggle. ”You will embrace your changes, or be… consumed.”

The corpse-construct froze in place, a rictus grin etching itself upon its visage as a seemingly endless tide of tainted blood flowed from its maw, a mere pittance of the sanguine streams shed by Mercer and his contagion.

The Prophet had done his work here. Another gamepiece of the Gods had been forced upon the board, and none could predict just what tale Omni would tell with his latest prisoner.

The ethereal form of Okor slipped through the skeins of reality that entrapped this pocket dimension of madness and death, returning to the Astral Realm, continuing to spread his corruption with each step in this sacred ‘verse.