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Parasite is the third part of The Underground series

Chapter 9 of 29

Lucid

There was one thing present around him, and in that sense it was ironic. It was ironic because it's presence implied that nothing was there. Silence. It was everywhere around him, so much so, it was almost a part of him.

The silence, like everything else, was simply a metaphor for something. He wasn't sure what that was, only that making logic of his surroundings was nearly impossible. Everything, from the aqua tint his world had taken, to the deafening silence around him, it spoke to him as though it represented something.

He was dreaming.

Alias's mind suddenly hit this realization, like he had a personal epiphany that answered every question to the world. In this one, it honestly did. Alias was dreaming, there was no doubt about that. He didn't recognize his surroundings and there really weren't details to aid him. His mind simply registered the fact that this was not where he lived, but a construct of his mind. Moreover, Alias was fine with this.

If he was dreaming, then he must be sleeping. The real question was when had he fallen asleep? He didn't remember ever deciding to sleep; suddenly he just found himself in this cyanic, hazy world, built on the fabric of his own imagination.

He felt a flash of alarm, and jumped as his boot came down on some solid object when he took a step forward.

Looking downward, Alias saw a small, dark object. His vision cleared as he bent down to examine it. Confusion filled him as he noticed the familiar shape of a handgun. He had stepped on it, making the loud clatter he had heard. Alias wasn't even aware it had been there.

The logical side of his mind that rejected the faux reality of his dreams questioned this. He could feel the rational part of himself wondering why a gun was in his dreams. The only conclusion he could reach was that dreams don't follow logic. Slowly he reached down, feeling the cool metal under his touch. Slowly, he picked it up, examining the pistol. Alias wondered what this represented in the hyperreality that existed in his mind.

Without thinking, he stood back up. Like a flash of electricity that surged through his whole body, a shock flashed through Alias as he came face to face with her...

The gun could have multiple implications. She, however, only had one in his mind. She looked exactly the the images he had always seen of her. Out of nowhere, she stood before him, dressed in an elegant, white evening gown, her raven, cropped hair fell down to her shoulders. There was something different about her; she was inverted. Instead of a primarily white body with her black stripes, her fur was a slate grey with the darker black stripes accenting it; a common sign of mixed parents. In her eyes, there was a look of both sadness, and anger. However, they didn't seem to be directed at him. For Alias, he could feel his alarm and confusion rise as he took her in. Before this moment, he had only seen her in what were like photographs in his head. For the first time, he felt as if he were standing in front of the real thing. How many times Alias had drawn her he could only guess, but as if she had stepped from the surface of the papers he drawn on, Alias's mystery zebra stood there before him.

She looked as real as any memory in his head and for a moment, Alias began to question what was truly "real". As his mind finally calmed, he again came to the conclusion that he was not awake, and that none of what he was seeing was true. With this revelation, he felt his alarm start to subside and the confusion diminish. In this reality, he didn't question her existence any longer. He simply felt surprise, and a bit of alarm that she was here.

Shaking his head slowly, he opened his mouth to speak to her. He wanted to tell her about how she was always lurking in the back of his mind. How her image would appear in his mind at the most random times. Why was she always there and did she know him? All these things he wanted to ask this phantom image. However, no sound came from his mouth. It wasn't his time to speak.

The zebra slowly stepped forward. Moving with a surreal grace, her paw lifted and pressed a finger to Alias's lips, silencing him. Unable to do anything but comply, Alias simply watched this mental wraith move about. Her paws, like silk, moved to his face, directing his attention down at her. Her touch was both cold and slightly disturbing. His face slowly began to feel like circulation was being lost. Standing there totally helpless to her, Alias could only watch as she opened her mouth to speak.

"There comes a day," she whispered to him, words like thunderclaps in his subconscious, "when you can't hide from the things you've done."

Her words were like ice water to his gut. His body felt the cold shock of her foreboding words that meant nothing to him. Suddenly, he felt a panicky feeling in himself. It was that initial fear after something had gone terribly wrong and the consequences would be dire. His mind began to race for a way out of all this, but the more he searched for answers, the less he found. Alias stared down at her in disbelief with his mouth hanging open. He tried to pull away from her, but her paws seemed to be cemented to his face. He couldn't break from her grip that she didn't even seem to try and maintain.

Suddenly, like a dangerous floodgate, his mind started racing with fear and panic. He didn't even know what he was to be frightened of. The zebra herself wasn't Alias's fear. But he felt it; like something was waiting out there to find him. Speech frozen, he could only submit to whatever her plan was with him.

Her words echoed around him, became physical manifestations that attacked him. He begged and pleaded for his mind to release him back to reality, however he felt the chains of his mind were strengthened by his fear. As her fingers left his face, Alias suddenly realized there was no escaping the mind. The walls of his subconscious were taller than any construction society could create. Worse, they left him without doors leading to an exit. They pushed the bounds of infinity matched only by the possibility of forever; all leaving Alias with the same, trapped feeling. Memories flashed about him, the white room briefly transforming into that memory, each one lasting only a fleeting moment. Delirium, the apartment on Grinstead, Palamont, Lazarus Plaza... Waverly Hill.

His mind's eyes recognized the familiar decaying asylum, one room in particular. Green eyes flashing around the room in a nervous haste, this version of the abandoned mental institution was exactly how he remembered it. His heart jumped in his throat as he felt his foot move slightly backwards, hitting something solid. Alias didn't need to turn around to know what was behind him. His dream revealed the foreboding monolith; a large, metallic, industrial tub, running easily twice his length. It was used for only God knows what in those early days of experimental psychiatric care. Craning his neck, The Mercenary looked down into the dark water, sloshing lazily around like black ink. As he looked back at the phantom, he noticed two tiny red dots on her otherwise, perfectly white dress. Slowly they grew in their radius; one on her right shoulder, the other on her left side. She remained fixed as the circular patches grew until a drop ran down her gown, leaving a small, red trail. Slowly, Alias raised a paw, now in complete control of his own body it seemed. Cautiously, he pressed against the patch on her side, finding it to be warm, and wet. A voltage of shock arched through his already fearing conscious as he pulled his paw back, looking at it. Face grimacing in utter horror, it hit Alias that she was bleeding through her gown. She was hurt, injured, and something in his mind told him that this was not the result of an accident. A sick feeling of helplessness enveloped him as Alias looked up at the zebra with concern. Her mouth remained closed, but there was a trickle of dark crimson blood that lazily dribbled down her chin. It hung there for only a moment or two, catching the light. His eyes followed the red orb as it fell from her, splashing on the floor resulting in a deafeningly loud crash.

Like an incomplete bridge, his mind had reached the limit of his memory. The walls of this reality started to slowly crumble. As he looked back at the zebra, beautiful in her elegance, he realized that he could do nothing for her. There was nothing he could do to rescue her from this doomed existence. He would go back, but she would be forced to stay and decay along with the rest of his dream. Alias would watch her die before him.

"You will know the truth..."

Her words echoed around him as the fabric of his dreams began to fray. Suddenly, her paws met his shoulders with great force causing his legs to knock against the edge of the steel tub. Alias felt himself lose balance and before he knew it he was falling backwards. The inky, black water welcomed him like a coffin embracing a corpse. He fell backwards away from her, arms outstretched for help. His mind quickly recognized how long his fall into the metallic chamber was actually taking, and yet, the zebra actually was moving further and further away.

Looking behind himself, Alias's eyes dilated in concentrated terror as he saw he was not falling backwards into Waverly's interrogation tub any longer. Rather, he found himself up, forty, sixty stories in the air, falling downward, plummeting at a velocity that outmatched any natural speed. Below him, stretching as far as the eye could see, an ocean of the dark, ink water awaiting him. If he could have cried out in fear, in desperation, in agony, in anything, Alias would have. He came closer, and closer, the wind ripping by his ears. At the last second, before his body would smack harshly against the unforgiving surface of this dark water, he opened his mouth in a last ditched effort to cry out for help.

Sweating, shaking, and letting out a growl of terror, Alias rocketed straight up, kicking backwards. His heart slammed in his chest as his eyes darted frantically around him. For a few seconds, he wasn't sure where he was. He wasn't where he was used to being. For those few seconds where he couldn't remember anything, he felt the worst case of helplessness. Falling.

Soon, however, his mind calmed, and the hyperreality from before faded into fractured shards of memory like dreams do.

His mind soon found a firm reality to rest upon. Looking around his kitchen, he noticed a clock that told him it was currently three in the morning. His mind and body were both so exhausted his immediate reaction was simply to fall back asleep. Predictably as he laid his head down gently against the kitchen table where he had dozed off earlier, he found sleep an impossible feat. Kicking in like clockwork, his insomnia kept him from reaching a deep sleep. Only this time with that dream, he was glad he had woken up. Thinking about the blood dripping from the zebra's mouth, he hadn't wanted the dream to continue. Nightmares weren't great sleep aids or incentives for the insomniac.

Openshaw a few nights ago, now his nameless zebra was haunting him too. It was ironic in the cruelest sense that for the first time he could remember dreaming, it had only been nightmares. Nightmares that pulled from every facet of his life it seemed. It was complicated enough that he drew her all the time. He'd find himself doodling her image on everything; case files, documents, napkins, everything. But now that zebra was even in his nightmares? What was worse was that Alias had no idea who this person was. She could be a complete figment of his imagination, but with her showing up in his dreams, speaking to him, that possibility was growing more and more unlikely.

Slowly standing up, Alias moved to the cupboard above the refrigerator, which hummed as it compressed the needed freon used to preserve it's contents. Carefully, his fingers navigated where his eyes could not see, until they bumped against a smooth, glass surface. Once he had retrieved his golden scotch from it's hiding place, he grabbed a glass, and filled it nearly to the brim. No ice.

He took one long gulp of the bitter liquid, the effects shown clearly as he held it in his mouth for a moment, face grimacing in revulsion overwhelming taste. However, there soon came a warming sense of calm from his gut where the craved alcohol was taken into his bloodstream. Heart still rattling about like a ceiling fan coming loose of it's surface, he took a seat, looking at the numerous papers and files spread before him on the kitchen table.

All from Jim Trilby; all property of the OCB.

Alias had gotten the case files regarding "The Isis Project", curious about how much of Trilby's story could be fact checked. Turns out, that unless Trilby spent an ungodly amount of time and money faking all this, everything checked out. Even news-feed archives from the time had articles written that coincided with what had happened. Of course, the major news networks were completely clueless as to what really went on, but that was nothing new.

Hour after hour of knowing sleep was pointless, and trying was time consuming, Alias poured over the files, trying to learn as much as he could about his current mistress that kept a painfully, tight collar on his world. Unfortunately, there wasn't much to tell. Computer's don't have personalities, so there wasn't a psych profile, only reports of it's abilities, which were irrelevant now.

His eyes moved to another open file, the picture of a young siamese cat standing in a candid pose. Alias carefully removed the picture where it had been paperclipped to the manilla folder, and held it up to the light for closer inspection. She was easy to recognize with her cream fur, tail of dark rings, cutting blue eyes, and dark, raven hair. However, this wasn't Isis, at least not then it wasn't. What clued Alias in was her smile. There was something fundamentally different about the siamese's smile. It was easy to tell she was truly happy, especially with the black and white feline standing next to her, Jim Trilby. And she should be happy; both of them should be.

The picture was from their wedding day.

The file was labeled "Trilby, Leigh R." Anything and everything one could want to know about her life had been confiscated by the OCB, and marginalized into this one manilla folder. In the incident report following Isis's escape, Alias had noted that for a time, they believed that Leigh Trilby wasn't under the influence of an AI, but rather acting on her own accord. Jim had even spent time in prison while being investigated as a coconspirator. It was a few months later that OCB actually pieced everything together and his name was cleared. By that point Isis was gone and the damage to his reputation and career had been done. Reading through Leigh's dossier, Alias's mind went back to what Trilby had asked him earlier. How far would Alias go to bring back someone he cared about? What would he do?

As he drank lazily, and flipped papers around, like a small glass harpoon through his gut, her words to him surfaced in his mind causing another flash of alarm. What had Alias done? He shivered slightly in his chair, remembering how his zebra's voice had sounded. What did she think he was hiding from? Had any of that been the reason he was connected to Waverly Hill? Could he be some freak killer who had murdered this poor girl and his guilty conscious wouldn't let him forget it? Who was she and why was she telling him that he'd know the truth? What truth?

Alias felt his paws grip his hair harshly. Fingers interwoven through his dark locks, he gripped them tight in frustration. Somehow, he had become a prisoner inside his own body. Sometimes Alias felt as if he wasn't the one in control, but rather his motions were being acted out by another. He felt like he was this bomb that could detonate at any moment. What if he simply snapped one day? If his mind could do the things it had just done to him, could it fool him into thinking he was still sane? A part of him wanted to go to Jenna and tell her this, confess everything so she'd be on guard, but something told him this would do no good. Jenna would simply think he was freaking out again, or trying to push her away. This was different though. When the mind truly didn't want to know what was going on, it could and would reject reality and substitute it's own. Dissociative identity disorders, antisocial personality disorders, all these things the mind could fool itself into believing or accepting. Defense mechanisms such as repression could block out events in a timeline. Was there something he was simply fooling himself into believing as true?

His black fists slammed down hard on the table with a crash, scotch splashing on some papers!

Pull it together, Goddamn it! His mind screamed at him.

Slowly, Alias took in a deep breath, and exhaled. Fingers moving to his eyes, he slowly rubbed the exhaustion from them. Maybe all this was the end result of the stress from Isis, Trilby, laced with insomnia. There was only a small silver lining about the current meltdown state of his mental ability. His body had become resistant towards Alias for a reason. It acted out harshly because there was something in his head that he had chosen to block out. Unlike most of his memories that simply didn't exist, this was something like having an answer on the tip of your tongue. He felt like he was so close to remembering everything, but when he pushed further, there was nothing.

Confusion about his own identity had become a living entity that leeched off his very body, sucking the life right out of him. It got to the point that Alias didn't question why he was the way he was anymore. He didn't question why a fall from three stories didn't completely shatter his bones, why his body would go into autopilot when attacked, or where his knowledge of espionage came from. He didn't question it because it kept him alive. When he should have died so many times over again, somehow this gift, this curse, call it what you will, kept him alive. Alias's confusion was simply the remainder of this unnatural biological equation; the metaphoric side effect of a drug. Moving slowly, his fingers met the surface of his glass, only this time he took a small sip of the potent alcohol. Looking down at the tannish liquid, he shook his head slowly. Once upon a time, drinking was enough to keep all that at bay. It was enough to take the edge off any day.

Scoffing to himself, Alias took another drink and set the half-full glass aside. He needed a new drug, because this one wasn't working anymore.