The Chip Of Immortality

A Story by suuyuwriteyunu

"Kidnap the girl. We need her magic for the immortality chip." "But sir, the child will die!" "You think I care?"

The sun’s rays danced along her freckled orange skin as she skipped merrily to the swings in the community park, humming a jolly tune. Her two front teeth had not grown out yet, but she was starting to feel the new, stronger ones peek out from the gap, and that was enough to send prickles of excitement down her back. Lowering herself onto the hovering swing seat, she pressed a button that materialized in midair as the swing started swaying her back and forth, back and forth.

“Hello, Mister butterfly!” She greeted the yellow insect as it fluttered by. The butterfly made no comment as the swing beneath her started to slow down…until it came to a stop. A shadow loomed over her slight shoulders as she looked up to the sky, its color a gradient from light blue to light grey, darkening after each second. The large clouds were bulky and besieged the air. The dull sky threatened to plop rain down to the ground as she slowly turned her head to the left, her braids fell to the back. All of a sudden, there was a quiet beep as the swing dematerialized and her bottom landed with a loud thud on the marble road. Swiveling her head back hurriedly, two dominant figures emerged, two microchips in their gloved hands, looking down at her with a pointed chin. On their vests, they clipped a tag that read ‘GenoTech’.

The butterfly was nowhere to be seen now.

“Miss Brydgette,” the one on the left grumbled, squaring his shoulders as he took another step forward.

How did they know my name?

Panicking, Brydgette scrambled backwards and flexed her fingers, remembering her sister’s advice of sensing other people’s magic to differentiate a human from a Magic. Her forehead wrinkled from concentration, but the tingling magic sensation never came.

Those two are humans. Her jaw muscles tensed as her older sister’s warning echoed loudly in her mind, bouncing from one wall to the other. Stay away from humans. Stay away.

The man on the right took another step forward, and the ashy-grey clouds in the sky started rumbling deeply.

She flinched, scooting away from danger.

“Miss Brydgette,” the human repeated, sounding more and more irritated by each second. White light flashed miles away from the west, and the distant sound of thunder whispered through the skies. “We’re not here to do any harm. We’re just here to…”

All of a sudden, the two men lunged at her, pressing the microchips hard into her wrists.

She screamed. She thrashed. She struggled. Her skin burned red from the humans’ grip as she tried to push them back, failing at each attempt.

No.

Lightning flashed before her eyes. Thunder cracked and her pulse quickened; her heart skipped four beats at a time. The microchip was now deep under her skin. The aching pain throbbed in her wrist and rose to her throat as she clawed at the humans’ arms, only to chip her own nails. Blood bled out of the corners of her fingers.

No.

Hot tears streamed down her face as she wailed, sobbing for help. But no word came out. The air was ripped from her lungs. Everyone had retreated back into their homes during the thunderstorm, leaving her alone with the two humans who had her strangled in their arms. The atmosphere turned murky as colors swirled around her vision, dark swirling eddies haunted her sight.

Then came the smell. The obnoxious stench of sweet smoke rose from the gloves; the kind of smell that shoots up your nose when inhaled. Even a nine-year-old like her could tell what it was.

Drugs.

NO!

Blood drained from her skin as she felt the world falling away, her warm cheeks becoming frost-cold as she held on tightly to the last string of consciousness she could find, her knuckles white from the effort. The sky turned black and the ground turned grey. The world spun around her as she was hauled into a white hovercar, thunder whipping furiously at the car door. The door slammed shut before her eyes.

No…

“We got her, Doctor Cyrus.” Their voices were muffled, as if they were talking into a broken microphone. Harsh rain crashed down onto the windows until all she could hear were the rainfall and her feeble breathing. Her limbs were glued to the spot and she could no longer feel her legs.

“Microchips have also been implanted into Miss Brydgette’s veins, sir. Her DNA will be collected any second now,” the other human spoke. This time, his voice was loud and clear, ringing in her brain uselessly as her head ached from the vibrations.

Brydgette’s eyelids threatened to give away and close at any second as she forced her last drop of energy up her torso, slightly lifting herself off of the car seat. In a split second, her head was shoved back down onto the comfortable seats by a similar gloved hand…

And she let go of the last light she had as she sunk into complete darkness.

“Doctor Cyrus, data transfers to the main cloud are complete. Miss Brydgette’s reconstructed genetic codes and DNA have been confirmed accurate by the immortality theory, sir.” The bright white screen blared green as the female robotic voice echoed through the spacious white room. The windows that stretched from the floor to the ceiling plagued the space. The bright sunlight was cut off by a fleet of flying cars, cloaking the pointy-nose figure in dark shadows that draped off his heels. Outside the glass pane, towers upon towers of blinking skyscrapers lined the marble road. Citizens hovered around, their plump limbs struggling to stay afloat as pixels materialized before their eyes, shaping up a cat’s body as it danced merrily in midair. With a bony hand on his squared chin, the cloaked figure let out an elated sigh.

“Cat videos really never get old,” he mumbled under his breath as he turned his head back to his desk, clawing his fingers through his hair as he pulled up the security feed of the GenoTech jails out of thin air. The hovering light blue hologram showed a young girl with light brown braids, pounding uselessly on the glass walls that trapped her. With each pound her limbs got weaker and weaker, until she finally gave up and slumped back down onto her knees, her face buried in the palm of her scrawny, pale hands.

“Doctor Cyrus, are you still there, sir?” A robotic voice chimed, its screen flashed white as the program slightly dimmed the brightness of the pixels that showed the prisoner. The air hung around them stiffly as the doctor took off his glasses, placing them gently in his white coat pocket.

“Yes, Siri, I’m still here. It’s just…” He glanced at the girl in the cell, who was hugging her knees as she sobbed. His slim face twisted from pity to determination as he squared his shoulders and sneered, at himself or the girl, it remains a mystery. “It’s for the greater good of humanity.”

Hesitant, Doctor Cyrus continued fiddling with something heavy in his coat pocket. “This will be humanity’s greatest leap in technology. Failure is not an option. No matter the costs.” Siri listened silently as Doctor Cyrus plucked a tiny hexagonal card from the desk, a grim expression afflicted on his face. The lights flashed green as the microchip was removed from the database and into the skinny hands of the scientist. His gaze lingered on the tiny white disk, then onto the rattling cage that sat obediently on his smooth quartz desk. Striding towards the furry creature, he peered into the tiny hutch. The doctor raised a brow at the caged squirrel, its fur shivering from fear as he forced the white chip down its throat mercilessly. The squirrel struggled in his grip, squeaking for air. With a start, he threw the squirrel back down in its cage and swiveled his head back to the bright pixel screen before him.

“All microchips are in place. The experiment may begin,” Siri reported. Doctor Cyrus gave his intelligent black orb assistant a slight nod of approval. From his coat pocket, he carefully fished out a pitch-black handgun as he traced his gaze along the outlines of the squirrel’s body. The sides of the gun glowed green as neon light flooded its tunnels. Before his eyes, pixels materialized into a crosshair, gun statistics typed themselves out in the corner, and a set of bolded text appeared, obscuring his vision before blinking away.

Gun Connected: Siri

He smirked. This was it. The moment even God gets belittled; the moment he brings all other inventors’ inventions to shame; the moment he becomes the world’s greatest scientist. This was the moment he’d been waiting for; his sole reason for living in this carefully crafted world.

The neon blue crosshair aligned on the squirrel’s head as it let out another squeak of terror, begging for mercy. Doctor Cyrus scoffed and clicked his tongue. Without a second thought, he pulled the trigger, sending the beam of compressed light piercing into the squirrel’s skull. The creature let out its last yelp before dark red blood splashed across the white marble floor. The bullet of light cracked the tile of the wall on the other side. Doctor Cyrus’s eyes widened as he put the gun down beside the ruined cage. Smoke erupted from the muzzle as he smoothed his silky silver hair back in astonishment.

“Woah Siri, chill. Did you get the pressure wrong again? I thought I told you before…not over 60,000 psi. God, it’s not that hard to get wrong! We’re not trying to kill humans here, it’s just a puny squirrel.” Doctor Cyrus snapped, “now my tile’s all ruined!”

Siri was silent before answering, “My apologies, sir. I will keep that in mind.”

“Good,” the doctor seethed before smoothing his hair once again. “Now, start the transition process. My life is on the line.”

Siri vanished from the large screen and reappeared in a split second, sending sparks of light dancing on the squirrel’s still chest. The hologram in front of Doctor Cyrus was shaped in the squirrel’s DNA; the sugar-phosphate started to decay and rot on the spot.

“How weak,” he sneered, dragging the adenine and the guanine out, while Siri replaced them flawlessly with Brydgette’s re-coded DNA. The doctor let out a gasp of bewilderment as he lifted his fingers from the blue projection, letting Siri continue the process.

“No matter how many times I look at it, a Magic’s DNA is always incredibly different from a human’s,” he pulled the security footage back up, zooming in to the girl’s freckled skin, examining it with close inspection, “and yet, there is nothing different from a Magic and a human’s body…” his voice trailed off as he swiftly swiped across the air before adding quietly that made the air conditioner’s low hum the dominant sound, “how they inherited such powerful magic in the first place remains a mystery…but that’s irrelevant. All that matters is how it can be put to use.” Smiling to himself and humming a low tune, he zoomed out from the little girl and rested his gaze back on the modification of genetics on the big screen.

Just then something caught his eye. He spun around. His eyes blared red as his face puffed up like steam coming out of a kettle’s mouth. He clawed uselessly at the air, swiping at the holograms before the pixels dematerialized and built themselves back up.

There was another girl, cloaked in a dark hood, inside Brydgette’s cell. The Magic’s cell. The core piece of this experiment.

At risk.

“An intruder?!” The doctor’s voice shook with rage, “how did it get in! Siri!” He roared and clenched his fists until his knuckles pierced his skin, four white spots of bone apparent on the back of his hand. He stared helplessly as the cloaked girl helped Miss Brydgette escape from the seemingly impenetrable jail. A shrill scream broke out, rattling the dead squirrel’s body, threatening to break all the surrounding windows. The doctor’s gaze scorned Siri’s screen as the computer glitched. Colorful pixels overtook the monitor and the artificial intelligence assistant struggled to generate words.

“Siri!” He boomed once more, scrambling his way to the beeping computer. Attempting to put the system back together, he dragged files into other folders and retyped codes, his fingers flying across the floating blue keyboard. But, as one code was fixed, twelve more errors popped up, enveloping the whole screen with red warning signs. The veins on his neck snaked across his face, purple and boiling with fury. “You useless things!” He cursed. His office was engulfed with high-pitched beeps and alarm sirens, chaos reigned as he glanced once more at the security footage.

The girl was gone. And so was his experiment.

Doctor Cyrus slammed down his hands and flipped the table in rage, sending the caged squirrel plummeting backwards. His shoulders heaved up and down rapidly as he clawed through his hair once more, his teeth bared like a wolf. Rushing back to his computer, he slammed hard on each key as he connected the last adenine to the dead squirrel’s thymine. His pupils dilated and his body shook.

“You will not ruin me…” he stammered under his breath, “you will not ruin me…you will not ruin ME!” His shriveled finger pressed hard against the big green button, sending sparks of electricity crackling in the air, raising the hair on his arms. Suddenly the image of the deceased squirrel materialized in midair. An otherworldly green light illuminated its throat before it slumped back down, unconscious. Dead silence swamped the room. The doctor shivered uncontrollably despite the hot air.

All of a sudden the squirrel sprang back to life, its chest heaving up and down heavily, its nose twitching hurriedly, desperate for air. The bullet hole in its head reformed and returned to its original state, and a grin stretched across Doctor Cyrus’s face, the corners of his mouth touching the corners of his eyes.

He cackled as he read the text on screen out loud. Behind the flipped desk, the sounds of rattling metal and frantic squeaks from the squirrel echoed around the room. The sound of life resurfaced and the squirrel wriggled itself out of the busted cage, running wildly around the white room.

The squirrel had come back to life, its little legs wiggling uncontrollably as its eyes twitched.

The squirrel had come back to life. The very same squirrel that got shot in the head moments ago.

The squirrel had come back to life. With the help of Miss Brydgette’s magic and the re-coding of her DNA, the squirrel really came back to life.

The experiment was…

“A success!” He threw his gun in the air with a celebratory feeling and twirled around on his chopstick legs. His limp heels crushed against the marble floor every time he jumped. “It’s alive!” He exclaimed, “the squirrel is alive! It really is!”

The sounds of heavy footsteps shook the floor but was quickly engulfed by the sounds of cheering from the scientist. Doctor Cyrus spun around again and cackled, “I’ve discovered the key to immortality!”

Trembling with emotion, he didn’t realize the gun never hit the floor. He didn’t realize that the gun was not in his hands anymore, but in the hands of a cloaked figure, standing menacingly in front of him, its muzzle aimed straight for his head.

The little black machine roared to life, neon light filled its tubes once again, and the crosshair that materialized was pointed to his pterion. As his eyes met the gun in someone else’s hands, they turned into a void; his pupils were little specks of dust. A shriek escaped his lungs before the condensed ray of light pierced his skull.

Dark, red blood splashed across the white marble floor, landing a second crack on the tile in the back. His eyeballs rolled to the back as his body shattered at the impact. His light skin turned pale, shrouded by numbness as his head lolled to one side, finally still.

“Die.” The cloaked girl sneered, slowly lowering the smoking gun. Dropping it on the floor with a clack, she kicked it aside and took a shaky step back.

Hawing behind the large glass doors, a familiar-looking lass stepped into the open, her freckled orange skin pale yet her cheeks were flooded with color. Her cheeks, the very same cheeks tears were rolling down on just ten minutes ago, were now dry with harsh resentment. She clasped her hands around the cloaked figure’s, staring bleakly at the dead body on the blood-stained floor.

“Let’s go, Brydgette,” spat her older sister.