Kaitlein lifted herself over a section of collapsed ceiling and slide down into the central chamber. The catacombs of Saqra Pichu perforated the living mountain, tying its innards to the abandoned city above. The entire site was closed to the public, an edict enforced by the Peruvian military, but Kaitlein had never seen the point of being rich if you didn’t have things that the proles couldn’t. At the cost of a small fortune, the British adventuress had gotten herself and a backpack of camping gear into the mysterious ruins. Now she had penetrated the apparent heart of the place – a temple built into a natural cavern that house a sacred site open to only a select few priests over the course of millennia.
Kaitlein grinned and shrugged off her pack. The chamber was a massive decagon set around a central feature: a perfectly-cut, ten-sided pinkish-yellow crystal larger than her. A stone dome capped the room and the crown appeared to a bronze iris made to swing open, although any connecting rope had long-since rotted away. Positioned around the walls were clay pots sealed with paper. Kaitlein broken the seal on one and discovered it was filled with nuggets of silver. A second was filled with copper. A third contained lead. A fourth, rhodonite. A fifth, opals. A sixth, gold. A seventh, agate. An eighth, tin. As Kaitlein searched the dozens of pots, the mineral wealth housed in this room stunned her. She got a camera from her pack and setting the flash, documented the archaeological find of the century.
A screech like nothing Kaitlein could imagine came out of nowhere. She dropped her camera and spun around, trying to locate the source. Kaitlein saw sparks dancing inside the massive crystal in the center of the room. The sparks faded along with the noise. An idea formed. Bracing herself, Kaitlein aimed at the crystal and hit the flash. Sound filled the chamber. Kaitlein’s heart shook. Her eyes vibrated in their sockets. Powdered metal and jewels jumped in their pots.
When the sound faded, Kaitlein had a huge smile on her face. Her eyes darted up to the iris above the crystal. She had to see what would happen.
Fortunately, Kaitlein had come prepared for a climb. She had years of experience climbing and repelling in difficult environments – it showed in her broad shoulders and powerful legs. Kaitlein had gotten used to being written off as mannish, even before her adventurer career. At least in situations like this, there was none of society’s pettiness. There was only the tension between herself, her trained body, and the secrets of the universe.
Picking out one of the walls, Kaitlein began driving pitons into the stonework. One of them bounced off the wall with a melodic twang, making her stumble backs. Kaitlein brushed away the dirt and grime on the wall to discover a metal in-lay. She couldn’t place what the metal was. It had a reflective sheen with no tarnish but felt rigid under her thumb and left a greasy feeling on her skin. It couldn’t possibly be steel, enchanting as the idea would be. One mystery at a time, Kaitlein told herself. She continued to set-up her climb while avoiding the in-lay.
Kaitlein ascended the wall and inched upside-down across the dome. Her tense muscles trembled from the effort, but her smile never faded. After a hour of grueling effort, she slipped one of her ropes through the mechanism for the iris and eased her way back down, trailing the rope through pitons. She sat down on the floor and wiped the sweat from her brow, drinking some water before setting up a camcorder and fishing out a pair of earplugs.
She gave the rope a few test tugs before turning to face the camera. “I’m going to piss off UNESCO so badly with this stunt, you have no-“
Her voice was drowned out when she pulled the iris open. The crystal roared like an engine as sunlight poured into it from the hole. Sheets of rainbow light filled the chamber. And the sound grew and split, becoming layers of complex harmonies, becoming music that Kaitlein never heard before. As she acclimated and could pick out the tones, Kaitlein realized there was the hiss of metal-on-stone. The dirt covering the metal in-lays on the walls had come lose… No, Kaitlein corrected herself, it was more than that, the in-lays were moving. Apparently-solid metal flowed through channels in the stone to form crude animations of wonderous birds, raging fires, and twinkling galaxies. And then it flowed out of the walls. Kaitlein danced out of its way and watched the strange metal swirl around the base of the singing crystal. It gathered in the center and fused into a thick tube.
The tube unfurled. A massive worm unwound itself from the crystal and reared up, displaying a head of quivering villi, all of them swiveling towards Kaitlein. The worm trained on her. The crystal’s song pounded in her skull. The smile dropped from Kaitlein’s face. She made a break for the entrance, sprinting along edge of the chamber. The metal worm rolled its bulk to block her path. Kaitlein immediately banked to the side. Bounding over the monster’s tail, she slid along the floor to her pack. Kaitlein pulled her Desert Eagle from the pack’s holster. She couldn’t even hear the weapon discharge. Whether she hit or not, the metal worm tackled her, pining Kaitlein beneath. Its bulk kept Kaitlein from doing anything but kicking and screaming like a madwoman. It pressed the churning mass of villi over Kaitlein’s face. Ozone filled her mouth and mouth. The smooth perturbances rolled over her skin like they were sniffing her. Kaitlein closed her eyes and she felt pinpricks on her eyelids pulling them open. She screamed, muffled, until her limbs stopped flailing and her cries faded.
Then the cracking of bones began.
Kaitlein tumbled through empty space. Flailing, her numb hands grasped at nothing. Something felt wrong – the rumbling of her breath and the thump of her blood both felt too distant. She tried to scream, and she couldn’t hear her own voice.
What Kaitlein could feel, however, was the building heat of her clit. Which amazed her, since she couldn’t seem to actually find it with her hands. She couldn’t find any part of her body. Regardless, she felt someone licking the outside of her labia just like Jane used to… no, it was more like how Bianca would suck on it… no, the way they bit her thigh was Justine’s technique… the fingers tips playing on the inside of her knees were definitely Thane… Kaitlein moaned silently as every partner she ever had ate her out at the same time. Her mind contorted and stretched in the current of the best orgasm of her life.
As the orgasm ran its course, Kaitlein felt information build itself inside her empty mind, like a realization that obviously wasn’t her own. The equations for an electromagnetic field tensor came to her unbidden. The complex physics was suddenly so simple and obvious. And it was so obvious that she could sense it, clear as a loud sound or a beam of light, if she only had the right nerves, unconscious reaching forward for electric fingertips she had never had before—
The shifting metal pulled Kaitlein’s encased brain and organs free of her split-open carcass. It curled around them to form a cocoon. Arteries stretched out across the room, tapping into the storage pots. Metal dust collected and fused. Soon, a lead skeleton emerged, dressed with gold and copper filaments. Strands of phosphor bronze wound around the dark bones to form gleaming muscles. Sheets of overlapping tin skin were pulled over the growing body. The beautiful tin face, webbed with overlapping joints, stared in horror and wonder at its hands mid-assembly. The eyes were made of the same mysterious metal that torn Kaitlein apart.
“What’s happening to me?” Kaitlein’s voice sounded wrong. Her mouth didn’t move. She had no tongue or teeth. Her voice, instead, formed out of a hundred tiny harpstrings in her throat. “What did you do?”
A presence answered. Interface had been requested. The process was invasive. Accommodations were made.
“Interface?” Kaitlein turned to look at her corpse, then down at her shiny body. She stood up on legs that had just been built. She looked at her corpse – her corpse? – and felt a jumble of emotions. She did what came naturally and reached out. She was enveloped, she realized, in a blizzard of individual magnetic fields that ebbed, flowed, and rippled like a hive of bees.
“Nanomachines. I can feel you. Millions of little… nanomachines.”
Interface was achieved. She was ready to walk the path.
“What path-Hey!” Kaitlein laughed, surprised to find a robot body could be ticklish. She looked at where the nanomachines had tickled her and realized they had left a scale-like gradient of gemstones imbedded in her arm. As more of the nanomachines flowed over her, Kaitlein waded over to the camera she had set up. Turning the viewfinder around, she got a good look at herself and gasped.
She looked like a Venus sculpted out of chrome. Wild patterns of birds, serpents, and flowers were drawn across her legs and torso using specks of opal, lapis, and quartz. Sleeves of gemstones, some as big as an egg, ran along her arms. Gold capped her nipples and lips. Her labia was made from gold filigree and led up to a Robin’s Egg blue stone in place of her clit. The hair trailing from her scalp was shimmering glass fiber.
She was ready to walk the path.
“The path?” Kaitlein asked even as she felt something guiding her perception. Her sixth sense spun wider and wider. She could feel the power humming through cables miles away, radio waves billowing in the wind, and satellites soaring overhead. But more than that, Kaitlein could feel the symphony rising from below, deep below the mountains, between the continental plates, an inhumanly complex torrent of electromagnetism originating from a lost little point buried so deep that it must have gotten stuck there before humans walked the Earth.
She would walk the path to the ship.
Kaitlein looked at her gem-covered body. Well, she had never seen the point of being rich if you didn’t have things that the proles couldn’t
MCM Drabbles 