29. FIRST CONTACT
I slipped out onto the landing, trying to blend into the shadows.
The lock clicked, cutting off the way back. Silence pressed down like a thick blanket, but a rhythm broke through it.
Of heavy, wheezing breath.
Someone invisible was breathing, and I could hear it.
The expected gray darkness hung over the landing. The lightbulbs were dead. The photocells were blind. The electricity had ended along with civilization.
— «Threat?» — I whispered with just my lips.
— «Confirmed,» — the cold voice inside my skull replied. — «Acoustic control. They react to sound. Kill them all!» — the imperative barked. — «Act!»
This internal dialogue no longer unsettled me. It had become part of my operating system. Another stroke in the portrait of a reality gone mad.
My gaze darted to the door opposite. Was I imagining it? Or did the door panel twitch?
I squinted. My updated vision, sharp as a scalpel, sliced through the gloom.
The neighbor’s door was slightly ajar. A crack a palm wide. And in the crack — an Eye.
Yellowish, bulging, with burst blood vessels. It hung roughly at the level of my face and bored into me with an unblinking stare.
The neighbor’s door creaked, opening wider. Fingers crawled out into the opening. Thin, deathly white, unnaturally long. They scuttled up and down the doorframe like spider legs, or as if an invisible pianist were playing a mad sonata on the wooden door panel.
The tempo increased.
The rustling of skin against wood was becoming unbearable.
— «Erkki?» — my voice trembled. — «Is that you?»
Until today, Erkki had lived in that apartment. A taciturn fat man, a professorial soul, eternally red-faced and sweating in his periscope glasses. He was always rushing somewhere, as if afraid of being late for his never-ending experiment.
— «Erkki, are you okay?»
Silence. Only the tapping of bony fingers. Suddenly the rhythm faltered. My hand holding the knife jerked on its own, obeying instinct (or an order?). The blade gleamed dully, aiming predatorily into the darkness.
The creature in the apartment reacted instantly. A blow from inside — the door slammed into the wall with a crash.
Something naked, twitchy, grinding its teeth, launched itself at me in the swift leap of a predatory insect.
I didn’t even have time to get scared. My body reacted faster than my thought. The extended knife entered the creature’s chest, sliding under its ribs.
A flash.
I managed to make out the familiar periscope glasses and the terrifying, animalistic snarl beneath them. The impact knocked me off my feet, as if a freight train had rammed into me. We crashed onto the tiled floor with a dull thud. The creature that bore the name Erkki convulsed, impaled on my knife, but it didn’t give up. It pressed, growled, and scratched, washing over me with waves of putrid stench. Clacking jaws reached for my throat.
I yanked the knife handle, twisting the wide blade in the wound. The creature let out a deafening howl — a sound in which nothing human remained.
With cold frenzy, I twisted, pulled out the blade, and struck, then again and again. Into the stomach, the side, the back. I hacked at the flesh of this monster that was once human, until its grip on my shoulders weakened.
Finally, throwing the limp body off me, I crawled back to the wall and, breathing heavily, got to my feet. Adrenaline pounded in my temples like a hammer.
THUMP…
THUMP…
Before me, in a puddle of black blood, lay IT.
An absolutely naked, dirty, thin body.
And the glasses. I wasn’t mistaken. The very same ones, cracked, but miraculously holding onto the bridge of the nose.
My brain refused to believe its own eyes. Erkki had weighed over a hundred. He was a mountain of a man. The thing lying at my feet barely pushed sixty kilograms. Bones covered with parchment-like skin…
Settling?
Again this unfamiliar word, but I knew what it meant…
*Settleangmentation or Settling — implantation, possession…
Or something else?
The Protocol had burned away his fat just like mine. Only Erkki hadn’t survived the transformation of the mind. His body changed, but his personality was permanently erased.
I bent down, grabbed the corpse by its bony arm, and rolled it onto its back.
The face.
Yes, the neighbor’s features are recognizable. But it is no longer a human face now, it is a mask of animal malice.
The mouth is agape in a final bite, crooked teeth covered in blood…
In my blood.
I recoiled, belatedly feeling a burning sensation.
In the heat of the fight, I missed the moment of contact. He got me after all. With the fingers of my right hand, I touched my neck.
Wet. Sticky. Painful.
The creature had managed to leave a farewell kiss as a souvenir after all.
> ⚠️ **ENTITY STATUS: FIRST CONTACT SUCCESSFUL. SHELL DAMAGE.**
>
> 💀 Congratulations, Executor. Your first exam is passed. Neighbor Erkki is a perfect example of what happens when the System tries to download higher logic into a brain clogged with domestic garbage. The layman’s psyche simply burned up in the process of Settling, leaving only an empty shell and the basic instincts of a predator. The implantation does not tolerate fuss and mental weakness.
>
> 🦠 But look at yourself. You fancied yourself a perfect, pre-cleansed vessel, yet you exposed your neck to a bite in the very first stairwell brawl. Charming protein-based clumsiness. Your new operating system is flawless, but your hardware complex is still extremely vulnerable.
>
> 🩸 The blood on your neck is not just a scratch. It is a fluid exchange interface with a defective, mutated carrier. Keep reading. Let’s see if your new code has a built-in firewall against animalistic rabies.
