Participants:
| Scene Title | Reap What You Sow |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | While Chess is deployed beyond their reach, Kara Price and Yi-Min Yeh continue on the trail of the Flower Garden. |
| Date | July 13, 2021 |
Snip
“Do you know what floriculture is?”
A girl of three is surrounded by bright red flowers growing across a vast trellis beneath the panes of a great greenhouse. The air is damp and warm, beads of moisture cling to the delicate flower petals. A man so many years her senior stands with his back to her, meticulously pruning the vine the flowers grow on.
“It’s a discipline of horticulture, specifically regarding flowers.”
Snip
The smell of these flowers is sticky-sweet in the humid air. She turns to face one of the red blossoms that hang down at eye-level, vibrant and colorful. Gently she reaches up to touch one, but finds the gentle prick of a thorn warning her from further investigation.
“It is a discipline that encompasses the entire life cycle of a flower.” The Gardener continues.
Snip
He smells of flowers too. But his aftershave is familiar as well; woody, with a hint of something like oak. Wet earth, pine needles, fresh grass.
“It’s an overwrought word, when gardener would suffice.”
Snip
The Gardener looks down at her. “Would you like to try a hand?” He asks, offering his shears.
Snip
The young girl reaches up, taking the shears firmly. “Careful, now. Pruning is a delicate task.” The Gardener explains, placing his hand over hers.
Snip
The blades scissor open, slowly closing around the neck of a flower. “For the best blossoms to flourish,” he explains, “the weak must be trimmed.”
Snip
A single blossom falls to the floor.
“Expertly done.”
Twenty-Five Years Later
Heping District
Taiwan
3:14 pm Local Time
There is no road leading north into the mountains from the Jiayang alluvial fan. Not anymore. The forest reclaimed it two decades ago, and what remains is a footpath with crumbling asphalt. This serpentine trail led up into the mountains, where a five-building complex that once belonged to the Sauma Association, a long-defunct biotech company that specialized in agricultural research.
But the Sauma Association was not what it appeared to be on the surface. Layers of financial obfuscation hid its true connections and purpose for decades since its collapse. But much remains of the abandoned facility; windows intact, glass-walled corridors connecting its complex buildings still standing. No graffiti, no vandalism, just the rapid encroach of nature and the natural entropic collapse of human industry.
There are still trucks parked in the loading docks. Trucks with dry rotted tires and chassis’ overgrown with vegetation. No one claimed this building in the company’s collapse, no one cleaned up the history left behind here, and no one has set foot in its walls in many years.
No one until—
Crack!
One slam of a shoulder is all it takes to force a stuck aluminum door to pop open halfway off its hinges, swinging into a massive greenhouse overgrown with wildflowers. Much of the ceiling above is intact but covered in dappling patches of green mold and fresh moss. The glass panes that are broken allow invasive vegetation in from the outside and plants from the greenhouse to stretch upward to shafts of bright sunlight.
Pollen drifts in the air along with mold spores from the dislodged door, caught in the beam of Kara Prince’s flashlight. Broken pieces of glass and plastic crunch under her boots as she slides in through the open doorway ahead of Yi-Min Yeh’s slimmer figure.
On the wall beside the breached door, large letters proclaim in English: Jīn Jièzhǐ Corporation.
The flowers that grow here are mutants. Red orchids that do not grow on a stem but rather a creeping vine like ivy. The leaves of the vine, too, have a reddish cast to them in the light. Iridescent, metallic.
This was the end of the road for months of research. An abandoned lab in the mountains of Taiwan. The last standing lab of the Jīn Jièzhǐ Corporation that created the Flower Garden project.
An agricultural complex that so far has been empty.
Kara stares ahead down the hall for a long moment before she lowers the flashlight bracing her gun arm, a respirator mask she hasn't worn since the excursion into the Exclusion Zone pulled over her face. It masks a good bit of her expression, but her eyes are clear for Yi-Min to read.
"I have to say," she whispers. "I wasn't expecting … actual gardens. I thought it was just a metaphor."
Her gaze is somewhat uneasy as she looks back at her partner. Her worry for failure of Yi-Min's method of being able to navigate this place hasn't failed her yet. But rather than speak to it, she looks ahead again.
"Broken containment here doesn't necessarily mean that further in the lab will be exposed to the elements. Might find something yet out here."
In a silent non-response to the comment about flower gardens not being a metaphor, Yi-Min stoops down to cradle one of the thick tendrils of red flowers in a gloved hand, turning the specimen to examine it from all angles with a wordless expression. When her words do finally come, they sound muffled through the mouthpiece of her own elastomeric respirator. The contraption sits heavy over the bottom half of her face— she is still not particularly used to the sensation of being vulnerable to the potentially toxic effects of particulates.
"Well, this complex was probably rather better kempt in years past, yes? Still… it is strange to see what a place like this has become. Such… dubious things must have been birthed here, once, and yet in the midst of such beauty." Yi-Min's voice grows quieter, and she doesn't seem to be talking about the red buds resting in her gloved palm.
This is the first time Yi-Min has had the opportunity to come home in decades. To the familiar, memory-laden soil of her beloved Taiwan.
Admittedly this isn't quite the reunion she had once dreamed of, digging for the ghosts of the barely-settled past off in some remote ruin. Nor had the window of opportunity to get here been anything like what she had expected.
Kara has proven she has friends in some extremely strange places.
But regardless, Yi-Min is here, now, and she is grimly glad for it. "You know I am not much for gut feelings, but there is something still here. I… feel it."
That intuition leads them deeper into the greenhouse, past tangled stands of creeping red orchids. Their smell is remarkably fragrant, as unnatural as their physical dimensions. Kara notices an ashtray on a dust-covered table, decades-old cigarette butts stubbed out in it. There’s a pair of shears on the table, and a withered clipping from one of the vines.
On the other side of the greenhouse there’s two doors leading to an already-explored residential wing that has mostly collapsed in on itself from the passage of time. But a hermetically-sealed glass door covered (on this side) with blotchy mold around the frame goes deeper into the greenhouse complex than they’ve yet been.
Getting the door open is trivial, Kara didn’t come here unprepared. A crowbar between the door and frame is strong enough to pry it open without needing to smash the glass. Their respirators help mask the smell of stale air that comes from beyond the door, but not the hiss that accompanies the door being forced open.
The hallway beyond is a matte beige color and shows no signs of mold and vegetation intrusion like the rest of the complex. Yi-Min surmises that this entire wing is on an entirely different air filtration system, admittedly one that stopped running a long time ago. But it doesn’t feel like a clean room, more like a quarantine area.
Flashlights reveal the hall travels about twenty feet ahead, ending at another sealed door. This one opaque and metallic.
Kara grins under her respirator when the gut feeling Yi-Min has pays off. "All right," she murmurs before clicking her flashlight back on and forward again. The quick glance down the hall reveals a likely need for the crowbar first rather than her now-holstered gun, so off she goes. She leans against the door she just pried open to give it a little more clearance, and then after stepping through turns back to offer Yi-Min her hand.
"Looks like the nest egg might be ahead," she notes almost encouragingly. "That, or…"
She doesn't say the or. She doesn't want to jinx it– tries to not even think of what they ran into the last time they went spelunking through an abandoned place.
Yi-Min grasps the proffered hand, using it for leverage over a particularly slippery patch of extruding rock in the flooring as she finds her footing again past the door. From their current vantage point, the appearance of an area still untouched by decay or verdure seems especially striking.
"Nest egg or not — yes, be careful," the shorter woman advises into the musty haze, knowing her warning is perfectly unnecessary. The memories of their last exhilarating romp through deceptively-deserted tunnels is still as fresh in her mind as it is in Kara's.
But all the same.
When Yi-Min arrives at the sealed door, she traces a finger lightly down its solid metal facade as she scrutinizes the architecture for hints, searching for an answer on how to open it.
It only takes a moment to find an emergency latch. Without electricity the keypad is useless. But it means there is no magnetic force holding the security bolts in place. They had quarantine cells like this at the facility she worked at with the Vanguard, similar design intention. In the event of a catastrophic loss of power, you had to be able to get into a quarantine area to eradicate samples before refrigeration units and depowered HVAC worsened any situation.
But she doesn’t see biohazard symbols on the door. Nevertheless, it feels like opening something dangerous. Forbidden.
The latch pulls easily, though, and Yi-Min is able to haul one side of the door aside herself. It glides across somewhat stiff bearing runners, revealing a secondary and windowless lab. Pitch black.
The moment Kara’s flashlight sweeps into the room, the true horror of the lab is revealed. First it’s the tanks. Vertical glass tanks filled with a murky brown fluid, some of which have silhouettes of human bodies floating in them. Then there’s the charnel pile. The middle of the floor is blackened by an intense heat and so is the ceiling, but not a long-enough burning fire for the roof to catch. The source of the flame is a heap of burned bodies reduced down to bone and charcoal sinew. A dozen, maybe more.
Lab equipment hangs on the periphery of the room. Examination tables, workstations, test equipment, refrigerators and cabinets. Nothing labeled.
What luck they have. Even though her face is covered, filters in place, her non-flashlight-wielding hand comes up by her mouth and nose anyway. It's instinct, prepared for a smell that's not likely to be fresh, given this place. God, she hopes it's not fresh.
Her light doesn't stay long on the pile, moving quickly past to other areas of the room, looking for other doors - places others could be. Not like this place looks like there's likelihood for that. Someone set something ablaze with gasoline-infused fire and likely never looked back.
Kara doesn't lose her tension, but she does slowly let go of the breath she held onto. "This doesn't look promising for finding documentation," she admits aloud, voice quiet in the still and silent space.
For her part, Yi-Min is completely silent when she arrives at the scene that greets them. Unlike Kara, the centerpiece of burnt bodies is the first thing to draw her in– she clicks on a clip-on flashlight when she draws close enough, the beam of light bathing the mass of mangled human residue in a hellishly yellow glow. The sound of the slow, vaguely ruminative inhalation she takes is muffled by her respirator, her stillness speaking of her emotions in that moment better than any noise she could make.
Her need to see more suddenly deepening, Yi-Min turns to the occupied glass tank that is closest to her, taking a step or two forward so as to center her view. The small woman bends close, wiping away a thick brackish film that comes away neatly with her gloved hand. Her fingertips curl from a trace of reflexive distaste, but she herself doesn't flinch as she stares into the patch of wiped glass at the body hovering just inside.
"Who were you?" Yi-Min asks softly, eyes half-lidded with chary curiosity, as though she were an onlooker pondering a specimen in a zoo.
The corpse contained within is slim but decayed. A decade or more of rot. The corpse is propped up by the locking of its knees and a slouched posture against the back of the tank. Cracks in the glass let in bacteria, which has left the corpse in a nearly skeletal state, making it impossible to recognize who they may have been, save for the taut remains of flesh stretched over bone. Each one after the first is the same, a slouched corpse a decade since rotting away in the humidity of this forested ruin.
The burned remains in the middle of the room, heaped into a pile, tell even less of a tale of their identity. But there is a curious condition among them that, while not helping identify them, suggests a story about their demise. To an untrained eye it looks like the resultant effect of extreme heat and bones; a fracturing. But the lines are too clean, and the location of the fracturing is too consistent.
Kara wouldn’t have been able to pick out the details, but as Yi-Min Yeh assesses the burned corpses she notices the cranial trauma they’ve all suffered. Cranial trauma this fire was meant to mask.
Their skulls had been sawed open. Prior to the fire.
Prior to death.
While Yi-Min explores where she does, Kara takes closer stock, of the other places answers might yet be yielded in this place. One door holds a small window, looks generally thinner– she sidles up to it, looking within to see another labroom of some kind, an examination table seen in the haze of the unkept plexiglass. Her eyes dance over what she can see long enough she doesn't suspect there's anything amiss before turning her head slightly toward Yi-Min. "Another lab room through here," she announces quietly, then makes her way over to check the other door, flashlight first into the hall as she opens the door with minimal fuss, no shouldering or crowbar needed. Perhaps they were all right for a while.
She tucks it away behind her and looks back to her partner, finally paying closer attention to all she does.
Yi-Min does not give any outward sign of acknowledgement to Kara's remark about the extra room to explore, though she certainly must have heard it. Indeed, she doesn't even look away from the current object of her fascination, her gloved fingers finally dropping away from the glass tank after having hovered there for far too long. "Look at this," she observes after a beat, letting her gaze swivel around to the other, similar sights dotting the room before landing again on the one directly right in front of her.
"They have all been cut open. You can see it, if you look carefully— there, and there." Yi-Min jabs with her pinky finger for emphasis, though it's hardly necessary. "All in roughly that same spot, you see? As if they were all lobotomized. What is it they were trying to do?"
It's not a question she expects Kara to be able to answer. The slight accusation in Yi-Min's voice (low though it is) travels through the air, rises to fill the space of the ruined, musty chamber around them. If no answers would be forthcoming from the silent environment, neither would Dr. Yeh be content until she is set on a path towards one.
Kara doesn't have confidence in her guess, but she answers unsettled and regardless, "Ensure they were dead, almost certainly. And if any of these were more clones, perhaps…" She hates this idea. "Perhaps they wanted the depths of their proprietary materials back." It's a thought that makes her teeth grit, molars tense on one another. "If…"
Her eyes lift uncertainly, looking further into the facility. "If this was a Company-intended liquidation."
As Yi-Min leaves the charred skeletons behind, Kara continues toward the sealed examination room. Her flashlight shone through the windows in the door reveals it to be a dead end, but signs of a struggle she can see do not seem consistent with what she’d expect of a paramilitary liquidation. It takes little effort to wrench the door open and shake off years of detritus from the hinges, and the door pushes open several jingling shell casings as it opens.
The exam room is small, with a single bed in the middle and a derelict overhead light that no longer functions. There’s no bullet holes in the walls here, no signs of gunfire except what is pockmarked on the walls around the doorway. Kara doesn’t see the shooter’s remains initially. Her eyes first track to a black scar in the wall moving at a downward arc: a burn about an inch wide. As her eyes follow the blackened scar in the wall she finds the remains of the shooter at the end of it, cut in half by some extreme heat. Like a laser. There’s a 9mm handgun at his side next to his severed arm. Jungle insects and time have stripped this man down to tough sinew and yellowed bone.
"Aggressor in here appears to have been Expressive," Kara summarizes the finding. Her frown persists behind her mask. Stepping in to see the bullet markings in here lead her to refocus out there– to notice better how intact most things seem, comparatively. Not even an escaped bullet past, despite someone shooting directly at the door. Mosaic? Her eyes flicker in a narrow before she leaves the room ultimately behind, but scans the flashlight back into it for Yi-Min's sake to see the evidence she witnessed while blocking the doorway.
"No records in here, though," she clarifies, looking back at the body pile once more, comparing mentally the scorch on the ground to those on the bodies. Different. Her suspicion grows, and the only thing that ameliorates it is the thought that this place has been undisturbed for a long time.
She's glad for the gun she's brought with her regardless, and reaches to unholster it once more.
Having exhausted the answers this wing will provide, Kara instead leads the way through double doors and into an overgrown hall. The glass walls and ceiling long ago gave way to the jungle vegetation. Dried leaves crunch under her boots as she follows the corridor to another connecting pair of double doors that lead into a command center.
Banks of computers dating back to the mid 2010s are arranged on a horseshoe counter. Chairs are either rotted through or knocked over. The glass domed ceiling has partially collapsed, leaving a tangle of jungle vines to dangle down inside the room. Birds call from overhead, flitting to and from nests in the rafters.
As Kara and Yi-Min venture in, they see demolished remains of flat screen televisions mounted on the near wall. The screens are cracked, some dislodged from the wall entirely and left to rot on the floor. Up from the overgrown computers there’s an observation level with monitors recessed into a single console. A security station. There’s no bodies in here, no signs of struggle, either. Next to one of the monitors there’s a slot for some kind of physical media with a yellowed cartridge inserted.
The slow taking in of the potential threats - animals that might have slipped in and would react poorly to their presence more of a suspect than other humans at this venture - leads to a gradual move on to examining the room for clues. Given what happened in the other space, the lack of signs of a struggle are almost puzzling.
Kara eventually finishes counting the monitors above before her eyes go to the other machines present, her brows arching once she finally gets there.
"Promising?" she wonders, gesturing to the cartridge with a tip of her chin and shining light on it.
Yi-Min’s reaction is a distracted, deferential nod as she diverts from Kara to examine the mostly skeletal remains of a security professional laying under the debris from the collapsed ceiling. The body isn’t burned like the others, and at this stage it’s hard to tell if the pieces of the ceiling impaling the body came pre or post-mortem. Yi-Min offers a casual glance up to Kara, but the wordless trust for Kara to handle this is implied.
The console is no less grisly than the cadaver, gutted by some tremendous force. Wiring is spread across the floor, workstations built into the console torn out and shattered. That the single, yellow cartridge remains intact is a miracle when everything else around it is so thoroughly destroyed.
It’s not yellow, either. Or, it wasn’t always. The yellow has hues of green in ridged crevices. The plastic may have been white or gray at some point, but exposure to the elements has weathered the material. It, much like the hardware Kara and Yi-Min found under Manhattan, will likely need digital forensics.
The cartridge slides out of the console with a satisfying, mechanical click when Kara depresses it. It’s thick, old, heavy. The faded stencil on the side indicates DAT-320, a magnetic tape backup cartridge that stores up to 160BG of data. If the weather didn’t destroy it, this could be a remarkable find.
Kara breathes out slowly when it looks to her that the cartridge is intact. She remembers the moment they made a similar find when spelunking in the Exclusion Zone, the box of tapes. A languid blink preserves her hope that maybe this assuredly fucked up find would be clearer in the information it would hold.
Answers were never a promise, but something the Sundered had hunted for so long. If this Yi-Min wasn't able to find them for herself, not fully, at least she might be able to find them for others who deserved them.
"Raytech might have something to read this. If not, I'll find something that can." As she promises as much, she carefully tucks it away in the pack slung over her back, zipping it closed before she takes hold of both flashlight and firearm again. She returns to Yi-Min's side, seeing if her studies have revealed anything else.
They haven’t. There’s little left behind of whatever this facility was. Scoured of so much evidence and exposed to the elements for as long as it has been. And yet in that there is a sense of finding a hidden treasure, felt in the heft of that magnetic backup tape.
Jungle birds hold court in the demolished ceiling of this secret grave, their calls offering no insight into the truth behind them. It is merely a song for the dead, and a reminder to the living not to remain behind long enough to join them. As Yi-Min stands up from the wreckage of the collapsed ceiling, Kara receives a simple message on the radio clipped to her belt. A two-squawk signal of the smugglers who helped get them here, under the nose of government officials and corrupt bureaucrats.
It’s time to go.
When the signal sounds, Kara turns to look at Yi-Min, her eyes filled with as much hope as pain. Even if they had more time, this might very well be the only thing they'd find regardless, save for perhaps a few more mysterious corpses– or lack of them. The end of the venture here, though, is an end to the truce of not holding Kara's secret new reality against her, and the ostensible nearing of the end of her time with Yi-Min. Or at least…
Time with the one she'd supported and mourned with and cared for and worried after, following her ability being 'stolen', and then her health declining. The one she'd anxiously waited to come back to awareness after her surgery at Yamagato. The one who insists that the 'real' woman she was in love with would be returning to her soon. (Should that even be possible.)
Suddenly, Kara finds her eyes stinging, not at all from having disturbed the rest of dust and pollen. Perspective abruptly assaults her. Once, they'd spoken of travel to Yi-Min's native Taiwan. It hadn't been supposed to be like this.
“What were you dreaming about?” Kara asks, shifting the book that had been open on her lap to the side, laying it face down into the blanket with its pages still splayed. She has a more interesting story to tend to now.
"About Taiwan." Yi-Min's eyes shut briefly, still with that faraway look in them just before doing so, still with that glowing shade of a smile. "There was a place where I have not been to in many years. A bridge beneath a grove of… how do you call it in English? Liu tang luo yu song. Cypress trees, I think."
A pause for yearned further remembrance. "Water so clear that it is as though a second world lies within. And you were there with me." The last detail, but not the least important.
“Liu tang…” Kara murmurs her thoughts aloud as she tries and fails to capture the entire phrase in the single pass. She tilts her head back idly, staring up at the bottom of the parasol with a pensive hm, minding the tiny holes where the sun has needled its way through. She shifts her sitting position, leaning back on one hand while the forearm of the other rests against a bent knee.
Hearing that she was present in the dream takes her away from the half-reverie of wondering what this place must look like, and causes her to turn her head. Her surprise is genuine, no matter how much she attempts to guard it. Yi-Min dreamt of her? When Kara dreamt of others, it was usually a terrible dream.
That included the good ones — the ones where she roamed a world not at war, lived in a place that was not Providence. Or even the middling ones, where she dreamed she was still working for Stillwater.
All thoughts she keeps to herself, in favor of asking with a touch of interest, “And what were we doing together?”
She turns her body more toward Yi-Min, brow arching. “Were we among the trees, or living in that second world?” There’s a touch of amusement in her voice as she wonders, “Like mermaids?”
This last line elicits an unexpectedly animated laugh from Yi-Min, who lands a lightly playful swipe on Kara's shoulder as she watches the spectrum of introspective emotions that her partner's expression travels through. "Please. I would pay real money to see you in a coconut bra and a fish tail. No, nothing so exciting as that, I'm afraid. We were together on the bridge, leaning on the rail. Simply looking out into the water beneath us."
It is Yi-Min's turn for her tone to take on a note of contented musing, as her gaze idly follows Kara's to the comfortingly shaded underbelly of the parasol they are both lounging under. "It was very nice, nonetheless. Simply to be, with you nearby, and nothing to worry about for once."
There was so much to worry about in the present moment. Many worlds and their impending ends, both personal and global.
"It was a favorite spot of mine when I was younger. Someday, perhaps, we shall have a vacation from Providence and I shall take you. Autumn there is beautiful beyond words."
"Sha gua?" Kara asks her softly to keep her from leaving immediately. She reaches for her partner's hand. Her thumb brushes over the back of the other woman's knuckles.
“I’ve never given much thought to additional travel,” Kara admits, turning her gaze to look out over the water. With a view like this, with a company like this, there were days she might actually feel as though she had everything she needed and for it to not be a well-covered lie.
"There is a much bigger world out there than this one," Yi-Min reminds Kara gently, still somewhat sunny with amusement at the vision of the normally stern woman as a whimsically free, only slightly tropically-themed nymph. And she is entirely serious about it, too, just as much as she is about the potential of future travel.
Kara Prince, Yi-Min will show you the world. Someday. If they don’t all die first.
"There's someplace here I want to visit before we go back to New York," is all Kara can manage to say in the moment, her heart overfull. "One unique and wonderful thing I want to share with you," a word with so much emphasis, valuing who she was even if she thought herself an impostor, "before whatever happens next."
It wasn't autumn. They hadn't come on vacation. But they had what they had, and in having each other, Kara found she had enough. She always had, and she always would.
The seeds of the adventure she dances around directly naming were sown long ago. Perhaps this Yi-Min wasn't hers, but Kara found herself to be a different person now than she was then as well. Instead of inheriting just the stresses and problems of their past selves, in this moment, they could give life to the dreams they'd shared as well.
However brief. However ephemeral.
When Yi-Min's hand slowly closes around hers in return in an initial, non-verbal acquiescence, Kara feels the crushing weight of her worries ease to almost nothing.
However brief. However ephemeral. And definitely heedless of the tiring hike back to civilization would first precede any capitalization on their trip to this country, planned or otherwise.
Twenty-Five Years Earlier
A single red flower rests on the floor, loose petals scattered around it.
A girl of three bends down to pick it up off the floor, cradling it delicately in her hands. The Gardener, looming above her, watches with curiosity and purposeful intent. "Very good," he says with warm approval, resting his hand on the girl's head. "Do you want to know why we do all this? The work?"
The girl nods, watching as the Gardener gently plucks the trimmed rose from her hands. "Promise you can keep a secret?" He asks, and the girl nods once more.
The Gardener leans in. "Each flower is a message," he whispers into her ear, "expertly hidden. Each petal a page, each page a story. Until one day, when the proper flower blooms…" He closes his hand around the trimmed blossom, and in a subtle sleight-of-hand, swaps it for a red origami rose.
"The whole story is revealed."