Seven Monsters and a Half
Synopsis:
A young woman awakens, paralyzed within a chemical paradise. Slowly, the horrific truth crystallizes: she is being used as a mere incubator. Only one nurse believes in her capacity to become something more than a victim.
It was sudden. She awoke to find that there was nothing in the world she did not wish to experience; life felt like a vast, shimmering opportunity, a prize demanding to be claimed.
She had never felt this way. Her mood was extraordinary, her confidence absolute. A feral lust for life surged through her, joy exuding from her very pores. She wanted to do everything at once. And she wanted to do it now.
Yet, in the very next heartbeat, a new sensation entered the fray, demanding her attention. Yes, she wanted to do it all, but… she could not.
She noticed her heart was barely fluttering—a few meager beats per minute—despite the frantic sensation of tachycardia thrumming in her mind. Her lungs filled with air only by sheer inertia, though she felt breathless with excitement.
Was she dead?
No. She couldn't be. Had she been dead, she wouldn't have perceived these sensations; furthermore, it would have been impossible to doubt her own existence. The act of doubting was, in itself, the proof of life.
But she was paralyzed.
Vegetative.
And alone.
Fortunately, she could still see. The vivid green of her eyes darted back and forth, pupils dancing within their sockets. And though the image was blurred, as if veiled by a thin, persistent haze, she saw.
She was in a meadow. A breathtaking expanse of green, dappled with clusters of wildflowers. Scattered trees rose from the earth, their trunks voluminous and swollen.
She was pinned to a hospital bed, her wrists and ankles bound by shackles. Naked and exposed to the sun.
The sun was a pale, brownish orb setting on the horizon—almost rusted, serene, and gentle. Its light sank into her skin, leaving a pleasurable warmth heightened by a soft, temperate breeze.
In the distance, the velvet carpet of rolling hills silhouetted the horizon, shaping a landscape so idyllic she longed to lose herself in it.
Time had stalled. She couldn't tell how many hours, days, or weeks she spent in that state. She couldn't move, but she didn't much care; she was profoundly happy.
To breathe and to see was enough. Even if the breaths were shallow and slow. Each inhalation was a fresh draught of joy and certainty—a sublime union of pleasure and fulfillment. Every sigh felt like a new adventure.
Some time later, while she was delighting in the rhythmic swaying of distant leaves, she heard voices behind her for the first time.
"She’s right there." The female voice that uttered these words sounded divine. Majestic.
"She hasn't recovered yet. Look at her eyes—they're moving at light speed. Dial back the mixture a bit." The male voice, however, repelled her instantly.
Still, she did not doubt that they both admired her. Oh, yes—that was it. They were worshiping her. Like a queen. Or a goddess. She felt like a supra-human entity, elevated far above the mortal plane.
"She seems to be enjoying herself."
"How are the embryos?"
"Perfect. Development is right on track. The serum is helping, certainly. And she doesn't feel a thing. Quite the opposite. Look at that smile."
"Spectacular. Did you reduce the mix? We don't want her losing her mind. Take it down ten or fifteen percent."
"Fine. But she might feel some pain."
"Let her. What does it matter?"
Though she heard them clearly, she couldn't quite grasp the sentences. Her state of absolute, blissful intoxication left no room in her brain for much else. Only scattered words managed to slip through and find meaning.
Reduce? Take away? She didn't want them to reduce or take anything. She wanted to remain in this state forever. That continuous torrent of pleasure carried her aloft through the kingdom of imagination, and she never wanted to be forced to leave.
She heard the voices fade and a door click shut behind her. It seemed perfectly natural. In this place, nothing was strange or discordant. If a door closed in the middle of a field, she simply noted how beautiful the sound of the latch was, and nothing more.
It was her world, and nothing would disturb it.
Days, weeks, and months drifted by. Then one day, abruptly, she realized something was shifting. The realization hit her with the force of a blow, but upon reflection, she understood it had been happening since the very first day she saw her paradise. The change had been so gradual, so languidly progressive, that she hadn't noticed until now.
And this change concerned her. Deeply. Because what was changing, in truth, was her.
First came the awareness that what she saw was not real. When the feeling first flickered, she could barely distinguish it, but gradually, the truth became undeniable. She still saw and felt the paradise, but the slamming of doors, the echo of voices, the objects and walls that flickered in and out of existence...
There were too many alien elements to ignore.
She had begun to see the true place where she was kept. Not all at once, not as a cohesive whole, but in jagged snatches. She saw fragments of greenish tiled walls, beds with white sheets at her sides, and occasionally, a bleak white ceiling defined only by a hideous fluorescent tube.
These were fleeting moments—ephemeral, almost ethereal—but they were enough for her to understand.
Furthermore, these glimpses were becoming frequent. She felt herself gaining the strength to escape the induced pleasure and think. To think for herself.
However, even though she could diagnose her situation—the kidnapping, the drugging—she still struggled to want to leave it. Most of the time, the sensation was too intense, too exquisite to consciously discard. It was like a Friday afternoon where you’d won the lottery and were having a world-shaking orgasm while sliding down a high-speed water slide.
The sensations were overwhelming, but their sheer bliss made their falsity hard to accept.
But she had no choice.
Because what worried her most wasn't the sedation or the captivity. It was what she felt inside her. And it wasn't just a feeling; she could see it. She saw it both in her happy world and in the jagged cracks of reality.
Her belly had grown progressively larger, and she knew what that meant. Yet, she couldn't explain it. She was young; she had never experienced sex with anyone but herself. Was she some new version of the Virgin? Was she to give birth to the son of a God?
She was delirious, obviously. But even in her most lucid moments, the sensation within her—the certainty that she was to be a mother—did not vanish.
She vacillated constantly between the tenderness of nurturing a new life and a blistering hatred for the fact that she was merely an incubator for someone else’s legacy.
Time surged forward, though she still had no way to measure its passage. In her ideal world, it was always sunset. She imagined she slept at some point, but she didn't know when or how. She felt neither sleepiness nor the act of waking.
However, her windows into the real world were widening. She could now observe her surroundings for minutes at a time, and it was the most horrific thing she had ever seen.
But she forced herself to look. She exerted every ounce of will to keep her brain on track, to inhabit the true reality rather than the pleasant one.
Truth be told, the pleasure had begun to sour. When she saw her meadow, she still enjoyed it, but the desire to stay forever had vanished. During a "peak," she still prayed to a God she didn't believe in to let her stay happy just a little longer, but when the drugs ebbed, she loathed herself for it.
She still couldn't perfectly control her mind; memories fluttered like wounded birds inside her skull.
She didn't remember who she was, her name, her age, or her home. But she remembered the dark halls of a research institute. She remembered being made to solve children's math problems or play with toys while they mapped her brain through wires glued to her shaved head.
Yet, she also remembered her captors as rescuers—as if they had liberated her from something, though she couldn't fathom what. Those memories were unreliable, but the more recent they were, the sharper they cut.
Now she knew what they were doing to her. Someone was using her to gestate their offspring. She even remembered what they had done in those early days, though back then she was lost in paradise and hadn't grasped the gravity of it.
How much time had passed? She couldn't be sure, but gauging the distension of her womb, it had to be at least six months. Seven, perhaps eight. She hoped with all her might that she would never reach the ninth.
She could stay focused for longer stretches now. She wondered if this reclamation of reality was a result of her own will, or if it was simply part of the treatment—making her struggle pointless.
One day, she got her answer.
She had grown accustomed to the voices and had even seen their owners. They were never quite sharp—appearing as if behind a blurred layer of reality—but she could distinguish them. Three voices repeated daily; three people who visited and studied her. She gave them names.
There was only one man: "The Doctor." The Doctor was devoid of sentiment. He never made a comment that wasn't clinical. He touched and examined her without scruple or care, probing everywhere, even internally. He revolted her—a pure, visceral disgust. In her blurred vision, he had the bloated physique of a pufferfish.
The two women were clearly nurses. Obvious, because they followed the Doctor’s every command, providing data and passing instruments. One she called "Nurse Magpie." She seemed—or appeared to be—gaunt and hawkish. She was almost as loathsome as the Doctor, a drone of temperatures, serums, and medical jargon. She only approached her when ordered, and her touch was as careless as his.
The other, however, was different. She was a saint. And so, she became "Nurse Saint." She also gave technical reports, but when they were alone, she tended to her. She fluffed her pillow. She adjusted the shackles on her wrists and ankles. Sometimes she even removed them to move her limbs… one by one, of course.
The girl’s face was a blur, but she could sense it was rounder, softer than her colleague’s. She was sure she was beautiful. She never touched her unless ordered, but when she did, it was with profound delicacy and affection.
She began to feel a sense of extreme friendship for her, bordering on the romantic. She was convinced that Nurse Saint, in some way, wanted to help her escape.
Then she would tell herself she was a fool. In a situation like hers, a simple act of human compassion was magnified into something exceptional, when in all likelihood, the girl simply suffered from the "defect" of having a soul.
However, the moment she realized she hadn't been overthinking it was glorious.
It was night—perhaps the early hours of the morning, for the overhead lights were on and the windows were dark in her snatches of reality. The Doctor had been gone for a long time, and she felt almost lucid.
Nurse Saint approached, leaning down until she was right in front of her face. She kissed her on the mouth—a quick gesture, barely long enough to feel the warmth of her lips. It wasn't romantic. It was a kiss of pure, fraternal, respectful love. She was stunned by how much could be conveyed in such a small act.
Then, the nurse moved to her ear and whispered.
"I know you hear me. I’m doing what I can. They’ll pay for doing this to the Chosen One. Listen closely!" The last part nearly pierced her eardrum, and she locked onto every syllable. "I’m going to change things. From now on, you’ll be able to speak—but if you find you can, say nothing. You’ll be able to move—but if you find you can, do not move. You’ll be able to see clearly—but do not look too closely. Do you hear me? Wait for the moment. I will tell you when it is time!"
She felt the nurse’s ragged breath as she pulled away. She saw her face again. She responded as best she could: a rapid blink. Nurse Saint was satisfied.
No further words were needed. She never knew what had changed or how, but after that night, her periods of clarity grew longer. Her capacity for reason normalized to the point that she had the mental freedom to obsess over when that "moment" would finally arrive.
Until it did.
The night before had been the first time she had slept consciously. She saw the Doctor approach and inject her arm. She didn't feel the needle, but she watched the liquid enter her veins. Shortly after, she felt the strange novelty of sleepiness. It lasted only seconds before she fell into the arms of Morpheus.
Now, she was in a far worse position.
Upon waking, every trace of her beautiful meadow and its eternal sunset had vanished. Her consciousness had been improving, but knowing she could occasionally return to that place had helped her endure the raw reality. Now, nothing remained. The loss crushed her even more than the thought of what lay ahead.
Even the reality wasn't "normal." She was in a different room. A different bed. Still bound, but now spread-eagled and surrounded by strangers. She saw how they looked at her: like an object. An inanimate vessel that would serve a purpose and then be discarded.
Among the crowd were the Doctor and the two nurses, but the others wore civilian clothes. She understood immediately who they were.
The parents of her future children.
Why? Why were they doing this to her? She heard them talking, and now that she could understand every word, she heard comments about genetic markers and congratulations on the successful implantation and development. She listened as each tried to extol the traits their future offspring would have—offspring designed in a lab and grown in the "biological container," which was how they referred to her.
She counted them. Five men and two women. Seven? She wouldn't be able to do it. Since Nurse Saint had spoken to her, she had been all determination and strength, but seven children? How was she supposed to give birth to seven? she had always been a small thing, her body fragile. If the thought of one terrified her, seven seemed an impossible task.
Her will buckled. She was certain she would die in the process, and she would do so knowing she was giving life to seven little monsters who would be raised by the seven worst people in the world.
She was dying to scream at them, to insult them; she wanted to rip off the shackles even though she knew it was impossible. She wanted to lock her legs and ensure nothing ever left her body. But she held back.
She remembered her friend’s words. If you can speak, do not speak. She had to wait for the moment. With a titanic effort, she swallowed her rage and feigned sedation as perfectly as she could. Meanwhile, she prayed with every fiber of her soul that those children would be born dead.
Suddenly, she felt someone grab her wrists to secure the restraints while they inserted an IV line connected to a transparent tube and a medical bag hanging by the bed. The Doctor approached with two syringes, one for her arm and one for her womb. This time, she felt the stabs, but she endured the pain with all her strength.
She felt one of the drugs trying to drag her back to her paradise. She felt the cool air, the temperate breeze, the rusty sun warming her pores.
But this time, she did not let go.
She remained in reality using every ounce of willpower left in her battered brain. It was a gargantuan mental struggle. She knew her paradise offered pleasure and happiness, while her actual situation was the exact opposite. Resisting pain is hard, but resisting relief when one is suffering is far more difficult.
The bliss tried to claim her, to transport her to that perfect place her mind constructed with the help of the chemicals. And she fought like a madwoman to stay present.
It was made all the harder because she could see, and what she saw was ghastly. They had placed a drape at her chest level, obscuring her view of her lower body, but she felt—distant and strange as it was—the rummaging inside her. She saw the babies being extracted, cleaned, wrapped in towels, and handed into the arms of their so-called parents.
But what disgusted her most—what ignited her, what gave her the strength to stay in the world of suffering—wasn't the violation of her physical and mental self.
It was the smiles on the faces of those "parents."
They held their offspring—their own blood, lab-created and perfectly gestated thanks to her body—and they ignored her completely. She didn't exist. She was an object, not a living being. To those people, thanking her would have been as absurd as thanking a refrigerator for keeping the milk cold.
She was exhausted, and there came a moment when she thought she couldn't hold on. Her eyes fluttered; she was on the verge of surrendering to that nauseating warmth that demanded her attention. But at the last second, she caught a glimpse of her friend behind the drape and the Doctor.
She opened her eyes and stared at her. The nurse returned a look that said more than a thousand encyclopedias, though it could be summarized in one word: "Hold."
And she did, because she trusted her. She knew they were going to let her die. At best, they would end her suffering in some "merciful" way after the birth. But with that look, her friend was confessing she had a plan to ensure it didn't end that way.
She had to have one.
Finally, it was over. She saw all those hateful scientists with their babies in their arms, perfectly healthy and comfortable. She had done it. She didn't understand how she was still alive.
At least one of the things she had been fighting—the unbearable sense of her body being profaned—had ended.
The problem was that it had been replaced by a new sensation: an absolute, boundless hatred for everyone responsible for her agony.
And that had to be weighed against the eternal, induced pleasure that she could no longer stand, which was steadily eroding her capacity to reason.
If she kept holding on, it was only because she could still see that woman. She looked at her, and in her bruised mind, the nurse appeared as her lover, her friend, her daughter, her mother, her goddess, her master, her servant, and her executioner. Her intellect was fractured, but she still knew this woman was her savior.
The nurse, somehow, heard her mental scream. While the others huddled in a corner of the room, obsessed with the newborns, she approached and began to manipulate one of the IVs. She pulled the tube from one of the lines and replaced it with another from a small bag she had hidden in her uniform pocket.
With lightning movements, she released the shackles on her wrists and ankles. Then, she leaned over her, placing a pair of large, sharp-pointed scissors on her chest.
Face inches from hers, she whispered:
"I know it's impossible, but I still believe in the Chosen One. If we're going to do this, it has to be now."
In that precise moment, she had a revelation. As the contents of the new bag began to surge through her bloodstream, as the woman whispered those urgent words, she looked through the nurse’s pupils. She slipped through those black wells, traveled up the optic nerves, and glimpsed her mind from the inside.
She saw herself there, elevated to the highest reaches of the universe, above the deities of every planet. She was the one who ruled, who ordered, who distributed. She was justice, evolution, love. All that and more, hidden in the mind of the only person who had treated her with dignity.
She didn't understand why this woman held such an image of her. But her trust was so absolute that she believed in what she saw.
She felt cosmic. She felt brilliant, brimming with strength and an almost infinite energy. Returning to the physical plane, every second felt like a minute; her mind was hyper-clear and fast, her movements extraordinarily agile.
Without a second thought, she grabbed the scissors and leapt from the bed, tearing away the drape. For a moment, she looked at herself, and the sight multiplied her determination a thousandfold. She felt nothing, but her body was a ruin.
She didn't understand how she could stand. It hadn't been a C-section; they had done something worse. She didn't understand how, after months of immobility and the butchery she’d just endured, she could move.
In a final gesture of sanity, she turned her head and saw her friend—her savior, her Saint—one last time. The expression on the nurse's face was the final injection of energy she needed. She was looking at her with adoration and a grin that left no room for doubt. This woman didn't just understand her; she wasn't just helping out of pity. She had faith. Authentic, almost religious faith. She believed she was someone special. And now, she was going to see the proof.
She ripped the IV lines from her wrist and, fueled by that final kick of adrenaline, launched herself with dizzying speed toward the group of "parents" who hadn't even noticed she was moving.
In barely ninety seconds, all the cruel inhumanity they had heaped upon her for months was returned in full, concentrated and expelled as vengeful violence.
She reigned like an angel of death. She danced with her scissors—a perfect, violent choreography that severed necks, pierced ribcages, crushed skulls, punctured eyes, and perforated livers.
She had no mercy. The fire of rage within her carried her at light speed from one individual to the next. No one tried to stop her because no one was capable. Her image—bloody, wounded, broken—combined with a face contorted by wrath and the sheer certainty of her actions, provoked such horror that her victims were paralyzed.
Throughout her mortal frenzy, she remained in that state of divine elevation she had never felt before. Her movements were lightning; her determination was limitless. However, her strength began to drain, second by second, as the deaths piled up.
At the very last moment, as she held the last surviving scientist by the leg, dangling his baby upside down, a sudden faintness overcame her. She was forced to drop him before she could deliver a fatal plunge to his throat.
The man fled in terror, looking back one last time with a mix of horror and shock—to him, it was as if his microwave had tried to murder him.
She collapsed onto the floor into a massive pool of blood, the copper stench nearly making her retch. The sensation of power was gone. The divine superiority had vanished. Everything was normal again. And normal meant dantesque.
The walls were splattered with blood; the room smelled of death. Bodies were heaped around her, many still twitching. She saw the Doctor’s head separated from his body, lying near a small infant whose skull was crushed, blood flowing in torrents.
She felt overwhelmed. Stunned. She couldn't have done all this. And if she had, it was only because she thought she was going to die. Why wasn't she dying? She wanted to die. Her revenge was complete. She could do no more. If she lived, the weight of this would be a torture worse than anything they had put her through. The memory of those babies would haunt her forever.
She felt her friend’s arms trying to lift her from the floor. She sat up as best she could, leaning against her. Her sense of touch was returning. She appreciated the small embrace, but it filled her with dread; the state of her own anatomy was appalling. She wanted to die now. Every time she looked at herself, she was shocked she was still conscious. Much of the blood on the floor was hers. Until now, she hadn't felt the pain, but she felt faint just thinking about what would happen when her nervous system fully woke up.
She looked at her rescuer and, knowing she was likely living her final seconds, she pleaded:
"Let no one forgive me. Finish the one who's left...
..."
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