The Embryomen performed very select services for a very discreet clientele. They grew bodies of all sizes and shapes for a myriad of purposes including organ harvesting, DNA, chakra and orgone manipulation, personality transfer, cloning and creating expertly designed, tailor made companions. They took great pains to be as unknown as possible outside their small circle of immensely wealthy patrons, but conspiracy theories regarding them proliferated none the less.
Decades ago their organization was kept staffed through rigorous and stringent recruitment methods. By present day however, this was no longer needed. Embryomen were no longer hired, they were simply grown.
Particularly talented staff were occasionally cloned. Often, poorer clientele whose DNA was deemed promising could receive services by birthing an extra baby who would be taken and raised to be an Embryoman. Such was the case with the dead girl’s brother.
Guesses as to the organization’s ultimate aims fell into two camps. Wealthy clients assumed over-obsessive if not simply unscrupulous interest in gene science coupled with monetary ambition fueled their existence. Most conspiracy theories involving the organization usually centered around much darker and more nefarious agendas. Only one theorist correctly guessed their real ultimate purpose. They were trying fanatically to breed a strain of human being without a soul.
What everyone got wrong however, is that their purpose was ulitarian. They were trying to save mankind from the coming storm.
On a dimensional plane very close to ours, bordering on the Astral, where occasional humans, especially mystics and artists could often tune to, a terrible, cataclysmic storm had been building for decades and was every year nearing impact. While the initial assumption was that it would only cause a small percentage of Mankind to go mad, it was gradually discovered that it would in fact effect most of the population. Indeed mankind as a whole would go first hyperactive then mad. The likely outcome would be species suicide.
If the soul could be shielded or even removed completely, the human race would cease to be linked to the Plane which the Storm would ravage.
Thus the Embryomen worked diligently across decades. Their research and knowledge allowed them to offer particular services which brought in sizable wealth to fund their ongoing work and experimentation. Embyromen were bred and raised to best execute their scientific tasks, although each and every one had a deep, profound well of loneliness within them. A type of lonliness that none of them could ever quite identify or even name.
………
The dead girl followed the fog’s instructions and built a memory palace, mostly out of stones and slabs she gathered from the graves and mausoleums around her. It was a small shack big enough for her to crawl through. The rooms were the size of a child’s tent, but the fog assured her it would serve the purpose.
The most important room was something it referred to as a Dream room. In it she was to place things both she and her long lost brother either remember or dream of.
“Chiiiiiiild. If you are in thiiiiisssss room when he dreams of one of the thingssssss you have placed here, you will be able to step out of the room and into Hall Of Half Forgotten memory. Thiiiiiissssss Hall exists in the shhhhhhhared dream space of all people. You can ussssseee it travel from your memory palace to hiiiiissssss.”
The fog assured her it wouldn’t take long, for everyone dreams of the womb on occasion. And indeed, it was only a few weeks later that one night a doorway appeared and the child stepped through into the Hall of Half Forgotten Memory.
It was much like an enormous museum at night.
Cavernous hallways wound and forked passing a myriad of rooms. There were rooms of three dimensional portraits; all portraits of imaginary friends, with few features and little detail, only broad, ghost strokes of presence.
A room of scent from lost loves, never recalled willfully, but when sniffed for a fraction of second from a passing stranger will envelope one utterly in ancient emotion.
A home longed for but never seen.
A Scroll detailing step by step how to fly in a dream.
A painting of the perspective you had of the world at 15 years old.
A dictionary of the language in which a 2 year old talks to God.
The face of the twin you shared the womb with but never saw after birth.
There. That was it. She had found it. This was the object the fog assured her would serve as doorway, although to where it had never been specific.
Silently behind her, the fog that had followed her carefully and unseen, smiled and prepared itself to cross in her place, leaving her to wander the dark Halls as a long forgotten ghost forever.
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Bad ghost! No cookie for you!
Very creepy Paul…but seriously creative.