The problem with having extremely good sound isolation set up in your murder lab so no one can hear your victims’ screams is… well, there’s a good chance no one hears your screams, either.

  As the guard thrashed and screamed under me, I felt a little silly worrying about the noise. I’d taken him down so fast, he hadn’t even managed to get any comms out. We were fine.

  But I also just felt all sorts of weird as I stared straight into the man’s eyes, whispering to him about the secrets of The Ravening Observer. Not so much because of the growing madness in his gaze, or the way his limbs jerked around like he was plugged into a live wire. It was because I could feel something vital, essential, welling up within me and pooling in my eyes. Then it slowly, silently, invisibly, dripped out, pouring into the man I was holding down.

  His eyes rolled back in his skull. Sticky black tar began to leak out of every available orifice. Finally, whatever was leaking out of me stopped, and he went still.

  I leaned over him in my flimsy hospital gown, hoping against hope I didn’t just horrifically kill a man for nothing.

  Then he twitched, groaned in an eldritch tongue, and his eyes snapped open. Black orbs with red irises stared back at me. A smile slowly began to stretch across my lips.

  Then I frowned.

  Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Does this mean I’m a father now?

  Moreover…

  Pop quiz time! If you’re a horrible human/eldritch amalgam, and you try to have kids the good old-fashioned way, what are those kids gonna be like? Better yet, was it even possible?

  I turned to ask Miss Assistant, but she looked like she was about to bolt away from me screaming, so I figured it was better not to posit that particular question to her at the moment. Even if she was part of the team that had contributed to the creation of whatever the fuck I was anymore.

  And that was a hell of a question all its own.

  Unbidden, the memories of my coma rose up to the forefront of my mind…

  —

  The darkness around me was absolute. Unbreakable. The only four points of light in the endless abyss were four glowing crimson irises, the eyes of the two figures staring each other.

  I was one of the figures. Somehow, I knew exactly who I was looking at.

  My eyes.

  And wasn’t that a trippy thought?

  The figure was ranting. The shadow speech twisted around me like coiling snakes, curses and complaints pouring out of the shadow’s mouth to spill at the lap of my new cybernetics.

  It really didn’t like the arms.

  The darkness around us quaked again, pale grey threatening to invade it. This gave me the briefest glimpse of the other shadow’s body. It was wrong. Thin. Wispy. The only part of its form that looked truly solid were the eyes.

  The shadow turned to glare at the grey invasion until it retreated. Then it snapped its eyes onto mine again.

  “This is your fault! We are weakened because of your weakness! We were captured because of your insistence on using flesh! We should have fled to our true realm and conquered it, spreading throughout the city!”

  Oddly, I didn’t even feel terrified to be the target of its anger. I just felt kind of… empty.

  “Can’t do that, I’m afraid. I’m rather bound to my icky flesh and blood and all that. So… Gonna kill me now? Finish the job?”

  “What madness is this? We are one.”

  “… what?” I really had no clue what to say.

  “I bestowed onto you the wisdom of The Observer. You have been enlightened. I felt your true birth. Why you insist on this fleshy form I do not know. But you shall have my support within the realm of knowledge, just as you spread The Observer’s glory in the realm of flimsy flesh.”

  There was… so much wrong with what it was saying, but I didn’t particularly feel like correcting it.

  Instead, my thoughts returned to that day I spent inside the learning shard. The shadow’s speech. My fracturing mind. The emergency shutdown of the deck, and the state of the shard afterwards.

  … well, fuck. Guess I might have sorta kinda left an actual shadow stuck inside my apartment.

  Instead of asking any questions or saying something dumb that would get me killed, I simply nodded.

  “We are one.”

  The darkness fractured around me yet again.

  —

  I blinked, coming slowly out of the memory.

  A half-shadow. That’s what I was. What I had been ever since that day with the learning shard. Just corrupted enough, in mind before my body followed, to qualify as one of them.

  Rather well illustrated by the shadow I’d just birthed. Its movements were clumsy as it tried to push past me and get at Miss Assistant, who was backing off with terrified eyes..

  “Enough,” I ordered. “Not her. You have no use of her, anyway.”

  Amelia flinched when I broke out into the shadow-speak, but I gamely ignored that. Instead, I turned back towards the net access point.

  “Follow.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  My shadowy offspring did, and I plugged myself into the local network again. Sure, I’d added my eyes to it already, but I needed a more solid connection for what I was about to do.

  “Merge with me.”

  With an eager groan, my kiddo lashed out, his hand stabbing deep into my chest. Instead of blood (or tar now, I guess) spilling all over the place, he streamed into me. His body lost all definition as it was reduced to energy and data.

  I felt like I was about to burst at the seams. My mind and my eyes instinctively reached out to guide the younger shadow. He streamed through me, finally found the net connection, and latched on, swirling down it like blood draining away into sand.

  I was left a panting, shivering mess, mind swimming and struggling to hold onto consciousness. Meanwhile, I could feel my shadow kiddo rejoicing to be in the netspace, even as its instincts reared their ugly head and the knowledge-hunger ignited within him.

  “No. Not there. I need you to get the protected files,” I whispered at him.

  He reluctantly peeled away from all the fresh data streaming through the system and turned his attention towards the most heavily guarded files.

  If I tried to get anywhere near those, the defenses would crack my puny mind open until they drew the eyes out to play. Sure, the eyes would infect and wreck the entire system, but the process would leave me a drooling mess on the floor. Not very useful.

  My kiddo, though? A true shadow? He’d nom right through all those pesky IDPs and get me what I needed.

  Though, as my kid began happily munching through digital defenses, I did wonder…

  “Hey, does your dear old pops have any netrunners around here?”

  I almost broke into shadow speech, but pivoted just in time to avoid freaking Amelia out any further.

  As it was, she still hesitated a second before answering. “Yeah. He does. Though, they’re mostly just focused around the block A containment for… obvious reasons.”

  “Ahhh, yeah, that makes sense. Wait, they’re responding now,” I said happily as a runner’s net signature came blazing in. He found the intruder, and then had just enough time to scream before my kiddo enthusiastically went after his mind.

  “Oh. Wait. Shit! No! Don’t you dare, mister, do not — !”

  I broke out into a stream of regular old human curses as my shadow spawn happily devoured the runner, traced their connection back to the runner’s body, and spooled out of the netspace into that human form.

  “Fucking children. Not even fifteen minutes old, and already he’s wearing some netrunner like a cheap rental suit,” I grumbled to myself as I disconnected. My venture to get my hands on that hidden experimental data was shot for the moment.

  Then I froze again. “Wait. You said your father has runners. Right? Like, with an ‘s’?”

  “Y-Yes. There’s two in a shift, working together,” Amelia squeaked, probably thinking by this point that she had made a mistake.

  Which, fair! She probably had.

  I wasn’t up to dealing with that at the moment, though. I was a bit busy staring at the ceiling in pure despair.

  “But… I’m too young to be a grandfather! He’s not supposed to be going around having kids of his own when he’s fifteen minutes old!”

  I could practically hear the screams of that second runner as my kiddo got his hands on them.

  “Great,” Amelia whispered. “I’m working with a lunatic.”

  I turned to to see that she had screwed her eyes shut and was muttering to herself.

  “Okay. This is okay. I can work with this. He’s still better than your father, Amelia, and what’s the worst that could happen? Well, okay, I could turn into a shadow monster, but that’s still better than what I have now. Okay.”

  Her eyes snapped open. I was surprised to find how much calmer she looked, or at least determined. “What’s our next move?”

  “Your father’s not here right now, is he?” I asked, suspecting the answer already. I couldn’t find him on any of the cameras. Wasn’t a guarantee, seeing as he was paranoid enough to leave most rooms without surveillance, but still.

  “He’s not. He left me here, like he always does, and went off to his meetings or whatever.” Amelia shrugged, then squinted at me. “Why? Don’t tell me you want to wait for him to come back or something stupid like that? I woke you up now ‘cause we wouldn’t have had a chance if his personal guards were around.”

  “No, no, that’s fine. Don’t want him dead that much.” A lie, but I didn’t need to admit that to her. “Is there a place here to access the wider net? The local node, maybe?”

  “My father’s office. It’s the only spot where you can connect the closed network to the rest of the megabulding.”

  “Perfect. We’ll need to make a little detour first, though.”

  Thankfully, it was ridiculously easy to do what I needed to at that point. With the runners taken out, I could mess freely with the cameras. I even sent out basic order pings to the guards and cleared them from our path.

  All but two of them. Those, I lured one by one into a random room for a good old eldritch chat.

  When that was done, I sent off the two brand-new shadows to do their own thing. With a little luck, they’d be able to get a proper horde going, and Amelia’s father dearest would return to find his lab overrun by shadows.

  I kinda wished I could see the look on his face.

  As it was, I was lowered into block A with a huge smile on my own face, a ridiculously long connection cable trailing up into the room above us from my neck.

  “Hello, guys! Who wants to go back to netspace?”

  Predictably, I had a whole lot of volunteers.

  —

  I hummed happily to myself and tossed Amelia’s scroll up and down as I walked into her father’s office. The lovely assistant herself was in a slightly worse mood, probably on account of the scroll I was toying with.

  “Are you still upset with me?” I asked. Not that anything could ruin my good mood. Not even the horribly oversized clothes I’d had to scavenge off a corpse to replace the sheet of paper they liked to pretend was a hospital gown around these parts.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, come on. I can’t just let you keep this thing as it is! They’d track us down the second you connected to the net with your customized, highly monitored work scroll.”

  “It’s the one thing he let me own!” Amelia hissed.

  “And you still own it. My shadow buddy is just getting it all nice and ready for you. Besides, it’s so much more useful now! Who doesn’t want a personal assistant?”

  Considering her own lot in life, the joke didn’t quite land.

  “Me. I don’t need a personal assistant,” she stated woodenly. “Especially not one tempted to devour my mind and turn me into one of its own kind.”

  “Well that’s just hurtful. Isn’t it, buddy?” I cooed at the device, which now contained that first shadow who had been so kind to me before in block A.

  The scroll briefly lit up. Two pitch black eyes with blood red irises glitched onto the screen, and a low eldritch groan echoed from the speaker.

  Amelia, obviously, wasn’t as thrilled as me. Or with me. Or any of that jazz.

  Speaking of, what was jazz?

  I shrugged to myself as I started booting up the good doctor’s personal work station, positively giddy with anticipation. It was time to tap into that sweet, sweet net connection to the wider world.

  As I waited for all that to sort itself out, I tapped into the local network again, finding it positively swarming with shadows. Shadows that were happily delivering all of the doctor’s data to the scroll I was toying with, where my bestest shadow buddy was compiling, compressing, and storing it all away. I would have a whole lot of fun going through that later, probably with Amelia’s help.

  A sunny smile stretched across my face as the work station finished booting up. It went through a lengthy security check process, all of which was subverted and corrupted by the shadows. They pretty much owned this slice of the netspace by that point.

  The only way to curtail such a widespread corruption would be to torch the hardware. The shadows would still be… somewhere. Somehow. I wasn’t clear on the details, since my puny, partially mortal mind struggled to comprehend them. But destroying the physical hardware would at least cut off their ability to spread.

  There was no stopping the spread now, though. Not as I felt almost all the shadows slip out of the private network and into the wider, public access netspace that belonged to the megabuilding.

  I stood and stretched a little. Then I gave a mock bow to Amelia, grinning widely.

  “Shall we leave the premises now, my lady?”

  She grumbled at me again and eyed her scroll suspiciously. But she didn’t stop me when I tucked her arm into the crook of mine.

  We strolled down the halls of her father’s secret lab towards our freedom. The fact that the lab was littered by corrupted androids, shambling shadows, and the remains of guards felled by the man’s own security measures was a nice cherry on top of my vengeance cake.

  Being a weird eldritch/human abomination was turning out to be so much fun.

  The fact that a small piece of me was constantly, constantly screaming in horror?

  Definitely not relevant.