MA-29 (Patreon)

“You certainly have a flair for the dramatic, don’t you?” He said, placing a large hand on my shoulder.

“I just wanted my wife to have her body back!” I said, in a quiet urgent voice. “You took it from her...twice!”

Someone stepped up beside him, and I realized it was Stephen, in Frank Barnett’s body. He looked ill-fitting in the tuxedo, with his hair pulled back in a ponytail, and his beard spread out over the lapels of his jacket.

“We could have had a good life, you cunt.” Frank reached for me.

A pair of armed guards grabbed his arms.

“Now, now, Frank. Now is not the time for violence, especially of a woman in public.”

“I was going to bring us here!” he said. “There was no need for you to run like that!”

“How was I supposed to know that?” I said. “You took our bodies away!”

“So we could be a family!”

He shook his head. “You still don’t know what’s going on, do you?”

I shook my head. “If you had just told me, maybe we wouldn’t have run. I didn’t trust you!”

Ex-Muritious smiled. “After tonight, none of this is going to matter. Both of you, take your seats, the show is about to begin.” He released my shoulder, and I stared up at him in confusion.

I sat down in the chair, and Stephen stalked off with the guards, mumbling angrily.

Trembling, I took out my purse and found some tissue. I opened my compact and dabbed my eyes, fixing my eye makeup, and trying to collect myself.

What did it mean that they weren’t placing me in some room? Why was I being allowed to sit with the rest of the staff, after being incarcerated at the Lord Mallory building?

I didn’t understand, any of it.

Ex-Muritious stood at the podium and took up the microphone.

“Welcome, everyone, to Transmigration Studios!”

Cheering and applause sounded from the crowd and the staff around me.

“Through a patented process that only Lord Mallory Incorporated has developed, you will get to participate in a controlled transmigratory event, the likes of which the world has never seen!”

The audience cheered again, applauding loudly.

“Underneath this dome, on this stage are seventy-two young bodies in the peak of youth. They are free from any contagion or disease known to man. We have even eradicated small conditions like sinusitis, and tooth decay. They are as healthy as they possibly can be!”

The audience applauded.

“And tonight, seventy-two of you in the audience, or in the seating on the stage, will get a new life!”

Again, people applauded and cheered.

“Let’s start the Pendulum!”

A semi-naked man stepped out onto the stage, wearing little but a loincloth over his groin. He took ahold of the steel cable as it was released.

Loinclothed men stood at several golden bowls arrayed around the stage and began rubbing the outer rim with a rubber mallet, creating a deep intonation. The lights dimmed and the spindle began to trace lines in the sand around the seated participants.

“Do not fear the spindle. It is created from a special material that can pass through normal mass. It is the device that touches the spiritual plane and draws forth the spirit from our bodies to be captured into other bodies.”

The spindle swept through the sand and the crowd, gathering momentum and speed.

The sounds increased in volume, intensity, and pitch. It had to be electronically generated, it was impossible for those bowls to change pitch like that.

My heart sank as the spindle passed through people on the event floor, then touched people in the staff audience. As each swap occurred, a light would go out, and the person on the disk would become animated, looking down and gasping as they discovered they were in a new body.

Things were going along to plan when a breeze suddenly struck up from inside the pyramid.

Ex-muritious frowned, looking over at someone off-stage.

“Ah, nothing to worry about folks, we think it’s just from the size of the...”

The wind suddenly turned into a gale, blowing in a circular motion in time with the spindle. The sounds from the speakers rose in pitch as the spindle cycled faster and faster, blown off track by the wind as if an enormous cyclone was starting to build...

Which is exactly what was happening. People began to scream as chairs were blown over, drink carts, snack stations, signs, flags, and other parts of the decorations all became airborne. The spindle whizzed in a furious pattern, slowly expanding as the enclosure creaked from the momentum contained within.

Panicked, I ran from the stage. I had to find Karyn, this wasn’t good, this wasn’t planned at all.

People in the audience screamed as they tried to run from the arena. Unfortunately, all the doors had been closed and locked, and the wind rose and rose. The lights went next, in showers of sparks, they became swept from their attachments, some of them falling in the center of the maelstrom.

The center.

I ran through the crowd and miracle upon miracle found Karyn crouched under a chair.

“Honey! We have to run toward the center, not the edge!” I took her hand.

The wind almost knocked us off our feet as the cyclone continued to turn, sweeping chairs and people off their feet and up into the cone of the storm. The spindle spun faster and faster, the steel cable still not breaking, but I knew it wouldn’t last long and when it broke, the sides of the building were glass and...

I pulled Karyn into my arms and ran for the center of the storm. I could feel myself being pushed as if from an invisible hand and felt the bite of the sand as it seared against my flesh. Karyn screamed, crying against the storm as I forced our way through to the center.

And finally broke through.  We panted, Karyn crying, as I dropped to the sand in the center of the Maelstrom.

The wind began to tear panels from the side of the building. They crashed with an infinite tinkling of shattered glass. And just when I thought we were going to die from the collapse of the pyramid, the steel cable broke.

A subsonic explosion boomed through the desert night at the release of the cable. Blue light streaked out in a fractal, ever-widening pattern with lightning quickness in a circular wave away from the building. The sands of the sahara rose up in hemispherical patterns at the passage of the wind.

At the time I had no idea the subsonic wave engulfed the entire world in six seconds.

Planes fell from the skies as pilots no longer controlled their bodies. Cars crashed on millions upon millions of highways as drivers no longer drove. Boats ran ashore, helicopters careened out of control, Motorcycles spilled riders, and the disasters on a global scale were epic as people’s souls were ripped from their bodies...

...and into others.

“Are you okay?” I asked as we huddled under the wreckage on the sand. The wind had passed over, leaving carnage and wreckage in its wake.

“I think so?” Karyn replied. I let her go and inspected us both. Aside from a few scratches and one small cut on the back of her leg, Karyn was okay. I had suffered the brunt of our mad dash to the center of the maelstrom. My left ankle refused to hold my weight, and my right eye was scratched from the blowing sand. I needed to wash my face badly but attempted to dig all the sand out of my hair and nose, spitting the grit from my mouth.

“Are you going to be able to walk, Mommy?” Karyn said.

“If you can help me.”

She nodded and tried to help me across the arena toward the exit doors. I didn’t like the look of the superstructure, it was careening to the left and I could see several of the metal supports bending. Glass fell all around us, crashing to the sand as the few survivors limped toward exits.

“Oh my god, who am I?” one man said, pawing at the front of his suit. “You’re in my body!” another woman said. “And you’re in mine!” a third responded.

Bodies were strewn in various states of injury and death all around the arena. It was like God shook the entire place like a child shaking a rattle.

“Don’t look, baby.” I hid Karyn’s eyes from one person who had been disemboweled by a sheet of glass. She moaned, looking at her hands, a stranger's hands as she tried to gather her intestines back into herself.

With a loud CRACK, one of the supports of the pyramid gave way.

“Run, baby!” I said, trying to limp and run at the same time.

“Come on, Mommy!” she yelled, pulling me along.

My ankle screamed agony as I tried to run/limp toward the exit. We made it into the tunnel just as tons of glass and steel cascaded down onto the survivors in the arena.