"Not eating, but making!"
Antybody is assembled wherever there is swarms of ants. Who controls him is a mystery
The Antybody is a paradox made manifest—a billion tiny creatures woven into a single, breathing consciousness. A pulsating mass of chitin and hunger that mimics human form with uncanny precision. Yet it is neither monster nor machine; it is something stranger, something that remembers what the world tries to forget. Its body flows like liquid shadow, shifting between the shape of a man and the chaos of a swarm, each leg a pixel in a living mosaic of Delhi's collective karma. When it saves a life, it does not act out of mercy but out of a strange, algorithmic empathy it learned from a lone scientist in a basement.
A typical sleazy evening at the Pulsar cinema in Delhi. I made my way to the cinema then stood and watched the crowd of moviegoers lined up beneath the concrete awning that led to the quadruple glass doors of the cinema. I sat on somebody’s scooter that was parked across the street, and waited for the doors to open and for the moviegoers to press forward. A man in a neat moustache and a short sleeved brown shirt immediately dragged out a bipedal sign saying HOUSE FULL. A vibrant shape crossed the darkened gaslit street, dressed from head to toe in natty pink surgical scrubs and headgear, but nobody noticed him. A pink surgeon’s face mask and shades completed the whole body look. Pink gloves blossomed from his wrists. At least the toes remain the same, I thought, watching him wriggle them in flipflops and Nike socks. It was Antybody. "And the gun," a voice spoke from the scooter. "Yeah, that works." I drew the cheap piece and waved it at Mr. Moustache who was now at his usual station behind the popcorn stand and he didn’t look down at the dull gunmetal, he continued to gaze at my profile and pointed to the stairs. "Where is he?!" I shouted from outside the projectionist's booth. Then pivoting on a single vertical leg and, rotating, I slammed into the swinging door, at the moment of impact keeping said leg perfectly horizontal. Then followed through with a roll into the tiny booth that ended with my back on the floor and the gun pointing at the familiar moustached figure beside the projector. A narrow crescent of light leaking from the cylindrical body of the projector blinded me and I worried slightly about my choice of heat seeking bullets for the gun. The projectionist knew everything and spoke out right away, "There’s no need for that sir, I can retire to my farm." I bounced to my feet and the projectionist continued, "Trouble is best left in the other place." I thought, too right, and said, " I forgive you." I hobbled past the movie posters on the curved wall of the once grand staircase and went through into the circle. The auditorium wasn't packed with bodies as I expected. Instead, standing center stage beneath the flickering silver screen, still clad in those natty pink scrubs, was Antybody. Beneath the surgical fabric, he was a perfectly human-sized figure entirely composed of millions of shimmering, restless ants. They crawled over one another in a localized frenzy, maintaining the dense, unassuming silhouette of an ordinary man trying to blend in. He was a proxy, completely under the control of Mayavi—the sentient, illusory sublevel of Delhi that had been pulling our strings since day one. "The cinema is closed," Antybody's voice was a disturbing rustle of countless mandibles rubbing together. "And your script sucks," I said, raising the cheap gun. Before I could pull the trigger, the side doors burst open. A bizarre battalion flooded the aisles with dozens of low-level municipal peons, physically stacked on top of each other like jumping jacks, their khaki uniforms blurring into a chaotic geometry of flailing limbs. They hurled themselves at the stage, confronting Antybody in a writhing, bureaucratic dogpile. Antybody's form dissolved in response, his pink scrubs collapsing as a black tidal wave of insects surged out from beneath the peons and up the aisles toward me. I knew the staircase would soon be flooded and could smell the biting stench of formic acid. So I began to climb the ornate plaster wall. At the second level I niftily tunneled my way through the dusty air conditioning ducts. I reached the roof access and was about to drop to the alley when police burst onto the roof. "Stop," one of them said in a quiet, high pitched voice, like a disco dancer from another world. "Death means nothing to me", I thought before jumping down and diving for the edge. Luckily the cops were distracted by the swarm of ants pooling out of the ducts behind me, and fired only a few shots into the insect-tide, letting me escape.
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Copyright Brian Hill 2022
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