Boundary Convention

diary excerpt

"The viciousness of human nature shouldn't appear in the field I am involved in, but what happened before my eyes makes me feel a little bit chilled."

Belletta was not walking fast.

After coming out of the field, she took a rest and put on a pair of simple high heels on her bare feet. She walked on the hard concrete floor with small, feminine steps, and the harsh sound of her pointed heels echoed in the narrow passage.

Coming out of George's underground farm, she led me straight into this narrow passage full of damp and musty smell. We have been walking for at least half an hour. This scene makes me feel familiar. A few days ago and Mo Xiao's experience in the library came to my mind. Compared with Mo Xiao, the woman in front of me is indeed somewhat similar in temperament, but my reason tells me that she is not the director, so I need to be careful.

"Speaking of which, I don't know your name yet." Suddenly, she started talking to me.

"When we met last time, I remember I told you my name, isn't 'reciprocity' an old saying in your place?"

In the dark ahead, Belita turned her head to look at me, and I, who was concentrating on the things under my feet, didn't have much thought to care about her problems, and just said two words out of my mouth as a conditioned reflex.

"wilderness."

"Yeah, that sounds pretty cool."

Listening to her answer, I seemed to see her shrugging in the dark.

"Is it the wilderness of the wilderness, the wilderness of the wilderness?"

"Hmm." I responded casually.

"It's not like you at all." I could clearly hear her snicker slightly through her nose. Although I can't see her figure clearly in the dark, I can imagine that if I take another step forward, I will bump into her old coat.

I stopped, but she seemed to be able to see me in the dark, and she grabbed my right hand precisely, and the bandage-wrapped fingers stroked back and forth along my meridians, as if she was enjoying a favorite baby .

"You have thin arms and legs, no matter how you look at it, it has nothing to do with the 'wasteland', it's just a small lawn at best."

"That's what it says, but the name is..."

I originally wanted to say that the name is given to the parents, but I stopped in the middle. My parents... what kind of thinking did they have when they named me this? I don't know, if I see them, I will definitely ask them.

"Is there any special meaning to this name?"

In the darkness, Belita's words came again.

"No...no, nothing special. By the way, what country are you from?"

"Me? I'm an Italian."

"Oh, Italian? Lived in Rome?"

"Is there only Rome in Italy in your opinion?" Bellita gently grabbed my ear and shook it. "There are obviously many other cities in Italy that are great."

"Is...is that so? But no matter what country you are in, the capital must be the most prosperous, right?"

"Oh, then you are wrong. From the fall of Rome to the present, the economic level of Milan is higher than that of Rome."

There was a little pride in her voice.

"To this day."

"I really don't know about this, but I really want to see the Duomo Cathedral."

"Oh, that's such a pity." Belita's expression changed slightly.

"Speaking of which, do you know why Italy can produce the largest number of artistic masterpieces in Europe?"

"Because of the Renaissance?"

Obviously, Beretta was not satisfied with this answer, so she ignored my answer and continued talking.

"Italy was always divided. There were countries everywhere, capitals everywhere. The people of each country created magnificent buildings and great works of art. They built the park Retiro and celebrated their achievements in it. ...They believed that doing so was to show their own glory, and they thought it was the best, but no one thought that the imperial capital they worked so hard to build would be nothing more than a slightly larger local city in the end, right..."

Belita paused when she said this.

"Yes, it's like Venice, can you imagine? In just a century, the majestic and majestic capital has been reduced to an insignificant port city. What else can such people do? Losing their ambitions, people I can only lament the impermanence of the years."

Having said that, Belleta's high heels echoed in the tight space again, and she moved again.

In this way, I followed Belita's footsteps and walked for a while. After passing a corner, I finally saw a little red light shining not far away in the dark, like a fishing fire at night.

Belita stepped forward and struggled for a while in front of the red light, only to hear a shrill electronic sound from the wall, and the red light suddenly turned into a green light.

"Are you ready?"

I saw that under the faint light, there seemed to be a hint of a smile on the corner of her mouth.

Amidst the insipid sound of the door opening abruptly, the electronic door opened with some delay.

Compared with the darkness outside, the lighting in this room is not much better. On the empty ceiling, several old tungsten bulbs make up the lighting conditions here. The damp and musty smell from the pavement filled the cramped space, exuding an unhealthy and decadent atmosphere.

Belita stepped forward, threw her head back, and fell on an office chair. The chair turned and bumped into scattered metal cans on the ground. I picked one up from the ground and looked at the can curiously. Judging from the weight, the can seems to be unusually made of aluminum, and it smells strongly of fermentation inside.

"beer?"

This elongated shape is indeed unique to canned wine, but it has not been oxidized and colored, and there is no brand or logo on it. There are several connected ellipses in the strokes, which obviously means wheat.

"Do you want to drink?" Bellita looked at me holding an empty jar for a long time, as if she felt that she had not fulfilled her master's obligation, and before waiting for my answer, she took out another jar of wine from nowhere and threw it at me. come over.

I took a look and saw that there were a few circles drawn with a black marker on the top of my can. From this point of view, it should contain wine.

I don't drink much, but I've had a dry mouth after walking for so long. Besides, the wine feels like it has been frozen, and the wine is not as bitter as beer. In this hot and humid place, I have no reason to refuse such a drink.

Through the faint light above my head, I can see the attractive color in the aluminum can. There are no bubbles in the wine, and the liquid is a little cloudy, just like the blood that has just flowed from the body. It seems that it should be brewed in a rather primitive way. Doesn't look like it will go with the jar at all.

Just when I was about to speak, my hand stopped suddenly. For some reason, I instinctively felt that this can of wine was undrinkable.

I was a bit at a loss and slowly put down the jar, looked at Belita, and saw that she was taking out a square metal block from the drawer, throwing it into the jar, and drinking it with her head up. She drank it for more than twenty seconds without even taking a breath.

"belch."

After an unrefined belch, she casually tossed the jar aside.

At this time, her face was flushed for a while, it was just a can of beer, it seemed that her drinking capacity did not seem to be directly proportional to the cans here.

She sat down on the chair and stretched, but as she stretched, she seemed to think of something again. She bent down and stretched her body to pick up the soda can that she had just thrown away, then turned her head upside down and shook, shaking herself The metal thrown in just now shook out.

"Oops, almost threw this away."

"What's that?" I stared at the mottled piece of metal in her hand and asked curiously. The first thing I thought of was stainless steel ice cubes, but the wine itself is ice enough, so there is no need to put it in again, right?

"Do you want it too?" She said, shaking the dull metal in her hand, "There should be some in your can, I just added it for a stronger taste."

"So what exactly?"

"lead."

"lead?"

"That's right, lead can inhibit the spoilage of wine, it can also make the taste of wine smoother, and it can also increase the sweetness. Nowadays, sugar is not easy to handle, so you can just let it go."

"Wait...wait, I know that lead can react with heated alcohol to produce lead sugar, but you are beer?! You also put lead in beer? Beer is not sweet! No, the point is not this, put lead In wine, aren't you afraid of lead poisoning?"

"Afraid?"

Her slightly drunken eyes suddenly faltered, and for a moment, I felt that there was an emotion in her eyes that I had never shown in the few tens of minutes I spent with her.

"Afraid?"

She repeated it again, in her characteristic very deep and weary voice. The word 'fear' was pronounced heavily, as if it was about to be chewed up and swallowed into the stomach.

"What do you know?"

Her wavering lasted only a few seconds, and then she returned to her previous decadent face, as if she didn't care about everything.

"If it's the original me, don't talk about adding lead, I can't even drink alcohol. Not only can I not drink, I will advise you not to drink, let alone give you alcohol in this place."

As she spoke, she stood up from the chair, snatched the can of wine from me, put it back on her desk, and sat down again.

"As a doctor, I know much better than you what bad living habits are."

"Then why do you..."

"Have you forgotten the purpose of this trip? I told you from the beginning."

Beretta raised her voice three minutes without changing her face, and interrupted me.

"It just so happens that the time is almost up, so I'll show you." She suddenly took out a pocket watch from her coat pocket, looked at it, and added. "Look at the decomposition of the live experiment."

biodecomposition? I couldn't help but muttered in my heart. Although I have heard of such experiments, it is definitely uncomfortable to watch a live animal decompose for the first time.

In this way, she led me into a small door at the back of the room, and continued to walk into the dark depths, sometimes through winding corridors, and sometimes through closed iron doors.

Tick, the sound of tick echoed in the secluded corridor, she occasionally stopped, looked at the pocket watch in her hand, and continued to move forward after confirming the time.

Finally, after turning a corner, we came to a laboratory. The plexiglass as thick as a brick divided the laboratory into a small unit, and there were dying people living in it.

"You said, the living body is..." The question in my mind blurted out.

"That's right, a patient with disintegration disease." Belita turned to me and said, her orange-red hair brushed against her cheeks, making her cloudy eyes even more frightening. "It's the one over there, the dying person."

Without further words, Belita approached the isolation room. The man seemed to have noticed Belita and slowly got up. Apparently, the disease called catabolic disease had almost eaten away his body.

Click, the pocket watch closed...

In a trance, the silk-like transparent substance distorted the space in the unit, passing through the body of the unknown person without hindrance.

Suddenly, he started scratching himself with his right hand, and the blood began to overflow from the body surface, turning the original gray bandage into scarlet, and every blood cell became hotter and hotter the moment it touched the air, and instantly turned into flying black particles.

The left hand, which was like a dead branch, slammed against the glass wall beside him, making an unbearable sound. The epidermis on the back of the hand began to fall off like scales, turning into black particles; flashing electrons shot out from the lifeless muscles, and were continuously annihilated in the air. Became bones.

Under the mosquito-like black particles, the cranial cavity gradually appeared, just like a picture in a biological anatomy textbook. At the same time, every blood vessel distributed in the brain was expanding violently, as if the atoms that constituted them repelled each other , diverged in unity and began to go their separate ways.

Where black particles are clustered, the decomposition speed gradually accelerates, and more and more black particles gather on the head. Due to the loss of muscles in the limbs, the man's body was extremely twisted, and the accumulated water in the abdominal cavity flowed out through the tattered clothes and bandages, like a deflated balloon. As the black particles escaped, the tattered bandage began to wrinkle, and the person in front of him completely lost his human form.

It's like a painting, with an invisible hand erasing the upper layers layer by layer, and at the end, I still don't forget to wipe the eraser off the manuscript paper.

In a blink of an eye, the man stopped wriggling, and the label called 'life' was removed from his body, leaving only the proof of his existence - the broken scarlet bandage.

I was dumbfounded by the sight in front of me, what a cruel disease it is.

"Why didn't he end his life in a humane way early!?" I yelled at Beretta.

"Because he doesn't want to become the fertilizer of the farm."

Lifeless words escaped from her mouth.

I suddenly remembered that when Mo Xiao and I were ambushed by the Eternal Undead at the beginning, when we visited the underground farm, I had seen broken bandages and those unknown black mist many times.

"Does everyone here have this disease?"

"Yes, except..."

"Why is that! Where's the doctor!?" I interrupted Beretta.

"You're thinking 'how can there be a disease with such symptoms', right? That's what I thought when I first saw it."

As she spoke, she put her hand into the pocket of her coat, groped for a while, took out a crumpled cigarette, straightened it swiftly, and pinched off the filter.

"About five years ago, I forget the exact coordinates. Anyway, not far from where we are now, something fell from the sky, a meteorite? Aliens? Or some other incredible thing. Then it fell with this At that point, a plague began to spread across the globe, and you saw the symptoms, so people called it disintegration. At that time, I was very naive and wanted to cure this disease.”

She put the cigarette in her mouth and continued speaking vaguely.

"That means there's no cure for the disease, is it?"

"There are many diseases on this planet that can't be cured, only alleviated, but catabolic disease is obviously different from them."

"Then why hasn't the government taken any measures? For example, the United Nations medical organization, humanitarian aid agencies, etc." I suddenly thought of this and asked her.

Hearing this, she suddenly laughed out loud.

"Haha... Humanitarian aid? It seems that you really don't know anything. Didn't you come with that woman Mo Xiao? She didn't tell you anything?"

"Sorry, my knowledge of the world is only up to 2020, but do you know Mo Xiao?" I thought for a while and asked. "The director doesn't seem to have told me about this matter."

"Heh, she's still the same." Beretta took a deep puff of the cigarette in her hand, as if thinking of something, "In 2030, for some reason that we don't know, the heads of state formed a coalition government, And invited the world's top scientists in various fields to concentrate on cutting-edge scientific research. She and I used to be colleagues and belonged to the Blood Research Institute under the coalition government, but the relationship between the two of us was not good, to be exact , no one has a good relationship with her."

"Then what happened next?"

"Later...there is no later. It is not good to enshrine too many gods in one temple."

In the middle of the conversation, she suddenly fell silent. I was about to ask, but she interrupted me.

"By the way, Wasteland, I warn you, don't get too close to the Mo family, no matter who they are. Don't ask them what they do, it's no good." Belita said suddenly with a serious face.

"Um, I see."

The topic changed so abruptly that I didn't have time to think about it, so I could only follow her words.

"Wasteland, Easterners believe in karma. I always thought it was nonsense, but now, I firmly believe it."

Suddenly, she paused, kicked her foot on the ground, and slid in front of me on her office chair.

"Can... let me see your right hand again?"

She asked me with a small voice like asking herself. I raised my right hand, looked at my five fingers, and stretched out to her with some hesitation. And she took it with her bandaged right hand. Knowing that the bandage she was wrapping had the same black particles under it, the touch of this hand seemed to be different. It was cold and uncomfortably soft, as if it would deform if it was exerted.

"I haven't seen my right hand for three years."

She said while stroking my hand like a treasure.

"The location of the onset of all catastrophic patients is random, and I started from the right hand."

I seem to see a few tears falling on her glasses.

"Is there no reason? Even if it is terminally ill, there must be a reason for it."

"Maybe there is, but I can't find it. All the so-called medical scientists can't do anything."

"All people who are called medical scientists are powerless?" This statement is a bit subtle, I frowned, and asked Belita my question.

Belita's hand that was holding me tensed suddenly, but after a while, she raised her head, her face was full of powerlessness and helplessness towards fate and her own abilities.

"Because this disease has nothing to do with pathology, but with physics."

she said slowly.

"The particles that make up the human body no longer maintain a close relationship due to unrecognizable reasons. I can only explain it to you in this way. If you want to listen to more professional explanations and descriptions, then I may have no choice, because I am not a physicist Home."

After she finished speaking, she fell silent, and the hand holding my right hand no longer had the strength.

I withdrew my right hand from hers. Complicated emotions filled my mind, making me tremble all over. Is it fear? I was really afraid, I was afraid of losing my right hand. I wash with it, I eat with it, I paint with it. If there is no right hand... at this moment, I feel extremely sympathetic to the woman in front of me.

"Now, do you know how rich you are?"

"Um."

Beretta asked me a question, and I immediately responded yes.

"I tell you that I don't want you to do anything, but I just want you to understand one thing. Everyone living here is very unfortunate. Maybe one day in the future, you will feel that your life is full of misfortune, but I hope you can Remembering what I told you at this time, you must bravely accept your misfortune."

She said to me earnestly, her tone seemed to see through that I was going astray, and tried to persuade me. Immediately afterwards, she stood up, smiled at me, and touched my head like a mother calling her child to come to eat after scolding her child.

It seems that my parents touched me like this before, I can't remember it, but I always feel that my body remembers the touch of being touched. The body that had been tensed due to frustration and surprise before unknowingly relaxed.

Suddenly, there was an urgent knocking sound outside the laboratory door.

The voice was urgent, as if it was about to knock on the door, and Belita walked towards the door and opened it.

"Doctor! My father is ill again!"

"What? It wasn't just three days ago..."

Beretta's face suddenly became ugly, but just like before, she only showed her wavering emotions for a moment, and then returned to a calm and serious expression.

"Take the patient to the treatment room."

She spoke in a commanding tone, and the authoritative and confident tone seemed to comfort the person who ran in hastily and recklessly, so she hurriedly shouted "Help my dad in quickly", while letting out of the way.

I took two or three steps back and saw two big men squeezed into the narrow door, with a thin figure in the middle of them. The thin guy was covered with a black cloth, just like those pilgrims who died outside. They are the same, but they no longer have a human form... To be precise, only half a human form. He was like a corpse with half of his body chopped off. The black mist rushed out from under his cloth, and soon covered the floor.

Beretta walked quickly to the plexiglass and flipped a switch. Only then did I discover that there was a heavy iron door next to the glass wall, and the white paint on it almost blended with the color of the wall.

Belita walked into the glass room, put the patient on the bed, adjusted the instruments, walked out of the room quickly, closed the door carefully, and fiddled with the desk again.

Through the glass, I saw that the patient's body was still slowly disappearing, and the black mist diffused in the room and stuck to the glass, gradually making it difficult for people to see the situation clearly. It's just that among the bunch of crude instruments, two looked very scary. Things like electrodes were inserted into the patient's body under the operation of the mechanical arm. As the patient convulsed, the entire glass window was blacked out. The fog completely covered it.

Belita hurried up and pulled me away, then beckoned me to stand at the other end of the room, returned to her desk, and hit Enter on the keyboard.

"Don't press!"

Without any reason, I subconsciously yelled.

But it was too late, the sound of the keyboard echoed in my mind, and then a heart-wrenching wail resounded through the room, mixed with the sound of electric crackling, shaking my eardrum, making the old eardrum The glass also kept shaking. What happened on the other side of the black mist, I can't imagine at all, I can only see the palm prints one after another were photographed on the glass covered with black mist.

Although each palm print lasted less than a second before being wiped away by the tumbling black mist, the dying slapping never stopped. It looked like a person who was burned alive at the scene of a fire, on the way to survive Make a last ditch.

"boom--"

There was another loud noise, and a few cracks suddenly appeared in the glass. Belita, who was standing at the front, took two steps back and said to me behind me.

"The glass...will not hold up anymore."