QSFer S. Berget has a new queer dystopian book out, Metamorphosis First Stage: Let Slip the Beasts.
Beneath the streets of East Resplendent, monsters are mounting a war against their masters.
Kaliope Dearborne, a customer service nobody for a pharmaceutical mega-conglomerate, wants only to escape her cubicle and find true meaning for her life. But after accidentally killing her little sister’s bully, she’s taken captive by The Warren, a ragtag group of runaway medical test subjects.
Kaliope learns that she and her captors are experiments owned by the VyroGen corporation. Locked away and evolving, pieces of her slough off as she grows stronger, faster, and hungrier. Only Thresher—not quite man, not quite animal—keeps her from losing her grip on reality.
When Kaliope discovers the hidden truth of her genetic code, she joins The Warren in the war against VyroGen. With chemistry-altering pheromones and brain-tampering, she’s converted into a sleeper agent. But deep inside the dark heart of the corporation, Kaliope finds something that drastically changes her role in the war. She might win back her memories, her body, and her life, but will Kaliope lose her humanity in the process?
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Excerpt
Thousands of glass panes hummed with discontent as the thunderstorm rolled into the giant maw of East Resplendent. Lightning and torrential rain pounded the city like an erratic, miserable war drum. Kaliope Dearborne tapped her keyboard to the beat as she processed yet another alpha tester complaint report. One of AugTech’s experimental ocular implants had malfunctioned. Exploded more like, judging by the horrific stills attached to the case. The tester’s right eye bulged from its socket, the pupil and iris ruptured, discoloring the sclera that leaked down his chin. Bruises darkened the surrounding area, the flesh angry and swollen around his cheekbone and concave brow. He was suing AugTech for reckless endangerment.
She rubbed her eyes, wishing, once again, that they would stop attaching stills to their cases and just paint her a word picture instead. Those images crept into her dreams. Left her with nightmares.
A jaw creaking yawn escaped the confines of her mouth. The standard, government-issued identelet vibrated against her wrist. Incoming notification.
Putting it out of her mind, Kallie returned her attention to the report. Her job was to circumvent the suit or pay out as little as possible in damages.
The hundreds of people sitting around her were busy doing the same thing, ten hours a day, six days a week. AugTech had plenty of experimental augments to test and no shortage of willing bodies. Willing? Desperate, more like.
She stretched, elbows bumping into the sides of her tiny cubicle, and let out another yawn.
“You look like shit.” Gabe turned from the cubicle in front of her, his wide chops downturned. “And would you stop bouncing your legs like that? You know the sound drives me crazy.”
“Huh? Oh.” She forced her legs to be still for the hundredth time that day.
“Another late-night binge?”
“That’s me, Gabe. Party central.”
“Another yawn and they’ll dock your pay.” He nodded toward the sec-cams mounted on the walls and ceiling.
“Don’t give them any ideas, please.”
He grinned and returned to his workstation, lest AugTech dock his pay for socializing on company time. It didn’t matter. They found other ways to talk that the company hadn’t detected and penalized. Yet.
Kallie ground her teeth and thought for the hundred thousandth time that there had to be more to life than this. The endless grind, the barely getting by. There must be something else she was meant to do. Something better. This can’t be all there is, right?
She caught her reflection in the identelet screen. Gabe hadn’t been joking. Kallie did look like shit. Bloodshot blue eyes rimmed in red with dark, puffy bags underneath. Greasy hair dangled around her wan cheeks, borderline green in the light of the office lamps.
The light frequency was supposed to optimize employee efficiency but made everyone look sick. She embodied the very essence of a hangover, but her last drunken adventure was at least two days ago.
The culprit was sleep. Or lack thereof. Her last proper night’s sleep was weeks ago. Years ago, really, but the last couple of weeks were rougher than most.
Every night she woke up to her sister’s crying. The sound was muffled, like Mathilda was burying her face in her pillow, but the walls were so thin, and Kallie was a light sleeper. The half-choked sobs poured into the pit of Kallie’s stomach like molten lead. Something was clearly going on, but Mathilda refused to talk about it. Always deflecting, always changing the subject.
An ache settled in Kallie’s jaw. She unclenched it as a red warning lamp blinked on her display—her eyes had been idle past the allotted limit.
She refocused on the current task. Ocular implant malfunction. Impaired vision. Damages.
Her legs bounced under the desk. The alpha tester came from the outer districts. He signed up for testing to feed his two kids and get health insurance coverage for his partner, who was going through expensive cancer treatments. Fuck.
Kallie approved the suit and escalated the ticket to Payables. It wasn’t much, but what more could she do?
Another alpha tester complaint report popped up. Another malfunction. Another outer.
“Corporate saints, I fucking hate this job,” she said without moving her lips or focusing on anyone in particular.
A murmur of agreement rose from the people around her. If they could, they would all leave right this instant and never come back.
Kallie hoped the day would come. Not holding my breath, though. Her spine tingled, anxious energy racing along nerve threads, making the hair on the back of her neck and arms stand on edge. The new report on her display swam in and out of focus.
What was making Mathilda so damn miserable?
“I’m taking an early lunch.” Decision made, Kallie clocked out of her workstation and nabbed her coat. She blew on her freezing hands during the elevator ride to the ground floor.
The temperature in the office was always set a degree or two below their comfortable level. The up-toppers claimed it increased employee output; she claimed it would give her pneumonia.
Free from the building, she glanced skyward, shoulders hitched up around her ears. Being outside during a thunderstorm was a bad idea. Looking up during a thunderstorm was an even worse idea.
She couldn’t help herself, the sky beckoned, pulled her gaze up. Her retinas didn’t get fried by a flash, so the storm must be terrorizing the inner districts now, jagged lances of electricity striking and getting trapped in their auxiliary power storages.
Still, she sprinted to the nearest Speedrail station, keeping under cover the entire time—there were no records of anyone in East Resplendent being struck by lightning, but if it was going to happen, she was sure it would be her—and hopped on the first hovertrain west to District 12.
Nestled in the perpetual shadows of the surrounding skyscrapers, she lurked outside the District 12 high school like a predator.
Author Bio
Suzanne is a huge nerd, a writer, a bookseller and a games journalist from Oslo, Norway. She has written around 4500 bits and bobs about video games, but only around a hundred of them are any good, and been published in 13 countries. When she’s not procrastinating in front of a laptop you can find her sewing pockets into all her skirts and dresses or stumbling around on a pair of newly acquired roller skates.
Two of her short stories have been published in the literary magazines Bøygen and Kamilla.
Let Slip the Beasts is her first novel.
| Author Website | https://suzanneberget.com/ |
| Author Twitter | https://twitter.com/SuzyLemmingroad |