Spiral - The Capital in Ruins (2011) [Hi-Res]

This is part 1 of a planned trilogy of records telling the story of Rip and his daughter Anomoly. To listen to part 2 “The Traveler” please follow this link: thespiral.bandcamp.com/album/the-traveler And look forward to part 3, which is in the works

Rip liked diseases. He didn’t like what they did to people, but he could appreciate the strength and brutal beauty of their operation. He liked diseases the same way he liked machines. These were his hobbies. Diseases and machines. He spent most of his life focusing his studies on one or the other and grew up to be an unremarkable scientist. Unremarkable, until he mashed his two favorite things together.

After years of research he created a machine, small as a disease, able to infect organic material and change it on a molecular level. With this small invention he had cured death, in theory. He had to test it on someone. Ethics forced him to inject himself. The shock to his body was painful and psychologically terrifying, but he lived through it. Within a few hours he had complete control of his molecular makeup. He could program the machines to make him look any way he wanted. They kept him in top physical shape and repaired injury to his body instantaneously. Rip’s strange hobbies granted him immortality.

Because of the shock to his body during the change, Rip decided to make the mixture a little weaker. The next person he injected had a mild, almost comfortable, changeover. Within the next three years everyone on Rip’s small planet had taken the injection. Five years later the problems started, and within ten years everyone on the planet was dead, except Rip. The problem was in the dosage. Rip’s dosage was so strong that his body never had a chance to fight back, but when he lowered the dosage, the machines had to mount a battle against the host’s regular defense mechanisms. Unfortunately, the result was death.

Once the people started to die Rip’s machines instinctively shut down all of his bodily functions until all danger was past. To him it felt like he was asleep. He woke up twenty years later to an old decayed world.