Unity

by Carl Stubblefield

  Two automatic doors slid open as Mengele neared them, revealing a large operating suite. The area was huge, and had large trays of instruments hermetically sealed in some kind of table. Violet light shined down, bathing the instruments in an eerie glow. They neared a metal wall and Mengele held Gus there, waiting.

  The reason became apparent when Gus ran out of MP and reverted back to normal. While he did not tighten his grip on Gus, his own body weight forced him to hold on tightly to prevent the pressure on his jaw. If it was not broken from that backhand, it was definitely fractured. Mengele punched some buttons on the wall, and a panel slid back, revealing crossed golden weapons, a sickle-like one and the other with what looked like a whip or cat-of-nine-tails.

  Mengele reverently removed the sickle and turned it in his hands, rotating the tip of the curved blade scant millimeters from Gus’ eyes. With lightning quick movements, he hooked Gus’ outfit with the top of his scepter and sliced downward. With four deft strokes, he repeated the process on all of his limbs, leaving Gus naked and exposed. Kicking the remnants off to the corner, Mengele pressed Gus against a wall, securing him there as restraints grasped his arms, legs and chest.

  Initially, Gus struggled against the bonds but found them as unyielding as Mengele’s grip. The wall rotated, forming an operating table that hovered in the air. Cold metal was chill against his back and legs, and Mengele fastened a band around Gus’ forehead, locking him down onto the slab.

  Gus heard the hiss of the panel closing, unable to see what was happening around him. When Mengele reappeared, the sickle-thing was nowhere to be seen, thankfully.

  “One thing that has always amused me is how they say how interrogation and torture never work. That the information is not reliable since people will say anything just to get out of pain. That may be true for regs, but for supers there are so many other avenues to explore. Among my other talents is an ability called True Sight. For a researcher, it is invaluable. I imagine that it has saved me decades of chasing after false hypotheses and faulty logic.”

  Gus tried to glare but it was difficult to keep the fear out of his eyes. He couldn’t move his head at all! Just the harsh overhead lights and Mengele’s looming dark figure over him. The back of his head began to ache with the tension of the headband pushing him into the hard metal, causing his headache to rise in intensity. He had a feeling these headaches were going to seem like minor irritations compared to what was coming.

  “One side effect that I discovered, quite by accident though, was that I could also detect the truth when questioning my subjects. Even truths that they were hiding from themselves! You would be surprised how effectively this cuts through the Rashomon effect. Even supers are notoriously short-sighted, basing entirely too much of reality on feeble interpretations of the data. That’s why everyone is wrong such a large majority of the time. From their limited perspective, they think they have the whole truth. Blind men each feeling a different part of the elephant.”

  Mengele took out a scalpel, examining its blade, cocking his head to one side before placing it back on the tray and continuing.

  “I will admit it was frustrating at times having such a wide vision and being unable to share that with anyone else. So much explanation, trying to dumb things down so it could be understood. Then being greeted with constant doubt and uncertainty. That is why I prefer to work alone. My research has progressed much more quickly without wasting the time to train inferior minds. The freedom it gave made me wonder why I hadn’t embraced independence much earlier.”

  Mengele turned and, with a deft movement, Gus felt something stab him in the forearm. The bore of the needle looked like a pencil lead—it was so big. Mengele folded over two more restraints that immobilized his arm even more as he connected the tubing to a milky white fluid-filled bag.

  Gus saw it drip into a small chamber, then descended down the thin tube into his arm. At first, he thought it was some kind of anesthetic, as he felt an odd numbness as the cold liquid flowed into his veins.

  “I suspect you share this type of independence, Gus, although in your case I would hazard to say it’s very misguided. But it led to this collaboration. I realize it’s not consensual on your part, but when hasn’t humankind had to be dragged kicking and screaming into new eras? Everyone resists change so vehemently. Shameful.”

  Mengele walked toward the central light, and the table followed him, following some unseen command, positioning itself next to one of the illuminated trays.

  Mengele fussed with arranging his instruments just so on the tray beside Gus, straightening them with a few light pushes and tweaks until they were perfectly aligned.

  “There. I think we can begin now. Two things. I do not mind if you struggle, most people need to at first. There will be a fair amount of pain, and you will not be able to control your initial reactions. We have all the time in the world, so I will be patient with you. You see that IV? Your arm is secured enough that you will not be able to dislodge or disconnect it. Alarms would instantly notify me even if you did manage it somehow, directly to my display,” Mengele tapped his temple. “And I am never far away. I love what I do, you see, so why distract myself with any other activities, especially as singular a one as you provide.” Mengele picked up a large scalpel as a large grin spread on his face.

  Gus thought he had learned what fear was from many of the things he had suffered on his path of becoming a super. He was about to learn that he had only seen the tip of the iceberg.

  “Have you ever thought of what is happening to fuel your abilities? What do you call it, mana? MP? Psionic energy? They all are wrong. I find it interesting that practically no supers wonder what this mysterious material is and how it is used. They just accept it without question, like a door turning on its hinges. Giving no thought as to why it functions as it does.

  “Not me. It is a matter of great interest to me and part of the reason you are not able to access your abilities right now. Without access to this mysterious MP, you are like an unloaded gun. Less even, because a gun could be used to bludgeon someone. You are equal to a reg now.”

  Gus tried to bring up his display and found that he could not. This struck him with more panic than being restrained. A wide grin stole over Mengele’s stony features.

  “How does that feel? To be powerless again? Back to square one. All that XP and those levels you fought for and nothing to show for it. Do you understand my interest now? Knowledge is power, and it gives me a superiority over any super who does not understand what it is and where it comes from. You are docile as a little lamb. Not that you were a match for me even when you had powers, but I think you understand the hopelessness of your current situation.”

  “What is happening to me? What happened to my display? Where is my MP?” Gus asked drunkenly, feeling cotton-mouthed and disoriented. He tried to struggle weakly against his bonds and even that was losing intensity as he slowly began to feel paralyzed.

  “Oh no. I’m not going to reveal that information. It was hard-won and I’m not going to just tell you how it works. But just knowing the answer exists is like turning the screw, is it not? It makes the whole experience that much more delicious. For me, at least. I like to dangle it there, just out of reach, like a treat for a dog, or a key to an inmate’s cell. So tantalizing and yet so elusive. I hope to finalize my findings with your help and then I can move on to the third component. It’s poetic, your mother gave me the first key, and now you offer up the second on a silver platter! Once I understand and master that, I will not need my employer’s help anymore, and I will truly ascend. The Nth want us to evolve, and I will be the first!

  “I can tell you are getting fatigued, let me correct that,” Mengele grabbed a syringe off the rack and poked it into the IV bag, emptying the contents.

  Gus felt his heartbeat increase as the medicine entered his system. His eyes flitted back and forth as he began to sweat; his heart felt like an over-revved engine and felt like it would burst. *Thrum-ta-dum-thrum
-ta-dum*!

  “Oh, do calm down. It’s just a little epinephrine, you’re not having a panic attack. Or maybe you are? I just can’t have you falling asleep. No, no. I’ve had subjects fall into comas and I could not rouse them once they were out. It’s much easier for me if you stay awake. Plus a little sleep deprivation makes a subject so much more pliant for my needs. Are you ready to begin?”

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Hertz Donut

  Mengele was a lot of things, but a liar was not one of them.

  He was meticulous in his studies, and his lab—though white and pristine—managed to be outfitted with modern-day equivalents to medieval torture devices. Gus was stretched like he was on the rack, feeling his bones pull out of their sockets. One time Mengele crushed his hand in his godlike grip, then leaned close to watch the restorative process, making notes on a virtual keyboard reminiscent of Yuki’s. Upon comparing it to Gus’ other hand, he noted the ring.

  “And where did you get this little trophy?” Mengele stopped as he must have analyzed it, then slowly looked at a ring on his own stone finger. He looked up at the ceiling and muttered, “You will pay for that one, gamesman.”

  Mengele continued with his work, with even more severity, if that was possible. Long incisions were made and Gus heard the *pat-pat* of his blood pumping out and dripping onto the metal table. It collected in grooves and was collected in samples vials.

  With all he did, Mengele had a sixth-sense of just how much psychological strain Gus could take before passing out. He would skirt the edge of it, and then pull back at the last second when Gus had almost succumbed to oblivion.

  Then the injections. All colors of materials with huge needles that looked more like the types used to inflate basketballs than the thin, smaller ones for giving immunizations. While some of these carried some kind of healing infusion, they were almost the worst of all.

  The infusion stimulated his Nth into a supercharged state, and they snapped into action to repair torn cartilage and re-affix muscle ripped off his bones. He saw bruises form on his naked body, then shift in unpleasant colors as they went from reds, to dark purples, turning a sickly green before fading into yellows and browns as if he were watching a time-lapse video.

  The Nth must have been so busy repairing the extensive damage that they had no resources to mollify the pain, because wave after wave of the excruciating process repeated in different areas as the damage was managed.

  In the brief moments when the intensity began to wane and Gus’ breathing began to slow, Mengele would reappear and put Gus through a new battery of tests. Mengele seemed unaffected by Gus’ screams and went about his work methodically and systematically. Each horror was worse than the next.

  Mengele extracted tissue samples, first by cutting a large section from Gus’ quadriceps muscles. And then he removed a wedge of bone afterward, with some tool that resembled a small jackhammer. Then there was the needle that extracted some of the fluid from his eye. He even winked with the eye Gus had temporarily damaged right before the needle went in.

  Gus’ desperate thoughts hoped for someone in the Crew to come in and rescue him, but after what felt like days, that brief hope guttered and went out. It was clear Mengele would keep him here as long as he served to satisfy his curiosity, although the grin on his face showed he enjoyed inflicting pain for its own sake.

  When the tests began to take brain biopsies, Gus was on the verge of breaking mentally. A cranial drill removed small sections of his skull and samples were taken like core samples from the earth. The smell of burning hair and probably bone was sickening. The noise was deafening, amplified a thousand times as the drill buzzed against his skull.

  After every injury, again came the injections and the Nth knit Gus back together again. Mercilessly healing their host according to their directives, despite their facilitation in the endless torture.

  To cope, Gus reached out for Nick, but found the communication blocked and staticky. Something in those damn syringes created a disconnect between him and his powers as well as with his NIC. He wasn’t sure which was occurring; he could sense them but not access them. Shapes behind an opaque glass, dimly seen. They obviously were working, since his body was being healed, but perhaps Mengele knew how to tax them to their fullest so they had no capacity for anything else besides keeping him alive.

  Left to himself, Gus tried with limited success to erect walls to shield himself from the pain. He began to accept that he was all alone and that this was his new reality. The walls were the only thing that seemed to help to a limited degree.

  Burrowing down into himself, he could escape a portion of the pain. It was by no means perfect, and often Mengele found ways to pluck him from his mental lair and drag him out into the searing sunlight of agony. But he scrabbled back in as soon as he was able, and the pain was less acute.

  At some point, Mengele tried to ask some questions, but Gus was either too deep in his mental fortress or too exhausted to think straight. Mengele simply shrugged and continued his work, whistling distractedly. He never became perturbed with Gus’ lack of response, flailing about when in pain, or any reaction Gus had to the tests. At times he just stood back and observed until Gus expended his energy, at which point he would approach again and continue.

  Time became an unknown concept. Gus couldn’t tell how long he had been here in the lab as each cycle seemed interminable. There were no windows or clocks, and nothing to indicate the passage of time.

  Mengele did not seem to ever need to eat or sleep, he would just move out of sight until Gus had recovered and he would be there again. If he did rest or eat in those windows, Gus never knew or saw. He felt like he was always nearby though. There never was a gap between restoration and experimentation.

  Gus longed to pass out, hoping that the loss of consciousness would trigger his Leech ability to overload and shock his system into death with all those latent absorbed powers. Why he had fought so long to avoid death had become a blurry concept at this stage. Death would be welcome. It would be rest. An end to struggle, an end to suffering.

  Mengele was too good, though. He knew how far to push and when to let up, so there was no reprieve for the captive.

  For a time, Gus huddled far in the corner of his prison of pain, his mind doing its best to shield him from what was happening. It gave him brief opportunities to think despite the pain. Not for long, as the intensity waxed and waned, interrupting his ability to focus on any one thing.

  In those snatches of clarity he would have brief flashes of the life before. He perceived his life as that of a stranger, in a detached and impartial manner. Before he could get too involved, Mengele would do something that would pull him out of his refuge, immersing him in white-hot pain of yet another unexpected source, until he could retreat back to his mental cell, where he would look back at this life that seemed less his the more he observed it.

  In parallel to his current existence, he saw that he had always been one who fled from pain. It almost seemed ridiculous as he observed the types of things that caused old Gus to flee to other types of cells of his own design in the past. Cells of different types, but all created and maintained by his old self.

  From this vantage, he saw how ineffective they really were, and how he had chosen this isolation. Part of him felt he deserved his present self-incarceration for reacting in this way so often. Another part saw it as the natural consequence of not treating a disease; it festered and spread.

  Yet another musing revealed most of his life was a manifestation of his failure to make anything of himself, and the need to hide from the shame he felt. Everyone could probably see the corruption deep within him as he could from outside of himself, whether they could articulate it or not, and avoided him.

  This could be why he had always been underestimated, ignored, and written off. That he had been weighed and measured and found wanting. He expected this realization to be painful but in this small detached space, it just was. He had lived a small life b
y and large, almost always choosing the path of least resistance.

  He didn’t see himself always chasing pleasure, but he avoided pain like the plague, and it didn’t take much of a threat to activate his flight response when he looked at his life as a whole. This realization did not come all at once, but interspersed over many cycles of suffering and reprieve. Somehow, though, it was an anchor. Something he could focus on to help him withstand when amid the bedlam and symphony of pain.

  At some point in the cycles, Gus’ mind fell to BoJack and Prime. The Oracle had said that he needed something from them. He was sure that he had missed the opportunity to take advantage of whatever keys they had to offer. But it was still something to focus on. A puzzle to unravel. A reason to withstand the void and not succumb to the darkness. Not quite a struggle or a resistance, but letting go of the reins he had so tightly grasped to steer away from every danger, perceived or real.

  Both Prime and BoJack had been through suffering, of the type that far exceeded anything Gus had ever had to endure during his life before. Yet they were able to persist. He would have had no idea if he hadn’t breached their privacy and looked within them with Telepathy. As his mind brushed against this thought, there was a twinge deep within his core. This. This was important. He couldn’t fully grasp why it was so, but he knew it and shifted his floating awareness on this concept.

  Again, the tide of torture dragged him away and he had to come back, grabbing glances at this idea whenever he could before he was taken again.

  An indeterminate time later, he had enough clarity to return to his line of thought. How did they do that? How did they deal with their pain and suffering without wearing it on their sleeves, inviting the sympathy and consolation of others? He found that he could access their memories as if they were his own, at least the ones he had already viewed. He felt the despair and heartbreak.