The Lore of Prometheus

by Graham Austin-King

  Elias smiled at that. “To begin with, I wanted to see if you were all right. Beyond that, I have a more professional curiosity.”

  “All right? How could I be all right? You do know what happens in this place, don’t you?”

  “I do,” Elias said, in a flat tone. “You might not believe this, but it is all necessary to a degree.”

  “It’s necessary to kidnap people and chain them up like animals?” Her tone was scathing and, she knew, ill-advised, but right now she didn’t care. She was done pretending this was all okay, no matter how they tried to justify it to themselves.

  Elias sighed and made his way around the desk to sink into his chair. He looked at her for a moment, steepling his fingers under his nose.

  “Do you know how the vaccine for Hepatitis B was first developed?” he asked finally.

  Mackenzie frowned at the non-sequitur. “I’m not sure what—”

  “The Willowbrook experiments,” Elias answered for her. “It was a state school in Staten Island in the United States, a home for children with mental disabilities. A researcher named Krugman intentionally let the children there become infected with Hepatitis.”

  Mackenzie gasped. “Oh my God! Why would anyone do that?” she demanded, speaking through the hand she’d clapped over her mouth.

  Elias nodded. “It’s abhorrent. But it can’t be denied that the research from it resulted in the discovery of both the Hepatitis A and B strains, and that led to the Hepatitis B vaccine.

  The Nazis did awful things, but through their experiments, they developed the rapid active rewarming technique that is still used for hypothermia today. Ethics are a wonderful, and very necessary part of medical research, Mackenzie, but they can be a stumbling block. Modern science rejects even the possibility of powers like yours. Our experiments, our programme, could never exist if we worked within a fully ethical framework. Look how far you have come already in just a few short months. This couldn’t have happened any other way. I know it has been hard, Mackenzie, but your abilities will never be fully realised, and certainly will never be understood, if we allow medical ethics to control what we can learn.”

  “But you’re supposed to be a doctor? How can you do this?”

  “It’s a bit of a cliché, but I suppose the ends justify the means,” Elias said with a shrug. “This research could herald in a new era of human evolution.”

  Bile rose in her throat and she swallowed hard as she recoiled in the wheelchair. “Even if it means burning people alive?”

  Elias blinked. “What?”

  “Janan. He burned Armond alive,” Mackenzie told him. “In front of me, just to see if I could put the fire out.”

  “No.” Elias shook his head. “We’re not monsters, Mackenzie. We’d never do anything like that.”

  “I saw him, Elias. I was there.”

  Elias frowned for a moment. “You’ve been on some pretty heavy medication, Mackenzie. The Cocktail contains drugs that can cause hallucinations that might seem very real.”

  “It wasn’t a hallucination,” she grated, the anger building underneath her disgust.

  Elias gave her an understanding but patronising smile. She’d seen it a thousand times. She’d worn it herself. It was the compassionate, condescending, look you gave someone when they were delusional, or on drugs.

  “Let it pass for now,” he told her. “There are more important things I want to discuss with you.”

  She ground her teeth and looked away. There was no point fighting him. She wasn’t going to convince him of anything.

  He nodded, taking her silence as acceptance. “Your powers, Mackenzie. The abilities of everyone we have discovered so far, have one thing in common. They all stem from a moment of great psychological trauma. For you it was the fire you were trapped in as a child. The fear you experienced, cut off from your parents and surrounded by flames, was something that few will encounter in their lifetime, and one that, I believe, led to a perceptual and conceptual break.”

  “I’m not sure I recognise the term,” Mackenzie said, narrowing her eyes at Elias.

  Elias nodded. “No, it’s something I’ve coined myself. I’m still not sure I’m happy with it, to tell the truth. What I mean is that your fear and trauma at the time of the fire led to a psychological break from your understanding of reality.”

  “I went mad?”

  “No, nothing so extreme,” Elias laughed. “No, what I believe happened is you broke free of the shackles we place upon ourselves, the limits of what we believe is normally possible. It probably helped that you were a child, and that your understanding of the world, of what is possible and what isn’t, was more fluid, and that enabled you to access this power.”

  “I decided it was possible, so it was?” Mackenzie wasn’t convinced and the look she gave him was less than subtle.

  Elias smiled. “I suspect it’s a little more involved than that. There is almost certainly a biological element to this as well, though we’ve yet to isolate anything in all the tests we’ve done. One thing is certain—it is this psychological break, this ability to affect a disconnect from what most people believe to be the rules of physics and possibility, that drives these abilities. What matters most is learning to control both the power and the extent of the disconnect. That’s what the Cocktail was for, to remind you of your ability, to push past the physical laws of this world, to reach through the disconnect and seize your power again.”

  There was more to this than he was saying, that much was obvious, but screaming for the details wasn’t going to get her anywhere.

  “That sounds fascinating,” she said, giving him her best smile. There was more than one way to skin a cat. “So, where do we go next with this?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I’ve never been shot. Shot at? Yes, sure, more times than I could count. But I’ve never actually been hit. It sounds a bit stupid to say after over ten years in the forces, almost like I really ought to have been shot at some point. But I suppose there’s a first time for everything.

  It didn’t feel anything like I’d expected. The impact itself was like a baseball bat had smacked me in the leg, and for what seemed like ages, that’s all I felt as I gaped down at the bloody hole in my thigh. That and an immense pressure, as if something were still forced down against my flesh.

  Afridi was cursing, and medics rushed in to inspect the wound and sort me out. The heat came next, like a hot poker had been driven through one side of my thigh and out the other. The wound felt hot, and wet, and just wrong somehow. That’s the thing that stood out to me most, just how odd and wrong and really fucking painful it was. Don’t get shot, kids. It doesn’t feel nice.

  They pumped me full of drugs despite me begging them not to. The pain was bad, don’t get me wrong. I’m not superman, and the pain was one of the most intense I’ve ever felt. But I don’t get on well with opiates.

  I broke my ribs when I was in my early twenties. Stupid boys racing go-carts on an indoor course in London. I spun out on a corner and another car slammed into the side of me. The impact smashed me into the side of the moulded seat, which helpfully popped a rib for me. Just breathing in felt like being stabbed slowly with a blunt knife. They put me on codeine, but I stopped taking them after the third day. It stopped the pain, but it felt like I had ants crawling under my skin. After two nights without much sleep I binned the lot and dealt with the pain instead.

  I’ve no idea what they pumped me full of after Afridi shot me, but it hit hard and held me for hours before I came to again. They had me hooked up to an IV, a saline drip by the looks of things, that hung on a stand beside the frame I was cuffed to.

  There was something on my head too, some kind of rubber cap with wires attached to it that ran to a machine against the wall. If I craned my neck forwards, I could just see the bandages they’d bound around my leg. They’d taken care to wash the blood off me too, which probably meant they’d cleaned the wound and I was unlikely to die of infection. Maybe.

/>   They left me alone for most of the day. A silent man in scrubs came in to check the IV bag at one point, and inject something into the drip line. It wasn’t a pain-killer, or if it was then it didn’t bloody work. I stared at him long enough to make him uncomfortable before he left.

  This became the pattern for what I guessed to be about three days. Doze, eat the grainy slop in the feeding tube, and glare at the unlucky sod sent in to check my bandages. I did notice that nobody other than Afridi tried to talk to me, which I took to mean they weren’t allowed to.

  By the fourth day the bullet wound had healed enough that the pain had ebbed and I was able to consider my situation. I sucked a mouthful of cold, grainy goop from the feeding tube and forced it down.

  “So, what the hell do I do now?”

  Talking to yourself isn’t actually all that uncommon. Getting answers, however? That’s a little different.

  “I’d say you’re fucked,” Johnson advised me with a cheery grin.

  I shook my head and ignored him as the door hissed open.

  “What the hell is that for?” I asked the two men as they wheeled in a machine. I make a point of trying to avoid Wimbledon when it infests the television each year. I have no real objection to tennis, but the grunts and groans get on my nerves. Despite my efforts, I’ve been subjected to enough of it to know this machine was a tennis ball launcher.

  I watched the two of them set the thing up and load tennis balls into the hopper. It had some manner of laser pointer attached to the front of it, and the small red dot settled on the centre of my chest, just above the restraining band than ran over my stomach.

  “I’m afraid my backhand’s a bit rusty,” I called over to them.

  The taller of the two glanced at me, and fought down a smile. He spoke English by the looks of things, so at least that was something.

  “So, what’s the plan here, boys?”

  They exchanged glances and one plugged the power cord into a socket in the wall. The machine came to life with a faint electric whine.

  “Hey!” I shouted at them as they made to leave. “Answer me, you bastards.”

  “Please don’t abuse the staff, Mr Carver.” A voice came through speakers set above the door. “They are simply doing their job.”

  I didn’t recognise the voice. It wasn’t Afridi, I knew that much.

  “Oh well, I’m terribly sorry to cause offence,” I snapped back at the speaker. “Maybe being chained up is fraying my nerves? Or maybe it’s the way you shot me in the fucking leg.”

  “You are The Miracle of Kabul, Mr Carver. If you object to being shot, then perhaps you should have stopped the bullet.”

  “Right. And for my next trick, I’ll wish these cuffs away and fly home on my shiny new fairy wings.”

  There was no response to that, and when the man did speak again his voice was flat and hard. “The machine will launch every three minutes.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered, closing my eyes against the insanity of it all.

  I looked at the launcher. It was a small black cube with a hopper on top, thankfully not that similar to the professional launchers you occasionally see on sports interviews. Those things can hurl a ball at over a hundred miles an hour. If a tennis ball hit me at that speed, I’d be blue for weeks.

  The launcher shuddered and sent a ball slamming into my chest.

  “Son of a bitch!” It didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected it to, but it wasn’t what I’d call a fun experience. At least it wasn’t launching cricket balls, I decided.

  The second ball caught me as unprepared as the first and I swore and yelled as if that might make a difference. By the fourth ball I’d started counting down the time to the next one. By the sixth I was trying to shift myself to the side so it wouldn’t strike in the same place as the others. It didn’t work.

  I had no idea how many balls they’d tipped into the launcher, but the hopper was big enough to hold at least a hundred. My maths has never been that great, but it was good enough for me to know that the next couple of hours weren’t going to be any fun at all.

  A tennis ball isn’t the hardest thing in the world, it’s designed to bounce after all, and that requires a certain amount of give. The launcher wasn’t going at full-power either, or at least I doubted it was. Add into the mix the fact that I’d just been shot a few days ago, so the pain was all relative. All these things combined to mean precisely fuck all after the first half an hour.

  I’d been hit by ten tennis balls by then, three minutes apart and travelling at about fifty miles per hour by my best guess, onto exactly the same spot. It hurt. It hurt like a bastard, and even when the hopper ran out, that didn’t help as much as you’d think. The repeated impacts numbed my flesh for the first little while, but that only lasted so long and when the numbness faded, the pain crawled out to claim me.

  They refilled the hopper the next day, and again the next. Then on the fourth day they brought in something truly evil: a clock. Someone had even marked a little red dot above the number two, so I could tell just how many hours I had until they started on this again. Torture is an odd thing. People often make the mistake of confusing torture with pain, and they’re not always the same thing. I won’t say that the tennis balls didn’t hurt, but the pain was nothing compared to the slowly ticking clock, marking out the time until the door would open, the hopper would be refilled, and it all began all over again.

  By the end of the week, I’d lost myself in the pain. Every impact radiated agony across my chest, and it seemed to reach out to the dull, throbbing, ache in my wounded leg. My chest was a bruised and inflamed mess. A red welt lay over blue and purple bruised flesh and the skin was split and bleeding. Each tennis ball struck now with a wet slap and I’d stopped screaming or even crying out.

  My body was a prison that I was eager to flee.

  The visitors filtered in slowly, watching me suffer.

  Johnson walked in through a wall, giving me a wink and a cheery wave. Pearson was suddenly just there, appearing between moments as he curled up in a corner, staring at me over the top of his knees with a look of horror.

  One by one they all appeared; Johnson, Turner, Pearson—all my failures.

  Every death, my fault.

  Johnson made his way over to me, inspecting the shackles and the torso restraint. He looked on with interest as another tennis ball slammed into my bloody chest with a wet thud.

  “So, as fun as this looks, Roasties,” he said. “Why are you doing this exactly?”

  “It’s not exactly by choice, you prick.” I was breaking Rule Three, but at this point I really didn’t care. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure I was fully conscious.

  Johnson shrugged and looked at Pearson for a moment. “Looks like a choice to me, mate. I can’t see why you’d let tennis balls mash you to a pulp when you could just stop them.”

  “You know, nice as this is, I’m not sure a hallucination is what I need right now.”

  Johnson smiled at me with a sideways look and snorted a laugh. “Did you ever stop to consider that maybe I’m not a hallucination?”

  “What, so you’re a ghost or something?”

  “Perhaps.” Johnson shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “Ghosts aren’t real, Johnson. People don’t talk to the dead.”

  “People don’t stop bullets with magic or their bloody minds, either, Carver.”

  I sighed. “I didn’t either, Johnson. I don’t know how it happened.”

  Pearson shook his head violently at that, as Turner muttered something that didn’t carry.

  “You know, Roasties, for a supposedly intelligent man, you’re remarkably stupid sometimes.”

  “What the hell is—” I broke off as another tennis ball hit and I grunted away the pain that flared. “What does that mean?”

  “He still doesn’t get it, does he?” Johnson said over one shoulder to Turner. “Look, mate. You’re missing the point. It doesn’t matter that you don’t know how you did it. Just that
you did.”

  “Even if that were true, what good does it do me?” My voice was a pained rasp, pushed out through a chest that felt like it was simultaneously on fire, and about to collapse in on itself.

  “I’d have thought that were bloody obvious…” Johnson paused as the launcher rumbled into life again, preparing to launch another ball. The ball flew towards my chest and then stopped dead, hanging in the air two feet from my bruised and bleeding flesh.

  “Sorry,” Johnson told me with a shrug. “Those things were really getting on my tits.”

  “How…?” I gaped at the ball.

  Johnson shrugged. “Haven’t a clue, mate. But then, I’m supposed to be dead, right? Maybe I’m not even here. And if I’m a hallucination, then who do you think just stopped that ball?”

  The tennis ball wobbled in the air as the visitors vanished, and then dropped to the ground, bouncing into a corner as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Mackenzie touched the orange key-card to the reader and pulled the heavy door open. The guard nodded a greeting and watched her as she made her way along the corridor. What was his name again? Saj?

  The transition still took her by surprise whenever she took the time to think about it. Over a period of weeks her escorts to visit the various doctors, undergo tests, and to and from Elias’ sessions had dropped; first from three guards down to one, and then to her finally being given her own key-card and a schedule. But then her own development made this almost insignificant in comparison.

  Her time bound to the wooden frame was already becoming a hazy memory, eclipsed by the growth in her power since. Elias had replaced the Cocktail of sedatives and hallucinogenic drugs with deep hypnosis to try and encourage the development of greater control. She could no longer deny the existence of her power, and she no longer wanted to. In many ways she was even willing to forgive Janan for her abduction. Leaving all of this behind now was almost inconceivable.

  She turned the orange card over in her hands as she walked, fingernails tapping at the plastic. It was limited, of course. It allowed her out of her room if she needed to leave for a session with Elias, or if it was close to meal times it would give her passage to the cafeteria, but other than that it was inert—useless. It was probably running on some kind of time-lock, keyed to her schedule.