The Lore of Prometheus

by Graham Austin-King

  She sniffed, scrubbing at her itching nose with the back of one hand as she rounded the corner. Her steps were still slow at times, and she tired easily, but her muscles and mobility were returning with remarkable speed.

  The sessions with Elias were an odd mixture of therapy, hypnosis, and scientific testing. Sometimes they simply talked, conversations that could have been nothing more than a casual chat were it not for Elias’ note-taking. At other times they experimented with fire, using the candle to try to hone her skills when in an alert state.

  She pushed through another set of doors and knocked at Elias’ office, pushing the door open at his summons. The lights were low, and a single bright lamp was focused on the black leather recliner—a hypnosis session then.

  “Have a seat, Mackenzie,” Elias’ deep voice came from the shadows. “Make yourself comfortable, I’ll just be a moment.”

  She hopped up onto the recliner, laying back and closing her eyes against the light as she fought down the surge of anxiety. Her nerves were the same every time. Loss of control of any kind was always something that had made her uncomfortable, and the fact that the black leather recliner reminded her of a dentist’s chair probably didn’t help matters.

  “And how are we today?” Elias asked, reinforcing the image of a dental surgery as he stepped into the circle of light.

  “Fine,” she said in a soft voice. “A little tired.”

  Elias smiled down at her. “Well, this won’t be too taxing today. Just do the same as normal, try and focus on the lights.” He set the circle of lenses spinning slowly. Reds, blues and greens rotating through a cycle as they played over her face.

  “Now, try and relax. Relax and listen to my voice,” he began. His voice droned on, and as always, she found her attention drifting, lulled by the soft tones.

  Mackenzie swallowed hard and wrinkled her nose at the harsh smell of smoke.

  *

  “That was better,” Elias told her with a broad smile as she blinked at the lights.

  She licked at dry lips, frowning at the sour taste in her mouth. “How long was I under?”

  Elias shrugged as he went to a side table and poured her a glass of water from the pitcher. “Not as long as you might think. A little more than two hours.”

  She took the glass from him and sipped at it, letting the water soak into her dry tongue before she swallowed. “It feels longer.”

  Elias nodded with a smile. “It always seems to with you. Remember I told you how different people react to hypnosis in very different ways? You have a strong mind, Mackenzie, a strong sense of self. It takes some effort to take you into a trance but once there, you seem to sink deeper than many others. In any event, I’m pleased to say you’re responding extremely well to the programme.”

  She fought down the urge to grin at his praise and pushed herself up from the recliner, swinging her legs over the side. She sipped at the drink again and looked at the remains of the candle. The wick was barely visible in the solidifying pool of red wax that all but filled the metal tray. “I did that?”

  Elias nodded but his smile faded as a frown grew. “You still don’t remember?”

  Mackenzie shook her head as she stood and made her way across to the table. “No, I don’t remember anything after I lay down. It feels like I’ve just been to sleep.”

  “Odd,” Elias mused, jotting something down in his notes. “I would have expected that to pass. It’s unusual but not unheard of. Most people have at least a hazy recollection of what happens once they are in the trance. We can look at this next session, there are a few things I’d like to try.”

  Mackenzie nodded, not really paying attention. Her inability to remember the sessions had never really concerned her.

  “This was a big candle.” She pressed a fingertip into the wax, toying with the texture of it. “It wouldn’t have burnt down to this in just two hours.”

  Elias snorted as she looked over to him. “Look up.”

  The ceiling was high in the office, easily twelve feet above the floor, but still the tiles were scorched and blackened above the candle.

  “I’ll admit, I panicked for a minute,” Elias laughed. “I even started to run to fetch the fire extinguisher, before I realised I could just ask you to control the fire.”

  “And I did?” Mackenzie asked. “That quickly?”

  It didn’t seem possible.

  Elias nodded. “Would you like to see the video?”

  She nodded, and Elias motioned her over to the desk and the laptop. The recording was crisp and zoomed in on her from where the security camera was positioned above the door. Elias skipped through the process of inducing the hypnotic state; the droning voice and slowly cycling lights, until the candle burst into flame.

  She watched as Elias had her raise the height of the flame until it raged in a meter-high column, and then gasped as the flame somehow left the candle altogether, burning in blissful ignorance of this impossibility as it hung in the air, away from the wick. Elias had her increase the height of the flame again; she snorted a laugh at his panic as the fire licked at the ceiling and he dashed towards the fire extinguisher, before instructing her to control it.

  She met his gaze as he closed the laptop.

  “You’re a very special person, Mackenzie,” he told her. He ignored her as she shook her head, and spoke over her attempts to talk. “You have an amazing gift, more powerful than anything I’ve seen in this complex, yet you seem determined not to embrace it.”

  “I’m not,” Mackenzie protested. “I just…”

  “You still cannot move past your abduction,” Elias finished for her. “I’ve explained this to you, haven’t I? How it was necessary?”

  “Yes, but…”

  Elias shook his head. “But nothing. The first stage of releasing your power, of releasing any power, is to confront it. This can only be done in a situation of great stress, when the body is weak enough that the mind is free to move beyond the normal constraints.”

  “I know,” Mackenzie said in a low voice. “And I have tried. I’m still trying. Most of the time it doesn’t even bother me anymore. I think it’s just one thing to know it, to have it explained to you, but it’s something quite different to live through it.”

  Elias nodded. “It’s no easy thing to go through, I know that. It was never supposed to be.”

  His calm response suddenly irritated her.

  “How do you know?” she burst out. “From videos? From books?”

  He seemed content to let her rage at him, looking on with infuriating calm and a slight smile that just served to irritate her even more, as if he were humouring her.

  “Tell me, Elias? Just how the fuck would you know?”

  “Are you finished?” he asked, slipping in the question as she paused to suck in a ragged breath. “I know because I designed the process. And more than that, I know because I tested it. I went through it myself.”

  “You…” she fell silent. There were no words for this.

  “Of course I did,” he told her in his gentle voice. “I would never subject someone to a programme I hadn’t experienced myself.”

  Her eyes narrowed for a moment. “But you knew it wasn’t real.”

  “How wasn’t it real? I was bound and naked the same as you. I was starved of distraction, of interaction, the same as you.”

  “Because you knew you could get out,” Mackenzie muttered.

  Elias nodded, scratching at his short beard for a moment. “That’s true, I suppose. The staff all had instructions not to let me out, even if I begged, but I suspect you’re probably right. It’s human nature,” he shrugged. “We respect the authority figure even when we’re told not to.”

  “You could have got out,” Mackenzie said in a flat voice. “Whenever it became too much, whenever you’d had enough, you could have been free as soon as you said the word. And now you’re laying the blame at my feet because, apparently, despite how much I’ve forgiven everything you had done to me, deep d
own I can’t fully trust you?”

  “A level of trust is required for this to work,” Elias told her, breaking his silence.

  “Why are you doing all of this?” she asked then, as if the question had never occurred to her before.

  He frowned for a moment with a bemused smile, before he burst into laughter.

  “Why? You might as well ask why someone would search for the secret of flight, or eternal youth! I could say something noble, like it’s for the advancement of human knowledge, for the betterment of mankind. The truth is that I just want to know. I’ve always been fascinated with magic—both the act of sleight of hand and also the myths and legends of wizards and sorcery. Western science is so dismissive of anything it cannot immediately categorise and label. Acupuncture, meditation, even the peculiar effects of aromatherapy or crystals. We dismiss most of it as superstition and nonsense. Even hypnosis is side-lined and often dismissed. But abilities like yours? Most scientists would reject even the possibility of it.”

  Mackenzie fell silent for a minute, digesting that. It did nothing to excuse the things she’d been put through, but at least her suffering had some sort of meaning to it now. Did that make it any better? She couldn’t decide just yet.

  She looked at the doctor. “What about Janan?”

  Elias shifted in his seat, looking uncomfortable for a second as he sat back. “What about him?”

  “What’s his goal? You say that you’re studying for your own curiosity but also for the betterment of man?” She paused long enough for Elias to nod. “Presumably, you’d like to publish your findings at some stage, if you could get results strong enough to overshadow the backlash? But what does Janan get from all this?”

  “Janan wants the key, Mackenzie.” Elias spoke softly, suddenly too still in his seat, almost as if confessing. “He wants to find the root of these abilities and replicate it. He wants the power for himself.”

  She nodded. “Not so very different from your goal on the surface. I suppose the real question is whether he would share the knowledge if he had control over it.”

  “I think you probably know the answer to that,” Elias grunted. “It’s irrelevant anyway. We have an arrangement, and Afridi isn’t directly involved in the research.”

  “So, what happens to me, in the end? What happens to me?”

  He looked confused by that, as if the question had never occurred to him, and she interrupted as he stammered his way to a response. “You can’t think that I’m just going to be free to leave here once you have your results? I was brought here against my will. I’ve been abused and half-starved.”

  She held up a hand to stop him. “Yes, I know your reasons, but it doesn’t stop the fact that it happened. I saw Armond murdered in front of me. I know you don’t believe that happened, that it was just a hallucination brought on by the Cocktail, but I know it was real, Elias. I can’t explain how, but I know it was. You were willing to push some ethical boundaries aside to get your results, but Janan pushed them much further than you would have done, and he’s still pushing. So, I’ll ask you again; where does it end? What happens to me?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Mackenzie pushed through the double doors and out of the cafeteria. Meal times were always a struggle for her. She could have eaten in her room but that meant isolating herself, and she’d spent enough time alone in this place. She usually managed to force herself to eat in the canteen at least once a day, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience. She felt the eyes of the technicians and scientists on her as she ate. In a way, she supposed she couldn’t blame them. It must be a bit like having a lab rat walk in and order lunch with the research staff.

  She made her way along the corridor, fingering the key-card as she made vague plans to use the small gym in her rooms. Elias’ words circled in her mind, like vultures waiting for their prey to falter and fall beneath the hot sun.

  It was his silence that had been the most telling. His inability to answer her question—what would happen to her? That silence was violent. A brutal intruder into a mind that had shifted from abductee and prisoner, to willing collaborator. That simple fact, that Elias had been unable to tell her how far Janan might go, tore through her desire to learn more about this power and in the space of twelve short hours she had come face-to-face with what she had become.

  She froze as she turned the corner.

  The card was at the very edge of the carpet, close to a cylindrical metal bin that might have hidden it from anyone who wasn’t walking along with their eyes downcast. She glanced around quickly, despite knowing already that the hallway was empty. There were no security cameras in this hallway; there was no need for them. The doors at either end of the hall were controlled by maglocks that would only release for enabled key-cards.

  She stooped quickly and snatched up the card. Unlike her orange key-card, this was solid black with a retractable line that ran into a belt-clip. The clasp on the back of the clip had snapped, and she wrapped her hand around the card to conceal it against her leg.

  The journey back to her room was a panicked scurry that would have stood out on any cameras that were being monitored. Despite the fact she passed nobody, and held the card palmed between her hand and leg, she rushed; convinced that she would be stopped and searched at any moment.

  The door closed behind her and she pressed her back to it, breathing hard.

  “Shit!” She looked down at the card. It was plain black with no other markings on it. There was no telling who it might belong to or what kind of access it might give her, but it would be more than she had right now.

  Her heart pounded as she turned the card over in her hands. Was she actually considering doing this? Staying meant she might learn more about her fledgling powers, and leaving risked losing all of that. She deliberately didn’t think about what might happen if she was caught.

  “Come on, Mackenzie, you dozy bitch,” she muttered. “You bloody well know what will happen if you stay here. It’s just a matter of when.”

  She swore under her breath again and touched the orange card to the reader. It was now or never. If she let herself think this over any more than this, she’d never do it at all.

  The door clicked open, maglocks releasing at the touch of the card on the reader. She was still within the lunch schedule. Leaving her rooms again would probably register on a log somewhere, but it wouldn’t look as strange as if she used the black key-card, rather than her own, to open her door. She paused on the threshold, swore again, and made her way along the corridor, turning left and taking the route she would normally use to go to see Elias.

  The lifts ran for six levels. Elias’ office was two floors above where she was now, but the lift also had a camera mounted near the ceiling. She noticed it every time she stepped in there, its little red light glaring at her. The camera made the lift nothing more than the fastest way to be captured. Instead, her hopes were pinned on the door standing beside it.

  She paused at the door, holding the black card in her fist.

  This was it.

  This was the moment.

  As soon as she touched the card to the reader a line would be crossed. From this point it would be a matter of escaping entirely, or facing the consequences of failure. The image of Armond’s screaming death as the flames consumed him filled her mind for a moment, and she shuddered at the memory.

  Janan had been utterly unconcerned at the pain he had inflicted. Armond had been a means to an end, nothing more. How could she ever have imagined that he thought of her any differently? And yet she had. In the weeks since she’d been released from her cell she’d participated willingly, even eagerly. She’d lapped up every scrap of approval and praise from both Elias and Janan like she was some kind of scolded puppy. It went far beyond her own curiosity about her powers and the project. She’d come to accept the goals of this place as her own, she’d even begun to accept that not only was her abduction justified, but that her time chained to the frame in the cell had been necessar
y.

  There was a name for people like her.

  The French would have called her a collaborateur and that was probably the truth of it. She could claim she was suffering a level of Stockholm Syndrome to herself if she liked, but the problem with lying to yourself is that somewhere, deep down, you always know the lie for what it is. And now, faced with the truth of things, the disgust and self-loathing were so thick it was all she could do to keep herself moving.

  The reader beeped as she touched the card to it and, as she pushed the door open a crack, she realised she’d been holding her breath.

  What had she been expecting? Sirens?

  She pushed the door open slowly, braced for a challenge or a room full of people, but it held only the stone stairs she’d hoped for. The cooler air felt slightly damp, and she shivered through the thin, blue, jumpsuit she wore, hugging herself against the chill.

  Her progress up the first two flights was slow, an agony of fear and anticipation as she expected to find guards around every turn of the stairwell. She stopped at the top of the second flight, massaging the tension in her neck and shoulders.

  This was ridiculous. She was just as likely to get caught creeping along as she was sprinting, and she may as well cover more ground.

  “You’ve rolled the dice, girl. Go with it.”

  The jumpsuit had come with soft tennis shoes that barely made a noise as she raced up the stairs. She ran like a frightened mouse, scurrying upwards and then freezing, hunching low as she listened for any sound.

  The camera was positioned above the door at the top of the stairwell. Mackenzie crouched down behind the railings at the bottom of the final flight, swearing under her breath. The stairwell was locked out to her orange key-card, which meant only those with the correct authorisation could get in here. This was both blessing and curse. Blessing because it meant that the camera was unlikely to be closely monitored, and curse because she would stick out like a sore thumb on the footage.