by Schow, Ryan
The shotgun blast was near deafening in the hanger. Abby’s head snapped back. She dropped face-first onto the cage floor.
He looked around, satisfied, yet embarrassed at having to use such barbaric tactics. All around, hundreds of watching eyes were judging him. Some burned with hatred, others went cold with fear, but the majority of them held signs of nothing. Neither fear nor anger. Not anything.
These kids, he thought, one day one of them will be responsible for something that will forever ruin our world. People like him, the mind scientists, they all but guaranteed such a future with all their incessant psychotropic meddling.
Swinging open the cage door, he hauled Abby out by the hair, hoisted her up and slung her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He headed for the door. Her exposed privates were seen by everyone and no one.
There was no modesty in this place, he thought, for these things—these unwilling subjects—they weren’t regarded as human. They were disposable. The sinful architects of Level Four’s Mind Sciences Division considered them inventory. Like cattle, or sheep, but with less favor.
With Abby, however, Delgado knew she would return to the outside world, and so parts of him actually felt sorry for her. For what he was about to do to her. Putting her on a gurney, he left HA-05, trekked Abby a good quarter mile down the central corridor to his private lab. Unconsciously, Delgado envisioned her a month from now. Two months. In his mind, he saw her at school, mingling with other students, smiling, laughing, doing the kind of socially retarded shit high schoolers do. No one would be the wiser, but he knew, in the back of his mind, the face she wore would be malleable. Fake. A creation of his own making.
After what was about to happen to her, what he was about to do to her mind, he knew she would forever suffer the horrors of this place. Of him. Her soul will teem with revulsion, he thought. At least she’ll serve a greater purpose. To some degree, all of them did.
All these filthy kids.
He had just gotten her arms and legs strapped to the table when Abby’s eyes fluttered open. Her body unconsciously strained against the heavy restraints. The swelling on her head where the shotgun’s bean bag round drilled her was already down and no longer red. Amazing! And the small cut, stitched up by her body’s own supernatural vices, it was gone, too. Just a drizzle of red where it first bled. He licked his thumb, wiped the residual blood from her head. She made a moaning sound. Like a wounded animal snared in a trap. He was still contemplating her healing capabilities when he went next door and made the phone call.
“I have a student from Astor Academy in my care,” he said on the phone. No hello’s, and no pleasantries. The woman on the other end of the line did not care for trivial conversation outside the public eye.
“You can’t be serious,” the woman croaked on the other end.
“It’s true.”
“I haven’t the time for jokes,” she said, sounding less confident that he was lying.
“Nor do I, Senator. I have other things to do.”
She stilled herself with a breath. “So it does exist,” she said with reverence.
Astor Academy.
“Indeed.”
“You are calling, I trust, because this student will return to school this fall?”
“She’ll do whatever you need her to do.”
“Brilliant,” the woman replied. It was a rare thing to hear such delight in a woman who normally sounded as if she’d chain smoked her vocal chords into oblivion. From her nicotine-caked throat came the words: “Astor Academy, as I live and breathe!”
“When will I hear back from you?” Delgado asked, trying to keep her focused, and trying to use proper English. The slang he’d grown accustomed to, it was a sort of rebellion that stuck years ago. It was the same as having table manners bred into you, then eating alone for years with no one to be polite for.
“So this child, is it a girl or a boy?”
“Girl,” he replied. “Sixteen or seventeen. Sensational. Very easy on the eyes. Blonde hair, blue eyes, delicious figure, if you require a description.”
God, he sounded ripe with faggotry. Like he was vomiting up the kind of high society small talk that always seemed to rub his last nerve raw.
He couldn’t help it, though. His hands had that damp, clammy feel. He wiped them on his pant legs and tried to slow his beating heart. The last time he was able to please the senator with a slave, his net worth had swelled by half a million dollars, so he was in a pleasing kind of mood whether he wanted to be or not.
“You shall hear back from me by tomorrow at the latest,” the senator replied, her tone a lot less aggressive than before. Still, the measure of delight in her voice held so much promise. “How are you planning to prep the child?”
A camera positioned on the ceiling in the far corner of the lab provided a perfect view of Abby. Reclining in his office chair, sipping iced Ginger Ale and rolling an unlit cigarette between his fingers, he studied the girl on the large computer monitor. The way she struggled, how she looked like she just might thrash her way out of the restraints had he not pulled the buckles impossibly tight, worried him. If she did possess telekinetic powers, she had no idea how to use them. And the way she was blistering in the face to get free, he wanted no part of her when her powers did come online, so to speak.
“She’ll get box therapy until you say what’s what. Don’t take too long, though. I’m a busy man. Too busy to get lost in these sort of, ah, extracurricular endeavors.”
“Don’t feign civility on my account, Dr. Delgado. It’s unnecessary.”
“I appreciate it.”
“As of now,” she said, “I don’t know who will procure the girl’s services first, but I can tell you, no matter who comes forward, no matter the fee I secure, rest assured the client will require the services of the Delta alter.”
Delgado all but snickered at the thought, although he dared not make such a sound lest he startle the senator. She could be such an unforgiving woman. And hostile.
Girls like Abby, he programed them to serve only two purposes: seduction and assassination. Seduction required the creation of the Beta alter (see: the kitten alter, or the sex slave) whilst murder required the creation of the Delta alter (see: the assassination alter). The bottom line, why he was so happy, was because use of a Delta alter paid so much more. Anyone could get a girl to do sexual favors for money or status these days; it was merely a matter of how much and to whom. But most young girls, they won’t kill a friend, a family member, a boyfriend or even a stranger. Not for any amount of money. With the Delta alter, though, such things were not only possible, they were guaranteed.
“I will begin immediately,” Delgado chimed into the phone, but the line was already dead.
2
He entered the lab. Abby’s head wrenched sideways so hard and fast it nearly took his breath. Her eyes were ferocious. Like something you would see out of an exorcism movie where the main character was possessed by demons.
“I don’t want this for you,” Delgado said, his voice gentle, kind, how you would talk to a mental patient, or an animal anxious to tear out your throat.
“Then let me OUT!” She bucked against the restraints, spitting and hissing at him. Veins stood out on her arms and forehead.
He had to quell this madness in her lest it lead to a supernatural reaction. What he absolutely did not need was for his head to explode and soak the stark white room with his creative juices.
Behind his back, he concealed a sedative. When he was close enough to her, he stuck the needle in her arm, depressed the plunger. The slick betrayal registered in her right before she got really syrupy looking. Her eyelids bobbed shut.
Without waiting, he rolled her back on to the metal gurney and down the hall to the box room. There were only three boxes and they were all on concrete slabs. Inside the coffin-like structures were tiny slats for air, and a waste disposal grate that dropped down into the slab’s pre-plumbed sewer drain so one didn’t stew in their ow
n excrement. He kept the drain closed, because when you’re forced to lie unmoving in your own waste, it’s so much more traumatic. This, of course, escalated the time frame on dissociation, or the fracturing of the mind. Only when her mind sufficiently split could he do the things he needed to do to her.
“A price must always be paid,” he said, as he laid her into the coffin, a tight squeeze. Smoothing her hair, reverentially, like a parent soothing their sick child, he gave her one final look, then he shut and sealed the lid.
When she wakes up and finds herself stuffed in the box, he thought, crammed tight in there with no wiggle room and no way out, she’s going to pray for death. In the box, minutes moved as quickly as hours. As slow as summer days. And two days? Two days was a punishment worse than hell. On the third day, her mind would splinter. It would tear in two.
By then, he’d be ready for her.
3
Back in his office, he accessed the generic mapping program required to create the Delta alter, i.e. the assassination program that would run in Abby’s brain. Instead of the antiquated ways of raising up these future assassins from birth using methods of fracturing the mind through ritualistic rape, torture and abuse, as well as drugs, sleep and food deprivation, Delgado developed an implantable microchip that was hardwired directly into the brain. He wasn’t the first to invent this technology, but his programs were by far the most efficient.
Basically he could hijack the brain without all the psychological work required to create an undetectable mind-controlled slave. The chip alone would monitor the host personality’s activities and activate the alter via specific commands called “triggers.” There was no reason to constantly monitor and strengthen the amnesic walls when the chip maintained all of this for him. This was how handlers put their slaves on autopilot.
In the earlier developmental phases, he would remove pieces of the skull and implant these chips directly into the grey matter of the brain. Now all that he needed was a patch plate (basically a bendable motherboard) on the outer surface of the skull with a drilled hole for a stem-line leading directly into the brain. It was so much easier this way.
Delgado studied Abby’s brain scans to the point of burning entire sections of it into his memory. After he performed the surgical implant, the details of these scans would fade from memory, just as the scans of his previous patients had done so many times before.
For the next eighteen hours, he coded Abby’s chip, which was fixed to a pliable motherboard so small it fit on the surface of his thumb with room to spare.
The beauty of nano-technology was this: everything that once required entire rooms full of huge cooling and electrical systems could now be housed on a motherboard less than a quarter of the size of a postage stamp. Even better, it could be “fueled” by the body’s “atomic energy.” The stem inserted into the brain needed only be the length of a sixteen penny nail, but much thinner. Now, instead of removing a section of the skull, he needed only to drill the smallest of holes. Accessing the brain was crucial, and the insertion stem would give him the direct connection he needed.
Delgado never stopped marveling at the fact that you could override a human being using remote computers wirelessly connected to such a small device. And the computer? Not some supercomputer of days gone by, but his own laptop. Like a video game.
But not.
4
When you’re working in an underground lab day and night, with no clock and no view of the outside world to mark the hours, two things happen: you lose yourself to your task, and perhaps you get a little bit loopy.
For Delgado, gigantic blocks of time passed as he programmed and loaded the Delta program onto Abby’s chip: martial arts, strength and endurance, weapons, stealth and evasive measures. These programs would eventually pass from the circuitry of the chip, into the feeder wire that led directly into her brain for rapid, permanent assimilation. This was how you made humans into slaves. This is how you made a girl into a weapon.
When he completed the final sequencing of programs, when he was officially done, he stuck the cigarette he’d been saving for days between his lips, lit it, then drew the smoke deep into his lungs. It was the most delicious bit of death he had tasted in what felt like forever. He’d tried to quit before, but he couldn’t. Instead of powering through pack after pack, he began saving one smoke at a time for the right moment, a moment like this.
He pulled hard on the cigarette, sucking the smoke down deeply, relishing every toxic pull. The nicotine high had him feeling slightly euphoric. Like the diet version of cocaine. Or heroine. What he really needed, however, was sleep.
Like hours of it.
In the morning, he would head to the box room and wake up Abby, or whatever the hell it was she had become, then he’d peel back her scalp and get her ready for the mission parameters specifically set forth by his and the senator’s client.
When the chip was synced with the brain and the host computer, when Abby’s brain assimilated the physical training necessary to complete her task, Delgado would ship her back to California—to the freshly birthed Dr. Holland, or Astor Academy, or wherever—and only he and the senator would be the wiser as to her true skill set, and her true mission. To Holland, she would be “healthy,” and that would be it. No funny business. At least, not any funny business anyone could find. But then, when the time was right, Delgado would make the call. He would wake her Delta alter with a pre-programmed trigger phrase. Mission parameters would be relayed, and Delta would take over Abby’s body and assassinate the target without Abby’s knowledge or consent. After that, Abby would be Abby once more and the Delta alter would simply “sleep,” and no one would know, or be able to prove a thing.
And Delgado?
Well, the scientist thought with a malicious grin, I’ll be richer than ever. Just like before, and not for the last time. Girls like Abby could kill and seduce and stay hidden over and over again. For dozens of years. Decades. They were the perfect murderous transplants for people like him. For vultures like the senator. For insidious fiends like the senator’s clients. Such were the incredulous ways of the rich and infamous.
The Safety of the Abyss
1
The sharp aroma of almost fresh poop wafts into my nose. The sour stench of urine. Heat. Permeating throughout my head, the epicenter of it a throbbing space between my eyes. Fire ants. Their torches all brilliant and scorching. My soul…inflamed.
My senses bleed back, slowly, methodically, in fuzzy shades of grey. I am numb. Then I’m not. Everything under my skin goes from black to white to Ultra High Definition. Four thousand plus pixels of light telling me I’ve gone from the frying pan straight into the fire.
The doctor, that son of a bitch, he shot me in the forehead. Not a bullet, though. More like being punched in the face full force. The reason for these fire ants. My body is a thousand pound slab of rock. Nothing feels light enough or free enough to move.
Clarity is rushing forward.
Making me aware…
My butt hurts, a stiffness settled into the pads of it. Like I’ve been sitting all day at school, but not on chairs as much as on cold stone. My shoulder blades, where they are compressed into the hard surface beneath me, they ache and sting. They’re flaring. Forcing any movement at all into my limbs requires an act of God. The slightest adjustment tells me there are walls on all sides of me, walls and darkness. WTF?
Clarity arrives; I’m aware…
My eyes feel puffed shut. I crack them open and they burn. Like they were salted, licked wet, then pressed shut. I blink slowly at first, then faster. Nothing appears. There is no such thing as my eyes adjusting. I inhale stale air, stare into the ink, black darkness.
The smells grow worse with this heightened awareness. I feel it as I move, the crusted mess of almost dried shit between my butt cheeks. The scratchy, burning sting of a rash. The kind of rash that ruins my flawless, luxurious skin with blisters and boils brought on by bacteria and irritation. A girl’s colon
can suffer all the rot of a not-quite digested meal fine, but smear your shit on the outside of your body—the thick paste of an unwiped load squished right up your ass crack—and we’re talking about a whole different story altogether.
Full awareness consumes me. Panic sets in.
Squirming gets me nowhere as my mind descends into frenzy. My chest is swelling fiercely with something…a scream, hysteria. The minute my mouth opens, it explodes out: the shouting for help, the fever-pitch crying jags. Everything echoes off the walls of this prison, yet my pleas go unanswered. So I keep screaming. I go at it endless, until my throat burns ragged, until the insides feel shredded. Panic fuels my frenzy, but…
….it’s useless.
And everything itches. It’s that anxiety, that overwhelming plunge into insanity you get when you can’t scratch yourself. The silence that used to coat my body now becomes a bedlam of ticks and tickles and needle-pointed niggles. I would eat a mile of broken glass to just scratch that one itch.
But I can’t.
And this kicks giant holes into my sanity.
My tears persist. Claustrophobia ensues. With barely enough room to rest my feet at the back of this box, and barely enough room to push with my palms on the top or my elbows on the sides, my body produces the kind of tantrum befitting of a toddler who hasn’t napped in years.
But nothing.
Nada.
So I wait, force my brain to analyze the situation as all the toxins in my excrement eat apart the once beauteous inner walls of my butt cheeks and possibly the tight virgin ring of my butthole. It’s not anything I’m comfortable thinking about, but when you’re in a box with no where to go and all the time in the world to think, something as simple as anal hygiene gets that extra bit of attention.
Jesus, it itches!
Oh my God, it itches so motherfreaking bad…