by Lee Isserow
When the procedure ended, she turned the sound back on as the doctor re-entered.
“How are you doing, lad?” he asked.
Rob gasped for breath as the haze of migraine started to subside, his mouth dry, throat bare from screams.
“Leah....” he rasped.
The doctor turned to the camera for Whark's input. She tapped her watch twice and his vibrated. He stepped out of the room and began the procedure over again.
This was exactly what she feared would happen. Just as with Liam and his un-deletable proclivity for the mechanical keys of a typewriter, a single memory remained in Rob. An emotional and physical connection to something, that in spite of frequent attempts, could not be sliced out of his subconscious. She knew that the feeds of Rob's sessions would make their way back to the company, and attempted to conjure a wording in which this could be viewed as a positive step. Deep down, she knew a PR spin was in vain. She would just have to make the other subjects prove themselves exceptional to make up for his breakdown.
The group went through from the mess hall to the living quarters, Micah and Sarah still going back and forth about their plan, even though it was well into the six-to-midnight recording cycle. They lay in their bunks and shared the projection of the facility. They knew the route through to the re-education room, and over dinner, Micah had put together a macro that he was semi-confident would overwrite the access required to leave the living quarters and allow them to enter the testing area. One of them would have to stay connected to the NeuralNet to mask the other's presence as they went through the hallways, but although they had discussed it intently, they still hadn't had a chance to run through the process to enter a normal mind via a tactile connection and incapacitate them. Returning from the bathroom after brushing her teeth, Sarah went past Micah's bunk and smiled at him.
'Oh, you're kidding...' he said, as she reached to his forehead, tapping it with her finger.
In an instant the connection was made, she was in his head, immobilising his spinal cord, increasing cerebral vasodilation, releasing dopamine and sending him to sleep. Her finger bounced off his skull, and only a fraction of a second had passed. She smiled to herself and lay in bed, eye on her internal clock for the 15 minutes she had set in the macro to pass before he would wake up.
APEX PROJECT AP_NLI-10
Marion Whark Daily Report #30
The second live fire exercise once again exceeded expectations. The subjects are not only adapting to the operating system, but evolving with it, understanding and writing automated processes for their bodies to follow.
Networking across the group has increased results tenfold, with stage three of the live fire course being passed in the third attempt – yet another record set by these patients.
Introduction of Subject8 has been seamless, the false memories are proving to be more robust than any of our studies previously. As the week goes on, we shall prepare for the next round of memory enhancements, until culmination at the end of the month, when a complete rewrite will be accomplished, and our subject's minds will be entirely of our own making.
As A-Eye logs will show, Robert McGovern had an incident during the test, the cause of which is still to be determined. I am currently of the suspicion that he, like Leah Cavendish may have had some undiagnosed condition that was not observed by the technicians during the recruitment phase.
An investigation shall be carried out as to who might be responsible. McGovern is currently undergoing further re-education, in the hopes that whatever symptoms he is displaying are purely temporary in nature, and can be easily corrected with minor effect on the results to the rest of the group.
Whark stared at her report, trying to ignore the lump in her throat. She knew there was no way to guarantee that Rob would actually recover, nor did she have any evidence to prove that the remaining five subjects would continue to be viable candidates as the memory alterations continued. Her thought process ceased, as she noticed the webcam above her terminal staring at her, a bright green pinprick of light next to the lens indicating it was operational. She went back to her previous report and added an amendment at the bottom.
Due to security concerns regarding our NeuralNet connection that have been brought to my attention, I shall be completing all further reports from an air-gapped workstation, and have them manually sent on from outside the facility. Whilst this might delay arrival, it seems to me that it is in the best interest of the company to do so.
She sent the report, staring at the light above her screen, suspicious of its watchful glass eye.
Sarah and Micah watched back as Whark's gaze moved from them to behind the terminal, where she then reached and severed the connection to the NeuralNet.
'Do you think she's on to us?' asked Sarah, as she withdrew her connection from the door lock, walking back from the bathroom to her bunk.
'I don't know.' said Micah. ''If we can get our shit together, hopefully it won't matter.'
The plan was set, but one issue still remained. They couldn't even think about taking the first steps with Liam watching over their shoulders. If he was 'Subject8', and they were part of the tenth iteration of the likely-annual experiment, then he had two years on them, honing the skills APEX had imparted him with. Knowing that was based on assumption, but erring on the side of caution, Sarah and Micah agreed that they wouldn't be able to take him down alone.
11
As soon as he was certain the others were all asleep, Micah slipped away to the bathroom, networking with the door lock and looping the camera feeds. He stitched in footage of him returning from the bathroom from an archive recording to cover his tracks. Sarah joined him in the system, patching in an automated series of temperature fluctuations in rooms across the facility that they hoped would read as fires, motion sensors alerts, and errors in the guard's RFIDs. They lined up four hours of alternating distractions to keep the NeuralNet busy, keep its circuits from detecting the loop surreptitiously placed in the living quarters. She went to Alex's bedside whilst Micah monitored the A-Eye chatter, in case their diversions didn't last as long as they hoped. Sarah interlocked her fingers and flexed them, knuckles cracking before she placed her hands on the sleeping woman's head. She initiated the tactile connection, as Micah had done with her, but rather than the blinding digital light of the NeuralNet, she found herself surrounded by nothingness.
Darkness. Silence. In the connection between the two, Sarah couldn't feel the pathways as easily as in the NeuralNet. From the shadows around her, a wisping haze of dream imagery started flowing, making its way to a whirlwind of light and pictures behind her. At the centre of the cyclone, Alex was walking through a desert projected around her, sand creating itself under her like a conveyor belt, moving with every footstep she took. The sun on the horizon was a forced-perspective trick that lay ahead just out of her reach, the sky a bright shimmer of blue that hung just above their heads.
'Alex.' Sarah said, walking into the dream, touching her shoulder, and taking attention from the false sunset.
'What are you doing here?' she asked, 'How are you here?' she reached out a hand to touch Sarah's projected form.
'They've been lying to us, Alex. Screwing with us from the beginning. We're going to get Rob and get out.' said Sarah.
'What are you talking about?' asked Alex. 'I don't want to go anywhere...'
'It's true.' said Micah, joining the dream through his connection to Sarah. 'They've messed with your memories, see?'
Alex's dream melted away, replaced by Micah's projection of the six of them at lunch after target practice.
'Do you think we should worry about their intentions?' said Farah, as Alex walked around and looked at herself and the others sitting there. 'I mean, if they're going to use this for military means, should we try and fail? Give them bad results and take them back to square one?'
She looked from memory-Micah to the Micah projecting himself into her mind.
'I doubt we're the first trial...' the project
ion said 'And I don't think even a small failure would put them off at this point, not when we've already shown them so much promise.'
She turned to herself, as if knowing somewhere deep down, that she was next to speak.
'So, we just keep on keepin' on? Proving to them that people can become killer robots and it's a great fucking idea?'
'See?' said Sarah. 'That's you just two days ago, and now you trust them implicitly?'
'Where's Liam?' asked Alex. 'Why isn't he with us here?'
'He's not real.' said Micah. 'He's just another lie, a collection of false memories.'
'I don't believe you.' said Alex.
'I didn't either.' said Sarah. 'And then I was forced to accept the truth.'
The projection around them changed, lines shifting, shades and colours merging to recreate the obstacle course. Sarah watched her memory, Alex standing where she had been when Micah touched her, Rob flailing on the floor in front of her.
'Why would you make me watch this again?' said Alex. 'That's sick! There's something wrong with him and you want to relive it?'
Sarah played the memory, and the projection she made of Micah came behind Alex, his fingers meeting the small of her back. Every emotion Sarah had in that connection pulsed through Alex's system, her fears and anxieties, mistrusts and beliefs all being shed as the implanted memories were overwritten one by one by the truth that Micah had stitched back together for Sarah.
'Those motherfuckers!' she said as it ended, her personality reinstated. 'I'm going to fuck that Whark bitch up.'
'We'll all get a piece, don't you worry.' said Sarah. 'But there's a shitload of new memories and information we have to pass over, and not a lot of time... Are you ready?'
'Load me up, bitches!' said Alex, a wicked grin on her face at the thought of vengeance.
Micah had packaged up everything they knew about Leah and Rob, along with a how-to guide for tactile networking. The infodump also had all the two of them had learned about traversing the facility's NeuralNet and Sarah's experiment at knocking him out. It was a huge rush of memories and imagery, but he had cut out the emotional subtext to lighten the load, he didn't want to risk blowing out Alex's nervous system with the fear he experienced seeing through the billions of eyes of the worldwide A-Eye network, or the revulsion they both had to watching Leah's autopsy and Rob's agony during his re-education.
The data downloaded, and Alex took a moment to sift through the information she now knew, before waking up and carrying out the next part of the plan.
She went to Pete's bedside, whilst Sarah kneeled down by Farah. A silent count had them both connecting to their sleeping friends simultaneously. They went through the same motions with the two of them as they had just done with Alex, and once they were themselves again, Micah dumped the knowledge in their heads.
All five of them knew the plan. All five of them were awake. It was time to deal with Liam.
'Are you sure you want to do this?' Farah asked Sarah. 'You don't have to be the one.'
'I won't be alone.' she replied. 'We'll be in there together.' She smiled at them then turned to Liam, sleeping soundly in his bunk.
She took a deep breath, cracked her knuckles, and laid a hand on his arm.
Darkness enveloped her. The hairs on the back of her projected neck stood on end. The connection didn't feel like it did when she had entered the dreams of her friends. She looked around for the whirlwind of ghostly false-perspective images that formed dreams around the others, but it never came. As she walked imagined footsteps through the black, she knew something was wrong.
'This doesn't feel right.' she said.
There was no response.
She reached out with her senses, tried to feel the connection to the others, but something was holding her back.
'Liam?' she said, unable to see him in the shadows surrounding her.
From somewhere in the distance, she heard a patter of footsteps accompanied by soft gasping. The footsteps became laboured, as if each one was taking great energy to accomplish. Hesitantly, Sarah walked further into the darkness, approaching the sounds.
'Who's there?' she asked.
Something grabbed her left hand. Tiny, greying fingers, veins dark, as if traced in soft pencil on pale skin. The arm lead back to tiny, slight shoulders, a neck tight and twisted. Atop it were panicked eyes stricken with broken blood vessels, looking out from behind transparent plastic. The child's face was masked by a thicket of greasy blonde hair, but the eyes shone out, begging Sarah to help, gasping at the bag that was sucked deeper into her mouth with every breath. Sarah heard other footsteps around her, other girls, each no older than thirteen, a dozen of them coming from the shadows, all gasping, all reaching out, each contorted by torture before their eventual suffocation.
Sarah knew they were tortured, for as the children walked towards her, the memories of each one of them was slowly downloading. Each a prize, held for weeks until their bodies grew too feeble to accommodate his desires. He had taken them all, from schools, playgroups, whilst their parents' backs were turned. Each of them was the spitting image of his sister, Lucy.
They used to play, laugh, while the days away. But a cloud grew over those saccharine-sweet memories. Their uncle, his name long erased. A burly man, gut hanging heavy, wobbling with every thundering step. He would take Lucy by the hand, her tiny fingers wrapped around his massive fat digit, and walk the little girl upstairs, with a barked instruction at Liam to sit still, shut up, until they returned. Every time Lucy came back downstairs, she would be different.
Over the weeks, she would become her normal self again, but the next time their uncle babysat, the cycle would repeat. Sarah remembered the night Lucy just wouldn't stop crying. The two of them laying in their beds in the small terraced house in Bromley. Sodden, peeling wallpaper in the corner hanging like a new page waiting to be turned, the window letting in a trickle of water when it rained too hard, and those cries digging into his skull. He begged her to stop, begged her to shut up so he could get to sleep, but she couldn't. He slapped her, the cries ceased only momentarily from shock. They started up again and he hit her over and over, but the droning noise wouldn't stop. He put a pillow over her head and tried to drown out the tears, find some peace. Eventually there was peace.
These girls, these replacement Lucys, they weren't even close to the real thing. Sarah could feel his emotions, if you could call them that. Adoration and disdain all at once. He made them cry just like Lucy, and tried to calm them down, thinking maybe this time it wouldn't end the same. But each time it did. Each time he found himself wanting to hurt them more, see their expressions as they gasped for air. She now knew him as well as he knew himself. Or at least knew who he was before the trial. His trial, NLI-08 had given him the tools to control his 'quirks', as Whark called them. Put the cycle on pause whilst he did her bidding. He liked Whark, she reminded him of his mother. His mother also had a foul mouth and was strict with him, locking him in the dark, leaving him with nothing but a typewriter to play with. Whark had become his new mother, a better mother. And every so often, she would let him out to play, let him find a new Lucy.
'Do you like my little sisters?' Liam asked, voice echoing from beyond the shadows.
'It's fucking perverse.' she said. 'You're sick.'
'Darling, we're all sick, this is a place for sick people. All of us are fucked up in the head and need a little fixing!'
'You're done here. The rest of the group knows you're a fraud.'
'I doubt that will do them much good. Not with you trapped in here...'
Sarah's face was contorted into a grimace, and the group were worried about how long she had spent inside Liam's head.
'We should we go in after her.' said Alex.
'Give her another minute... she might be getting information.' said Micah.
'We don't know that.” said Pete. 'We can't even network with her! For all we know, he's turning her into a vegetable!”
'They're so worr
ied about you, isn't that sweet!' said Liam, emerging from the shadows, a wide jack-o'-lantern grin carved on his face.
'You can hear them?' she asked.
'You can't? God you're fucking slow, aren't you? Are they teaching you guys at retard speed?'
'They're taking their time. From what I've read, previous subjects had a habit of going completely fucking insane.'
'In my group, we all started insane. There wasn't much room for improvement. Although I think I've improved on it a little...'
The girls started walking towards Sarah, clawing at her projected skin with their tiny nails, ripping meat away that felt all too real. She tried to hold in the screams, didn't want to give him the satisfaction of hurting her, but they dug deeper and deeper, overpowered her, pushed her to the floor and clawed her clothes away, scraping at every bare scrap of flesh with five razors on each tiny hand.
'I know what you're thinking.' he said 'He's only blocking me from my friends because I'm in his head, his projection. Do you want to test that theory?'
The shadows consumed the girls, and withdrew. Sarah found herself lying down, a cold concrete floor beneath her, she was clothed again, under bright white florescent lights. Liam stood over her.
'Well, this is an interesting memory, isn't it.'