by Mike Essex
The more I watched them, the sadder I felt that I couldn’t reach them. They came close to finding me once, following a lead to an abandoned TethTech laboratory but it wasn’t where I was held. Some days I couldn’t find them at all, no matter how hard I looked. Eventually I just stopped watching them and hoped they’d do the same and move on with their lives. Seven years was a long time to search and a long time to carry that burden.
Eli took to the stage ready to be re-elected into power for another five years as the other two parties looked on. They couldn’t know the outcome but I already did. He had manipulated the leaders of the opposing parties every step of the way to ensure they were defeated.
The one time favourite, Gregory Hill, had seen his life destroyed when he visited a brothel and engaged in some rather unpleasant night-time activities that his wife quickly found out about. Of course when I say ‘visited’ I mean that The Deck used me to take control of his body, walk him into the brothel and have him carry out those activities.
With each new temptation I made him give into at the brothel, I could feel his life being destroyed, yet I couldn’t stop it from happening. His wife and children left him, his political career went down in flames and his chances of winning tonight were all but non-existent. None of this was his fault, but as far as he remembered it was.
The other party had Tony Gunn in the running, however he was merely a last minute replacement after his predecessor Niles Renswick was admitted to a mental hospital after seeing visions of his dead wife everywhere he turned. The Deck hadn’t killed his wife, nature had taken care of that many years ago, but they did construct the visions by twisting his mind with my own and showing him memories he thought were long lost.
Eli had planned for me to take control of Niles to ensure that he was sectioned under the mental health act, and locked away in a secure hospital, with the memory of his visions keeping him there long after I’d relinquished control. It seemed he did too good of a job on Niles, with the potential PM forced to admit himself earlier than planned. Eli was even happier with this result.
As I watched him destroy these lives like they were nothing I knew that he would never give up this control. Even when he ran out of chances to be elected back into power I knew he’d just have some pawn he controlled be elected in his place and that the cycle would continue on again.
Six years ago was the date he said he’d release me from this machine. After my attempt on his life I knew he’d never let me be free. For as long as my body still had life in it I was his.
With each passing day the monster grew tired of watching Eli in control. He had once held great power of his own as one of the richest men in the UK and easily the most successful: Tobias Zen.
Although I was the one who had dragged him into my mind I sensed that Tobias had taken a liking to me after all these years. We managed to bond over our mutual hatred of my former father. He’d operated on both of us, each time in some misguided effort to save the world, and our bodies were now nothing more than a testament to his obsession with altering things he couldn’t accept.
Yet, whilst Eli Keyes was nothing but a destructive force in our lives he was not seen in the same way by the outside world. The public loved him and he had the highest approval rating of any Prime Minister since records began. It seemed like he’d have been able to win this election without any trickery but he wanted to be sure.
Whilst we’d tricked people into voting for him in his first election this time people turned out to vote in their droves with no persuasion. Eli was ready to take control of them and swing the votes the other way if he needed but it wasn’t necessary. By the time the polls closed we knew he was guaranteed to be voted in this evening.
It wasn’t hard to see why the public loved him. He’d provided better working conditions for the ‘have-nots’ by reinvesting government funds into the poorest parts of the city. For the ‘haves’ he’d reopened the export routes between nations by forming a treaty and ending the resentment projected towards our country after the 20 Day Siege. This allowed the haves to export more products at a higher price which helped them live more extravagant lives and that success even filtered down to the have-nots.
Most importantly, people were quickly starting to ditch the terms ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ and a unity was slowly forming between the rich and the poor. All of this without the need for war. He was seen as a hero by many.
None of his achievements would have been possible without using my body or my brother’s. Eli used us to control the key political figures he needed to influence; forcing them to dictate the policy changes he needed and to ensure they passed at both a Parliamentary level and at the United Nations.
Although the public loved that he had achieved this success without bloodshed I knew the truth about his achievements. People had been interrogated, tortured and died by my hands and even though I had felt no sense of control in those actions I lived every moment as those people when their worlds came crashing down.
I had ruined lives, both physically and mentally. I had hurt. I had killed.
The monster didn’t judge me for these actions. He knew they were Eli’s work and out of my control. With each passing day and each horrific act he told me how we’d escape and get revenge. Even after seven years I still held out hope of ending Eli’s life, if only to end my own suffering.
Some days I hoped Eli had simply used me all up. I wished my body would buckle under the pressure and that today would be the day where my mind would finally give out from the torture. At least then no-one else could be hurt and I’d be free. I didn’t know if there was an afterlife but anything had to be better than this, for Will and for me.
Yet even at my lowest points, when my body felt drained of all its power, I somehow survived another day. Perhaps it was the monster whispering in my ear or perhaps it was a desire to be reunited with Rex and start the relationship we’d been so close to beginning. Whatever the reason, I had made it this far and I had to see what tomorrow would bring no matter how dark my life had become.
The new Prime Minister began his acceptance speech and highlighted the things he was proudest of from his previous term. All of them great achievements, all of them accomplished by making others comply with his desires. There were no big choices any more, only actions that we had manipulated people into completing. Their compliance was what saved our world.
Sure, the majority of the public went about their everyday lives without us having to control them and for the most part everyone maintained their own free will. Yet they now lived in a world that hadn’t been earned. It had been forced on them by the manipulation of others. It was a false utopia.
Whilst he launched into a monologue about ending poverty, my vision began to blur as I felt myself being pulled back into the darkness and away from the light. I’d been made to do this a million times before, every time The Deck chose a new body for me to occupy and a new mind for me to control. Countless lights shone in front of me illuminating the darkness, each one of them a body I could escape into if only I had the control I so badly wished for.
One of the lights grew brighter than the others and began to outshine them. The light consumed me as I felt another mind being linked to mine. When the light began to fade I saw the first glimmers of vision from this Tethered soul and I realised that something was not right.
This was a place Eli would never want me to be.
I stared through my new eyes looking back at the figure that stood over me. Their face was shielded from view by a golden mask, their head covered with a purple hood.
TWO
The purple hooded figure shone a light into my eyes, causing them to sting and I reached for them to wipe away the tears. As my unfurled finger reached towards my eye I was taken aback and moved it into focus. The finger was a deep red colour, the fingertips long since burned away.
I looked at the man in front of me, who I’d once known as the snatcher, and wondered if my new body had been just anothe
r one of his experiments. The other fingertips were just as burned but in slightly different patterns to each other. Perhaps even after all this time he was still honing his technique.
That was something he promised me he’d stop after the death of his sister. Something I’d made him promise after I’d Tethered myself to him.
He knew what I promised I’d do if he started experimenting on people again and yet here he was. I’d given him his life and he had thrown it away. I had no more energy for second chances. Grace was right, we never should have let him go.
Some people never change. Eli hadn’t and the snatcher hadn’t.
The purple hooded figure placed the light onto a table and bent down to remove the blood pressure monitor from my arm. My knee connected with his face, sending him flying backwards and denting his mask. He raised his hands into a defensive position, and I used the opportunity to slip out of the chair and reach for his throat.
His head hit the wall hard as I pushed him backwards. He stumbled slightly, dizzy from the shock and then bent down on his knees raising his hands back up above his head in defence.
The snatcher looked pathetic. Was this the best he could offer me now? Deep down he must have known that I’d be back one day to make him pay for breaking the promise he had made. I guess he had known it would come to this.
From a nearby table of operating equipment I grabbed a small knife and lent down towards him. I didn’t care that he was defenceless or had all but surrendered. He had caused this body great harm when he had promised he wouldn’t. It had to stop here and now.
With one hand I held him against the wall and with the other I made sure he could see the knife glistening as I thought about where to slice him first.
“You promised,” I told him as I felt the remnants of a damaged tongue moving around my mouth trying to form the words. Another trait of his experiments.
“You son of a bitch!” I screamed as I moved the knife by his jaw. “Let’s start with your face.”
With one fluid motion I dug the knife in under his mask and lifted it upwards. The mask flew into the air, exposing his face. Except this was not the face of the killer I had expected.
In shock I stepped away from him, clutching the knife tightly as the mask hit the floor. I ran the mutilated tongue around my mouth and stared at my burned hand again. “No, this can’t be happening,” I said.
As he started to lift himself away from the wall I held out the knife towards him. “You need to start talking right now.”
The man, whose face I had never seen before, started to speak. “I know you have a lot of questions but believe me we are on your side. Just sit down and we’ll chat.”
I moved my free hand up to my face and could feel a leathery texture, all rough edges and pockmarks. There was only one body I could be in; I had become the snatcher.
“Please put the knife down and sit,” he stated.
He was more polite than any kidnapper than I’d met in the past but I wasn’t prepared to do what he said. “I’m all out of trust,” I said.
“If you want to stop your father then I assure you that right now we are your best option Emmie.”
“How do you know my name?” I replied, also curious as to how he knew I could jump from body to body.
“That body you’re in now. I believe you know him as the snatcher? Is that right?”
“Go on.”
“Well, he told us all about you Emmie Keyes, daughter of Eli Keyes and sister of Will Keyes. He told us explicitly that right now you are the most important person in the world.”
“Then you know what I can do?”
“In a way, yes. Although it wasn’t until today that I’d seen it with my own two eyes. You truly are magnificent, has anyone ever told you that before?
The monster in my head said to me “I’ve told you that many times.” In my mind I told him to be quiet, although I was glad he’d made the journey here with me.
“Yes,” I replied “and it always ends badly for them.”
“Well, I assure you this time it will end very well for each and every citizen of this planet,” he broke into a huge smile, exposing his pristine white teeth beneath, held in place with transparent braces.
Nothing about this felt right. The room was too vivid and white, all pristine and modern, whilst this mystery man was too polite and his face too perfect. It all felt like a hallucination from being stuck in the machine for too long. I wondered if Eli was testing me.
“You’d tell me if this was fake right?” I asked the monster.
“This is as real as you or I,” he replied. Which given his status as a disembodied voice in my mind was not especially comforting.
“Who are you?” I asked the handsome man.
“You can call me Cleon.”
A female voice crackled over an intercom system and stated, “Stop playing with the prisoner and put your mask back on.”
He reached down and positioned the mask back onto his face, taking care to secure it tightly behind his ears.
Much like the snatcher’s mask, the one worn by Cleon was heavily damaged, with scratches across the entire surface and some deep dents, one of which I’d probably made. It had seen some serious use.
He turned to face what I presumed was a camera and took a bow uttering “as you wish, Sis.”
“Now,” said the monster and I was already one step ahead of him. Dashing forward I grabbed Cleon’s right arm and pulled it tightly behind his back. His body shifted to the right from the shock and I switched position to reach his left arm tightly.
I held his left arm behind him so he couldn’t reach me and raised my right hand to his throat, resting the tip of my knife just beneath his golden mask.
“Must we play these games? I told you I’d talk if you’d just take a seat,” he explained.
“Somehow I don’t believe you,” I replied.
I pulled Cleon’s right arm tightly. “You don’t want me to hurt you do you?”
He mumbled a “No.”
“Then start walking.”
I folded his hand into a fist and jammed it into his back, forcing him to walk towards the door. As he reached an access panel I told him not to try anything and he simply nodded along. The voice behind the intercom had gone silent. If they truly were brother and sister then she’d be experiencing a Tether event right now and would be hopeless to help him.
Cleon looked at the keypad but didn’t move.
I slid the knife slightly along his neck until the first drops of blood started to seep through the cut. He took a short, sharp inhale of breath from the pain.
“The longer you take the deeper I’ll cut. You wouldn’t want your sister to endure that too would you?”
His head twitched slightly, like he’d realised that shaking his head to say “no” would only draw the knife in deeper.
“Good boy,” he was no child, but I’d seen enough horrible men in this world that treating him like one made me feel powerful. He keyed in the access code ‘7812’, which I made a mental note of as I heard the door unlock.
Cleon stood there frozen. With my body pressed up against his I couldn’t feel a weapon on him and he hadn’t threatened me at any point. The room was devoid of anything he could have defended himself with and even the knife I held to his throat had been likely put there for medical procedures. It didn’t feel right.
“Open it,” I pushed his fist into his back again.
As he opened the door I gripped the knife tightly in my hand. I wanted to be ready for whatever soldiers lay beyond the door so I could use his life as a bargaining chip. I led his body out into the hallway and quickly shifted my view to look down both sides. There was no-one there.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“It’s just me and my sister, that’s all.”
“You honestly expect me to believe that?”
“Well it’s the truth. This place was abandoned a long time ago,” he shifted his elbow towards a sign on the wall.<
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On the sign were two interlocking T symbols that caused the monster to speak up. “You should remember this place Emmie.”
“And why is that?” I asked him in my mind.
“It’s quite far,” he replied. “You could do without the dead weight.”
“I’ll come back for you,” I told Cleon as I swung his fist back around and hit him square in the jaw. He fell backwards and into the room behind us. Tobias walked me through how to reset the code on the keypad to something different and as I swung the door shut I heard it lock in place, sealing him in so he couldn’t escape.
“Ok then, show me what I need to remember.”
THREE
With Cleon incapacitated, and his sister trapped in a Tether event I was free to explore the halls of this seemingly abandoned facility. At first I walked slowly, keeping the knife in front of me, expecting an attack at every turn but it seemed like Cleon hadn’t lied to me. This place really was empty.
Unlike the main TethTech building this one was rather plain. There were no bright coloured lines highlighting the routes throughout the building and no plaques or photos on the wall of the fallen soldiers they wanted to help. It didn’t feel much like a lab either; a lot of the rooms contained just broken tables, chairs and computer monitors.
“Was this your first lab?” I asked Tobias.
“No, but it is certainly unique compared to all of the others,” he replied.
“Tell me why.”
“All in good time, we’re almost there now. Take a left here.”
A bright light shone around the corner and I pushed my body against the wall to avoid it. I was more at home in darkness now than I was in light; each bright light in the machine had been a prelude to something awful happening.
I watched the light carefully to determine if any guards were coming my way but it didn’t move. I waited for any sign of life and heard nothing.