Hypersubjects

by Ainsley Komper

  “It is because of your abilities. They kept you in isolation for a while, they control you a lot, you live here, you have to. I am different, my situation is not that drastic in that sense.”

  “Let’s run.” She replied. “They are not that powerful, they are just a company.”

  “A company with military contracts and part-funded by the government. There are rumours that most of the funding actually comes from the government but it is all mostly deals under the table.”

  “But we are not criminals, we can go wherever we want to and if they try to hold us back, we could seek asylum. This government has plenty of enemies.”

  “And plenty of allies. Besides, they can fabricate stories. For instance, that guy we helped to capture was not what they said he was.”

  “So, what are you suggesting we do?”

  “We?”

  “We are in this together, aren’t we?”

  He smiled, for the first time in many days and it was as if for a moment the mental map did not exist anymore and she was normal.

  “Yes, we are.”

  In that very moment, a team of men arrived. Taran was instructed to follow them for a new mission. They told her to report back to Dr Alkan because she may be part of it too, so she pretended to head over there but got inside a bathroom cubicle. She tracked Taran who was walking with the team. She sensed nothing out of the ordinary so she decided to track Mercy again, and this time, her energy was increasing considerably, emanating in several directions but especially one in particular, going to a few floors below. Ciana scanned for anyone she could have considered suspicious until she found Braith, he seemed unconscious in a room. There were a lot of guards outside that room and now Taran joined them. Her phone rang to let her know that Dr Alkan was waiting for her, ready to enlist her on another mission. Mercy and Braith were neutralised so she was scared that the mission was about herself, but to her surprise, it was about a guy called Lark. After seeing his image on video, she remembered him from the same group as Braith, so a quick scan of her mental map located him on the fifth floor and she informed them. They confirmed that information with several eyewitnesses but suddenly, he disappeared from there. Lark was gone and she could not locate him for a few moments until she felt him one floor above Braith’s room, almost directly on top. Taran could go after him and neutralise him by doing whatever it is he can do. They asked her repeatedly if she could see it but Ciana said it was confusing, that he was moving too fast in different directions. Dr Alkan said they just need at least one location to track him using the CCTV. Lark managed to go unnoticed one floor down and be next to Braith. She ignored how, but he was there, inside the room with him but Taran and the others were fine. It was as if Lark was invisible to them, maybe he had neutralised them already. She told them he was on that floor and the message was passed to the whole team, including Taran who went in search of Lark. It was a great relief for her as his well-being was her ultimate concern. This was all very confusing for her because Braith seemed to be strong enough to face a whole team of operatives. Taran was perhaps even stronger since he defeated Braith, Mercy could connect with people and now Lark seemed to have stealth capabilities. Maybe it was safe for her that her tricks were not that menacing as having tracking tricks and a super-memory did not seem as deadly. Then, Lark got closer to Braith and some sort of connection was made, their signatures morphed into one big enough to attract Mercy’s energy, so she focused on them. The three of them joined in a strange conjunction that surprised her.

  “It can’t be, it is not possible.”

  “What isn’t possible?” Dr Alkan replied.

  The agent with Dr Alkan grabbed Ciana and shook her in order to get her out of the trance she was having.

  “What is not possible? Tell us what you know now!”

  Scared, she did not have a choice.

  “They look like one, they look like they are together.”

  In a matter of seconds, all the units ran to the Braith’s room but it was too late. Lark was gone and Ciana asked to rest as this effort was too much for her, or so she said. Dr Alkan did not want to release her but the security guards reported that the cameras picked up a trail of Lark, who had in fact been at Braith’s room for a few minutes.

  “Why did you lie?” Dr Alkan asked.

  “I did not. Their three signatures are very special, difficult to understand.”

  “Three? What are you talking about?”

  Ciana was not used to lying or concealing stuff from anyone and her naiveté always put her in trouble, but this time, it was more serious than she initially thought.

  “Lark, Braith and…”

  “Who else?”

  “There is someone else, a powerful signature that interferes with everything.”

  “Is it a man or woman?”

  “I don’t know but it comes from someone in the building, it is very strong.”

  “Since when?”

  “This morning.”

  Dr Alkan asked her to wait there, but she followed behind.

  “What are you hiding from me?”

  “I could ask you the same. We have been kind to you, we have cured you and now you are lying to us, blatantly. What for? What evidence do you have that we are the bad guys here?”

  “Something is going on and you don’t want to…”

  In her mental map, the doctors approached Braith and did something to diminish his signature, the same happened to Mercy.

  “What are you doing to them? Are you going to kill them?”

  Dr Alkan stopped and looked at her.

  “Will you do the same to me when the time comes?”

  She ran out from them.

  “She cannot leave the building! Go!” Dr Alkan commanded the guards.

  Two guards went after her while the other two stayed with him. Ciana opened the door of a corridor and blocked it with a chair to gain some time. When she hid in a small storage room, she called Taran on his mobile and told him what was going on. He moved away from his team and told her to go to the big cafeteria on level 4. She hung up and noticed how most of the staff were in pursuit of Lark, who was running with Dr Velia. Once the guards who were after her left the corridor, Ciana managed to go undetected to the cafeteria. There were not many people around, but suddenly, she felt the guards approaching from one entrance and Taran leading two guards towards her via another entrance. He lied to her, he had always been on their side, always neutralising the subjects out of control like he did with Braith, maybe with Mercy too and now with her. She was out of control as well. Unfortunately, in those moments, she just froze with fear, overthinking every move and tracking every possible danger, but just when everyone was about to reach the cafeteria, all went black.

  TARAN

  Once upon a time, a child from ordinary parents in an ordinary neighbourhood felt he was everything but common. However, he seemed to be starting with his name: Oliver Smith. Both his first name and surname were the most common in England. He hated them and for a while he tried nicknames which never stuck. As a skinny white boy from the suburbs of a city in the South, he embraced the only aspect of his life that was different to the rest of the boys, which was his mother’s heritage. An immigrant from a small Polish villa, Julia Kowalski grew up in England from the age of six but, through her family, she tried to keep part of her Eastern European traditions. Little Oli was on board of that train as it was very exotic for him to have roots from the other side of the continent, food that none of his schoolmates knew about and words here and there that were his secret language. Growing up poor was difficult, and once he identified himself as a geek with no preferences for any sport practiced by the locals, namely football, rugby or cricket, he took solace on a computer that his father bought in a second-hand Indian shop. His poor social skills and skinny physique turned him into an awkward character at school, someone not cool enough to qualify for the cool parties but not totally at the bottom of the food chain because you never know when you will
need something dodgy online. This peculiar label slowly pushed him into hacking territory. When he least expected it, he was a fully realised IT guy, working part-time at different offices and studying for his degree. It was somehow an overwhelming feeling that there was no information he could not get, from movies, music, books, software and then he slowly stepped into more dangerous territory such as hacking accounts, university files and making fake information available online. The magic of creating everything out of nothing, status or power only coming from bytes, ones and zeros, lines of code that were as light as ether. When he delved into darker stuff like the deep web and illegal transactions that he could sell to the other side of the world, that is when he changed it. Perhaps money was not the real issue but he lied to himself in order to have an excuse for going into the underworld of cyberspace. So, he needed to change. Finally, he could get rid of it, at least in this part of his life, so he created another name, but this time it could not be a silly nickname. It could no longer be Oli93, or O_Smith, Hacker_Oli or video game, film character or rock legend references. He wanted to find a unique characteristic about himself, something that defined him. With the coming wave of European immigration, being half-Polish was not that rare anymore, but his other feature was. That is how the alias of Taran was born, an alias that slowly took over his life to the point of being known as that, finally leaving Oliver Smith behind. The origin of Taran goes far beyond his early twenties, all the way to his childhood and perhaps before his own birth. Memories are faded, corrupted by our own impressions and perceptions, many of them are difficult to pinpoint, especially the ones that we felt as intrinsic of our own nature. He bet that nobody could remember the first time they drank water or got burnt, shivered with a cold or felt the strong itchiness of electricity. For him, it was so normal that it happened on a daily basis. Touching the old fridge, the corner of some swimming pools, the handrails of the parking lot at the train station, the old garage door at his stepfather’s workshop, the swings at the park, the car graveyard; all of them and more were part of that series of situations where he just felt it and, for him, it was normal. Gradually, he learnt otherwise and started looking online for people like him, just to see if there were others out there, which there were, but not many. Almost all of them were in Asia or behind the iron curtain and when he started chatting with one of them, the name of Taran came up. Perkons was from Latvia and he was able to showcase his conductivity skills online by playing with static electricity in balloons. It was hard for Oliver to do it but, slowly, he learnt a few simple tricks from Perkons. In one of his many chats, Oliver admitted he had never heard the name Perkons. Perkons was the Baltic name of the God of Thunder and he was using it because he did not want to attract the wrong kind of attention to his real name, not that he did not trust Oliver, but it was a rule he self-imposed just in case his reputation could be compromised, thus affecting his job or family. Oliver got that the guy was paranoid and fucked up, but when the time came for a proper alias, he liked Perkons’ suggestions about looking for equivalents of the same God in the British Isles. Funnily enough, Taranis was that equivalent and even better, a name he had never heard before. It did not stick much but its nickname did: Taran. The God of Lighting in the Kingdom of Great Britain, so to speak. Far from being deities and closer to being freaks of nature, Taran and Perkons kept a polite friendship for a few years before actually meeting in Berlin when a trip with one’s college group intersected with a family trip from the other. They both managed to escape their own groups and shared a few beers in one of those weird electro clubs in the convoluted Berlin night scene. When Perkons was slightly drunk, he mentioned that his cousin Irina got in touch with this institution in London which was paying good money to study anomalies in the skin, including conditions like his. Irina got the information when doing an internship at a Pharmaceutical company dedicated to set up and execute all sorts of medical trials. Once in the business, Irina got access to all sorts of listings, including the ones requiring subjects prone to electric conductivity. Perkons’ condition was famous throughout the whole town, so he decided to travel to London for a two-week study worth more than six months of his current salary as a bartender. Oliver did not need the money and between his studies, part-time jobs and hacking as Taran, he was too busy to try, but the idea was beyond cool. The notion of being studied because you were unique and special made him feel that, for once, he did not have to make an effort in order to be someone but his life was taking another direction at that moment. Perkons eventually moved to London and visited Oliver a couple of times when he managed to get out of the big smoke. He was a proper weirdo and the only real conversations they had were, of course, when Perkons was drinking. They shared some Eastern European connection but Poland was far away from Latvia, so besides downing straight vodka, they did not have that much in common. Nevertheless, Perkons stayed in touch and shared how happy he was at the institution, Tecnium something, how fast he was progressing and what a great move it has been to get enrolled there. However, he stopped communicating for a while and, suddenly, he got in contact again but from the US. It turns out that his condition was in high demand and the money was better on the other side of the Atlantic. He was very honest with Taran and told him that his departure had left a vacancy in the UK. Most importantly, if he managed to score another subject with the same rare condition, he would get a bonus, hence his interest in convincing Taran to take his place. Reluctantly, he did so but only after finishing his studies. What is more, Irina was working at the institute so she would be able to help him through the whole process. Once he moved to London, he rented a room at Irina’s while he started working at the institute. As soon as he was enrolled there, Perkons stopped communicating with him and progressively cut all ties with Taran. Irina said he used to call her from time to time but the truth is, shortly after that, he changed his number, closed his social media accounts and YouTube channel. Even his email address stopped being valid and basically disappeared from the few people Taran and him had in common. Still, Taran had plenty on his plate because working at the institute turned his world upside down. London was a difficult city contrary to his hometown and Irina was not the easiest person to live with, however, he felt it was the only real connection he had and was hopeful that by being near her, his chances of seeing his friend again were greater. Awkward and sometimes distant, Perkons was perhaps the best friend he had ever had, so he still hoped to hear from him again. In the meantime, at the institute, a team of three doctors were his point of contact. They were in their forties but the excess of smoking and coffee had turned them into obsessive creatures working round the clock, lacking any grooming skills or common manners. The idea of living inside those walls terrified him and despite all of the inconveniences, he preferred Irina’s company. No matter how grumpy she normally was and how full of Latvians the apartment got, always speaking in their own language and leaving a trail of cigarettes and empty bottles, he still preferred that to the emptiness of a sterile room at a building that looked like a mixture between a hospital and a government corporation. Initially, there were only tests on what he could do, but after a few weeks, they started testing his resistance to electricity which was actually above average. Then, a more invasive approach started with injections and inhalers before being tested against small and then not so tiny electroshocks. He was interested in knowing where everything was going, but they basically kept stalling him and giving him evasive answers. Little did they know, he had a trick or two under his belt so, one day, he started doing small hacks here and there until he finally found out that before him and Perkons, there were others, many of them. His condition was more common than he thought, so the tests went far back to more than two decades. Little by little, he kept stealing pieces of files and of data, sometimes via the wireless network, others by plugging small devices into the main server. Perkons would not be happy to find out that Taran’s condition was more acute than the Latvian’s. However, Perkons featured more intense disch
arges that were more spreadable than other subjects. The program had actually accumulated a huge amount of data that was private to the institute and out of scientific publications. Decades of research were kept hidden from the public and was now applied and expanded with subjects like Taran. He wondered how many were at the same stage as him because he had not met anyone like him so far and there were no mentions of current subjects alike. His progress in the research was going steady as well because the variety of tests broadened to several procedures that painted a more complete picture of his condition and his resistance to electric discharges. A few of them were in water, others in a dense gas environment until a different phase arrived. He was injected with a saline solution, asked to rest for 5 minutes and was given two metal electrodes to hold. A few times, he could generate small amounts of electricity and others were a bit higher, depending on the injection. The test was done every three days while other systems were tried and his body fluids checked. There was a chemical imbalance in his body that allowed a flow of currents between him and his surroundings. What they were studying was how far he could resist the charges and the way he could manipulate them. He could not become a human Taser or someone who is just immune to electric discharges but the peculiarity of his condition was worth studying.