by Brian Craft
Orion slowly opens his eyes and smiles. The image of Iris appears on the screen in front of him, brighter and bolder than before.
Burroughs darts from the room.
Moments later, Plummer rushes in, first checking that Orion is still secured to the chair. Then he lingers out of reach as he releases Orion’s restraints. Plummer watches him like a hawk, on guard that he’s going to comply and go where he’s supposed to go.
Orion sits up and winces, sensing the muscles of his body have constricted tremendously. His fingers jitter a little as he tests the tips against his thumb. He swings his feet to the floor, shaking off a wave of dizziness and stands. Without resistance, he shuffles toward the door.
As they enter the hall, Plummer orders, “Follow the way-finder.”
Orion realizes the red way-finder line has floated even farther from the wall where it was originally anchored. The line actually passing straight through him and moves with him wherever he moves.
“Stay on track, Orion.” Plummer tentatively floats the order, watchful he doesn’t do anything, odd.
Orion follows the line. Turning a corner he can see crimson light from the Red Room flooding the corridor at the far end. The sight of it freezes him in his tracks. The prospect of being restrained for days on end, oblivious to your own mind is a horrifying idea. He does not want to enter that room again.
From a distance he spies another tech guide a nearly incoherent inmate out of the Red Room. The inmate didn’t endure her incarceration very well and needs help standing.
Orion inches a little closer. The inmate lifts her head, and Orion sees that it’s Iris.
He lurches forward trying to reach her, but Plummer is fast. He knew something would eventually happen that pushes Orion to resist, and this is it.
Plummer engages Orion’s magnetic cuffs and he’s thrust to the floor where they stick, his arms legs and waste anchored. The impact knocks the wind out of him long enough for Plummer to hit him with an electrical charge. It’s not as powerful as the police, but sufficient to soften Orion enough to be handled and delivered safely back to his cell.
CHAPTER 15
A citizen outside the Center for Mind Mastery pauses on the sidewalk. He bends to retrieve a little drone lying on the concrete. It's smashed and non-functional after falling from the skyscraper. He peers up at the building that seems to dissolve into the sky and spots a tiny dot growing toward him. His curiosity anchors him in place, gawking at it until he realizes that the dot is a something and that something is coming right at him. A second later, another little drone hurtles down and smashes inches away on the pavement. The inconspicuous citizen runs away in case more rain down.
Dr. Burroughs descends through the cavernous interior of the Center for Mind Mastery in his glass elevator. The exposed aluminum superstructure in the form of six massive uprights arch ever so slightly from bottom to top like a futuristic cathedral, dividing levels into cell blocks. The levels are a continuous single corkscrew, where techs scurry around catwalks checking on inmates, liberally flashing Code Green's into the cells of unruly occupants. The glass elevator passes level after level of closed glass cells on the way to the bottom.
Sinking past the lowest cells, the elevator shuttles Burroughs into the gloom of the sublevels.
The suffocating darkness of the sublevel detention area radiates outward in the form of six corridors, like the spokes of a wheel diverging from the central elevator shaft and fading into shadow. Glowing green buttons mark six-foot increments into the distance along the black glass hallways until all you can see in the dark are tiny dots of green light.
The elevator doors slide open, and Burroughs emerges. A rail-thin tech junkie named Sline hurries to compose himself when he realizes that the doctor has surprised him with a visit.
“Dr. Burroughs! Personally. I didn’t expect—“ Sline struggles to find his words before Burroughs cuts in.
“What happened?” he demands.
Sline bounces back to his control panel as if somehow it might give him a clue he missed before so he can share it with Burroughs and save his own skin. “The walls. They sort of pulsed clear. Only for a second.” Sline looks down one of the long black corridors, fear in his eyes. “All the housekeeping was unmasked.”
“Awake?” Burroughs presses.
Consulting the monitor again, Sline replies, “The monitor says they’re still suspended.”
Burroughs casually walks along the row of blackened cells. He presses a small control, and the front of the cell clears.
A haze of pale green light spreads into the corridor, shining off the black glass. Inside the small cell, floating in midair is a single inmate. Stomach down with back arched to an extreme angle, arms and legs stretched wide, and a thick Hive beam anchored in the forehead of citizen Fray.
Trapped in suspended animation, his face frozen in mindless oblivion.
Burroughs steps closer, a completely indifferent look on his face as he inspects Fray closer.
Sline skulks over to them. He tries to avoid seeing Fray but the urge is overwhelming, and he glances inside, then drops his eyes to the floor. He says, “Clearing the housekeeping disturbs me, sir. It’s…unnatural.”
Burroughs steps back and blackens the cell glass. He turns to loom over Sline. “Your job is to make certain they stay in.” He leans closer. “And your goal is to stay out.”
Sline musters enough courage to peek from behind his fear and asks, “What if they wake?”
Burroughs extends his finger and pokes Sline in the forehead. Then he saunters past to the elevator, steps inside, and the doors close.
Sline is left in the sublevel all alone in the dark with his housekeeping.
…
Plummer and another tech toss Orion into his cell and close the door, sealing him in darkness. He stands and faces front when a window clears allowing Plummer to see inside.
Plummer says, “You might want to sit.”
“I’ll stand,” Orion states in an act of blind defiance.
“Suit yourself,” Plummer replies, then leans out of view. He reaches for a large green button glowing on the door. He hesitates a second, then taps the button.
A brilliant green flash blazes through the window from inside the cell. Plummer glances in and then darkens the window before exiting the chamber.
Orion lays sprawled on the floor inside his cell, unconscious and drooling. He tumbles into his mind’s abyss, at the same time his brain has been stimulated to full throttle.
In the haze of Orion’s subconscious dream, he becomes aware of sitting next to Iris in the back of a maglev transport. City lights whiz by at lightning speed, streaking into long trails of glowing color that vibrate into ripples flowing outward, mixing with other ripples to create pools of colorful fractal bits. Then the colorful fractals congeal into new objects.
Faceless people fill the seats of the transport, blending from them like attached fixtures. Then the transport and passengers deform and stretch out as if filling an infinitely long tube, pulling away faster than the rest of the train can follow. Everything merges into a tunnel of blended light and color until all is a blur, except Iris and Orion.
The yellow flower from Orion’s rooftop appears in front of him, the petals expand into a thick forest of unusually perfect, plastic-like green trees with leaves moving freely like the fractal static. A uniform, blue-washed sky blankets everything, and Orion stands naked under a tree with Iris. The kinetic movement of the lucid dream slows to normal. He moves closer and kisses her.
A rattling SHOOSH announces the wind as it swirls in through the plastic leaves, spinning around, animating them in a whirlwind. Sight and sound spin into a dizzying cataclysm of static. Color bleeds to white, the forest disintegrates, and Orion falls through a nightmare of distorted melting images.
The city, faces, and then blinding whiteness encompassing everything before Orion jars awake on the floor of his cell.
A silky red rivulet of blood trickle
s from his nose. When his eyes peel open, they’re drained of color as if he sees into another dimension through foggy white crystal orbs. Then the deep blue pigment bleeds back into them. He blinks, and his awareness rushes back to reality.
He spooks and sits bolt upright, then tries to stand before falling to his knees. There next to him, a tiny window appears and GL peers through. She states forcefully, "Tell me what you remember or lose it forever."
“My head is pounding,” he says, as he bores his fists into his temples.
GL knows she can’t give up on him that easy. “You listen to me. Are you listening?”
He pitches forward until the crown of his head sinks into the mattress. An aching groan deflects GL’s question.
“If they wanted it so bad that they did it in front of everyone, it has to be important.” She thumps her forehead into the glass between her fingers, demanding his attention. “Do you want to lose your goddamn mind? Tell me!”
“Colors.”
“Describe it. Now!”
“Blended. Flash. Flying. Some kind of presence.”
GL knows who that is and the thought puts fire in her eyes. “What did the doctor want from you?”
“To know about my crime,” Orion says, struggling to piece it together.
“Where? When? Who? Tell me about your crime,” GL demands, again.
“I can’t remember,” he says. The struggle for his mind forces him to pitch forward and back, grinding his head into the padding. “Why are you pushing me?”
“Because it’s all you got,” says GL. She needs a different approach because Orion’s mind is spooked, and he’s drifting into the fear. She continues softly, saying, “It’s okay. It’s all good, I’m here and I got you. I know it hurts. So just listen to my voice, Orion. If they could have gotten the memory of my child from me, they could have stolen my whole mind. If I have to tear every piece of flesh from my bones to keep it, I will. What you love is the path to you.”
Orion stands to pace the cell. He’s jogging his mind, searching for the holes. His strength is returning and he begins to focus. “I never did anything wrong before that night on the train. That man.” He fades for a second, and then rallies to announce, “He scared me when he tried to do…something.”
“Walk your mind around that hole. See what’s missing.” GL’s gentle but compelling voice leads him like a mother and a cub.
Orion drifts, the holes in his mind stretching, trying to join and become a gaping breach. “I don’t know.”
“You’re not trying! Answer the god damn question!” GL screams at him, a desperate cry to stir a sleepwalker whose straying dangerously close to falling off a cliff.
His frustration boils over, and he slams his hands into the blackened glass wall. The impact spreads over the entire cellblock chamber in a wave, turning all cells, all LCD glass, to crystal clear. In the adjacent cell, Orion stares directly into Iris’s face. He lurches backward, and the wall goes black again, dropping him into darkness.
GL appears again in her little window. “Who is she, Orion? Tell me her name.”
He's standing mid-cell, staring at the wall that separates him from Iris. "She looks like I should know her," Orion says, reaching for the memory. It's coming, like a whiff of cloud forming into a shape. He's approaching it. He's winning.
GL’s eyes get wide. “That’s it. That’s what they want. She’s the one. Remember her!” Orion looks dizzy, he’s on the verge. GL presses. “You need that memory. You need to keep control of your mind.”
Orion takes a deep breath, relaxing his muscles, closing his eyes and ignoring the pounding in his skull. He slowly opens his eyes to stare at his own reflection. His arm raises, compelled by instinct he reaches out his hand. His finger extended to touch the reflection of his own face, zeroing in on the perfectly smooth surface. The instant of contact with the reflection, a perfect face-sized circle clears in the glass around the fingertip.
Within the clear window, Iris stares back at him.
“Iris,” he whispers.
“I see you two have met,” Iris replies. She smiles and looks past Orion to the small square window behind him where GL’s eyes are peering through.
…
Burroughs enters and crosses to his desk where he reclines into the privacy of his office, his floating video monitors appear, displaying six cells: Orion, Iris, GL, Terrence, Scryberg, and Jax. “He spoke the key but it was only a whisper to my ears,” Burroughs says. “Humanity to unlock humanity. Brilliant.”
Nurse Mina lurks near the huge ant colony. She replies, “The last patient acceleration got a bit…ugly.”
“He’s in a class of his own,” Burroughs states. “And I have his key. We’ll buffer him with a group session. Her emotional vacuum will be fertile space for my direction. Icarus will do the rest.”
Burroughs freezes on the image of Iris.
Along the top of the ant colony, a single ant crawls free of the dirt landscape and crosses the last piece of vertical glass toward the edge. It pauses at the open top for a long time, its antenna wiggling around, inspecting the edge.
Then, it steps over, crawls across the finger-width thickness of glass and defies gravity as it escapes down the front of the colony wall. Its zigzag descent passes thousands of its ant companions still toiling away inside.
CHAPTER 16
Scryberg stares at the dome over the common area where cartoon-shaped white clouds drift aimlessly in a uniform blue-wash sky. He gnaws the corner off a pink-ish, bread-like cube before tossing the rest onto a large tabletop where it rolls to the center. The table is more like a round, six-foot diameter pillar about waist high, composed of thousands of thin, milky-white rods extruded as a group from the floor of pin-dome like a bundle of unsharpened pencils standing on end.
Across from him, Terrence and Jax are planted around the table on extruded stools. Terrence quietly nibbles the edges off his food cube, slowly making it round. He watches Jax very slowly and meticulously tear his cube in half while regarding each fiber pulling apart, like gravity releasing two bodies separated by space until their mutual bonds break and free them both.
GL and Orion sit on the floor near the side of the room away from the others. “We have to get out of here,” Orion states bluntly.
GL is tracking the fake sky overhead too and replies, “I hope you can keep that thought.” She aims Orion’s attention to the dome. “Blue sky.”
Orion studies the graphically designed clouds, his gaze skipping from one to the next without anything standing out. He finally asks, “What does it mean?”
"Icarus! Ic-ar-us!" Scryberg yells as he stomps toward Orion, tossing his food as he advances. "Burroughs's final solution machine."
GL yells at him, “Get a grip, Scryberg!”
He points at the food and gets in Orion’s face. “That’s you when they get through. Processed and fake. Cubed for easy stacking.”
“Sit down, he’s the same as you,” GL fights.
Scryberg backs away, keeping his eyes glued on GL. “I’m not some scratch on your hand. No one is like me. I’m me. Get it?”
Orion addresses him calmly, “I get it.” His deliberate eye contact seems to calm Scryberg. Then his paranoia over the blue-wash dome snares him again, and he veers away, mumbling to himself as he goes.
GL draws Orion’s attention back to the dome and explains, “The plastic sky. They always float this over our heads before we go to Icarus.” She looks up like she can see past the dome. “The Icarus room is way at the top. Separated from everything else. Everyone else.”
“They hurt you there,” he states. Hoping she’ll differ.
GL explains, “The last time we went, there were the four of us and two others. Burroughs pushed the group like never before. It’s a machine like Hivemind, in a way. It’s his final goal, I think. The entire room is the machine, and we get marched inside it and strapped together like a team. Each of us in a chair anchored to this central column. It’s all smooth and se
amless.” She cups her hands and puts them together to form a circle. She holds it so he can see inside. “Kind of like being inside a donut. Like a tube that circles around to meet itself.”
Orion tries to lessen the tension. “A donut doesn’t sound so bad.”
"Sure," she agrees. "If you like biting on one made of shattered glass." She serious expression conveys that she has no humor for Icarus. "He turns it on and your whole body is like when your foot falls asleep. Pins and needles. And you aren't in control of yourself anymore. He makes things happen with our brains. The machine sort of amplifies us. Forces us to move things around."
“Telemetry. Like maglev,” Orion adds.
“But straight from mind to object. Mind control,” she counters. “And every time we go in, at least one of us doesn’t come out. At least not alive. And last time it was two.”
Her comment provokes Terrence to look gravely over at them.
Orion remembers his fellow Hiveminder, Aoki. Burnout. “There’s only five of us,” he points out.
“Burroughs can’t get it to work. Everyone has their breaking point,” she replies. “Always one that can’t take it. Then the machine quits. Seems like six is the magic number, but the right six is important. Gotta be the right six. Now we have a Hive man.” She looks at Orion like maybe he’s the game changer.
Then the door slides open and Iris stumbles in, looking a bit worse for wear.
“And there’s six,” GL adds.
Iris squints into the room, rubbing her temples in an effort to ease the residual burn of Nurse Mina's mind map session. The second Iris spots GL, her eyes light up and welcome amazement spills over her. She can't help herself as she runs over and falls across GL, embracing her freely like a child hugs her mother. GL stiffens, her hands floating in the air around Iris like she's not sure she should touch this stranger. She glances at Orion, helpless in response to the odd display.