Utopian Uprising: Prisoner of the Mind

by Brian Craft

  Pace inspects the holographic brain models as Orion’s begins to exhibit fewer sparks. Like a storm beginning to dissipate, Orion’s model clears. “Doctor,” Pace says. “What’s happening here?”

  Frustration smacks Burroughs in the face. He sees not only that Orion’s model is exhibiting something altogether new, but brain #6, Iris, is wavering. The sparkling highlights in her brain model have become erratic, then pool together, then begin to diffuse altogether. Either Burroughs stops the experiment now or she’ll burn out, and he’ll lose the key that unlocks his star player.

  The liquidy streams of light recede quickly from the team, like a straw sucking up fluid, Icarus retrieves its energy. The spheres crash to the floor and roll away. The team relaxes, and the sheen of the torus walls disintegrates. Instantly, Orion’s mag-cuff’s release. His hands lifting free surprise him for a second. Then shallow pant coming from Iris snags his attention.

  He jumps from his chair and pulls her free, too, barely ahead of Plummer and his guards racing in to secure them. Orion and GL lock eyes right before her cuffs release. Terrence, Jax, and Scryberg sit up, too, and that’s when GL slams her fist into the guard’s face. The impact throws the man backward with blood gushing from his nose. The excitement kicks off a domino effect of aggression as Scryberg screams for vengeance and dives on the guard in front of him.

  Plummer is forced to intercede, leaving Orion and Iris alone. They seize their chance. Orion ducks under Iris’s arm to support her and they run for the open door. It closes as they slip through and into the hallway.

  There in front of them, Orion comes face-to-face with Pace waiting impatiently to escape in the elevator. No words pass between them before the doors to the lift slide open. Pace feels for the wall behind him as he inches away, unable to break eye contact with Orion.

  Orion helps Iris in, and then the doors close.

  “Exam One,” Orion orders the elevator, and it descends obediently.

  Iris has her feet under her now and looks at Orion as if to say, ‘What now?’

  “I don’t know,” he replies. “I didn’t really expect to get this far.” He holds her shoulders and looks in her eyes. “Could you hear us?”

  “What do you mean?” she replies.

  “Resist,” he speaks deliberately, hoping the word will help her understand.

  She presses her mind to recall. The reflection filtering back to her. “I kept thinking that I needed to resist the machine. I couldn’t let it have me. Just resist it.” She wavers. “I could hardly form a thought and got to saying resist, resist.”

  “Resist,” he says. “Then I’m not imagining it.”

  “Are you saying you could hear me?” Iris asks.

  Orion replies, “I think I could hear everyone. At first like you were in another room. Then Icarus opened the door.”

  The lift slows to a stop, and the doors open to the floor where they’ll find Exam One.

  Orion and Iris hug the walls as they sneak along the corridor, careful to avoid discovery by any technicians that haven’t gone to Icarus. They quickly locate the room and duck inside.

  “We won’t have much time,” Orion states as he jumps in the exam chair and pulls on the neuro-helmet. He sees that Iris is immediately overwhelmed studying the control panel. “Just follow any prompts,” he says.

  “Prompts?” Iris frantically analyses the touchscreen control panel. She would have better luck reading his mind herself. “How many tries to I get?”

  This is a one-time shot, and the clock is ticking. If he can understand how he controls the LCD glass, and more so how he launched a surge into the building that shut it down, they might be able to find a way to make it happen again and escape. So, Orion gets ready to jump without a parachute because he has no other choice. “Touch as little as you have to.”

  Iris ventures a random stab at a button, and the system springs to life. Graphics and lights saturate the digital panel. She tries to make heads or tails of one display with patient files and discovers one marked ‘Orion’. She taps it, and the room springs to life as thousands of light beams project into Orion’s helmet, splitting to form the web of his mind. The surge yanks him back in his seat, and the 180-degree video screen suddenly floods with imagery.

  Iris whirls around amazed at the cascade of imageries. “Well, there you go. I think it’s on.”

  “Alright, now prompt me,” he tells her. “Like we talked about. Start with something like the roof.”

  His own words launch hologram memories into the room around them, giving Iris a start. She startles a little when the prominent image of Dr. Burroughs steps forward.

  “It’s only a memory,” Orion assures her.

  “What about your crime?” she starts. “That’s what—“

  The holograms and images radically transform as the neuro-web overhead highlights new areas of memory. The images race across Orion's apartment, his building hallways, the maglev, and Fray. Nothing, in particular, gives them a clue about how Orion can control this device.

  …

  The team of techs drag Orion’s four defiant team members into their cellblock chamber. Each is tossed into their cell, and the glass walls slide up to seal them in.

  Nurse Mina strolls in as the techs exit past her. She casually walks around the circular chamber checking each one, then she exits.

  …

  Orion’s urgency forces the images to race by too quickly and in random order. Iris moves close to Orion in the chair. “Focus. Calm down. It’ll come to you.”

  “There’s gotta be more to it,” Orion says. “Scan the edges.”

  Iris skims the chaotic, shifting images. “I’m not sure what I’m looking for.”

  “Something I wasn’t focused on,” Orion suggests. The moment they met on maglev appears.

  She gets right next to his head so she can see from his point of view. Her breath wafts on his neck. “You were focused on me,” Iris tries. The proximity of the real Iris prompts the images to change. The colors get warmer, and all the rest of the images around them blur.

  Iris sees the phenomenon and smiles knowingly. “Orion, do you remember the video I gave you?”

  The room shifts again, and he experiences huddling in front of the viewing walls in his apartment. The little window displaying the natural world plays in front of him. “Beautiful,” Orion says, echoing his own voice as it emanates from the memory.

  Iris whispers to him, “The images aren’t important Orion. It’s the feeling. We wanted you to feel so you would believe yourself. You can’t resist that. That’s the key.”

  The little yellow flower from his rooftop fades in to fill the screen, then the view changes to the distance vision of the Green Zone islands.

  “I wonder how my garden’s doing,” Iris muses.

  Then the hologram memories shift again, the entire scene rockets forward across the city to the Green Zone where it stops to display Iris in her garden.

  “This isn’t mine. I never saw you there,” he states.

  “Can’t be anyone else’s,” Iris replies.

  “But I’ve never been there,” he reiterates. “I didn’t know you before—“

  The images blur into a speeding tunnel of mixed colors and images. Blobby faces fly past, then suddenly shock into clarity. The Hivemind room at Societal Services fills Exam One; ninety-nine members resting in position with odd, ghostlike versions of each person floating above themselves.

  “Is this Hivemind?” Iris walks through the holograms to examine the odd fantasy. “Are you imagining this?” she asks.

  “It’s some kind of mixed image,” he replies. “Those ghosts aren’t there in Hive. I can’t control this.”

  Voices in the corridor outside of Exam One steal her attention. She ventures a tiny peek around the corner and spots Plummer coming their way. A second later, Burroughs rounds the corner. “They’re coming!” she tells Orion.

  “Wait!” he shouts. “I need to know what that was in Hive. That’s
the day I self-animated.” Images race by: Aoki goes slack, red room, his black cell, ants, then jarring to a stop on an enormous vision of Dr. Burroughs.

  “You can become a world,” says Burroughs’s hologram.

  Iris stands over the control panel, hunting for a way to shut it off. She probes for Orion’s file again, but there are thousands of files for it to be lost in.

  “He’s got so many in here,” she opens one. “These are individual sessions.”

  “Iris, hurry,” he pleads. He grasps the edges of the helmet, ready to throw it off but fearful to do it while it’s still engaged. As his fear mounts, the images in front of him get darker, shuffling through his arrest, torture, and imprisonment.

  With the voices from Plummer and Burroughs getting closer, Iris gambles. She hits a control marked ‘release.’

  A grunting guttural sound tumbles out of Orion as the illuminated neuro-web grows brighter and brighter, the pinpoint synaptic junctions begin multiplying exponentially. His face crunches into a distorted grimace, his muscles straining as the intensity amplifies all over his body to the point of overload. Pure energy gushes into his brain, and a torrent of tiny images waterfall across the video screen and spill into the room, millions of memories from thousands of people.

  Iris is horrified and can think to do nothing other than smash the panel. The only hard object in the room not bolted down are her mag-cuffs. She raises her hands above her head and swings with all her strength, smashing her wrists on the glass surface. It cracks, and that surprises her for a second. She rallies her strength and swings again, cracking it more. Blood trickles from slices that open across her palms.

  Then suddenly, the neuro-web that has been swelling with intensity, filling every synaptic junction with activity and light, explodes into a magnificent flash. The all-encompassing brilliance throws Iris off her feet.

  The reality Orion experiences in his mind: walking into Hivemind and being greeted by the secretary, talking to the city planners, watching the city on closed-circuit displays, and thousands of individual ants. He’s inside the mind of Dr. Burroughs.

  Iris struggles back to her feet and swings as hard as she can. Her bloody wrists slam into the glass surface and the display shatters, instantly going dark. Simultaneously, the room powers down and drops them into darkness.

  Orion slumps utterly exhausted. Iris runs her hands over his face, checking to see that he’s still alive. “Okay, okay.” She pulls his helmet off, making sure he’s free of any remaining connection or surge.

  “You’re okay,” she says. “Tell me you’re okay. Oh, shit.”

  Burroughs enters the room, his expression rankled with disgust like he just caught two stray dogs eating his lunch. He shoves Iris aside and grabs Orion by the sides of his face. Burroughs’s thumbs crudely force Orion’s eyelids open.

  Burroughs glares into Orion's eyes like he's studying his mind. "Fools," he snaps. "If you ruined this mind…" he trails off before pushing Orion into Plummer.

  …

  Orion and Iris are dragged into their cellblock. The techs toss them in their cells, and the doors slide shut. Burroughs touches the security pillar, and all the cell fronts clear, then he walks slowly around the room, administering a Code Green to each of them, one by one, saving Orion for last so he can witness his friends pain.

  “Not you, Chair #1,” he says to Orion before letting all the glass turn black. “You’ve done enough to my brain for one day.”

  Orion slumps to the floor of his cell. He squeezes his head like he needs to stop it from exploding. He sways back and forth, hoping the physical movement will quiet a million memories that are expanding in his mind and pushing his sanity to the brink.

  He finally breaks. His rabid screams resonate into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 18

  A diminutive man wearing green coveralls and safety goggles detaches an automated machine from an immense assembly line and rolls it away. He guides the bright yellow mechanism through a crowded manufacturing facility, so vast that it curves distantly away over its own horizon. He aims the wheeled dolly into a fenced corral where other technicians repair similar factory apparatus. He carefully releases an access panel on the equipment to inspect the interior. Within seconds, he finds a worn part and pulls it out to replace it. He discards the exhausted part into a bin and quickly fits in a replacement. He performs the entire repair by memory…

  He scans the room to guarantee no one is watching before he slips a sharp-edged screwdriver from his coverall sleeve and covertly nicks a tooth on the newly installed gear. It's a deviant act that will ensure his continued employment when the gear breaks again soon. The memory blurs...

  For a brief, hazy moment, a woman smiles at a man in an elevator, then someone rides a personal transport through a crowded city street, a woman kisses her husband as he leaves their apartment for the day, someone paints a wall, another stands in line at a food center, the person in front of him stares at the advertisements on the walls, the person in front of her stares into space wondering how long this will be, the person in front of him touches his hand to the ID scanner to access food rations, thinking all along how dirty the panel must be…

  A maid in a richly-decorated private residence delivers a glass of scotch in a crystal glass to Governor Roman. He grabs her wrist before she can exit. Fear is the only sensation as the maid stares out the window of her high-rise apartment building. Rubbing her bruised knuckles, she can see lights from the arriving police cars below in the street. GL sees the flashing blue and red lights at the adjacent building…GL walks the corridor of Societal Services, passing dozens of other workers and techs in white coveralls. One tech waves timidly at GL and greets her with, “Good morning, Gloria.” GL continues on her way without stopping…

  …the moment slows, accentuating every detail as GL passes Orion. His perfectly styled hair, pressed perfect clothes, fresh clear skin, and a vacant look in his eyes. He doesn’t notice her as he heads toward the morning shift change in Hivemind…

  Gloria presses her palm to an ID scanner…a blurry shuffling of dozens of hands, all shapes, sizes, and colors pressing the ID scanner, people blurring past the entrance as the door jockey’s open and closed, then…Gloria at her workstation analyzing data collected across the metropolis…

  Gloria melts from the shadows as she exits a dead zone. She crosses the busy street holding a little boy’s hand…he’s fascinated by the magical floating maglev drifting into the dreamy, illuminated sub-station…Fray stares at the Hivebeam above him running the length of the transport. On the periphery of the memory, Fray watches Orion move away to the end of the car…Fray’s hand reaches for the beam, his fingers spreading wide as the ready to clutch the energy, his point of view shifts to Orion, Fray’s voice echoes ‘I hope he sees’, his hand contacts the Hivebeam…suddenly a torrent of images blast past and into a blinding white flash…Orion stares into Fray’s eyes…Sargent Tack…A glass wall seals Fray into a green cell and Sline engages it…Burroughs talks to city planners, through the window he witnesses the stadium field change to:

  ‘RESIST’

  The crowd grows quiet as they register the message.

  Burroughs dramatically scowls. “Deviants.” He smiles to himself as he marches toward the door, leaving the city planners behind…

  The flood of memories caves in on itself and Orion snaps his eyes open. Masses of tiny red vessels crisscross the white of his eyes like a roadmap of Paragon City, prominent dark circles accentuate the sockets and painting him a gaunt, skeletal version of himself. His hair and face are sweat covered, his shirt thrown off and balled on the mattress next to him. Sweat and saliva smear the glass by his mattress. He’s been in his darkened cell for what seems like days as the memories of thousands of other people invade his mind. The circus of thoughts, feelings, and images create a frenzied, hell-like nightmare, leaving him almost unaware of his own self. And still, the sickly green tint, cast from the glowing button persists, but swallowed into
blackness in the cell corners, leaving Orion floating in a formless void.

  “Orion…”

  He blinks repeatedly, trying to sharpen his vision in the dim. Trying to put some order to the pieces. Forcing his own memories to the forefront. But they always become overwhelmed by the memory of someone else who shared a similar point in time. Perspectives, adjacent to each other in time and space, erasing the lines of division; touch a door handle and it leads to the last person that laid a hand on it, and your vision is high jacked. Remember the maglev and it slips away into the memory of someone who built it, and then you're not in your own awareness anymore.

  “Orion…”

  The foreign memories collected together in his mind are like a disjointed reality spanning the entire city.

  “Orion, answer me,” GL says. Her fingers clearing a square window into his cell.

  Finally, Orion gains a minute pinhole of awareness, enough to turn and look at GL. “Gloria,” he says. His voice dry and weak.

  “I don’t remember that person,” she replies. “Call me GL.”

  “Were you worried I’d forget your name?” he asks softly.

  “Shit, I was worried you forgot your own damn name. You’ve been mumbling and rolling around inside some kind of fever dream for days.” She motions with her eyes, directing attention to his hands resting on the bunk. “The shit you’re doing with your hand is pretty creepy.”

  Orion achingly presses up to rest on his elbows and investigates what she's talking about. GL's slides her fingers along the glass, squeaking like an eerie high-pitched violin until she's relocated the window near his hand.

  “What’s it doing?” he asks. He holds his hand to his face, inspecting both sides superficially.

  “Put it back, by your shirt,” she advises.

  He reflexively lowers his hand to the bunk, where his discarded shirt lays in a bunch.

  “What?” he asks.