Bloody Mary took her massive ax and swung it. The people turned into wisps of gas, evaporating at the blow.
“Please stop!” she pleaded. “Please!”
Bloody Mary did not listen, decimating the phantom spirits mercilessly. They did not scream as they were killed. They had no voices, and even when they opened their mouths, their vocal cords were muted. Inside their mouths, their teeth had rotted off and their uvulas were tarred black with oil. At the center of the crowd were her parents. They’d landed from their flying chicken. Bloody Mary was heading straight toward them. Reiko tried to warn them, begging them to escape.
Suddenly Bloody Mary and all the people vanished. Reiko saw the ceiling, which had mouse and elephant patterns on it. She looked over and saw the doctor operating on a woman. Had she been hallucinating? No, it must be the chemical defenses within her body.
When Reiko had the procedure to get the artificial arm installed, she’d also asked to have chemical boosters implanted that would automatically counteract foreign substances beyond a certain threshold. It had been a recommended process for military officers, but many had objected on grounds it could cause mental diseases despite scientific evidence proving otherwise. As Reiko’s consciousness came back to her, she was glad she’d ignored the critics and gotten the upgrade. But she knew if she didn’t do something immediately, she was going to lose consciousness and get stuck in this Cyber Bubble dream until she was— What was their end goal? How far did they take these Cyber Bubble experiences? The doctor was working on the other woman, sawing from the sound of the female screaming and the jarring noise of the blade on bone. Were they not using anesthetics? Were there people actually paying to directly experience a painful surgical procedure?
The thought angered her, and energy pumped through her body. There were restraints on her, but if she could activate the knife missile and use it to free herself, she might have a chance. She noticed there was music playing on the radio, a violinist racing against seeming chaos in a frenetic aural clash with an orchestra. Reiko began her struggle toward freedom.
PART II
THE
REVOLUTION
OF THE
BLOODY MECHAS
BISHOP WAKANA
LONG BEACH
I.
Bishop hated sleep; he never knew where his subconscious would force him. Even after Bloody Mary’s soldiers injected him with hallucinogens, he resisted sleep as long as he could.
“Where is Bloody Mary?” he heard someone from his past echo.
He looked up and saw swastikas that were made of human bones. “I don’t know.”
“What is your name?” the Nazi officer asked. His hair was on fire and his skin was semitranslucent, so Bishop could see the skull underneath.
“Bishop Wakana,” he’d replied.
“What is your role in the army?”
“I’m—I’m a surveyor of crops.”
“Are you lying, Bishop Wakana?”
“N-no. I’m a surveyor,” he confirmed.
“Good. There’s nothing I hate more than a liar.”
The Nazis whipped him. They beat him. They pulled out his teeth one by one. They put wires on his eyes to keep them open. They kept on asking, “What’s your mission? Where’s Bloody Mary?”
Except these weren’t Nazis above him. It was a doctor and his nurse, their faces covered by sanitary masks. They weren’t looking for Bloody Mary anymore. Bloody Mary was the one who had brought them here.
His vision blurred again and he saw black blobs moving all over the ceiling. They were amorphous gatherings of slime that were waiting for him to get weak and vulnerable so they could mutate him into a blob too. Bishop gritted his teeth and saw a claw reaching out for his neck, trying to throttle the breath out of him. He closed his eyes and after he reopened them, the claw was gone. Water was dripping down the walls, colored a sickly green that was acidic. He wanted to vomit, and nausea was making him dizzy. An earthquake wracked the floor, and the whole room was spinning. The tiles were heads of all the corpses he’d buried. He closed his eyes, ignored their accusatory expressions. The Nazis were going to take him away again, laughing at him after what they’d subjected him to.
“Just tell us where Bloody Mary is going,” they’d told him.
But that was the past, when he’d sworn, “I don’t know. They never told us anything about her.”
The Nazis put Bishop in a room that spun ever so slowly. Every time he lay down, they accelerated the spinning sensation to put him in a constant state of dizziness. Whenever he opened his eyes, the Nazis decelerated again, and he couldn’t tell if the speed changes were part of his delusion. Somehow, the chemicals they’d injected him with were dredging that all back up.
How long had the Nazis tortured him? He remembered the mosquito room, where they’d isolated him in the complete dark. He couldn’t see anything, but he heard the mosquitoes buzzing in his ear. They were all over his body and within a few hours, every part of him was itching. Since he was chained up, he couldn’t scratch his body. It was worse knowing he was being sucked dry. How many mosquitoes did it require to drain a human of all his blood? He should have been more worried about what diseases the Nazis infected them with. He wished there was some way he could kill the mosquitoes. Anytime he was about to doze off, they buzzed in his ear. How long were they going to leave him inside with the mosquitoes?
“Where’s Bloody Mary?” someone asked again.
Why did they keep on asking him that? Whatever mission she’d been on, it was completed by now, wasn’t it?
He was itchy all over, and the thought of these tiny insects feasting on his blood made him angrier and angrier. Why didn’t he just tell them where Bloody Mary was going? It would be so easy.
“Do you want kids?” the Nazi asked.
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“You’ve never thought about kids?”
“Never,” Bishop lied.
“You should. I can tell that death doesn’t faze you,” the Nazi said, glancing at all of Bishop’s wounds and broken bones. “What about your future?”
“What about my future?”
“If you don’t comply, we will sterilize you. Then what would your wife think?”
How did they know about her? “I don’t have a wife,” he tried to lie.
“You told us you were married.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Are you lying to me? I told you I hated liars. You told us how much your wife wanted children.”
Had he really told them about his family, their plans for at least three kids? He didn’t remember what he’d said, what he hadn’t. But it was true. For Bishop, having lost his father at a young age, he wanted to have the family he never had as a kid. The Nazis brought the sterilizing gun and gave him a choice.
“What are you doing?” Bishop demanded.
“Where is Bloody Mary?”
Bishop looked desperately at the gun. They’d already taken everything away from him personally. Now they were taking away his chance to have children. The Nazi saw the helplessness in his eyes.
“Last chance. Are you really willing to give up everything you cherish and hold dear for Bloody Mary?”
He was about to tell them everything he knew, anything he could to clutch on to the dream that he’d eventually be able to escape and have kids with his wife. It took all his strength to remind himself that even if he did give Bloody Mary up, the Nazis would still kill him. He spat in the Nazi’s face, defying them at his most vulnerable. The sterilizer was barely noticeable. There was a luminescent gleam and heat emanating from the faceted prod. It was over in a minute.
“I salute you for sacrificing everything to keep your secret,” the Nazi had said with a begrudging hint of respect. “You can no longer have children.”
They beat him badly that night. He di
dn’t care then because he’d lost the one thing that had kept him going for much of his life. He cared even less now that the doctor was pumping him with chemicals that transformed his subconscious projections into a torturous reality. He was jumping through time and it was his wife, Felicia, angrily accusing him of sabotaging their future.
“They said you had a choice,” she said.
“Who told you?”
“Who cares who told me? Did you?”
Bishop had a hard time meeting his wife’s angry glower. “I did,” he confessed.
“Why didn’t you just tell them what they wanted to know?” she’d demanded. “Everyone else did.”
“How can you say that to me?” he asked furiously. “Do you know what they did to me? I couldn’t let them win after all the ways they tortured and humiliated me!”
“You could have for your family.”
Family. Bishop thought again about his father, killed for . . . for what?
Felicia had a temper. So did he. Their yelling matches went all night. Security guards in their apartment came by a dozen times, told them the neighbors were complaining.
“Even with the veteran benefits, we’re barely making ends meet!” Felicia yelled. “I don’t want to live in this studio forever. You can’t walk outside without fear of getting mugged, the toilets always get clogged, they turn off hot water all the time, and the elevator breaks every other week. It’s hard for me to climb up fourteen floors on my bad knee!”
“I don’t want to go back to the police force.”
“Why didn’t you want to go back?” a voice asked. But it wasn’t his ex-wife. It sounded like Reiko.
“Because I hated being around dead bodies all the time.”
There were so many corpses during the Texarkana attack. Up above in the mecha called the Syren, everything looked like toy figures. Even in his rocket pack, it appeared to Bishop as though humans were ants in combat.
“You’re doing well,” the doctor said. But he wasn’t the Nazi physician. “Your Cyber Bubble is getting the highest traffic on the site for the past three hours. That’s superb. People are looking through your past and it’s abnormally lucid. I’ve never seen past dives that are this vivid without some type of augmentation or memory recorder.”
“Which past?” Bishop asked.
“In the Nazi camp. They want to see all the details. Your memory is blocking out the faces for some reason, which is okay, but if you can recall specifics, that’ll be great because audiences love a rivalry. All the arguments with your wife are helping too. Adds real drama and stakes to the situation. But what exactly is it you were protecting? If you saved a grand reveal for everyone, I think that could really spice up ratings to the point where sponsors will send ad money your way. I’m not guaranteeing your freedom—that’s out of the question. But with sponsors, we could mix up the memories and potentially upgrade you to full-fledged ‘Author’ status. That means you’d get a variety of experiences and genres people will pay to watch. I can also give you something a little more . . . pleasing, depending on your preferences.”
Sponsors? Bishop thought again about Felicia, wanting all the things he could never provide her. It was basic stuff, but they couldn’t afford a home of their own. Not with prices skyrocketing in the capital city, Los Angeles. The police force job he’d been offered was in Dallas Tokai, but he didn’t want to take it, which infuriated Felicia. “Housing is cheaper there,” she said. “MEZ Enterprises has houses on sale that have a progressive development factor of five at affordable rates.”
But it was too close to the Quiet Border for him to feel comfortable. He didn’t want to go and became upset with himself because he couldn’t do what was best for his family.
“Why didn’t you just tell the Nazis what they wanted to know?” Felicia demanded again.
He pondered that decision all the time. Why hadn’t he just betrayed Bloody Mary’s location? The other soldiers did, and the ones who survived weren’t punished by USJ authorities.
The Nazis tied his limbs in four opposing directions with a motorcycle at each end, a modernized quartering. “They’ll begin to pull and once they go, there’s no way to stop until your arms and legs get pulled out from your body!”
They had lists of executions they’d been improving on, from scaphism to dismemberment, all of which his interrogators meticulously described. “We have the medical technology to kill you, then bring you back to life and kill you all over again. Your whole life will be a thousand deaths,” they warned him.
What was death? he wondered. Was it a physical end, or was there a spiritual one too? Would he be reincarnated as a ghost, wandering the planet, burning with a desire for vengeance? Or did life cease when its physical form was ended?
Beyond the Nazi interrogators, he noticed shadowy figures watching him. There were endless numbers of them, no faces, and barely discernible bodies. He could feel their eyes. It wasn’t just his physical self they were watching. Their sight was somehow boring in on his brain as they studied his emotions. He wished there was a divider between him and them, but he was tied on a metal frame, and the skin on his back was turning ashen from the volts.
He was surprised to see Reiko approach him. “Wh-what are you doing here?” he asked her. “You have to get out of here!”
“None of this is real,” she said as she began to loosen his straps.
“What are you talking about?”
“This is part of a Cyber Bubble, the unregulated and illegal side of it from the looks of it. I changed the preferences so you can see everyone who’s watching in avatar form. You’re plugged in, but if I disconnect now with the way they’ve hooked into your brain, you’d suffer a bubble psychosis and have really bad mental damage. If you wake up naturally from it, you should be okay.”
“I don’t understand. This is all fake?”
“This is a rescue, Bishop. Wake up.”
Rescue? That’s what they’d told him in the past. The Nazis staged fake rescues, sent in fake soldiers from his rocket pack unit to try to trick him into thinking he’d gotten out. “Did your mission succeed? Did Bloody Mary reach her target?” they asked.
He replied, “What mission? Who was Bloody Mary supposed to target?”
“You need to tell us,” the Nazi soldiers masquerading as Bishop’s own said to him.
“I don’t know anything!” he’d yelled.
When he finally did get out, the sight of couples with their kids made him bitter. He hated hanging out with friends who only talked about their newborns. He hated when they sent him their pictures and videos, bragging about the dumbest things. Oh, look, my kid is petting a dog for the first time! Hey hey, my son is dressed up in this cute mecha pilot costume. Whenever he saw his wife look longingly at other couples with their kids, it made him angrier and meaner.
“I don’t know where she is,” he often said to himself in the shower, making Felicia ask who he was talking about.
“That’s already over,” someone said to him. It was Reiko again. “These are just bad memories getting all jumbled up.”
“It’s not over!” Bishop yelled. “I don’t know where Bloody Mary is. Stop asking me!”
“I don’t care where she is!” Reiko yelled back, releasing him from the charged torture bed.
“Then what do you want from me?”
“Give me your hand.”
“Why?”
“So we can leave together.”
She looked so much like Reiko. Was it really her? Or had they dug out his memory of her and projected it to deceive him? They knew about Felicia. Why not Reiko? She extended her hand out for him to grab.
She looked so real. Would it cause any harm to follow? When he touched her hand, he felt himself being drawn somewhere else. Suddenly he was on a street he didn’t recognize. Looming above them was a massive biomech. The biomech was tall
er than the ones they’d fought outside Texarkana, reaching all the way to the stars. Was that even physically possible? It was terrifying to behold.
“Wh-where are we?” he asked, and saw Reiko cowering in a doorway. He went to reassure her, but there was a shield of energy around her, preventing him from getting close. The biomech above was destroying everything in its wake. Bishop was more confused than scared.
“Reiko,” he said. “Are these your memories from Kansas?”
At the word Kansas, she looked up at him and they zipped somewhere else. It looked like a room, and everything was messy. Reiko was in pain, unable to move her arm. There were artificial augments that had replaced most of her arm, but she was crying because it hurt so much.
“What’s wrong?” Bishop asked.
“My arm. I can’t use my arm anymore.”
“Why not?”
“The attack. Nerve damage. The—”
But the whole environment changed again, and this time they were inside a laboratory or workplace. Bishop did not recognize it. There were many cubicles and offices where mecha parts were being designed. Reiko was by herself and somehow, he could read her thoughts. She was afraid because her arm hurt so much. All the designers around her were very talented, churning out new mecha designs around the clock. She couldn’t because of the chronic pain she suffered after the Kansas attack. She noticed she was getting fewer assignments, as she kept on missing deadlines. Her colleagues were walking around with big shining crowns on their heads. Bishop stared at Reiko’s arm and it appeared to be made out of sticks.
Cyber Shogun Revolution Page 20