‘Someone tired of rhetorical questions?’
‘A Neanderthal. I don’t mean that as an epithet …’
‘I don’t even know what that means.’
‘An insult,’ he supplied. ‘But this is an insight into what the Neanderthal must have felt in the face of Homo sapiens.’
I was speechless. I had no idea what he was going on about. Or why Cronin was looking so uncomfortable.
‘We have the opportunity to be strong as a species, to move forward as one, to make progress as one, to deal with the threats and opportunities that expansion provides from a position of strength, to actually build something instead of tearing things down and constant petty squabbling. This is an evolutionary point in human history. Do you understand that? Do you see what you’re opposing? What you’re trying to drag down, destroy?’
I tried to think through what he’d said.
‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,’ I told him. ‘You fucking psycho,’ I added. Liberating.
‘George, that’s enough.’ Cronin did not sound happy at all.
Rolleston turned to him. ‘We have an opportunity here for an insight. Do you not see that? He is effectively an uplifted animal.’
‘What are you talking about?!’ I screamed at him.
Rolleston turned back to me. Again he looked angry.
‘I told you, we’re asking the questions,’ he said.
‘Or fucking what? Threats of pain are a little fucking redundant, don’t you think?’
‘I’m angry, Jakob.’
‘Good!’
‘Do you know why I’m angry, Jakob?’
‘Were you recently strapped into a chair and asked stupid fucking questions?!’
‘Because we’re more alike than not.’
‘Brilliant. Unstrap me and we’ll go for a beer!’
‘Because we’ve both been given a great gift.’
‘What?’ I asked, though I think I knew the answer.
‘Why are you healing so quickly?’ Rolleston asked.
‘Themtech,’ I said quietly.
He nodded. ‘Imagine my disappointment that it has been given to one so undeserving. You were a good if disobedient servant, Jakob, but let’s face facts. You’re little more than a brute beast whose only thought is its own selfish gratification.’
And the thing was, he wasn’t trying to anger me. He probably didn’t even think he was insulting me. He was just describing things as he saw them. He wouldn’t even have understood that I didn’t see myself the same way.
‘Not only so undeserving, but someone who’d never be able to understand what he was, let alone understand what we’re trying to do,’ he explained.
I met his eyes and tried not to flinch away from the cold analytical expression on his face. It was like he was studying an insect.
‘I’m an animal who’s caused you a lot of trouble. You know I’d never join you, right?’ I told him.
Cronin actually laughed. ‘We couldn’t use you.’ I heard Josephine sigh. Rolleston’s eyes flickered towards her. ‘You lack the vision. Though I think you know you’ll serve in the end.’
‘Nobody wants what you want except you,’ I said. Very fucking eloquent, I thought.
‘That’s because people only see the small picture. They fear what they don’t understand and like you think only of gratification. And the people whose power relies on them think only of the illusion of providing that gratification. Everyone’s miserable. Imagine if that could be changed.’
‘This is a waste of time. You’re crazy. Seriously. Move on. Brainwashing, torture, getting killed, whatever.’
‘Not quite yet.’
‘George, let’s just get what we need from him,’ Cronin said. He was looking more and more nervous.
‘As Mr Douglas has pointed out, he is an animal that has caused us a lot of trouble. He needs to be taught an object lesson in power. He needs to understand his place in the scheme of things.’
Suicide implants had always struck me as tools of the religious fanatic but right now I was thinking what a good idea they were. If for no other reason than I wouldn’t have to listen to any more of this shit.
‘We want to know where the deserters are. We also want to know what you know about Earth’s defence plans.’ Rolleston was talking to me now.
I didn’t say anything but I went very cold. Mother and her people would move – it was standard operating procedure for them when people got captured – but I thought back to what the prime minister had told me about fortress Earth’s vulnerability. God was their only real hope against Demiurge, and fear and paranoia were diminishing that hope.
‘You’re going to have to get that the hard way,’ I told him.
‘It may interest you to know that you were betrayed by two of your own people,’ he said.
It made sense, but I tried not to react. I still felt angry. I hoped that whoever had got away would realise that we’d been betrayed and hunt down the traitors. It must have been two of Mother’s people. It was understandable. They had roots here. A lot of pressure could be brought to bear. Then something occurred to me.
‘Hold on a second. If we were betrayed, then why do you want to know where the resistance are?’ I asked.
Rolleston was too experienced an officer to give much away, but there was something there. Something he didn’t understand.
‘You know everyone breaks. You know that people can be broken in a very short amount of time using the variable time effects of a sense booth, and you have enough base cunning to understand that we can now break and slave people almost immediately.’
I thought back to Skirov tearing off gobbets of flesh on his pile of corpses, but he had known there was something wrong with him and wanted to die. It was pretty much the closest I had to hope. I wasn’t sure I was as strong as Skirov had been, however.
‘Then just fucking do it. Maybe you can make me like the sound of your voice as much as you seem to.’
‘Jakob, I can break you just as quickly without torture or other little tricks.’
I didn’t like this at all. Rolleston turned to Kring and nodded. Kring looked to Cronin. Cronin looked uncomfortable but finally nodded as well. Kring turned and left the room.
Moments later I could hear the sounds of a struggle. I watched Kring carry a gagged, bound, badly wounded but very angry Morag into the cell. He put her down and forced her to kneel. She stopped struggling when she saw me. Fear was written all over her face. I turned back to Rolleston.
‘Come on, not like this. Fucking brainwash me, torture me, but leave her out of this. We don’t deserve this. At the very least we’ve been worthy opponents.’ I was babbling nonsense – anything to delay the inevitable.
‘You are less than an insect to me. This is about understanding your place. This is about the fortune of your presence here before me. This is so you can understand something better. This is so you can admit your hypocrisy. You fight and struggle so hard to pull down what those above you have sought so hard to build, but you will betray it all for your own selfish wants and desires. Do you understand how pointless everything you have ever tried to do is?’ He turned to Kring. ‘Take her gag off.’
‘Go and fuck yourself, you cunts!’ Her anger made her Dundonian accent so broad it was almost impossible to understand. Fuck knows what the English and the Americans in the room thought she’d said.
‘I will have her gang-raped in front of your eyes. My understanding is that she is used to it.’
‘Don’t fucking listen to him, Jakob.’ I heard the resolve in her voice. I knew that she would be harder to break than me.
‘Please …’ I was begging now.
‘I will put you both into a sense machine and you will watch her being tortured for decades – do you understand me? You know me; you know I’ll do this.’
‘Fuck him! Jakob, listen to me. He can’t touch me. Don’t tell him anything.’
I couldn’t look at her. I was weeping. I knew R
olleston would do these things.
‘Not immediate enough for you?’ Rolleston asked. He drew his sidearm and held it at her head.
‘Fuck you!’ Morag screamed at him. I’m not sure I’d ever seen anyone so angry before. ‘Don’t you do it! Don’t you do it, Jakob!’
‘No … please … stop …’ I was sobbing as I begged. I wasn’t sure who I was begging to stop. Rolleston was starting to pull the trigger.
‘Jakob! Look at me! At least fucking look at me, you bastard!’ Morag screamed. I had to force my head round. She was scared now, but resigned, stronger than I could ever be as I tried to meet her fierce and earnest look. ‘Listen to me. It’s okay. If it was the other way around I would watch you die.’ I believed her. I broke.
If they were still alive, then I betrayed Mudge, Pagan, Cat, Merle, the whanau, all of the resistance and my entire fucking planet and everyone I’d ever known alive or dead. All the while Morag was crying, begging me to stop, not to say any more. It took me hours to sell out everything I knew. Rolleston listened to it all. I was numb with disgust at myself by the time I’d finished. I thought I was just a shell, that I couldn’t feel any more. Rolleston proved me wrong.
‘Do you understand now?’ he asked.
I nodded, neither understanding nor caring. It just seemed easier. Morag was a foetal ball on the stone floor, dry sobs racking her frame. Rolleston showed me that I could still feel. He shot Morag twice in the head.
I screamed. I screamed ‘No!’ over and over again. I screamed until my throat bled. I’m still screaming.
They left me in the room with her cooling corpse. It had been a large-calibre gun, though oddly quiet, suppressed. Her skull looked like a broken egg. I couldn’t take my eyes from it. I could see where technology had violated her flesh. I had the obscene urge to try and put her head back together.
I don’t think that leaving me in there with the corpse was planned sadism; I just think they had other things to do. They wanted to get on running their psychotic totalitarian regime. Eventually they came and took her away. They tidied up her remains like the sum result of her eighteen years of life was to make a mess.
When she was gone I stared at where she’d been. They’d reduced her to a stain. All I could do was stare. I hoped someone would come and kill me soon. Even brainwash me, make me someone, something else. At least I’d be on the winning side. You can’t fight something like this. There was no thought of revenge. There was nobody left to take revenge. There was just a shell staring at a stain on the ground wishing he could be switched off like the machine he was.
It’s amazing how long you can think of nothing when the alternative is watching a replay of your lover being double-tapped in the skull. Any attempt to try and think of her in better times just ended with the same two whispered shots. My lover reduced to a spray of matter on the wall. Except sometimes I managed to think about all the shitty things I’d said and done to her in the brief time we’d been together. Even then it still always ended with those two gunshots.
It felt like days. I had a clock and calendar on my IVD but I didn’t understand them any more. I occasionally drifted off into fitful sleep. I dreamt of fire and plains of black glass haunted by black-cloaked figures.
It took a while for me to realise there was someone else in the cell with me, she was so quiet and unobtrusive.
‘How did you know it was us?’ I asked. My voice was a rasping croak torn out of a damaged throat. ‘The traitors?’
I couldn’t even bring myself to feel anger towards whoever had betrayed us.
‘They didn’t say who you were, but I recognised you when I saw you. I know how you move.’
It was funny how the Grey Lady wasn’t frightening any more. She was just a force of nature, something you couldn’t fight against. She was one of the bad things that happened to you when you tried to fight the likes of Rolleston. She moved into view. Now she was looking at me. Her eyes must have been implants but they looked real. They were grey.
‘How’d you get her?’ I asked.
What fucking difference did it make? I closed my eyes, watched the replay again and opened them to find the Grey Lady looking at me, her head cocked to one side almost quizzically.
‘I deployed with two other enhanced members of the Black Squadrons, both ex-special forces. They engaged the others. One of them was killed. The other was badly wounded but captured Miss McGrath. It wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re asking.’ For some reason that seemed important to her.
We said nothing for a while. In other circumstances it would have been awkward.
‘Why do you do it?’ I asked, more out of something to say to break the silence than any real interest in anything. ‘Work for him, I mean.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘Are you fucking him?’
She said nothing but there was the slight flicker of something there. Like I’d hurt her. I was good at hurting women, but this was the Grey Lady.
‘Do you just want to become some biotech god?’ She shook her head. ‘Then why? Why do this to people?’
‘You do terrible things to people who you disagree with,’ she said.
‘It always feels like they started it.’
‘You turned on him,’ she said.
‘Because he was trying to get me to do something terrible.’
I couldn’t even find the strength to be angry.
‘Only in relative terms. It depends on your foresight.’
‘You people like your justifications, don’t you. Like to feel good about what you do.’ Again I delivered this with a completely flat voice. I didn’t really care.
‘I do it because I’m good at it.’
‘You don’t fancy doing it for someone … nicer?’ Even in my hollowed-out state it sounded weak.
‘You’re not standing where I’m standing.’
‘So you are fucking him?’
Again there was just a flicker of something. Sadness? Anger? Go on, piss off the Grey Lady. Actually that wasn’t a bad idea. Maybe she’d kill me. I’d been thinking a lot about the afterlives all the signalmen I’d ever worked with had told me about. But they were just hopeful fantasies, dreams of seeing Morag again.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she told me.
I sighed. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Because you smell.’ It was delivered with monotone honesty but the childishness of the statement from the Grey Lady’s lips made me laugh. It was a bitter laugh. It sounded like somebody choking. I was sure she was right. It felt like I’d been lying here for days. The only concession to hygiene was some kind of suction/cleaning device strapped uncomfortably over my groin and arse.
‘So?’
Even through the numbness and pain, the Grey Lady carefully and thoroughly giving me a sponge bath rated as deeply surreal. She was thorough. She even shaved me and put some kind of small machine in my mouth that brushed my teeth, then washed and deodorised my mouth.
‘You’re healing quickly,’ she said, examining my many wounds.
That’s the Themtech, I thought. That’s what makes Rolleston and me so close. I’d not been paying any attention to my wounds but there was a lot less red on my IVD and the pain was subsiding. I think I would have preferred being able to concentrate on physical pain.
When she was finished I asked, ‘Why did you do that?’
She didn’t answer. She leaned forward and kissed me. I snapped my mouth shut like a trap. She straightened up. Again there was a flicker of something there. Hurt?
‘What the fuck!’ I shouted.
I was feeling again. I’ll give them credit, these people liked to push the boundaries. She undressed. Her naked body was wiry, hard but surprisingly petite for a frame that contained so much power. She stood in front of me, somehow vulnerable.
‘Don’t you understand?’ I asked. Desperate.
Steely fingers calloused from years of martial arts practice touched me. She knew how and wh
ere to touch me.
‘Don’t …’ I begged.
My body was already starting to betray me. A single dry sob painfully racked my frame. She gracefully swung a leg over the couch I was strapped to and straddled me.
‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she said, sounding vulnerable as she looked down on me. It was the one thing she could have said. She leaned forward to kiss me. This time I let her. This time I reciprocated. She was real. It was something. It was more than the constant feeling of numbness.
When she left I wept. Now part of the cell seemed haunted. I couldn’t make my eyes go there. I had betrayed everything else, why not her? And still nobody would kill me. Was leaving me here wretched like this part of Rolleston’s punishment? I knew exactly what I was. Rolleston was wrong: I wasn’t an animal. That was too noble. I was scum. When sleep came it was fitful. I wanted my dreams to punish me.
It was a plain of black glass over fire. In the distance the jagged knife points of mountains. Protruding from the plains were obelisks like the stone cairns of the Highlands writ large and made of the same black glass. Alien-looking glyphs of orange light played over the surface of the obelisks. The landscape was somehow familiar to me. A black sun burned in the sky. I didn’t want to look at it. I couldn’t look at it. There was something terrible about it.
There was movement next to me. I swung around, the sensation of fear an almost welcome return of feeling. I was staring at the hood of a black-robed figure floating above the ground. The figure was moving towards me but didn’t seem to notice me. I stepped to one side and it ignored me as it floated past.
I looked down at myself. I was naked and whole. But naked and whole as the machine I was. All components of the weapon were present and correct. The glyphs from the obelisk seemed to be playing over my pale skin like a projection.
In the distance I could just about make out two flying creatures of some sort, high in the air. It looked like they were circling. Somehow they felt like judgement. I started to walk towards them.
I woke up on the couch. My face distended, pulled forward. Black liquid tendrils, like one of Them. Instinctive hard-wired fear and loathing at this. The tendrils extrude from my flesh, my mouth, my face, piercing part of it, part of me.
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