I planted a tiny kiss on his forehead.
He was plenty ready to talk, I reckoned.
He was shaking all over, his mouth stuck agape like a terrified but guilty fish that was covering for a coup. His cheeks were wet with tears. He had been crying from the internal strain of withholding the truth from me. When I let go of his lapels, he thudded to the floor and collapsed under nerveless legs. That dastardly manservant obviously had an incredible hold over this youth; maybe I had underestimated his Svengali-like sway over young minds such as this kid’s. I felt momentarily sorry for him, but I knew I could free him of his fearful oath of silence. He started whimpering like a criminal dog. He wouldn’t look at me.
He was a tough nut, all right. Half an hour of interrogation and he still hadn’t told me anything I could use against the Butler. It was a convincing act but I could smell guilt on him. Thick urine-y guilt. Nobody lets themselves be smacked around and hugged as much as he had without knowing something.
I took my seat and waited for him to take his. It took him a long time. I pulled my bag from under the table. Interrogation supplies, provided, as best they could muster, by the royal guard.
I drew out a small bag of coloured pastel sweets. I popped one in my mouth, opened the bag and placed it on my left. I looked at him and smiled encouragingly. I reached into the bag again and took out a small clear jar filled with Aplubian jumping funnel toothed fear spiders. I placed that on my right. I looked at him, frowned and shook my head gravely.
Good cop, bad cop in one package.
I had just revolutionized everything.
“Now then. Let’s take this from the top....” I said.
* * *
Chapter Nine!!!!!!!!!
Auspicious Meetings And New Heights
In which Space and the dastardly Prince finally meet, the clone Funkworthy begins his attack and the real Funkworthy gets one of his premonitions.
“Now then. Let’s take this from the top...” said my ‘teacher’, leaning over me.
So this was the meaning of re-education. There were, all in all, far fewer textbooks and multiple choice quizzes involved than I had hoped. It looked like at the first sign of direct rebellion, the worker would be taken away and broken down through a series of physical anguishes and instructional films about motivation, teambuilding and potential. If those didn’t break my will and make me obedient, then nothing would. Looking up at the blunt and bespectacled face of my teacher, I knew I couldn’t take much more schooling.
I could only take some measure of solace in being half done with my mission.
After I had been knocked out by the guards, I was bundled away into the processing unit of the security block. When I came to from the mighty punch, I found myself being dragged through what I assumed to be the interior of the sorting and education station. The drab grey walls and stench of despair bore out my hunch, as did the prevalence of security cameras and hatchet-faced men swinging batons in the most menacing gesture of nonchalance I could imagine. The first thing that greeted me as I opened my blurry eyes was, happily, my goal-or rather several dozen of them. Next to me was a line of slump-shouldered rebels following a red line on the floor of the corridor. One of the guards dragging me noticed I was awake and looking quizzically at the line.
“’At’s where you’ll end up, if’n ye don’t belt up, new lad. These sad sacks is on their way to the detention blocks.” He added helpfully, “Education didn’t take, did it, you slime?” He hollered at the procession of sallow faces. This was my chance, I thought. I fished around the inside of my mouth with my tongue and found my two little precious bundles there. I felt the flat button shape of the tracer and, as we neared the end of the line, slipped my hand from the grip of the guards and, collecting the button quickly, slapped it onto the underarm of one of the passing inmates-a young man who looked at me alarmed but who nodded his consent when I showed the thumb thrusting rebel hand gesture. Lucky I had happened upon a fellow rebel, I thought, hoping that my reservoir of luck had not dried up.
“Oi! Wot’s all this?” one of the guards behind me thundered, looking from my grasping hand to the underarm of the man who was to be my beacon. I panicked, thinking my desperate gambit to trace the fellow to the location of the detention blocks had been rumbled so quickly. The guard narrowed his eyes and looked between me and the prisoner.
“You… bleedin’ pervert!” he yelled and cuffed me round the ear before re-securing my arm.
“Wot?” enquired another guard, stationed at the door we were set to enter.
“Get this, we woz passing by the line down there and this one-feeling all ‘last chance’ and whatnot-grabs some lad here”, he said, pointing to his underarm. His companion looked goggle-eyed at me.
“Is that wot he’s into? Bloody weirdo.”
“I know! You read about people who like that kind of thing but still….”
I clearly really did not have a firm grasp of Aplubian anatomy, it seemed, but as I was dragged through the door I saw my imprisoned signal carrier trudging down the line, looking out at me, nodding defiantly. I wanted to flash the rebel handsign in triumph but stayed my hand and thumb. If these guards wanted to believe that my grab was some last ditch expression of perversity before the ominous education process, then that was fine by me.
My tracking mission complete, now it was just a matter of getting out of the re-education in one piece, I thought, as the guard manhandled me into the ‘education gurney’. The fellow grappled with me in the same manner that I suspected he tried on trousers in the morning-madly pulling in all directions at once, grunting and angry. He left after I was strapped down, and a mild-looking fellow wearing small glasses and a lab coat introduced himself and pulled up a seat next to a control panel. As he tinkered with it, I began to feel that my place of repose was a little too curious.
I had been secured into what could only be described as the lovechild of a
hospital bed and an angry cutlery drawer. It poked me like a sadistic robot lover that suspected me of infidelity. The gurney, guided by the control panel that my esteemed educator was manning, plunged deep within me as if it expected that there was a reservoir of oil or diamonds somewhere in me that should be tapped. Above me, several cheap screens staticked into life and began to show images of assembly lines, toil and other such indoctrination clichés. Alongside this were a bunch of subliminal messages- the usual slogans like ‘obey’ , ‘resistance is futile’ and ‘futile means bad’- but embarrassingly the low level of literacy of the slaves meant that the flashed ‘subliminal’ words had to be left up for a good few seconds so as to be registered at all. Indoctrination is one thing, but condescension can really sting.
It was after this first eternity of invasion, when the man leant over me and muttered, “Now then. Let’s take this from the top...” in a smooth menacing baritone that I knew that it was time for me to exit reality.
I clamped down on the ampoule of Aplubian painkillers that was balanced on my back teeth and a sharp acidic tang of chemicals hit my tongue. I would not be present for the rest of this torment, I decided, at least not in mind. I wondered dimly how long the drug would take to kick in.
I coughed lightly and waited for the pain in my exits and entrances to die down as the soporific effects of the compound overcame my natural defences. And waited. And then I waited more, feeling all too normal. The ‘teacher’, who was fiddling with the screen positioned above my head that was showing images of obedience and hard labour, sighed and muttered and then began powering up the gurney again. I really began to wonder about the quality of the chemical I had been given.
The ‘teacher’ leaned over me again and started speaking to me about the fiscal benefits of slave labour and the moral strengths of subservience. I sighed inwardly and agreed wanly with his words. I supposed I would have to engage with this charade and pretend to be dumbly won round by whatever the man proposed, and just hope that my apparent unconditional surren
der would let me out of there quickly and with no more pain. I ran my tongue around the inside of my mouth, searching for traces of the drug that might kickstart the effect. Nothing. I grimaced and looked up into the implacable face of my tormentor.
“We want to help you Winston”, he said, before suddenly checking his clipboard and correcting himself. “Oh, I’m sorry-Tito. Winston’s my next patient”, he apologized distractedly.
What was curious, I thought, was that he had positioned a small plenian junt monkey on his head at some point. Was this a part of the indoctrination? Perhaps he wanted to throw me off balance and make me question my perceptions, opening the door to a new way of thinking. That would explain the monkey and the name game. These were devious people, I thought. Maybe I had underestimated them.
“You must think that we are here to punish you, Tito. Well, that is just not true.” He sat down next to me and took on a paternal air, as if he was taking some time to correct a difficult pupil. He had, at some point in the last few seconds placed an accordion in front of his mouth. Another odd mind game. Couldn’t figure out why his ears were made of snakes though. . “Rebellion is a sickness, you must understand, and I must make you well. Do you want to be made well?” He said calmly through the accordion.
“I do”, I said, ignoring the fact that he was letting a tiny river of ants skateboard out of his ears.
“That’s good”, he said as the top of his skull opened up and a small robot peeked out and giggled mischievously. “We are here to remake you, remake you as a better worker. That is re-education.”
A terrible thought gripped me as the ceiling turned into rainbows that shimmied down towards me: what if all of this was being caused by the ampoule of pain medication? It could easily be the case, and it really would explain a lot about this latest illogical swerve in the indoctrination process and the physical makeup of the universe. I looked down at my strapped-in body and realized that I was a river made out of music. That, I was almost entirely certain, had not been the case a few seconds previously. I gulped. Was I really going to sit through an indoctrination while this was happening? There was tripping, then there was stumbling, and then there was this-which was tumbling down a hill that was made out of fluorescent wolves.
“I want to learn, I want to get this done, but I want to get it done soon. I am feeling… off”, I insisted.
“All in good time”, my teacher intoned calmly, “but you must understand the methodology. Obedience is not enough. Unless someone is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? You must understand power. Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
“The Aplubian command knows best”, he assured me, resettling his spectacles on his nose in a gesture I found oddly endearing. “For instance, if I was to hold up four fingers and ask you to tell me how many there were, then you could count for yourself and that would be fine.” He raised his hand up as he said this, but I was distracted by his palm which had grown a woman’s mouth that was screaming racial epithets at me in a language I was only just discovering.
“You understand?” He asked.
“Y-y-y-yes!” I replied.
“Good. But if I was to leave my hand the way it is now and tell you that the Aplubian command has informed me that I am holding up five fingers, well, how many fingers are there?”
He waggled his hand at me, which, as far as I could tell was now a typewriter made of my own fears.
“How many fingers, Tito?”
“Um… eleventy? I can see a finger and a lump of pure jealousy and then one thing which seems like a ball of time… except now I can see that time is really just another expression of love but-”
A shock of pain ran through me. I looked around and my teacher had his hand on a large dial. “That was seven. This dial goes up to eleven. I want you to learn, I really do, but you have to want to believe in what I tell you. Now, how many fingers am I holding up?” he asked, his hand hovering over the dial.
I looked at what was in front of my face. It was an enormous black hole made out of hot jazz, firing out a near constant stream of howling owls.
“I see… five? Five fingers?”
“No! You have to believe! The process cannot go ahead if I do not believe that that is what you actually see. Now, let’s start over. What do you see? Speak to me honestly.”
“I see a robot giving birth to a cow made of flames. Now it’s trying to breastfeed it some binary milk but the cow is turning into the face of an old god”, I said to him, dreamily but quite honestly.
He looked at me for a long time, with melting eyes, and I heard-or thought I heard-a door open behind me or somewhere in the space-time continuum that ran through us all.
“How’s it going in here, doc?” asked an enormous lizard.
Somebody else sighed and took off their glasses. “This torture’s taking ages. Go get me my nipple pliers and the jump leads.”
I thought about what a terrible phrase that was and thought to take a note of how spectacularly bad it made me feel. It was perhaps my penultimate real thought. Lastly, I thought of Space and wondered where he was, before I realized that he was inside me because we are all one.
“I’m warning you, my arms are getting tired.”
This was a cunning lie, but while holding the subject by both ankles over a chasm, it is important to appear less in control then I actually always am. Due to naturally great genes, a strict exercise regime, sheer mental fortitude and an awful lot of practice, holding people over vast drops for the purposes of questioning was as familiar and easy to me as piloting an exploding freighter out of a black hole while fighting a cyborg.
The man at the end of my arm just shrieked at me.
I let my arms dip a little.
“Oh, dear me! It seems even my vice-like grip is slipping. If only I had an incentive not to drop you to your doom!”
The questioning of my second suspect was going fantastically well.
The Royal Guard had seemed reluctant to tell me the location of the highest point in the palace, and they were even more dubious when I took the next candidate for questioning out for what I assured them was a ‘casual informal stroll with little to no chance of anyone dangling over fatal chasms’. My masterful acting carried the ruse, and they never for a second considered that I might be planning on doing the very thing I said I would not! Obviously they were unaccustomed to playing with a mental gamesman such as myself.
By the time I walked the chap up the fifty-eight flights of stairs and onto the Palatial Viewing Balcony, he had worked up an awful lot of questions and suspicions about me and my techniques. This would never do. I had to gain his trust in order to grab his legs and haul him over the precipice.
I invited him to sit on the wall and chat while we took in the view, and then as casually as I could, I sprung my fiendish trap.
“My word!” I remarked. “If you don’t have the most handsome ankles I’ve ever seen then you can butter my balls and call me a Frenchman! May I see those delectable joints more closely? I admit that I’m something of a connoisseur.”
Swept along by my stream of flattering words, he let me grasp his ankles, and the snare was completed. In a fluid movement, I stood up and pulled his ankles entirely out from under him and commenced a quite thorough dangling.
I found the unique power balance of the situation to be most conducive to proper interrogation or wedding proposal, but I must say that the Aplubian physiology must have some strange quirk to it where the natural fear and candour responses are replaced by the rather less useful bafflement and outrage I was seeing so often in the course of my investigation. Rather than confessing everything, he spent a full ten minutes screaming for the authorities and accusing me of being a dangerous madman.
Still, one can only scream at the man holding you over a seventeen-mile sheer drop for so
long before self-preservation kicks in. He was cracking under my expert lifting and holding.
“Please! I don’t know anything!” he claimed mendaciously.
“Then explain one thing to me: why am I dangling you over a chasm? If you weren’t a suspect, this wouldn’t even be happening. Logic!”
“Is this about my brother?” he cried. Now we were getting somewhere.
“Go on… your brother: butler-ish kind of chap, is he?”
“No! No! I thought you knew. The guardsman named Eduardo is my kin. He has been cursing your name since you arrived, accusing you of all kinds of madness and plots. He claims you are the killer.”
I remembered the fellow; he was a little keen with his sword hand and quick with the stink eye. He had peered disdainfully over other people’s shoulders at me on a couple of recent occasions.
“I assumed this was revenge for his words about you, Captain.”
“Pah! You think rumour affects me? I am no stranger to jealous jeers and the uneducated masses often misunderstandimate my words.”
“So… with all that behind us, you can let me up now?”
“You still haven’t confessed!” I cried, suddenly a little frustrated.
His scream was as piercing as it was annoying.
“I know nothing!” he insisted, after he was through.
“Maybe you’ll know something if I drop you to your death, good sir.” I reasoned.
“I really, really, really would not.”
“How do we know if we don’t test it? I’ve been assured that many criminals scream their confessions with their terminal breaths. There have been studies, studies in journals. Why, to let you go now would probably be the quickest way to the truth. Unless you have something to tell me now...?”
He looked up at me and seemed to consider his situation anew.
The Court of Crusty Killings: A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure Page 10