by K. T. Hanna
Something cold sat on my forehead, lulling me into a sense of peace. But the sparks didn’t let it last long as they sizzled and pinched against the insides of my body, boiling the bile where it sat in my stomach, tempting it to rise up.
Trying to control its uprising by calming myself didn’t work. The electricity was angry, wild, and I couldn’t do a damned thing.
I sat up so quickly that the room spun, and the pain shot through my head, my arms, my legs. Moving hadn’t been the best idea, but I didn’t want to remain lying down. Yet I couldn’t physically control my limbs. I fell back down, frustrated as the pain sizzled throughout my body. Hot, yet cold, with an ache I probably couldn’t medicate. What the fuck was this?
I did try to warn you.
Come again? What the hell did you warn me about? My body suddenly felt cold, like I should know what SC was talking about. It sat at the tip of my brain, mocking me, calling out to me, teasing me.
The pause was infuriating, and it was only then that I realized the background noise around me. People moved in and out, trying their best to be quiet. Then I remembered entering the apartment. If you could call it that. Perhaps nosediving into the living area as my limbs decided to stop obeying my commands.
Yeah, that about summed it up.
I did warn you. I told you to turn back.
Wait. You mean turn back and go where those weird things wanted to claw my guts to bits?
Claw?
Their hands. They had hooked nails that dissolved when the sun hit them and blood red eyes, and smoky bodies that screamed at me with no noise. Those fuckers. My head hurt just trying to think about this. But I had to, for the sake of my little friend who apparently only chose to see what it wanted to when chastising me.
Those students were completely normal. Why are you making things up?
There was no hint of teasing, no hidden joke. It was impatient under the strained tone, irritated with me.
I’m not making things up.
You left your post on campus only having gathered twenty-nine of the necessary forty-seven identities. Your notes on their topics of conversation lacked detail and demonstrated wavering attention. You did not complete your mission. You were given the chance to return and chose not to. This is your punishment.
I didn’t quite grasp what it was saying at first. But the spasms in my limbs, the pain in my head, all of it slowly came together. This was punishment for not completing a mission. It was my first transgression and, as such, not death? I couldn’t help but feel shell-shocked. Questions ran rampant through my mind, hounding me to ask them.
Why was this my punishment, and what was it supposed to entail? How long was this going to last? Was it more of a warning than anything else? Last but not trivial at all, how had it done this to me?
But all of those words fell away when my eyes finally gave into my cajoling and opened to reveal Dr. Leigh Caroline checking my pulse. White curtains hung around me, denoting that I had probably been taken to the emergency room. That was going to put a hole in my meager savings. I might have been on Mom and Dad’s insurance, but I still had a deductible. Ambulances were rarely covered.
“You really should listen when it warns you,” she said, her voice low and her eyes on the chart in front of her.
I wanted her to say more. Her silence weighed heavily on my already pounding skull. The spasms wouldn’t let me speak out loud yet.
Finally, after what seemed like an age, she stood up and peered over her glasses at me. “That was foolish. You can’t just leave an assignment like that. You’re lucky your friends thought to bring you here.”
Very lucky. Although UPenn’s hospital was close to our place, Mercy Hospital was too. My ending up here was probably entirely coincidence. I’d be happier about it if I could get my thoughts straight. If I could manage to think for longer than the pain allowed me to.
I wanted to speak, but my body spasmed again, and my teeth clenched forcing me to swallow the words I’d have preferred to yell.
She scribbled down a few things on the chart and finally looked at me, her lips pressed into a firm line as she pulled out a device from her pocket. This one was slim, and appeared to be made of seamless silver metal. She ran it across my forehead, and then down my arms. It emitted a low rumble as it dragged its blue light across my skin. “There’s no arguing against it. If it tells you to do something. Do it. Don’t argue. No matter what.”
I wasn’t sure, but it felt like she was trying to get a point across to me, one that she didn’t want to say out loud. I tried to study her face, but the spasms kept making my vision swim. She appeared to be studying the results her scan thing gave her. Had she told me to keep on even if something was threatening me? Did the system just not care that something had been about to attack me?
Considering I should have been dead, and it didn’t yet have much invested in me, I could see why I’d be a necessary sacrifice, but I didn’t understand why it acted like it hadn’t seen them. Dr. Caroline was still looking at me, her green eyes laser sharp.
“I’m not telling you this to berate you. I’m trying to help you understand the situation you’re in. I’ve been there, even if it was a while ago. You’re here for a reason. That reason is to assist the program in every way you can. With everything it asks of you despite what your personal convictions might be.” She patted me on the shoulder, hope that I understood her, that I wasn’t going to be difficult reflected in her eyes. “I’ve adjusted your severity to coincide with the type of infraction. Your power is…”
She paused, pursing her lips and glanced at the silver thing again. “It fluctuates severely.”
No shit, I thought, but did my best to nod. I wasn’t sure I managed to get the sentiment across.
The doctor smiled. “Sorry. It takes a bit to get the hang of it, but once you’re used to it, it’s not such a bad thing.”
I tried to nod again, ignoring the stabs of pain that made their way down my spine with the effort. “How long?”
The words came out of my mouth mostly garbled, but from the frown on her face she tried her best to figure them out. A brief smile tugged at her lips and she answered. “Just a couple of days. Now rest up. You’re in good hands here.”
She left my cubicle, and I tried not to let the shock wash over me. For a minor screw up because I didn’t want to be eaten alive by ghouls, I’d be in pain for the next two days. I didn’t want to be dead, but right then, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be alive either.
The beeping of machines surrounded me, but none of them looked anything like I’d seen in hospitals before. I wasn’t sure if I was even in a real hospital room. What if they’d put me in the basement, left me to rot down there in my own pain and self-inflicted electrical shock?
“What the fuck is this supposed to achieve?” I yelled out the words as loud as I could, or at least I tried to. My teeth rarely stopped clenching from the shocks that ran through my body, and the pain had receded to a dull rhythm in the back of my mind.
It’s supposed to remind you that while you are alive, you are subject to the assignments given to you by the Second Chance system.
Gee. Thanks.
You sound disgruntled.
Really? I tried counting to ten, but in the end didn’t care and just let loose a tirade of thoughts that had been plaguing me since I ended up in here.
SC brought me back to life, for their purposes. I didn’t ask to be brought back to life. SC chose to, that’s not on me. So acting as if I should be grateful for something I didn’t ask for is obnoxious. Especially knowing then what I know now, I would never have chosen a second lifetime if it was one of servitude.
SC was quiet. I imagined that I’d hurt its robotic feelings or whatever it was, but I couldn’t even convince myself of that. This whole debacle made me want to scream. And my yelled question earlier should have at least brought
someone in, if indeed they had anyone in this ward. It led me to believe that I wasn’t in a ward, that I was in some out of the way place where only Doctor Caroline and her staff had access to me.
How many hours had passed? I didn’t even want to contemplate the couple of days that I had ahead of me.
We did not realize the point you just brought up. Giving people a Second Chance at life was something we assumed would be welcomed by the individual.
Yeah? Well, assumptions are the mother of all fuck ups.
It was one of my favorite sayings, and the system didn’t seem to know how to deal with it. I let it stew in its lonely algorithms while I tried to concentrate on sourcing the origin of the pain firing through all of my nerve endings. Maybe if I found it, I could somehow stop it? If someone touched me right then, I thought I’d scream.
You have given us a lot to think about. As appreciation for this, your punishment has been reduced.
What? A glimmer of hope lingered in the back of my mind.
We will reduce your disciplinary lesson by twenty-four hours. Thank you for your feedback.
Its presence vanished. As much as I knew it was still there, I also knew that talking to it right now would be entirely counter-productive. It’d been almost two weeks and I still knew relatively nothing about the program.
Has it really only been two weeks? I wasn’t sure I could imagine life without my ability anymore. Would I even want to?
Idly, I activated the visual information behind my eyelids. Except every time I spasmed, the damn thing flickered. Turning my power against me seemed an inordinately cruel form of punishment. Yet I understood it. I even—sort of—admired it.
Though my power simply seemed to want to escape the confines of my body. It was angry, if that was even possible.
Sleep beckoned me in the moments between convulsions, but each time another shock shook me, my brain woke up. Why had it not seen those shadows? Maybe it was because even though it knew they were there, it didn’t consider them a threat. That meant the system, again, knew a lot more than I knew about these things. If it did, why wouldn’t it share them with me?
It could have told me not to worry, that they were remnants of my death and unable to hurt me. Yet, I doubted that, because two of them had attacked me previously.
In the interests of keeping their protégés alive, I’d have thought they would help us survive by arming us with knowledge. I didn’t feel like I knew more, or that I absorbed the order of the world any faster than I used to.
Eventually exhaustion overtook me, and I dreamed of electric beetles stinging me half to death while I ran from them. Their leader bug lorded over all of us, laughing as it reached out its pincers to grip me by the arm.
Only I woke up to find Dr. Caroline there, taking yet more blood, to perform more tests.
“Hey,” she said as I leaned back down into the pillows as if I’d never sat up in the first place.
“Hey.” I responded through my clenched teeth that were probably locked that way for eternity now.
“I’ve been informed that you gave the system unexpected feedback, and it has thus decided to cut your sentence down a little. There’s a first time for everything. Congrats.” She smiled while she checked my vitals.
“Yeah.” Congrats to me on a whole twenty-four-hour respite. It couldn’t come soon enough, but damned if I didn’t want it to come right now.
She frowned as she examined the rest of me. Her light brown hair was streaked with grey, and a strand of it kept falling down in front of her eyes. She flicked it away, irritably, before whipping out her little scannydo. I had a sneaking suspicion that it was what controlled my ability. Not the SC system, but that thing in her hands. If I’d had any decent control over my body, I would have snatched it off her.
“It’s a good thing you got it commuted. I’m not sure why, but the spasms aren’t agreeing with your system, and your ability is almost…” She checked the chart in her hands and adjusted a few dials on the machine that was monitoring me. “Honestly, it’s sort of feral.”
“Good thing,” I ground out, having managed a little more finesse when speaking now. “Because...e-electric sh-shocks u-u-sually w-work so w-well.”
Damn. It took forever to stutter out the words and express what I was trying to say. I was so tired from attempting to speak. Relief washed over me when she smiled.
“Good, you’re fine. If you can be sarcastic while undergoing this, I don’t think they broke you.” Notating another few things down on her clipboard, she flashed me a smile. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Try to rest.”
Another shock made me clench up. Didn’t break me? She spoke of it so casually before ducking out of the room. How many people had it broken before? Not to mention that I wanted to know what the hell they’d done to disable my resistance to electrical shock. I knew I’d had it. With the amount of power I’d exuded several times over the last weeks, I should have fried.
Of course I’d try to rest—and fail abysmally at doing so. Power zinged through me with nowhere to go. Maybe some of the stuff she’d been doing drained some of the excess, but not enough. Right now, I could probably power Times Square in New York City. I didn’t want to risk touching anything lest it burst into flames with the static.
It took a while, but finally I fell into a troubled sleep. In it, dark, shadow filled monsters chased me around. Electrical storms raged inside of the clouds that made them whole, red eyes gazed at me while their claws reached out toward my face.
And when they opened their mouths to devour me, strikes of lightning shot out, trying to sizzle me alive.
Punishment made me angry. Maybe angrier was more accurate. I was in the worst mood ever when I finally got home on Sunday afternoon. The house was empty, which suited me just fine. The doctor had let me sleep after the shocks stopped because of how little I’d had while undergoing what I’d like to refer to as torture. Yep. Angry had become my new way of life. I wasn’t sure if I was okay with that.
With little more than two weeks left until the State Championships, I hoped I could recover in time.
I wasn’t hungry, not even a little bit, but I remembered promising Neale that I’d eat properly and maintain mass. Calories were important for a long-distance runner. I grabbed two apples and made a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches to take into my room. My stock was running low. I’d have to duck to the shops this week. But I wanted to delay that, because it meant talking to Orion, for which I was not yet ready.
The bread was just this side of its used by date, and definitely not fresh. I ripped it apart with my teeth anyway, pretending it was the Second Chance system’s punishment module.
You agreed to and accepted that punishment could occur when you agreed to the ToS.
I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it, but I think it sounded slightly offended. Of course, I never imagined that I’d be forced to endure electric fucking shock therapy.
What else would it entail? Electricity is your skill. Punishment must fit the method.
I don’t know. Maybe not get paid? Get fined? Move up in ranks slower? Something not torturous?
I gave up trying to reason with it. Whatever it was, that voice in my head wasn’t human. It probably wasn’t even a machine. Could be an alien from a different dimension totally screwing with me for all I knew.
We are not an alien.
That was definitely indignation. I couldn’t help the smile. Maybe it was taking on human characteristics after all. Could have fooled me.
You are...teasing us?
Maybe.
I took another bite out of my sandwich, proceeding to gobble it up faster than before while the system contemplated my comments.
We are not alien. We are not human. We were created to keep you safe from yourselves.
That was a hell of a lot more information than I’d received before,
and I buried my thoughts as actively as I could while outwardly chewing just as slowly as I had before.
So you’re sort of protectors of the human race?
Of earth and the human race. We intervene with the sole purpose to keep human beings safe.
How?
How?
I paused, trying to think of a way to phrase it that it might actually give me a legitimate answer. How do you determine what events or items require intervention?
Simple calculations. We extrapolate from data, seismic shifts, and dimensional tears what the future will bring and take steps to prevent catastrophes.
So the items we filch, the meeting I bungled, those all were check points?
That is information I’m unable to divulge. I might have pushed my parameters already.
And the deathly silence that followed meant it really had taken leave of the conversation. By now I could tell when it did that. Still, it was a hell of a lot more information than I’d been able to glean from the very unhelpful interface and tutorial.
I was beginning to suspect that SC leaned more toward the chaotic neutral.
SC went quiet after that conversation. Its penchant for swapping between I and we indicated that it might have an overarching hierarchy or something. Sort of like a command center. Maybe each individual section could act independently to a certain extent and within guided parameters. If mine’s reactions were anything to go by, it had said too much.
Despite everything, I hoped it didn’t get into too much trouble for doing so. It was my fault it had risen to the bait. Sort of anyway. I couldn’t talk to anyone else about it except for Dr. Caroline, so it was nice to have the voice in my head to confide in. And wow, was I glad that people couldn’t hear my train of thought, because that was some questionable processing right there.
Still. It felt lonely. Powerful, but lonely. Which, of course, I combated by running. Running to school. Running at school. Running home.