The Book That THEY Do Not Want You To Read, Part 2

by Andy Ritchie

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied, looking at the strong line of my jaw, the new shape to my eyes, the slim nose, the slightly wider mouth, ‘it looks fine.’

  Actually, I did at the time think that it looked rather well. I suddenly had the look of a young Liam Neeson, perhaps with just a hint of Jude Law thrown in for good measure!

  ‘I’m assuming that, once all this is over, you’ll be able to change me back.’

  Once all this is over.

  Was this ever really going to be ‘over’?

  What exactly did I mean by ‘over’, anyway?

  Did I mean ‘back to normal’? If I did, then it would never be ‘over’ because nothing would ever be ‘normal’ again.

  My brief moment of philosophical musing was interrupted by Tukaal’s reply.

  ‘I have saved your original settings on my SICPad. I’ll also make sure I do a couple of back-ups of those settings when I can get hold of some memory cards or memory sticks.’

  It was a little bit weird to hear the way you look...or more precisely, the way you used to look, being referred to as ‘settings’.

  ‘I suppose when I change back to what I should look like, it’s going to hurt just as much.’

  If I was hoping for a crumb of comfort from Tukaal, I was disappointed.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, nodding his head with unnerving enthusiasm.

  ‘I guessed as much.’

  The next stage of my transformation was by far and away the easiest and most comfortable...which was a surprise, seeing as this involved another needle being shoved right into my brain stem through the back of my neck.

  As with the injections in the face, Tukaal’s preparations involved cracking open a nanite pod into a bowl and then drawing the nanites into the syringe. He only used one nanite pod this time instead of four, which was something for which I was grateful as I was uncomfortable enough at the idea of any nanites crawling around my brain, let alone an entire battalion of the things.

  As before, he dabbed a point at the back of my neck with the antiseptic/anaesthetic cotton-bud-thing and, much to my relief, I didn’t feel the needle start to enter.

  ‘Now, Jeth, you need to keep extraordinarily still for me,’ Tukaal then decided to say.

  If I had been made of stone I couldn’t have been more motionless.

  ‘Now these nanites won’t be entering the brain itself, I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear.’

  I wondered about nodding, but thought better of it.

  ‘Their purpose is to simply add interference to the electrical and magnetic emissions associated with the electrical activity in your brain. Here on Earth the technology is very crude...EEG, MEG...but on other Confederated worlds, technology of this nature is significantly more advanced. If Mendelssohn has access to it, and if he’s fitted it to URG Trackers or drones, then it would not be inconceivable for them to be able to pinpoint you from a few miles away...there...that’s done.’

  It was only when he said ‘that’s done’ that I realised that I’d been holding my breath every since he had dabbed the back of my scalp with the antiseptic.

  I exhaled with an air of thankfulness.

  Stage 3.

  Just uncomfortable really, having nanites placed at the back of my throat and then not being able to swallow until they have managed to find and burrow their way into my vocal cords where, Tukaal cheerily informed me, they would make small but important changes to the length, thickness and tension. Those changes should, he said, be able to fool any speaker recognition systems which may be used to try to track us by ensuring that the fundamental frequency...blah blah...mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients...blah fucking blah...vector quantisation...blah blah...gaussian mixture models...blah and blah and blah.

  To be honest, I didn’t really listen to much of what he was saying; not only because I wasn’t really interested, but also because I spent several minutes after the nanites had done their work going:

  ‘do re me fa so la te do’

  like an over-enthusiastic opera singer; that is until Tukaal pointed out, rather cuttingly, that the changes he had made would affect the way I spoke, and unfortunately could do nothing to help the way I sang.

  Git.

  [Collator’s Note: In a number of voice notes which JP later makes, his voice does indeed sound different, but not, I have to admit, significantly so.]

  Stage 4.

  Not at all painful.

  Not even uncomfortable.

  Just very, very embarrassing.

  Tukaal handed me 8 nanite pods.

  ‘Now, this is something which I’m pretty certain you are going to want to do yourself.’

  I stared down at the eight small pill-shaped objects in my hand.

  ‘You need to break one of these in your hand and then rub it on the skin. I’ve already programmed them to target your apocrine sweat glands and alter your secretion’s protein levels. All you need to do is put them in the right place.’

  ‘What...here, now?’

  ‘I’ll turn around if you’re shy,’ Tukaal replied, smiling.

  ‘If you’re asking me if I want you watching whilst I rub mercury around my tackle and up and down my butt-crack and so on, well, yes, I would prefer it if you didn’t watch, thank you very much!’

  Tukaal chuckled as he turned away. I called him a ‘bastard’ as he did so.

  The contents of the first pod went into my right ear, pod No.2 my left ear. No.3 I shared between my left and right nipples, whilst No.4 went around my belly button. Nos.5 and 6 went under my armpits and No.7 went on my balls and the base of my knob.

  Last, but not least, No.8 went around my bumhole.

  When I’d finished, Tukaal, rather thoughtfully, passed a box of cleansing wipes back from the driver’s seat where he had been waiting for me to finish.

  ‘These were in the pocket of the door.’

  I took them and wiped my hands before I dressed.

  ‘Okay, those nanites are up and running,’ Tukaal confirmed as he clambered into the back of the van, ‘so that just leaves us with the eyes.’

  The eyes.

  Fuck, how I was dreading this.

  All the time I was applying those nanites to the various parts of my person I was desperately trying to think of ways I could avoid what Tukaal was insisting needed to be done.

  I could wear sunglasses all the time, keep my eyes hidden, make a conscious effort to avoid looking at cameras...

  I could perhaps wear some contact lenses with a different eye colour and pattern on them...

  I could simply stay in the van forever and not venture outside; that way, I’d never be seen by anything or anyone...

  But none of those options really made sense. After all, if I wasn’t prepared to go the whole hog and do everything I could to prevent myself from being located, then why did I bother doing any of the other stuff in the first place?

  Yes, I could wear sunglasses.

  Yes, I could make a point of avoiding looking at cameras.

  Yes, I could wear contact lenses.

  Yes, I could stay in the van.

  But what would be the point?

  Constantly wearing sunglasses and avoiding cameras? That sort of shifty behaviour was probably more likely to get me noticed.

  Wearing contact lenses? They may mask my irises, but would do nothing about my retinas.

  Staying in the van forever? What sort of existence was that?

  If I did what Tukaal said then I wouldn’t have to be constantly watching, always on edge, forever worrying that I may, just may forget to put the glasses on, may turn the wrong way and look straight into a peering lens or, worse still, straight into one of these URG Tracker-things that could see right past my contact lenses and deep into my soul.

  Look at what Tom Cruise went through in Minority Report to avoid retinal scanners; he changed his eyes completely!

  Doing anything less than Tukaal had suggested simply wasn’t worth the risk.

  After all, I’d already end
ured having my face melted. How much worse could having nanites injected into my eyeballs be?

  A lot worse, as it happens.

  A lot, lot worse!

  Tukaal was as gentle as he could be and took as many precautions as possible. He put drops of the antispectic/anaesthetic into the corners of my eyes in the hope that it would dull the pain as it had with my skin, but it didn’t.

  And even though I was looking up and right as far as I could in an effort to avoid the sight of the needle coming closer and closer and closer, I was still able to see it in my peripheral vision, getting bigger and bigger and...

  I cried out when I felt it touch my eyeball, and I cried out some more when I felt the momentary increase in pressure before it started to pierce the outer tissue of the eye itself (or sclera, as Tukaal had helpfully informed me!)

  I whimpered as I felt the needle slide deeper and deeper into the eyeball proper, certain that it wasn’t going to stop, certain that it was going to go through the back of my eye socket and right into the heart of my brain.

  As a pain, it was so, so different from the face-melting agony of earlier because, whereas that had been so...spread-out, so unfocused, this was the exact opposite.

  This pain here was so incredibly concentrated. It was as if all the agony was flowing through just one, single nerve, and that nerve, so alone in its suffering, was screaming for all it was worth and in so doing was making the noise of millions.

  And as the agony continued, I could feel a wave of despair flooding over me, forcing me to moan pitifully. It was despair born out of knowledge, out of knowing that although this bout of pain would soon be at an end, there must inevitably be another bout, equally agonising.

  I did, after all, have two eyes.

  Tukaal, I think, sensed that I was approaching the limits of what I was able to endure because he did not pause between extracting the needle from my right eye and thrusting it into my left.

  I can’t remember what I thought for those few terrible seconds...I’m not even sure I thought of anything at all...I just wanted an end, to something, to everything...

  I felt I was teetering on the brink of an abyss, every microsecond of agony pushing me closer and closer to the edge until, as the pain became unendurable, I felt myself pitch forward and begin to fall into the waiting blackness.

  Then I heard Tukaal’s voice...

  ‘That’s it, Jeth, the nanites are in. You can relax now.’

  ...and the yawning abyss simply dissolved into nothingness.

  I didn’t just relax.

  I sobbed with relief.

  And it wasn’t just a half-hearted sniffle, either, this was a full-blooded, let-it-all-out, purge-the-soul bout of sobbing, the sort of sobbing that comes from very, very deep within and which, once released, cannot be constrained or stifled and must be allowed to run its course...because this was not just about pain. This was also about fear, this was also about anger, this was also about frustration, this was also about loss.

  It was a raging mega-tsunami of emotions bursting forth, emotions that I had held manfully in check ever since that moment when I had realised that Tukaal’s arrival had dragged me into a world that I could not possibly understand, that I was totally unprepared for, and from which there was never going to be any way back.

  I suddenly felt that I could not cope with this.

  I realised that I was completely and utterly out of my depth.

  I may have tried to kid myself that I had some kind of say in what was going to happen to me in the hours, the days and the weeks ahead, but, in reality, I was grossly ill-equipped, both in terms of intellect and in terms of willpower, to influence the world of Tukaal and Mendelssohn and THEM.

  I was just an insignificant piece of flotsam, floating on the waters of despair, losing the battle against the crashing waves of dark emotion that flung me relentlessly against the unforgiving rocks of my inevitable demise, again and again and again.

  Before we had started this transformation, I had told myself that I was prepared to do anything to stay alive. But now, as I sat with my head in my hands, heart-rending sobs shuddering through my entire body, I wasn’t so sure.

  Why?

  Because, deep down inside, I felt that all the pain, the suffering and the anguish I had just endured, and all the pain, the suffering and the anguish that I knew was yet to come, would all be in vain.

  I was a dead man walking.

  It was pointless now to believe otherwise.

  Yes, I could change my face.

  Yes, I could keep running and running and running.

  Yes, I may even stay alive for a while.

  But, in the end, my luck was bound to run out...and, if it didn’t, any appetite I may have had for a life like this, a life forever lived under a constant and oppressive cloud of potential capture, torture and death, would be quickly exhausted...and then I would be finished anyway.

  And if it was all so inevitable, and if it was all going to be worse than that which I had already endured, then why would I ever want it to go on?

  Better, surely, to end it now.

  I hope that was the lowest point.

  If it wasn’t, then...well, let’s just say that there won’t be any more long, rambling descriptive essays like this.

  I had stared into the abyss and I had pondered, for just a moment, the thought of plunging into it.

  But I had decided against it...not because I had suddenly thought of something that gave me hope...not because I was overcome by the need for vengeance...not because I was filled with a sense of divine purpose...

  I had just decided that I didn’t want to give up, that I was still prepared to do whatever it took to stay alive...at least, for now.

  And so I stopped sobbing and took yet more deep breaths, lifted my head out of my hands and opened my eyes.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Tukaal asked, his voice heavy with concern.

  ‘Like someone has just shoved needles into my eyes,’ I answered dryly.

  For a moment, I found it hard to focus on Tukaal’s face, and I found myself at first squinting and then opening my eyes wide in an effort to bring clarity to my sight.

  ‘Something wrong?’ Tukaal enquired.

  ‘Everything’s a bit blurry,’ I replied, with surprising calmness given the fact that I now had things inside my eyeballs and someone else was controlling what they were doing in there.

  ‘I guess that’s just a reaction to having the nanites introduced...’

  ‘You guess...? What do you mean, ‘you guess’?’

  Tukaal coughed...and it sounded like a nervous cough, the sort of cough which does little to inspire confidence.

  ‘Let’s give it a couple of minutes...’

  And so we gave it a couple of minutes.

  Thankfully, a couple of minutes was all that was needed and, to my enormous relief (and, I guess, to Tukaal’s as well), the sharpness began to return until, eventually, I was able to see clearly once again.

  ‘You now have a different retinal pattern than you had before,’ Tukaal informed me, sounding very pleased with himself.

  I didn’t find having a new retinal pattern anything to get particularly excited about, I have to admit, though I did find that Tukaal’s next suggestion somewhat intriguing.

  ‘How would you like to see the colour of your eyes change?’

  It was a most disconcerting thing to see, not only because of the change in colour, but also because of the change in those beautifully intricate patterns which make our irises so individual, so unique.

  At first, the iris of my left eye began to shimmer, followed a moment later by my right, almost as if there was a light inside my eyeball, tiny sparkles of light, enhanced by the fact that they circled the intense blackness of my pupils...and then, without warning, the dark, hazel colour of my eyes simply vanished, replaced by a rather vivid blue.

  It was like watching a computer-enhanced special effect.

  ‘Too strong? Too bright?’ I h
eard Tukaal ask as I looked at my reflection in the mirror and studied how the intensely bright eyes fitted into my new, more hawkish features.

  ‘Actually, I think they look rather well.’

  And they did. It’s an odd thing to say, but the way they looked, the way they sparkled...it was almost as if they had a fire in them...a life of their own...

  I couldn’t begin to imagine the number of times I had looked into my own hound-dog hazel eyes as I brushed my teeth or brushed my hair. Now those eyes were gone.

  I couldn’t begin to imagine the number of times I had absently studied my own facial features as I slowly shaved away the weekend stubble. Now, those too had changed.

  And how did I feel at that very moment, staring into eyes that weren’t mine, surrounded by a face that wasn’t mine?

  I felt relieved.

  It was finished.

  The ordeal was over.

  ‘Thank fuck that’s all done,’ I said as I put the mirror to one side. ‘How about another cup of tea?’

  ‘Splendid idea,’ Tukaal responded cheerfully. ‘Whilst you do that, I’ll make a few changes to my own features.’

  I almost went sick when he said that.

  ‘Aw, shit, do you mean you want me to stick needles in you and stuff like that?’

  Thankfully, he laughed.

  ‘Oh no, that won’t be necessary. There are nanites throughout this shell. It won’t take me more than a couple of minutes to make the necessary changes to the way I look.’

  With a relieved sigh, I got up and made another cup of tea; and this time I suddenly remembered that there were some Chocolate Digestives in one of the cupboards.

  I put the two teas and the biscuits on the worktop and sat back down...and found myself looking at...it wasn’t Tukaal, not quite...but it was Tukaal, if you looked closely enough.

  If anything, the bastard had made himself even more handsome, seemed to have thrown in a little bit of ruggedness, sort of Clint Eastwood-esque. His eyes were a different shade, his hair a little lighter, his complexion a little less Mediterranean. It’s difficult to say for sure what had changed about him, but he had definitely changed.