Two soldiers force my body onto the ground and tie my arms behind my back. The weight of them alone is enough to crush my back. When coupled with the taste of blood in my mouth as my face is smashed into the roof, it turns into a torturous experience.
I wish I could tell you that I did something heroic here. That I managed to throw the bodies of the soldiers off me, grab one of their guns, and fight my way out of this. But I have been through enough to know that there is nothing I can do to escape this. Every ounce of struggle I put into getting away from these soldiers will just mean more pain in the end.
There’s a chance that the North Korean regime will want me to work with them, and oddly enough, part of me is actually okay with the fact that North Korea will have the cube instead of the Syndicate. In reality, I don’t think the result will be much better for the world. If anything, the North Koreans will use it to simply destroy all their enemies, namely South Korea and the United States.
But somehow that is better than the Syndicate having it.
Even as the handcuffs are forced around my wrists, blood dripping out of my nose as my face continues to be scraped against the pavement, I feel a sense of accomplishment.
Yes, this is humiliating.
And yes, I utterly failed in my attempt to destroy the Syndicate. But the consequences to what is happening are slow to make their way to my mind. All I care is that the Syndicate lost. They don’t have the cube in their possession, and they never will.
Now, the North Korean regime will use it to destroy the world. But in the end, the result will be the same. The Syndicate will be dead. The Last Migration will be foiled. And this world will be forever ripped away from the hands of the council.
That’s at least what I picture in my fucked-up fantasy.
But when one of the soldiers whispers into my ear, I realize just how wrong I was.
“It’s impossible to escape the truth,” the man whispers in a heavy accent. At first, I wonder if my mind is playing a trick on me, but when I turn my head and connect with his glimmering eyes, I know just how bad things are.
They are with the Syndicate too.
The ties with the Syndicate and North Korean government likely go back generations to the time when the Syndicate dealt arms to the North Korean government during the Korean War. They are entrenched in nearly every government and bureaucracy in the world.
They are here too.
And now they have the cube.
“No!” I scream, kicking my legs to try and shake the two men off me. They don’t budge. Put together, they are well over four times my body weight and are putting enough pressure on me to break my back.
A meaty elbow collides with my head. I try to push through the pain, but the force of the elbow is too much for my brain to handle. My vision goes black and in the same instant I lose all feeling in my body.
I’m not sure how much time passes in my momentary lapse of consciousness, but when my vision returns, I am still pinned face-down to the blood-covered roof. All the armed figures are chanting some weird hymn that at first doesn’t make sense to me. When the low, chilling frequency of their singing reverberates off my bones, I know exactly what they are chanting.
It’s the same creepy melody that the members of the Syndicate of Truth sang on the night of my induction ceremony. They all have the same tribalistic nature that the Syndicate members had and the same cadence to their voices. The sound waves have a terrible way of seeping through my pores and sending a series of chills down my spine. Each new note that they sing in perfect harmony sinks into me, their cold, dark energy slowly weighing my body down.
The soldiers are no longer on top of me. They stand around me in a semicircle, all of them joining hands with the black pits in their eyes staring at me. Immediately, I know that these things aren’t humans. They are robots. Robots that are programmed to kill me and make my last few moments alive a living hell.
“We are everywhere,” one of the men whispers into my ear. I want to get up. I want to scream and shove my fists down each one of their throats. But the specific frequency of their singing keeps me glued to the floor, the taste of blood and sweat fresh on my lips.
I’ve never been so scared in my life.
And that’s coming from someone who has seen dozens of things that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. But something about this feels different. It’s the tension in their rigid bodies and emotionless eyes that makes me want to scream yet also freezes me in place at the same time.
They seem to emit the same chilling energy that everyone in the Syndicate does even though at their core they are nothing more than large, fancy hunks of metal. One of the members of the Syndicate likely owns the company that manufacturers these humanoids and sells them to governments all over the world.
The Syndicate can hack into their worldwide army of robots at any time and get them to run to my location. This reality is inescapable. Their hymn, which by the second increases in volume, will always echo in my ears. I wish I could run away. I wish I could get up and kill them all with the power of my fists alone.
But there is one humanoid at the center of the semicircle, its smelly brown shoes inches away from smashing my head. It is holding up the Chimera Cube, the exterior glowing at his touch. The other humanoids continue to chant, their singing picking up in tempo along with the beat of my heart.
The once chilling feeling the sound waves left in my spine has slowly boiled into a burning sensation that is eating me alive from the inside out. I scream, the pain becoming too much as their chant takes on a lurid pace.
Their notes have all slurred together into one mind-numbing cacophony. If I were able to move my arms, I would gladly use them to rip my ears off and then my eyeballs would come next. But my wrists are still chained together, leaving me helplessly writhing on the floor. Witnessing this is more painful than being burned alive. Every neuron in my body is going haywire, each one of them sending incessant signals to my brain that the ship my life has sailed for years is going down.
The pain is so vivid that it has somewhat of a texture to it as it flows through my veins. As the chant continues to increase in tempo and pitch. the heat of the fire flowing through my blood reaches an unbearable level. It feels like I’m melting as the sound waves continue to pound against me and amalgamate into one nasty ring in my ear.
Then I finally connect the dots.
Yes, the sound is painful, and it sucks. But the pain is coming from an epicenter in my spine. It happened when the humanoids were on top of me pinning me to the ground. They poisoned me.
It would be one thing if this poison would put me to sleep, only for me to wake up a few hours later. Although that thought is terrifying, and I will likely be naked with my body forced against a block of ice when I open my eyes, at least I know that I will have a sliver of hope at making it out of this alive.
But I can already feel the difference in this poison from all the other times that the Syndicate has drugged me.
This one isn’t meant for me to wake up again.
Once I close my eyes, I will be dead.
“Fuck!” I yell, but it comes out sounding more like a moan. I will say that if anyone ever tells you that little separates pain and pleasure, they are wrong. They may sound the same, they may even look the same in many instances, but pain has a way of cutting through the very essence of my being whereas pleasure blankets my mind in a soft comforter.
Pain is the worst.
Pain is the one thing I have spent my entire life trying to avoid. And now I will die feeling so much of it, that the thought of death seems like a happy alternative.
“You should have listened while you had the chance.” The same humanoid that whispered into my ear a few moments ago is back. Despite the thing being nothing more than a large robot, when I look into its eyes, I feel as though it understands my struggle.
“Break me out of this!” I holler, hoping that the machine will listen to me and uncuff me. It ignores me. The humano
id bluntly sings in my face, its chanting not missing a beat compared to the other ones.
Even if I could convince it to take the cuffs off me, that still would not help my situation. Every muscle beneath my neck is unresponsive to my commands. Instead, they all think it is a good idea to continuously expand and contract, resulting in my entire body to look like a human spring. The pounding of my face and legs uncontrollably against the cement only adds to the pain threatening my consciousness to give out.
But that isn’t what’s going to kill me.
It’s my heart.
“No!” I scream again and slam my head into the bloody, wooden roof. The only thing that results from that is more pain centered in my forehead and a chip of wood stuck in my front teeth. That doesn’t stop me from doing the same thing over again, my front teeth nearly falling out from the impact.
In a way, causing myself this pain is cathartic. To know that I am going to be the one to end this and not the Syndicate gives me a surge of energy that empowers me to continue slamming my head into the roof even harder. Now I know why Jake did it so effortlessly. Now I know why he had no other option but to do it himself.
This is the last liberty I will have in my entire existence, and I intend to use it.
But it might already be too late.
As I continue smashing my head into the roof, hoping after every hit that the blackness swirling around my eyelids will eventually swallow me whole, my heart continues racing. It is beating so fast in my chest that it hurts to even breathe. Any moment my heart will collapse, and I will be dead.
But I can’t let that happen.
I have to kill myself first.
“Agh!” I scream, the madness driving me to a point of insanity I have never felt before. The smell of blood and dead bodies that once infested my nostrils is now gone. The singing of the humanoids is fading into the background of my mind as the only thing I register is the agony.
My story should end like this.
It’s how it was meant to.
My spazzing body coming to rest feet away from the spot where Jake shot himself as the cube dances above my head. We were meant to go down together. Blood brothers until the end.
But we never thought that our end would be the end of the world too. We never thought that losing our lives would mean the world losing its freedom and my father losing his legacy to the monster of the Syndicate.
Most would look at this story and say it’s a tragedy. If there is any civilization that ever exists again with the freedom to access the past, they will look at my life and say that this is impossible.
But my story isn’t unique.
This is just the epitome of the beautifully fucked-up nature of humanity. It’s just a reminder that at the end of the day greed is more powerful than love. It’s nice to think that the good forces of the world will always win out over the bad, but I finally know that my father’s pipe dream will always be just that—a dream.
At the end of the day, we aren’t meant to be happy. We aren’t meant to love each other. We are meant to eat, fuck, sleep, and let out our bodily functions somewhere in between it all.
We are addicts.
And when humanity hits rock bottom, there is no coming back from it.
That rock bottom is today.
In this moment, I thought I would cry. Part of me does want to break down into tears and let the sadness overcome me. But I feel strong. I feel like I won. Because now I get to die knowing that I never let the monsters overcome me.
I never caved in to the power of the Chimera Cube and let the greed consume me.
I tried to do the right thing.
And it is that thought that gives me the final peace I need. I’m done with this pain. The Syndicate won. My life is over, and whether it is the continuous pounding of my skull against the roof that kills me or my heart finally giving out, the feeling of blackness is all the same.
My last sensation is of a warm stream of blood dripping from my nose onto my lips. Right before I finally let go, I feel two hands pick me up by my shoulders. I am too weak to open my eyes, too weak to fight the humanoid that is likely plotting to take my dead body and chuck it off the roof.
Then the faint humming in the back of my mind cuts off. I expect a smooth blanket of darkness to welcome me to death’s door.
But instead there is an explosion.
This is not how I die.
Chapter 22
“You weren’t supposed to wake up.” The deep voice rattles the silence that has blanketed my consciousness.
My senses are all thrown out of whack, my mind trying to absorb its surroundings as it emerges from its slumber. The first thing my eyes are welcomed to after they adjust to the initial flood of light is stars.
For a moment, I question if I am traveling through outer space, but it only takes me a second to figure out that the stars are nothing more than a painting. I am in a cramped cabin with storage compartments on either side of me and a large window in front of me that overlooks the blue sky. The ceiling is covered in a frighteningly realistic painting of the night sky, the constellations all in the exact arrangement they appear in space.
The idea that this is what being dead is like is instantly tossed out of my mind as I lock eyes with the person standing in the doorway to the room. They are tall, well over six feet in height, with short black hair with blue streaks in it. Their face appears to be normal. Besides the red pupils to their eyes, there’s isn’t anything out of the ordinary about their glowing dark skin.
But it’s their body that frightens me.
Their torso is covered in a large metal plate with a screen on the exterior that is turned off. They have long, spongey legs that are no larger than a few inches in diameter, yet the thin metal rods still manage to have enough strength to hold up its upper body that has large enough muscles to knock out a boxer.
They aren’t human.
“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” they say, shifting awkwardly in the doorway. “You should go back to bed; you need your sleep.”
I immediately dismiss their concern about me sleeping. My heart is back to racing at a frenetic pace as I rip the covers off me. It’s not until I take off the covers that I realize that the room is freezing—frost has even formed on the inside of the windows.
I know exactly what this thing is.
It’s a different model of a humanoid, just another one of the Syndicate henchmen here to make my life a living hell. Of course they didn’t let me die. Of course they didn’t let my corpse rot on that roof.
They’d rather punish me forever.
“Excuse me, but who the hell are you and what is happening?” I stand up, somewhat surprised by how normal my body feels. I likely permanently scarred my face after banging it against the roof more times than I can count, but the wounds from the explosion and sensation of the poison killing me from the inside out is gone.
“I’m Anika.” She extends her hand, her fingers looking oddly human for a figure that resembles a killer robot. “I’m working with Justin. We are here to take the Syndicate down.”
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.” I sit back down, a sharp pain shooting through my chest. I rub circles around both my eyes, hoping that I can massage some sense into me, because nothing seems real right now.
The last thing I remember, I was surrounded by humanoids in the North Korean military, barely holding on to life. And now I’m in some sort of flying vessel with a humanoid that could end my life at a moment’s notice.
“I’m sorry,” she says, a softness to her deep voice that only brings me more anxiety.
“Sorry for what?” I look up after violently rubbing my eyes to make sure that I’m not dreaming. After doing so, I can confirm that this is not a dream.
After a few seconds of being in a weird mental haze, my senses are starting to come back to me with full clarity. I quickly scan the surroundings to see if there are any clues as to what is happening. Then I see the cube. It is nestled in a
cubby in one of the wooden shelves that lines the wall, it sitting there as if it is nothing more than a decorative piece.
In this moment, I’d like to be optimistic.
I’d like to believe that I am safe. And that the rebellion actually exists and that all the wounds on my body were magically healed with the power of the cube.
But I can’t take any risks.
Whether it’s the paranoia, the trauma, or the shock from Jake’s death still settling in, when my eyes connect with the faint glow of the cube, I lose it.
“What is that doing here?” I stand up, suddenly a wave of vexation rising from within me. I’m tired of everything in my life feeling like it’s out of control. I’m tired of having the entire world after me for this cube, only for it to stay by my side no matter how many times I’ve tried to destroy it.
This thing needs to be eradicated from the Earth.
This cube needs to explode. And I’ll bring down this aircraft and the entire world with me. I’m done with the pain. I’m done with being so close to death only for this fucking machine to bring me back to life.
I don’t want to do this anymore.
I don’t want to be here any longer.
Now I finally understand that knowing when to quit doesn’t make me a loser, it makes me a stronger man than anyone in the Syndicate will ever be.
“What are you doing?” she snaps as I lunge across the bed to where the cube lies in the cubby. I’m in such a crazed state that the thought to breathe doesn’t even cross my mind. My arms shake with the force of the adrenaline surging through me, my entire body hell-bent on completing its final mission: self-destruction.
“Run,” I say as I hold the cube in my hands, the warm touch to the exterior bringing my mind a pleasant calming sensation. When I place my hand on top of the cube, the exterior glowing white at my touch, I don’t feel anything.
I don’t feel sad, angry, excited, guilty, none of it. All I feel is a numbness that has encapsulated my being to the point that it is unbearable for me to continue. The world doesn’t deserve this cube. Humanity is too corrupt for something this perfect.
The Conspiracy Chronicles Boxset 2 Page 70