by Mason Adgett
Still nothing.
I tried both at the same time. I touched the sensor square and said, “Power on?” Why it came out sounding like a question the second time is beyond me but it did the job. The chair beeped, the square lit a dim green and after it clicked and beeped some more I again said “Contralt.” This time instead of powering it down I asked for and received access to the previous application. I made some minor adjustments to the protocol, sat back in the chair and re-ran the program.
A moment later we were rolling toward the security door, only this time I faced forward. It whizzed open and we went through and to the right. The halls here widened a bit but were still sterile and empty, dotted with security doors but undecorated otherwise. The place was some sort of fortress of the mad doctor medical variety. According to what the chair AI had told me we would have to go through three more of these security doors before we arrived at our final destination – Medical Bay 4A, Neurosurgery.
We passed through door number 1 and everything looked much the same but after door number 2 the environment lost a little of the claustrophobic security vibe and opened up a little. Now instead of just the plain walls the hallways were lined with rows of benches – hard, uncomfortable ones – down one wall and pictures hung along the other and the doors which appeared between them were not security doors but the old-fashioned variety with handles. It was still empty but now it seemed more like a hospital and less like a high security prison.
We continued to the end of this hall and through the security door at the end. I tensed. Even had I not familiarized myself with the chair’s programmed route I still would have known we were getting close. Now instead of a hallway we rolled into large open area. This, I thought, looked like a real medical lab and though there were no people there was quite a bit of motion. A large desk-like unit separated into several sections dominated the center of the room and at each station some sort of robotic contraption went about its mysterious operation. Wheeled table-bots maneuvered carefully around other stations that dotted the walls, passing equipment from bot to bot. My chair slid through seamlessly, passing close enough to the tables I could have reached out and grabbed any of the devices on it. All of them looked dangerous so I didn’t.
We approached a door in the far corner, not a security door but one with a handle. It opened automatically, swinging inward, and I doubted any human hand had touched the handle in some time. I could see inside the room before we entered and I had only a brief moment to process my disappointment. I had been hoping to find India but the cot inside the room was unoccupied and the two surgical bots beside it waited expectantly.
This operating room was intended solely for me.
I did not wait to find out what the surgeons intended. I jumped out of the chair – having earlier disabled the restraints, of course – and stepped back away from the room as the chair-bot continued to enter. I only had a few seconds, I figured, before the bots would react to the chair being empty and I used it to pull the door closed and put a little distance between us.
I maneuvered through the moving machinery to another door, similar to the one I had been taken to, and turned the handle. It opened easily and the room inside looked much like the other only empty – just a cot, no patient, no bots. Only one other door connected to the lab but I had to cross the entirety of the large room to get to it. I was beginning to think it was all a wasted effort and India was being held at another facility.
I danced my way through the dangerous-looking devices anyway but had only gotten halfway through when an alarm sounded and most of the bots stopped moving. I hesitated briefly but when nothing immediately came for me I continued to the door. When I got there the handle stubbornly resisted my efforts to turn it. Unlike the other, this door was locked.
I stepped back to consider my options but it turned out I had no time for options.
“Do not move or you will be annihilated.”
I turned my head enough to see a weapon-laden security droid, the band of red light that served as its visual sensor oscillating with menace. Or maybe the menace was just implied by the large three-barreled laser gun that it had pointed at my head.
“You will enter Medical Bay 4A or you will be annihilated,” it instructed, or threatened if you went by digital tone of voice.
“What’s medical bay 4A?” I asked, feigning ignorance. “Isn’t it this one?” I wiggled at the door handle, a small part of me expecting immediate annihilation.
The bot didn’t answer but one of his barrels started to glow red and I heard a high-pitched humming. “Okay, okay,” I said, taking my hand from the door. I started to move slowly towards 4A, my hands by my ears. Its door opened automatically and inside I could see the surgery bots waiting expectantly. It seemed my only choices were being cut in half by a red laser or lying on that cot and having my head cut open.
I don’t know about you but to me it was an easy choice.
Halfway to the door of 4A I burst into a sprint, passing the door and ducking as quickly as I could below the level of one of the table bots. I had the vague hope maybe some of the stuff on the tables and counters was expensive enough that Kanstky wouldn’t really want it destroyed just to kill little old me. It was a vain hope. I felt a flash of heat and looked up to see a scorch mark in the wall only millimeters above my head. I huddled down even further but the table bot started to wheel itself toward the security bot and I was left with a difficult choice.
“Enter Medical Bay 4A or you will be annihilated,” the bot repeated, an extra layer of distortion adding an even more menacing dynamic. A sizzling sound followed and the laser must have hit the table bot, which wobbled and then stopped abruptly. I slid quickly away from it and crept around the workstations on the other side. The security bot started beeping loudly – an alarm, I gathered – which was very helpful as it helped me track its location while keeping out of sight. As it approached behind me I circled back to the security door that exited the lab. Of course it didn’t open, no matter how hard I stared at it and tried to gather my den. And believe me I tried.
But there really was no escaping this time. The bot finally came up behind me and I raised my hands in defeat. I surrendered too late. One of the barrels on his phaser glowed blue. A moment later I felt a searing pain in my chest.
I collapsed with barely enough time to regret the decisions that led to my death.
I wasn’t dead, as you may have gathered. The laser was set to stun and I would later discover I had merely been knocked unconscious. As awareness faded my eyes locked on the security bot – the murder bot – and I experienced a strange sensation. I could see the bot clearly enough but the rest of the scene didn’t seem quite right. Something happened to my peripheral vision where objects began to lose their clarity and become indistinct but in this case they weren’t so much blurry as breaking apart, the pieces flying outward, leaving only blackness behind.
And then I was dreaming.
····10····
I dreamed worms crawled into my ears and ate my brain.
Horrifying, right? In my dream though it was oddly comforting as the more they ate the more I could feel my worries falling away like deadweight. India Phoenix? What did she matter? I saw her briefly as a passing butterfly. I stressed out momentarily when Kantsky appeared behind her as a gigantic evil wasp and then both disappeared as a thick slow-crawling worm – more like a caterpillar really – ate that portion of my membrane that was concerned with such things.
Lewis also appeared, his face attached to the body of a fat baboon. He scowled at me and yelled something indecipherable but then he too disappeared into purple smoke and peace washed over me like a warm breeze. A few other people appeared too and they all seemed very agitated but the worms continued to eat away and I simply did not care.
Then in the dream I began wondering about the worms, where they had come from, why they were so hungry and other such things. So I worked my way through the laboratory to the table and found Kantsky hold
ing a jar of the worms and inside they were reproducing at an incredible rate. A robotic arm plucked one out and brought it close to my eye where I could see it more clearly.
I was not at all frightened, just curious. I reached out and it crawled onto my hand. It was about the length of my index finger but not as thick and covered with fine hairs that tickled the skin. A repeating pattern moved on its back, white diamonds on a black background with a blue border on each side. It moved along my hand, onto my wrist, expanding and contracting hypnotically.
Then instead of it being in my hand I was suddenly holding my own brain and it was crawling atop it, eating, eating, eating away. A good portion of the left frontal lobe had already disappeared like a muffin that someone had taken a bite out of.
Goodbye worries, I thought, watching the caterpillar expand, contract.
I smiled happily as another worm burst through the surface right around the area of the left temple. A sign appeared with an arrow pointing to it – “Arena Broca” it helpfully informed me then burst into a meaningless gray cloud. I noticed something printed in the tiniest of typefaces and I brought my hand closer to my face so I could make it out. It blurred as it got closer and I had to blink three times to clear my eyes. Even then I had difficulty deciphering it as the caterpillar wriggled and squirmed. I could see it was a sequence of digits.
I finally was able to work out the first three: 309. Then I awoke.
I’d really rather I hadn’t. The hungry caterpillar was far more pleasant to look at than what confronted me now – the leering face of Dr. Kantsky. In my dream he had appeared as a giant wasp. I could see what had given me that impression. His eyes were too big for the narrow triangle that made up his face and the unruly strands of hair that poked out around his ears looked like antenna. The striped pattern of the black leather he wore completed the effect. With the sight of his face all my worry – or fear, I should say – returned in a flash.
“Subject is conscious,” a flat voice intoned and an irritated ripple furrowed across Kantsky’s brow. “Increased beta activity detected.”
“Yes, he’s awake. I see that,” he said, never turning to face the bot that had provided the information, instead keeping his eyes locked on my own. “Mute further neural activity updates. Alert on vital warnings only.”
I thought about jabbing him with an irritating comment like, “Subject is contemplating escape and revenge,” but decided against sharing. Instead I kept my mouth shut and closed my eyes, preferring darkness to the manic blackness of his stare. With my eyes closed my ears took over, feeling out the space in the room, the quiet repeating beep in the corner, the close sound of Kantsky’s breathing. I could feel its light breeze on my face and had to refrain from turning away.
“Open his eyes,” Kanstky commanded a moment later and I felt a light tickle at my eyelids as my eyes opened on their own. I tried a few times but found I could no longer close them. Kantsky smiled into them, angling his face so it was in alignment with mine, coming close enough our noses almost touched. “You can’t avoid me, 309,” he said. “You can try but it is no longer possible. You are now and will always be under my full and complete control. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said. It was not what I intended to say.
“I see you do understand,” he said, his eyes wide, his nose bobbing up and down a couple times enthusiastically. The look he cultivated was refined, cultured, but the mask didn’t hide his madness.
He had somehow taken control over my body, I found, keeping it paralyzed. I tried to move, to speak, to object, to scream, to punch him in the face. I could feel my limbs as they lay flat against my side, my sensations were uninhibited. I simply couldn’t move them, no matter how hard I tried, despite the lack of any type of bind or restraint. Maybe he had me hypnotized, I thought, or under some kind of physical inhibitor.
“Now you will simply lie here,” he said, “as I perform the necessary operations on your neural hardware. I promise you will feel no pain – I have disengaged these centers – but you will still likely feel many strange sensations as the surgery progresses. Have no fear. Dr. Kantsky is here.”
He said the last in an exaggerated hero voice and against all my best efforts I laughed at this feeble joke. Kantsky smiled benignly. Then he disappeared from my field of view. Music started playing in the background – some tinkly piano piece – and a surgical bot moved briefly through my field of view, two red lights at the end of one tentacle-like extension and what I took to be a cutting laser at the end of another. I could neither close my eyes nor follow their path with my gaze, just wait as they passed across the canvas of my personal hell.
I felt something move along the top of my head, a light pressure and a quick buzzing sound then cold air against my now bald scalp. I heard Kantsky somewhere above my head humming along with the music then that sound was joined by another hum which I took to be the laser powering up.
As he had promised I felt no pain but I knew the moment the laser sliced through my skin. It was just the barest tickle but I could feel its precise path, the shape it opened – a triangle – and I could feel just as well the hard edge of the blade that was next placed against my skull. I felt the vibration as it started to spin and heard the sickening high whine of it as it encountered the resistance of bone.
I heard Kantsky humming, humming, and then a quick snippet of lyric: “but they’re the only friends I’ve known, ba-da-da-dum, ba-da-da-dum.”
I stared straight ahead at the white ceiling, the pale amorphous box of light that hung directly above me. I tried to shut my mind off like my body, to get lost in that empty expanse of white. Oh, caterpillar that eats away my fears, where have you gone? There was no hope. There was simply no hope left, of any kind.
These are the only friends I’ve known:
Charles. Always there for me. Okay with my flaws, doesn’t harp on my shortcomings. Knows almost all of them though I tried to hide them.
Shondra. Have I not mentioned her? She has nothing to do with these events except here she was in my mind as I lay helpless at my darkest hour. We hadn’t talked in months. Why? I don’t know. Time. Time gets the best of us. And I’m not the best of us – I had never been more sure of this then that moment on Kantsky’s table.
Paul, another unrelated friend, I would have said he was barely a pal. A freelance co-worker, just that, but here he was as I relived some of those casual conversations that had turned cosmic at the turn of a phrase. One of those people you underestimated on sight – he seemed a simple guy – but when you got to know him long enough you realized he was full of so many deep insights. I only now realized he had been giving me advice like big brother to little brother – useless advice now that echoed in my mind like the sound of so many lost causes and the silent applause that heralded their failures.
Michelle. She was really Charles’ friend but she was a badass and I missed her then. I missed her almost as much as I missed Charles and Shondra and my mother. If I got out of this – when I got out, I corrected myself – I would have to call Michelle, see how she was doing.
I would have cried but I guess I couldn’t. I stared straight ahead, cheeks dry, eyes on the ceiling and felt a prickling in the area of the hole that had just been cut through my skull.
Kantsky’s voice above my head was full of disturbing glee. “Almost in there,” he said. And he sang it as though it were part of the song: “Almost in, ba-dum-dum-dum, we are nearly there.”
I heard then a whisper in my right ear. “Help us, 309.”
Kantsky continued to sing, his voice never changing, as another whisper joined the first, this one from my left ear. “Please help, 309! 497 has become unstable!”
Several beeps sounded from one of Kantsky’s machines. “Perfect,” he said. “We have saturated the cerebral cortex.”
At the sound of the word “saturated” a shade of pink crept into my vision like soft liquid blurs on the edge of my field of view. I tried to blink it away but my eyelids fai
led to perform this reflexive measure. Seconds later the pink crept away on its own but then the voice spoke up again, somewhere between being in my head or maybe located in my inner ear.
“309, please, will you help us?” It was like a tickle on my eardrum, louder than a thought, quieter than a sound.
I had no idea what was going on. But I wanted to say “yes” in any case. What other choice did I have? I couldn’t, though. I was still paralyzed.
“Thank you, 309!” said the whisper in my right ear and I felt rather than heard its sense of desperate hope. “We can decipher your thoughts, 309. You must not move until the right moment is precisely upon us.”
The use of the number 309 bothered me. It was too Kantsky. The strange voices gave me a stirring of hope but at the same time I felt a sense of disquiet, a paranoid suspicion Kantsky was playing a trick on me. Either that or the voices were just an auditory hallucination triggered by whatever operation Kantsky was performing on my brain.
“We are 100% real by all physical measures. We are nano-molecules designed by 497 to assist in the transplant of the obrut but we are capable of more. Much more!” A certain childlike quality to the voices added to my disquiet.
I assumed 497 to be Kantsky, of course, and the nano-molecules immediately confirmed it. “Yes, he is 497W911. His control loop has become distorted and he endangers the entire system.”
Now there were several questions I could have asked at this point and a few of them ran through my head, none of which made much sense. What, for instance, was an obrut? How potentially dangerous was the unstable control loop of a mad hacker? And what was wrong with simple names like Gregory and Kantsky that these weird serial numbers had to come into play?
“There is no time!” responded the nano-molecules to these unspoken queries. “We release control to your central neural unit. Act now!”
There was a tremendous sense of urgency behind these words – in fact, they now appeared even visually in my mind as well as on the inner ear – but I still didn’t react immediately. I’m only human after all and it took me more than a moment to process what I had just been told. However as soon as my eyes flicked upward, instinctively trying to get a glimpse of my torturer, I realized I had indeed been released from my paralysis. This did not, though, make me forget that my scalp lay open and my skull had a hole in it, which cost me a second more or two as I considered how to handle this.