“Take me back!”
I run to the door and pound on it. “I want to go back!”
The bands heat around my wrists. Too hot. White hot. They sear my skin and electrical charges course up my arms. This isn’t the mild itching sensation of the nanos. This is a fierce and cruel power, emanating from an outside source. I can’t harness it or absorb its energy. It’s a dead power that ignores my impassioned pleas. From nowhere, from the walls or the ceiling or the bed or my own brain, Dr. Dawson’s irritated voice materializes, impossible to ignore.
“You’re a bit old for temper tantrums.”
“What are you doing?” I stumble backwards, cradling my arms to my chest.
“You’re not on some podunk military base anymore. You’re in the middle of a Prothero compound equipped with the most advanced technology humanity has to offer. We’ve seen what you can do, and we prepared ourselves accordingly. You’ll need to mind your manners here.”
I crawl over to the bed and hoist myself up onto it, not bothering with the covers. I sleep curled up in a ball on top of the sheets. It’s the best sleep I’ve experienced in weeks, like falling forever into an inky black night.
The next morning Dr. Dawson arrives with a flurry. Lights buzz on overhead, he throws back curtains to reveal a barred, heavily glassed window out of which there will be no escape. Trailing him, in a similar lab coat is a thin, severe white woman with jet black hair pulled aggressively into a bun. She collects a blood and tissue sample before I’ve had a chance to rub the sleep out of my eyes. Dr. Dawson paces the room at the end of the bed, his fingers drumming on a tablet curled in one arm.
“First things first. We’re taking samples—”
“I noticed.”
“And then we’re going to review security footage passed along to me by the leadership at Fort Columbia that I found extraordinarily enlightening. Do you want to hazard a guess as to what’s on that footage?” he asks, turning towards me, all his perfect white teeth flashing.
He’s a fox. And I’m a rabbit. Caught and about to be devoured.
“No.”
“Great. We’ll grab some breakfast on the way.”
He stands by my feet, grinning like he’s won a prize. His teeth are so bright, I wonder if he and Senator Fuller use the same dentist.
“Come on, get up!”
I roll off the bed and stumble into the bathroom, twisting the lock on the door to his exclamation of “three minutes!” I splash water on my face and run a brush over my teeth. My hair is wild, straight out of bed, but I don’t give it a second glance. It’s Prothero, not a beauty pageant. There was a time, during the staged events and commercials when my hair was long and straight. Chopping most of it off was one of the best decisions I’ve made in the last three years.
I untwist the lock and Dawson pushes through the door, waving me out of the room. We proceed down a sterile, echoing hallway, making a brief detour to a communal shower room. I run soap and hot water over my bruised, aching body, cleaning and untangling my dirty hair. Dawson stands outside the shower stall, discreetly offering me fresh clothes when I step out wrapped in a thin towel. A Prothero uniform. Breakfast is a tube of creamy green paste collected from a windowed room along the hallway, given to me by a disinterested man dressed in scrubs. We walk while I consume the nutrients and try not to gag.
“Is this part of my prison sentence?”
“In here,” Dr. Dawson says.
A piece of wall slides free from the hallway and opens up into a sterile white conference room. I put a hand up to it as we pass and register a miniscule spike in the energy around the frame. I should have sensed this. My thoughts are so fuzzy here. There is a distraction, a distortion ringing subtly in my ears. It’s all muted.
An image of the shaking nightmare orb blips in my brain. What does it mean?
Dr. Dawson slams his fist down on the table in the middle of the room, startling me from these thoughts. A team of scientists stands against the walls, observing in silence. A virtual player sits in the middle of the long, shining table. The thin woman leans over and presses a button on the device before anyone speaks. The virtual spins up and an image of me in the cockpit of Condor 9 rolls into view. Veins of electricity writhe from my body and astounding, alien code floods the monitors around me.
I watch myself stare like a possessed woman into the cockpit window as the aircraft slams through the fence. The powerful electricity doesn’t phase me as I scramble towards the seats and brace for impact. The next frame clicks to an overhead view of the mid-section of the Condor, where I’m cross-legged on the metal. The first team of soldiers approaches. I electrocute them and they fall to the ground. The screen fuzzes out and goes black.
An exposed nest of spiders scrambles through my insides. The conference room is quiet, bordering on serene. No one shuffles a foot. The white female doctor stands close behind me. Her presence has me on high alert. She hovers with a predatorial air, like a cat who doesn’t want to move too far from her cream.
“We need to determine if you can reproduce the side effects witnessed on this security footage,” Dr. Dawson says.
I blink once, twice, three times, maintaining a flat expression as long as humanly possible.
“You want me to electrocute someone?”
“We need to understand where and how this ability manifested,” Dr. Dawson says.
“Why? Is this more super soldier bullshit?”
I look over at Dawson and then glance around the room. None of the other doctors will meet my gaze.
“That is none of your concern,” the thin woman says.
“It damn well is my concern.” I scoot my chair back, into her, and jump out of my seat. The tabletop virtual console spins to life and the images replay. She doesn’t appear ruffled by my outburst, even as particles of the virtual drift from the image and gather clumsily on my skin, forming into blue honeycomb patterns.
“Arthur,” she says, disinterestedly.
The bands fire up, frying my wrists, and I grimace at Dr. Dawson before reclaiming my seat. The metal cools. My fists clench on the tabletop, the remaining pixels sparkling like diamonds on my forearm. The woman spins the chair I’m sitting in so my face glares up at hers. She favors me with a bored purse of her thin red lips.
“Let me be clear when I say, you may be invincible for the time being, but you are not untouchable. No one is. And your unreserved cooperation is fully expected. That is not a request. That is an order. Testing will begin tomorrow morning at 9am sharp. We're done here, Arthur. Unless you want to add any further information?”
“Ah, no.”
“Wonderful. You are all dismissed.”
Reznik waves the virtual away and stalks from the room on five inch black heels. The rest of the doctors file out after her, forming one line of white coats punctuated by more white. Dr. Dawson and I are left alone in the eerie boardroom as the door whooshes shut on unseen hinges.
“So, that went well. Is that woman your boss?”
“She is a…liaison from another department. Her name is Pavel Reznik and she’s been brought in to oversee our investigation. Eleni—”
“Am I on trial?”
“In a sense. Listen to me carefully. I've tolerated your flippancy because I'm the good cop here, despite what you may think of me. I’m your ally and friend. I can make things go easy for you. Reznik…she is the bad cop in this scenario. She’s a very bad cop, Eleni.”
“She does seem like a horrendous bitch.”
“Go up against her, and it will hurt. You will not win.”
“Never do.”
“And yet you keep trying. It’s an admirable trait.” He smiles over at me. A genuine smile.
“Really? I’ve heard it's lethal.”
“Against Reznik, perhaps. For both of our sakes, complete cooperation is going to be the best solution for the moment. It will keep you alive.”
“Reznik's not a doctor?”’
“Not on any paperwork I’v
e seen,” he muses. “Regardless, more samples must be collected before preparing tomorrow’s tests.”
“Dr. Dawson?” I ask, glancing down at the shimmering pixels, twinkling on my arm. He looks at them as well, with more than a passing fascination. “What do you want from me?”
I’m forever asking this question. And never getting a straight answer. It should be so simple. This is probably why I have trust issues.
“I want you to pass these tests. And then I want to take you somewhere safe,” he says, steepling his fingers on the table. “Somewhere Prothero can’t hurt you.”
The metal heart flutters in my chest. “The space and aeronautics institute?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “That is off the table. Permanently. I want to take you somewhere different. Somewhere better. Where there are people like you.”
“People like me?” my voice trembles. The nanos on my skin shudder and pulse.
“But first, pass the tests,” Dawson says.
Dr. Dawson begins with simple tasks this morning, asking me to arrange an image on the virtual. But, like the last six days of testing, nothing happens. My numb body won't respond. It's filled with all the desolation of a week trapped in Prothero's clutches while the world goes on without me. Matty edges closer to death. The Contras move towards instigating war. Everything about my previous life sits in shambles and Dawson wants me to create something from the desolation. I don’t have something from nothing.
Dr. Dawson clicks his display. Classical music barrels into the room from the invisible speakers buried in the walls. It’s pleasant and soothing, a lilting combination of piano and strings. A virtual thrums to life from the left band. It’s the image from the lime tree, the one featuring a Mateo-Rabbit hybrid embracing me. We’ve been here before. But that’s as far as it will go. That’s as far as it ever goes.
“Good, Eleni. Now, can you manipulate it?” Dawson requests, doing his best to mask his eagerness with calm.
I do try. I send my mind out to touch the scene, transform it with my thoughts. Nothing results from these attempts. I reach out, my fingers swiping cleanly through the image. No magnetic attraction or static sparks. The lights above us briefly dim. Then, more nothing. Failure fills the space between us with awkward and tense silence.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur.
“But you’ve done this before,” Dawson insists. It’s not a question. It’s a request.
I nod, pressing the heel of my hand against my temple.
“Perhaps you need rest. You’ve had a stressful week. Let’s try again later,” Dr. Dawson concedes.
The next fourteen days happen exactly the same. Three weeks of the same blurring sameness. Tests are performed to draw out the virtual response and I fail them miserably. Dr. Dawson labors under a constantly fading hope that I mentally hid the ability to control the powers and he need only enter the right sequence of tests to unlock the secret. It’s tiresome but at the same time I’m grateful to be alive. Though I’m not sure how much longer Reznik will allow this oversight.
Every day Dr. Dawson looks a bit more strained, our tests feel that much more desperate, and I spy one or two grey hairs pop up in his expertly trimmed beard.
The only positive side effect of the experimentations is the chance to engage in eastern meditation every day. Dawson believes meditation and yoga will help foster a stronger mind-body connection, giving me greater control over the abilities. I’ve gotten quite good at entering a trance state and sending my mind reeling outside of itself. It’s improved my hacking abilities, but failed to produce any gains in the virtual manipulation department.
With my mental hacking strengthened, I’ve quietly accessed Prothero databases, amassing a stockpile of information around particularly distressing subjects. The first being the bands and the mysterious technology surrounding Prothero. I’m looking for unusual electrical readings from the city records, any whisperings of noises or odors coming from the lab. This is as much of a dead-end as I imagined it would be, but it doesn’t stop me from flagging and absorbing any relevant information.
The second subject is The Fullers. Senator Edmund and Clinton—there isn’t much exciting information to collect aside from rumors that Edmund Fuller engaged in affairs with high profile virtual movie stars. Clinton, despite showing a strength for business management, has not made any educational or political gains in the last two years since being accepted into the program at Fort Columbia.
There is no mention of the skirmish in the SIM between us, or his expulsion from the National Service Academy. All records indicate he is enrolled, scheduled to graduate this June and his military career is on track. There are no recent images of him on social media. He hasn’t updated or added any new content to his wave profile in weeks. My curiosity regarding his whereabouts is piqued, but nothing else comes from the research.
And third, last but not least, I’m scouting out all the information available around different strains of NV. I don’t trust what Prothero told me. They want to keep me weak and submissive. In a peculiar move, Prothero hasn’t silenced the newsgroups on the subject of nano virus mutations within the former United States, though as Mateo indicated, there are no reports of new strains in Mexico City.
I’m able to put together a map of the locations it’s cropped up across the country. So far it’s been confined to this continent, and mostly in the original Southern states. Mississippi and Louisiana were hit especially hard, and my heart spins out to Scarlett, wishing I could bypass all the security measures and assure her I’m alive. The information I gather is scant, and not enough to draw any conclusions. Clinton is alive somewhere, Prothero possesses immense technological power and nefarious plans to re-introduce a stronger variant of the virus to the population. For what purpose, I cannot fathom.
After another two weeks of failed progress and a steady increase of the headaches, I am summoned by Dr. Dawson and escorted to the room with the sliding wall and virtual monitor. Or maybe it's a different room. It’s hard to tell anymore. All that sterile sameness again.
Dawson carries his customary tablet, but doesn’t seem interested in peering into its contents as he usually does. He’s seated at the table, staring at an empty spot on the wall, one set of fingers drumming on the metal and his other hand laying dormant on his beard. His nails are expertly manicured. His beard groomed to perfection. He looks like a supermodel posing in the middle of a fashion shoot. It takes a lot of money and power to look so effortlessly attractive.
“Take a seat Eleni.”
I do as requested and occupy a chair across from him. He doesn’t look at me. A bad sign.
“I received a wave from Reznik this morning. Prothero leadership is not happy. Unless I produce results within the next three days, they will reassign me, and Pavel will take over, steering the direction of the testing,” he says.
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Neither do I. I’m afraid I’ve done everything in my power to coerce a display of your new abilities. Including threatening you with death,” he says.
“That was my personal favorite.”
Dawson lets out an explosive sigh and clenches his fingers as I imagine he might if they were tightening around my neck. Jokes are a lost cause today.
“The lack of progress left me with a lot of free time. I reviewed more security footage from the last month. It gave me an idea.”
“Oh,” is the only response I muster.
Avoiding my gaze, he leans over and clicks on the virtual.
The first image materializes as an overhead angle of Scarlett and I studying together the night the virtual thrummed to life of its own accord, the first time I realized I could manipulate them. This fades from view and the next scene portrays Rabbit and I perched high on a building in the SIM, piloting our drones and arguing heatedly, then us sitting on the bleachers together with all the intimacy of two lovers. The Rosas, Scarlett, and I sharing breakfast together. The Rosas and I exiting the cafeteria
on our way to field exercises.
The coppery taste of medicine and breakfast gruel turns to ashes on my tongue. My lips won’t move to speak. Dr. Dawson politely fills the silence.
“Eleni. You are not interested in your own welfare, in preserving your own life by putting your focus on the tasks Reznik and I outlined for you. If we can’t convince you to cooperate for your own sake, I urge you to consider your friends.”
He clicks a button on the table and the virtuals grow larger, filling the emptiness of the room with the flesh and blood images of the people I’ve left behind in the pursuit of Mateo and the Contras. Another button makes the image pulse, die away and come flourishing back with my friends now featured in ominous locations. Scarlett, Rabbit and The Rosas sit in individual prison cells, in the sparse loneliness of solitary confinement.
“That’s not true,” I whisper, reaching out to Scarlett, the glimmering pixels pulling away from the image and absorbing into me. “You didn’t—you didn’t do this to them.”
“Not yet. But I can make this happen. And worse. I don’t want to do this Eleni. I’m a scientist, not a soldier. Not someone bent on bloodlust. But you and Reznik put me in a difficult position.” He shrugs and meets my gaze. I believe him. I believe he doesn’t want this.
“What can I do?” I ask, fear leaching into me as more light shifts from the virtual and into my skin.
“You’re already doing it,” Dr. Dawson answers, gesturing to the light transfer.
New images twist into the virtual. From Dawson. From my own mind. Scarlett strapped to a hospital bed. Rabbit beaten by a prison guard. The Rosas with sunken cheeks.
“No.” I shudder. The pixels pick up speed, pouring from the images and polluting the room with light until I no longer see Dr. Dawson five feet from me.
Metal Heart: Book 1: The Metal Heart Trilogy Page 20
