6
November 18th.
Matt Burke:
It’s like a high-tech Ghraib.
They’ve got him in an airtight chamber, strapped limbs-and-torso into some kind of wild new VR simulation web thats spinning and flipping him like a doll as the sims pound him through his full-face visor (which is sealed so they can feed him scent as well as sound and vision). When he moves voluntarily, he’s walking and running on a pivoting treadmill, the web restricting him when he hits simulated VR barriers, a wired bodysuit letting him “feel” what he’s supposedly experiencing.
“Tell me about Delilah,” a voice drones with clinical deadpan, though no one visibly present in the test facility is speaking. The tech running the show is glued to graphics gauging a variety of autonomic responses. They spike. Flutter. Begin to creep jaggedly up.
I can watch a version of what he sees on a screen in the monitor’s room. The machine sims her: slim, toned, tanned, hair shimmering black, sultry eyes, pouty lips.
“Where did you meet her?”
“Classics club,” I hear his voice give them. He sounds drugged, half asleep. “Frankfurt. Dark basement dive. Lightshows. Loud.”
“You went alone?”
“Yes.” Interesting how clear his voice stays despite how whacked he must be. “Peter and Armin were tired. Scheduled to fly early in the morning. But they recommended the place, knowing the kind of music I like, or hoping I’d meet someone.”
“You took a cab?”
The graphics spike way off the chart. But then I remember what happened with that particular cab driver.
“Delilah: She approached you?” the voice continues, apparently not concerned about getting a verbal answer to the last question. “In the club?”
“Dancing. She said she liked the way I moved. Yelling over the music. Asked me where I was from. Asked me to come out back so we could talk.”
“And then what happened?”
This is different. The response graph arcs up smooth and stays put just down from the top. And when he answers, the voice is different: deeper, colder. Like it was Athens, when there were guns on him.
“It was a trap.” Very matter-of-fact. “There were four of them. Waiting. Two worked for the club as security. Then more in a van.”
“What did you do?”
“Tried to shake off the drunk I had going. Got ready to move. Looked for her. Afraid they would hurt her.”
“But?”
“She laughed.” The graphics suddenly dip and bounce all over. I watch his body get tight in the webbing. Worse, the sim does a cruel job recreating the scene, right down to the ugly grin on the girl’s face. I want to kill her myself. But then he comes down, just a bit: “She set me up.”
“What did you do?”
“Slipped my wallet in the trash,” he gets relatively cool. “My passport.”
“Why?”
Still cool: “They would want to know who I was. So they could put me on the web.”
“Why didn’t you resist?” the interrogating voice keeps on.
The graphics bounce about again as a half dozen hulking thugs surround his trench-coated avatar in the simulation.
“I locked up,” he admits, soft for a moment. “But it unbalanced them when I came willingly. Like I wasn’t afraid. They were. I could feel it. I had more control…” His voice shifts back from the fragile human to the deep dark as he goes, and his autonomic responses do the rise and flatline again. The interrogator tries to shake him:
“What about the girl?”
The plateau rises but stays level. His voice gets colder.
“She lived with them. Did her part to try to break me. Flirted and teased. Ridiculed. Laughed.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I gave her nothing. It made her angry. One night she made sure to be loud when her lover had her. Then she came out naked and smelling like sex, trying to kiss me with his cum still on her breath. Hajaf got a little shaken up at that. I think he liked her.”
“What happened to her?”
The sim fast-forwards through the re-creation of him taking out his guards, all the way through him popping everybody in the apartment but the girl. I watch him hold the gun on her, backing her up. She throws away her weapon. Holds up her hands. I can see her mouth moving rapidly, begging, pleading, trying to manipulate, but the video feed I’m watching has no sound. He backs her up against the wall, presses the gun up under her jaw. I watch his vitals ride the action.
He acts it out in the web (it’s creepy to watch): Traces the muzzle of the pistol down her neck, between her breasts. She starts to respond, thrusting herself at him, thinking she has her way out. He shifts the gun into his left hand and digs it under her ear, and she’s grinding her pelvis at him like she’s giving him a half-assed table-dance. His right hand goes into the coat like he’s going to undo his pants, but then it comes out with a big fighting knife.
“What did you do?”
The tip traces the lines of her pretty face, her throat. She freezes up and starts to tremble.
“We talked.” His voice is worse than Athens.
“About what?”
“Things. You know. Small talk. Passwords.”
Then it gets stranger: He lays the long blade across his own face. And carves…
“Why did you do that? Why did you cut yourself?”
I watch his sim-self bleed, cut diagonally down through the right eyebrow and cheek. He takes his time answering.
“To make a point.”
“About what?” the interrogator stays right on him.
“Pretty faces. Hers. Mine. She’d teased her lover, Yusuf, about how pretty she thought I was. So he took out his knife and threatened to cut my face. But he wanted me recognizable.”
He takes the knife, and pinning her to the wall with the gun, he makes an equal wound down her face. Her avatar is sobbing, begging.
“She told me what I wanted to know.”
He withdraws the knife and caresses her hair with his gun-hand. Without sound, it looks like he’s whispering to her, softly, almost comforting. He uses his knife-hand to push an open notebook within her reach, and she swipes the print-scanner and types something with very shaky fingers.
Then he puts the pistol away, takes hold of her by the head and kisses her. She shivers and cries and lets him, responds to him. Starts slowly reaching for his gun…
But then her eyes snap wide and her body jerks and I realize he’s shoved the knife up under her jaw. He takes her last breath into his mouth before pulling back. Then he presses his facial wound into hers and holds her as she stops convulsing and goes limp in his arms.
I look down and realize the tech’s hands are shaking as he resets the sim.
So are mine.
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 23
