Blast Protocol

Chapter 24

SILAS

Loud, crackly, buzzing sounds. Voices. Staticky. Like radio noise in a cop car.

To be honest, I'm surprised I even notice. The pain is very raw, and very real, and try as I might, I cannot block it out.

It's funny, I've always thought I would hold up well to torture, perhaps in the same way that a lot of men seem to think they could rise to the occasion and land an airliner in an emergency. I relate to strong, competent heroes. I like to think that, in dire situations, I'd be able to exercise similar levels of control.

Something's happening in this room. Something noisy. But it feels distant and unimportant. It feels like I'm hearing and seeing it somewhere at the end of a long, echoe-y tunnel.

I can't bring myself to care about it. All I know is that I'm in more pain right now than I've ever felt in my entire life. If it continues—and it seems like it will—I may very well go insane.

Perhaps it's better, then, to focus on what's happening here, in this room, rather than the pain.

Gavin. He's at a stand-still, listening intently to the radio chatter. Whatever thrill, whatever excitement he'd felt at what he was doing to me—that seems to be gone now. He's already moved on to something else. It's as if I'm not even here. It's as if this project, which has been underway for the past 20 minutes, doesn't even matter anymore.

I'm like a half dissected carcass left to rot on an examination table. Stretched out, opened up. I can only assume that I'm about to be slowly disseminated into all my various parts.

He mounted a mirror. It's up in the corner. I can see myself clearly in it. He wants me to see.

What am I, anyway? I don't even know anymore.

I believe I'm human. I know I'm human. But all I can see right now are plates, and pistons, and wires, and parts. All I can see are things that I never would have believed to be pieces of me.

There are organic bits in there, too. Somehow, they don't seem like they belong. They seem alien, housed in these cages of metal. Gavin has unlocked those cages to show me what's inside.

Was the mind meant to experience something like this? To see myself, pried open like a toy in need of a new battery?

The various fleshy-looking organs arranged inside my torso are connected by these strange, conjoined, rope-like tubes, some of them looking kind of like the liquid cooling system for a PC. As I watch them, they move and throb a little. They vibrate to the rhythm of the weirdest organ of them all; what looks to be my heart. White. Puffy. Moist. Pulsing.

With every beat, with every pulse that I can see in that mirror, there's an aching thud in my head to match it.

The same fluid, whatever's pumping in that heart, is also circulating in my brain. I hope he doesn't show me that, too, but I think he will. He'll show me that, and a lot more before this is over.

But for now, the operation has come to a stand-still. Gavin listens to the radio, his eyes wide and somewhere else. Meanwhile, the voices get louder, more frantic.

Finally, he shuts off the walkie-talkie. As if he's heard enough.

"I need to go out for a bit," he says. "Don't go anywhere."

No! I want to yell. Please don't leave me alone. Don't leave me here like this, with nothing to look at, nothing to distract me.

I can't even move. My limbs are stretched out like complicated springs. And that fucking mirror, revealing my body from the waist up—if he would at least take it down-

But Gavin is already gone, with the door sliding shut behind him. My bright blue irises adjust in the mirror as I study myself, glowing unnaturally like ring lights. I am alone, with the seconds stretching out ahead of me.

Only...am I?

At the very moment the door shuts, something shifts on the left side of the room, just inside my periphery. A figure I hadn't noticed before. If they had even been here before. If they were even actually here right now, and not a figment of my distended, overloaded, 'neural matrix', or however the hell I was supposed to think of it. C.S. Lewis said, "You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body." I wonder what the hell I have.

But the person, or whatever it is, is moving now. Stepping in front of me. Into frame.

Long, dark hair, tied back. An anime T-shirt tucked into a long black skirt.

Pale face. Too pale. Almost...grey.

Stranger still, there's a gap in the middle area of one of her cheeks. An actual hole. As a stare at it, a shiny, black shape emerges from that tiny pit in the girl's face. It crawls on swift, blurry legs up the side of her forehead and burrows in her hair.

I can't speak. If I could, I would call out her name. But I can only watch as she turns toward me. And maybe it's better that I can't speak. It also means I can't scream.