Twenty Sixty-Four

Chapter 2

He was lying on something that felt like a camp cot, but higher off the ground. He was strapped down in some way so he could not move. Harsh light from somewhere behind him fell on his face. O'Neill was standing at his side, looking down at him intently. In the other side stood a man in a white coat, holding a syringe. They were murmuring professionally. Bradley made out phrases like "Not yet" and "testosterone infusion".

Even after his eyes were open, he understood his surroundings only gradually. He had the impression of swimming up into this room from some different world, a dream-like green underwater world far below. How long he had been down there he did not know. Since the moment they arrested him he had not seen darkness or daylight. Besides, his memories were not continuous. There had been times when consciousness, even the sort of consciousness that one has in sleep, had stopped dead and started again after a blank interval. He did not know if the intervals were of days or weeks or only seconds.

With that first blow on his elbow the nightmare had started. Later, he realized all that time in holding was only preliminary, a routine interrogation to which most prisoners suffered. There was a long list of crimes—espionage, sabotage, perversion and the like—which everyone had to confess to as a matter of course. The confession was a formality, but the torture was real. How many times he was beaten, how long the beatings continued, he could not remember. There were always five or six men in black uniforms at him simultaneously. It was always the men performing beatings, not mendroids. Sometimes with fists, sometimes clubs, sometimes steel rods, sometimes it was boots. There were times when he rolled about the floor, as shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless, hopeless effort to dodge them, only to receive more and yet more blows: in his ribs, in his belly, on his elbows, on his shins, in his groin, in his testicles, on the bone at the base of his spine. There were times when it went on and on until the cruel, wicked, unforgivable thing seemed to him not that the guards continued to beat him but that he could not force himself into losing consciousness. Sometimes, some part of his mind seemd to float above his tortured body, looking down at the horror below. Other times, his courage deserted him so he began shouting for mercy even before the beating began. Just the sight of a fist drawn back for a blow was enough to make him pour forth a confession of real and imaginary crimes. Other times he resolved to confess nothing, every word had to be forced out of him between gasps of pain. Then there were the times he feebly tried to compromise, when he said to himself: 'I will confess, but not yet. I can hold out till the pain becomes unbearable. Three more kicks, two more kicks, and then I'll tell them whatever they want.' They only laughed at any resistance, relishing the challenge. Sometimes they beat him so he could no longer stand. They would dump him like a sack of potatoes onto the concrete floor of a cell to recuperate for a few hours, and then be taken back and beaten again. There were some longer periods of recovery. He dimly remembered them as they were spent mostly in sleep or stupor. He remembered a cell with a plank bed, just a shelf sticking out from the wall, and a chrome wash-basin, and meals of hot soup and bread and sometimes coffee. He remembered a surly barber arriving to scrape his chin and crop his hair, and businesslike, unsympathetic nursedroids in white coats feeling his pulse, tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running cold sensors over him in search for broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm to make him sleep. The wall still had a faceboogle ranting and flickering away on full volume, social media scrolling by itself, reminding him this violence was just an extension of the abuse he had always suffered.

The beatings were less frequent, and mainly a threat, a horror which he could be sent back to at any moment his answers were unsatisfactory. His interrogators were no longer thugs in black uniforms but Corporate consultants: sharp, precise people with quick movements and flashing glasses. These worked on him in relays which lasted —he thought, he could not be sure—ten or twelve hours at a stretch. These Conversion Specialists, as they were called, saw to it that he was in constant slight pain. They slapped his face, tugged his ears and hair, made him stand on one leg, refused toilet breaks, shone glaring lights in his face, played loud rock music until his ears rang, left him naked and mocked his body. The aim of all this was to humiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning. In a bizarre way, it reminded Bradley of school. The constant low level torture was not the main method, however, their real weapon was merciless questioning that went on and on, hour after hour, assigning him bizarre sexual desires, threatening rape and tripping him up, laying traps for him by playing altered audio of his voice, twisting everything he said, convicting him at every step of lies and self-contradiction until he began weeping as much from shame as from nervous fatigue. Sometimes he would weep half a dozen times in a single session. Most of the time they screamed abuse at him and threatened at every hesitation to deliver him over to the guards again. Other times they would suddenly change their tune, call him Colleague, appeal to him in the name of CorpSoc, The Ronald and his virile masculinity, and ask him mournfully whether even now he had not enough loyalty to the Corporate left to make him wish to undo the evil he had done. They would insist that deep down he wanted to be a real man and could put aside his perverse tendencies. When his nerves were in rags after hours of questioning, even this appeal could reduce him to sniveling tears. In the end their wheedling broke him down more completely than the boots and fists of the guards. He became just a mouth that agreed, a hand that signed, whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out what they wanted him to confess and believe, and then confess and believe it quickly, before the bullying started anew. He confessed to the assassination of eminent Corporate employees, the production and distribution of seditious and obscene websites, participation in pederastic orgies, embezzlement of public funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage of every kind. He confessed that he had been a spy in the pay of the Neochinese government as far back as 2048. He confessed that he was a fervent atheist, an admirer of socialism, and a sexual pervert. He confessed he had murdered his wife, although he knew, as his questioners knew, she was still alive. He confessed for years he had been in personal touch with Hillary and had been a member of an underground organization which included almost every human being he had ever known. It was easier to confess everything and implicate everybody. Besides, in a sense it was all true. It was true that he had been the enemy of the people, and in the eyes of the Corporate there was no distinction between the thought and the deed.