He had to prepare his mind. They were coming and, very soon, he wouldn’t have a choice. So he had to prepare his last haven with every bit of fortitude in his soul because, if he didn’t, he would break open. Then everything would be lost.
~
“What’s the status of the subject?” Curt, demanding, but cool, the Blackcoat’s voice cut through the air. The room, filled with tables of electronics and enough lab equipment to fill a dozen science labs, instantly became solid with tension. The Blackcoat was easy to anger. Luckily, the answer was one Scott felt The Blackcoat might endure.
“The subject is as stable as can be expected. As of yet, he has outlasted the others, but no-” The Blackcoat’s hand sliced down, effetely cutting Scott off. Wrong, thought Scott, The Blackcoat never endured an answer.
“The subject is stable?”
“Yes,” began Scott, “Although no one is unchanged by the purging.” The Blackcoat only stared, causing Scott to take in the strange largeness of The Blackcoat’s pupils, despite the bright fluorescent lighting. What a completely irreverent fact! But Scott couldn’t help himself. His mind was spinning too fast for him.
Folding his hands, The Blackcoat maintained his calm for another minute. Then, “The subject, which is in all ways disposable, is stable. Yet, it has not broken. Do you expect me to be happy with this? Pleased with these useless results?!" Scott sensed what was coming, but had no real way of preventing it. The man in the black trench coat had chosen his anoyminous title, “The Blackcoat”, that was true, but what was also true was that The Blackcoat had earned his sinister sounding title.
“I can’t wait for the subject to break over the course of weeks. I need for it to break now. I need the information now. I need to be able to manipulate it now!”
The subject, just in the adjacent room, “the subject” was clearly visible. With tubes dripping a toxic looking green fluid into his arms, and surrounded by beeping machines, he looked like a patient in his last hours of cancer. But he wasn’t being treated here. And the fluid being put into him wasn’t medicine, but perhaps as damaging as chemotherapy.
“I could-”
“You will”
“Increase the amount of serum but-”
“There will be no but.”
“But-” Scott had to say it. His entire life, his childhood of learning to protect those weaker then himself forbade him to go any further and so, despite being terrified, he said, “but his mind won’t survive. David-”
“SHUT UP!” Veins were standing out in the black coats forehead, and he assumed a posture so menacing that Scott felt sure he was about to be attacked. The blackcoat hated it when subjects were named directly, but this response confused Scott. The name seem to have personally carried the power to enrage the blackcoat. Yet, subjects were no more personal then a bag of goods. Take subject, unhinge subject’s mind, prepare for transport. Clearly something was going on below the surface.
Fixing Scott with a murderous green eyed glare, one so intense it was a surprise that the man on its receiving end didn’t burst into flames and simply wither away, the black coat snarled, “You will obtain the information even if it means you must obliterate his mind in the process!” Then he whipped around, shrugged his long coat furiously into place, and stalked from the room leaving a very confused Scott in his wake.
~
You could give up David. It would be easy. Just let them in. Let them into the hollow libraries of your mind. Let them read the books you’ve hidden from them. It would be easy. This would all go away…No? Even now, you bar the doors? The fortitude in you does surprise me, but it will hurt. No, that’s not quite right though, is it? The whole of your consciousness, everything that you are, aflame with agony. I can feel that you truly want to die. But you won’t, not until you unbar the doors to your hidden sanctuaries, not until you let them see what you’ve let no other see. You can’t imagine any other way for this to end, can you? …Still you keep them out? I am impressed. But all strong things wear down with time, and time is something they do have. They have all the time in the world.
