Invictus

Chapter 39: DCCCVIII

As my fingers touched the sweat against Twitch's skin and felt the blood coursing through her veins, I saw something.

Immediately, I became disoriented and my vision shifted from the wooded Shoshone forest to a large white room with bright lights overhead. At first I thought I'd teleported somewhere else, but then I realized that I was, literally, seeing the world through a different set of eyes.

"808, I want you to take these five objects and strike the five targets. You have two seconds."

I had become 808, but I had no control over her body. I was merely a passive witness, feeling and watching events that I knew had already taken place. The view reminded me of the first person shooter's I used to play on my VR rig back at Tia's.

A woman with blonde hair pulled into a tight ponytail and a white lab coat stood to the right of 808's periphery. There was a tablet in her hands, and she was watching 808 cautiously while she jotted something down. 

808 lifted her lanky white skinned arm and started levitating what looked like five black daggers up off a plastic table located in the center of the large room. In seconds the five black daggers were airborne, soaring towards the five bullseyes that were hanging on the distant wall. The hand that was doing all this was that of a child, no older than fifteen I assumed. The black daggers darted towards the bullseyes with blinding speed, punching right through the metal they were composed of.

The daggers hit their mark, but barely.

A voice on an invisible loudspeaker overhead blared. "We need her to be accurate. If she fails again, punish her." I recognized the voice, it was Helena's.

The blonde haired woman in the lab coat gave a sour look upward where Helena's voice had played. "Ma'm I fail to understand the point of this test. I thought we were going to be honing her stacking skills. You insisted that we were preparing her for that CDOT contract."

"We are. But what state department of transportation is going to contract with Ori-gen to build roads and bridges if we can't get this test right. If she can't hit bullseyes with a kitchen knife, how can we expect her to apply the right pressure to stretch a high tension wire or lay a stone that's perfectly symmetrical with the one below it? We need her to be precise. This exercise is designed to hone that kind of precision." Helena said.

The blonde haired woman nodded as though accepting the answer, but the look on her face showed otherwise.

"Please continue Doctor." Helena said.

The Doctor looked to 808. "Again please."

808 grunted and brought the black daggers back and set them on the table in the same order they had been in before, but her compliance stopped there.

"Again 808." The Doctor said even gentler this time, but 808 still didn't listen. She just stood there with what I knew had to be a menacing look on her face.

"Ma'm she's not —" I could tell the Doctor was reluctant to obey Helena's harsh instructions. She didn't want to hurt 808. 

Helena waved the Doctor off. "It's fine. I'll take care of her."

The ensuing silence that came after Helena's words were followed by 808 collapsing onto the floor. Her vision began to rock back and forth violently. Her body convulsed with what I knew had to be electricity coursing through it, causing her to shake wildly. When the electrical buzzing finally stopped along with the shaking, the Doctor approached and tried to extend a helping hand to bring 808 to her feet.