Mindless

Chapter Two - 022

 I don't even fight them as they drag me away. I know I'll be punished for this. Pain still affects the purples, even when nothing else does.

As the two guards drag me down the hallway, I wonder what the process is for becoming a purple. I know their education is discontinued. I wasn't in continued education, though. So I guess my employment will be discontinued. Most of the purples are able to sit by themselves in the cells all day messing with tangiscreens. Their defects allow them to get lost in their heads.

The guards scan their wrists on a mini keypad on the wall, the little identifier inside of them making beeping sounds as a new hallway opens. This one is wider, and on any side of it there are rounded door frames with glowing purple electrofields in them. Some doors have no electrofields or occupants. I am thrown into one of those.

Except the electric field turns red, not purple.

I am scheduled for termination.

The edges of my vision turn black as the room spins around me. I have the vague sensation that I'm dreaming.

Termination? Termination... no, that can't be right... it was one offense? Was it? I can't be... no...

I know the walls are soundproof, but for some reason I hear someone screaming. It takes me all the way up until I run out of breath to realize it's me. And then I scream some more.

I have to get out of this-- what would the other girl think? What if I was the only free thinker? What if she gets in trouble because of me? What if...?

I run to the electrofield. Thrown back into the wall as soon as I hit it, I slump over in the corner of the cell. I'm terminated. I am a terminated girl, alive.

And so I wait. There is nothing else I can do. There isn't even an air vent in here. Not that I'd be stupid enough to try that. Last night, the camera's red eye flicked off right before the girl came in. I'm almost sure that she had something to do with it, to make sure neither of us was caught on camera. But this one is clearly still running.

So I cry until my eyes run dry, and then when water and a bowl of nutrient-mush comes into the room through a hole in the wall, I drink it greedily. I mess around with the tangiscreen in the corner until it's screen dims to blackness, indicating my session is over.

I wait. Because I know that at any point in time, someone could walk through this door and I will be terminated. Hours pass. I float into a sort of haze, occasionally speaking my thoughts or laughing to myself at the absurdity of everything.

At one point, I laugh so hard that I can't stop. I just keep laughing and laughing, and I collapse into a pile of me on the floor and I can't stop laughing, and it feels like my internal organs are all getting smaller and smaller and my vision edges with blackness and I can't stop laughing, the strange hacking sound almost unrecognizable as my own voice, and then I hit my head on the floor very hard and suddenly nothing is funny anymore.

And that makes me dizzy and filled with something new, some feeling that no matter what I try to do nothing is going to work. Everything is over for me. It feels like I am surrounded by water, but it comes up to my neck and then it goes over my head and I breathe it in. And it makes me realize something.

If nothing comes out of my termination, if there really were no other free-minded people, then my entire life has not had an actual purpose.