Psion Gamma (8 page)

“Finally, I want to talk about my father,” Albert continued. “He is—he is the greatest man I have ever known.” A heavy weight settled in Byron’s chest. “My father, despite having to disguise our relationship for the last five and a half years, has always been there for me. After my mother died in battle it would’ve been easy for him to throw himself into his work and stop raising a child. Instead, he has made time for me regardless of the demands of his job. Even lately, as I’ve struggled to—to get through the recent events—my mission and such—he has been there for me, constantly checking up on me. I hope I grow up to be just like him. I love you, Dad.”

A large smile broke out on Byron’s face. He opened his eyes to see his son looking back at him. He’d never felt so proud of anyone in his entire life. It was one of those rare occurrences when he knew he’d done a decent job raising his son.

January 8, 2086

S
AMMY HAD NO IDEA
what kind of gas the Aegis injected into his compartment, but it stunk like burned toast and paralyzed his muscles. Wearing gas masks, the Aegis dragged him out of the van, patted down every inch of him, and then propped him up on a dolly. One of them buckled straps around his waist and shoulders before wheeling him behind the others.

Through drooping eyelids, Sammy saw that he was in a well-lit, underground parking lot. They passed two security cameras, which meant there were probably more, but he had a feeling whoever was watching those cameras didn’t care about some kid being wheeled into the building on a moving dolly. Every pillar they passed had a large purple ‘N’ with a golden circle wrapping around it. Some of the walls bore this symbol, too.

They brought him to an elevator. Each Aegis except Stripe and the one pushing Sammy had a gun trained on him. When the doors slid closed behind them, Stripe pressed his thumb to a scanner above the columns of floor buttons. The panel of buttons swung open to reveal a second panel set into the elevator wall. Only three buttons were on this new panel: black, red, and white. Stripe pushed the black one.

The steel box descended for a long time. As it dropped, the effects of the paralyzing gas began to wear off. After coming to a smooth stop, the doors opened. Sammy expected to see a filthy, dark, dripping hallway straight out of every slasher film he’d ever watched late at night when his parents thought he was asleep. Such was not the case. They came to a pristine, almost gleaming, corridor. The walls were covered in a cream and gold wallpaper with a deep purple trim. The carpeting was a light tan with rich embroidery. The long hallway stretched on before them. Somehow this scared Sammy even more.

They went halfway down then took a right into another hallway, this one shorter and narrower. It was lined with four skinny doors on each side, each with a small circular window about two-thirds of the way up.

A thin, breaking voice screamed out from behind one of the doors. “Let me go! Let me out of here! I want to go home!”

Through the second window on his right, Sammy saw the source of the shouts: a thin girl with short black hair. She was on her hands and knees in the corner of a white room with a metal ring around her neck that chained her to the wall. Sammy thought she couldn’t be any older than Jeffie. She looked up at them as they passed and screamed even louder. The Aegis made no sign that they heard her. At the end of the hall stood a tall black door. Stripe scanned his thumb again. There was a click, and the black door swung open.

The room beyond the door was scantily furnished. There were two chairs, one with heavy-duty arm restraints built into the rests, and one without any restraints at all. The second one looked more like an office chair. A table stood against the nearest wall with a white sheet concealing the identity of the oddly-shaped lumps atop it. Hanging from the ceiling was a helmet similar to the one Sammy used when he played virtual reality games at Psion Beta headquarters. The room was immaculate, probably even sterile, but despite the lack of smell, Sammy sensed death in this room. An awful chill ran up his spine and ended at the base of his skull.

While two Aegis removed the magnetic cuffs from Sammy’s arms, three guns stayed trained on him. They shackled him firmly into the restraints on the armrests of the chair and his feet were placed in ankle-cuffs. When everyone seemed satisfied he was secured, all but Stripe left the room.

Stripe walked behind Sammy, who craned his neck to see what Stripe was doing. With great care, Stripe took off his hat, coat, and tie and hung them on a small, thin stand. Then he removed his glasses and placed them in the front pocket of his coat.

“Not the most comfortable clothes for traveling, you see. Especially in the middle of the summer.” He began unbuttoning the cuffs of his white shirt, then rolling them up his arms in careful fashion. “But the rules are the rules. And I obey the rules.”

“Why am I here?” Sammy asked. He checked the sturdiness of the restraints as subtly as he could.

Stripe did not answer immediately. When he came back around in front, Sammy got a better look at him. He had neatly trimmed and combed hair ending above his ears. His gray eyes, confident and intelligent, were not kind.

“You won’t get out of those without help.” Stripe gestured with his head to the restraints. “I saw you pulling at them. They’re built to withstand six hundred kilos of pressure. So unless you have supernatural strength . . .” He let his words hang in the air as he measured Sammy up with a stare. “Why do you think we are here?”

Sammy lied as best he could. “I don’t know. Did I do something wrong?”

Stripe frowned as if he found Sammy’s words to be troublesome. “Wrong is a very awkward word, don’t you think? Very arbitrary. You see, you may not have broken any laws, but you did do something that needs correcting.”

“What do you mean?” Sammy asked trying to sound scared, like the girl he had passed in the hall. “What needs correcting?”

“No details. I just want to speak very clearly to you. I want you to understand every single word that I say. Are you listening to me?”

Sammy nodded, his eyes wide. The closer Stripe got to him, the more he could sense his own fear crawling across his skin like an army of spiders marching up his arms and shoulders toward his brain. Stripe’s sharply cinnamon-scented breath hung in the air around Sammy’s nostrils.

“Good. You seem like a smart boy. You’re not screaming like most of the crap we get. We ran a DNA search for you on the way here. Nothing was found. It’s happened before. Your family is one of the unregistered pieces of gutter trash, probably from the slums judging by the stench on you. I don’t really care. The point is, one way or another, you will tell me who you are and where you are from. It’s such a simple thing. If you tell me now, I can go have a talk with your family, and everyone will be happy. Including you. If you don’t tell me, I have to make you unhappy.”

Pieces fell together inside Sammy’s head.
They kill Anomaly Fourteens
. . .
and probably their families, too
.

“Do you believe in God?”

Sammy hadn’t decided one way or the other, but since he was pretending to be Al, he answered in the affirmative.

“Good for you. Do you pray?”

Again he nodded.

“If you don’t answer every question I ask, you will come to realize through significant pain that there is no God. Have I made myself clear?”

“Yes.”

“Did you understand every word that I said?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell me your name and where you live.”

Sammy said nothing, but his mind raced furiously. If he lied, they’d figure it out. What would be the point? Cold hard calculations flashed before his mind’s eye and he resolved that the only way of getting out of the situation would be to wait for a chance to escape. That moment was not now, not in this chair.

Dread rose in him, filling his chest and settling over his heart. He would be tortured. He knew it. He wanted to cry. More fear hit him in a way he had not felt in over a month.
This is real. This is really going to happen
. He steeled himself as best he could against whatever was coming.

The Aegis smiled. His perfect teeth, end to end, side by side, framed by bright red lips was all Sammy could see. And for the third time in his life, Sammy prayed.
God
. . .
Please God, if you’re there, please save me. He’s going to hurt me.

“So you’ve made your choice. Good. A little courage never hurt anyone.” Stripe smiled as though he’d made a private joke to which only he knew the punch line.

Stripe stood up and flipped a switch on the wall. The helmet hanging ominously above descended until it was level with Sammy’s chest. He put it on Sammy’s head, snuffing out all the light. There was a loud sound, like metal scraping tile, followed by something heavy dropping into Sammy’s lap.

“Lean forward and throw up in this. I don’t like cleaning up messes.”

The blackness inside the helmet was replaced by a kaleidoscope of images and movements. It reminded Sammy of going to a holo-laser show in a dome theater and thinking he was flying even when he wasn’t moving at all. He picked up speed, traveling through a dimension of spirals and wormholes. He tried to close his eyes, but when he did a painful shock nipped his ear. His whole body convulsed as his eyes reopened. The Aegis snorted softly nearby, unseen.

As minutes passed, the movements became faster and faster until his eyes could just barely keep up with the swift changes in direction, jerking him around until his brain spun inside his skull. His mind, plunged into such disorientation, could no longer tell if he was sitting in a chair, hanging upside down, or twirling madly in space.

When his vertigo reached a critical point, he lurched forward and vomited into whatever sat in front of him. His eyes involuntarily closed, shocking him even more than the first time. He retched again and again until he heaved nothing but air and sound. The swirling and turning continued. Every so often Sammy believed he could withstand the pain of the shock just to keep himself sane. But each time he tried to close his eyes the voltage increased, and it hurt too badly to resist.

When Sammy finally lost all concept of spatial and time orientation, the helmet turned off and retracted back to the ceiling. He closed his eyes and heaved several more times, still feeling as though he were zipping every direction at once.

“That was fun!” Stripe said. His voice was like glass in Sammy’s ears, thundering through and trying to shatter him. “Now I’m going to give you a tiny taste of what you can expect tomorrow if you decide to continue this silly farce. Your homework will be to think about this next experience every time you consider withholding information from me.”

Sammy cracked his eyes open to see what the man could possibly be preparing to do. The world was spinning and in the middle of it Stripe stood using a small knife to break the seal on what looked like a tube of toothpaste. With protective gloves covering his hands, Stripe squeezed a small dollop of white cream onto his fingertip, and held the glistening droplet up for Sammy to see.

Sammy could only see a spinning ball of light.

“Do you want to tell me what your name is now?”

“No.” He didn’t remember screaming while the helmet had been over him, but the sound that came from his throat was a hoarse whisper.

“Could you at least tell me whether or not it’s Muhammad, John, or Michael? Because I could eliminate an appreciable chunk of the male population . . .”

Sammy said nothing, keeping his focus on not retching.

“Did you know that there are only three connections between your skin and the sensory area of your brain? So when I do this—” he touched the glistening finger to the back of Sammy’s left hand, “—you feel the change in pressure, temperature, and a slight wetness almost immediately.”

The spot the man touched felt wet and cold on Sammy’s skin.

Stripe continued very calmly, speaking as though he were sharing a great secret with his captive. It dawned on Sammy that this was a man who his father, Samuel Sr., would have described as being in love with his own voice.

“I’ve made the sensation of pain a special study for myself. It’s so wonderful. It helps us feel alive. You probably don’t know much about pain. But you’re here, so I’ll teach you.”

As the wet dot on Sammy’s skin began to warm, Stripe lectured about the different nerve endings in Sammy’s hand and how they communicated with his brain. All Sammy heard were bits of words like pacinian, spinothalamic, and cortex. Normally his hyper-intelligent brain would have picked up everything instantly, but the tiny dot on his skin had grown uncomfortably warm, as if it were too close to a candle.

“Let me ask you a theoretical question. What if some brilliant researcher isolated a molecule that could duplicate the effect of temperature change on nerve receptors? The possibilities are endless!” Stripe exclaimed these last words in a rapturous voice. Then he got unnaturally close to Sammy’s face again. His cinnamon breath permeated Sammy’s entire being. The twisted scar on his lip filled Sammy’s vision. “And, you see, here’s one amazing discovery: a person can feel it without any damage to the skin. No death from dehydration . . . even when you experience such intense heat that your skin should be burning off your bones.”