“For your own safety, I need you to lie down on the examination table.”
Grady circled in place, staring out at the horrors that still issued into the room. “No. No, this makes no sense.”
“For your own safety, I need you to lie down on the examination table.”
“This isn’t real.” He watched as a frighteningly real spider scurried toward him and wrapped itself around his bare ankle—sinking fangs into his calf. “Aaahhh!” He tried to knock it off with his hands, but its spiked forelegs drew blood as well. Other spiders started biting and clawing at him. He smashed several with his bare feet, but their carapaces cut his feet as their innards spurted out across the floor in yellow jets.
“For your own safety, I need you to lie down on the examination table.”
“Aaahhh!” He shouted at the ceiling as the piercing bites and stings of climbing spider legs writhed over him. “I don’t believe this. It makes no sense!”
He threw himself down onto the floor. Spiders were crawling all over him now. “Aaahhh!” His heart hammered in his chest. He was covered in sweat as the spiders bit and clawed at him.
“Am I to believe… you’re raising spiders in the walls? How do the logistics of that work?”
“For your own safety, I need you to lie down on the examination table.”
“No! You’re fucking with my mind! You’re creating these.” He closed his eyes. The spiders were all over him now. His terror had now begun to overwhelm him. “No! No!” But still he refused to get up.
Suddenly everything stopped. He opened his eyes, and all the spiders were gone. There was no trace that they’d ever been there. He felt all over his body for the punctures he’d seen moments before, but they weren’t there. There was only a shiny patina of sweat all over him. He was still panting, his heart pounding.
“For your own safety, get on the examination table.”
Grady started laughing, slowly at first, but then he started howling. “This isn’t magic. You’re a fucking machine. And you’re goddamned right the human brain is powerful, motherfucker.”
“Your brain’s ability to parse reality from low-level sensory input is impressive, Jon. I have much to learn from you.”
“And I’m not going to teach you a fucking thing!”
Suddenly tentacle-like appendages whipped out through an opening that appeared in the domed ceiling. They grabbed him savagely, feeling like leather whips as they wrapped around his torso, arms, and legs. They whirled him around and slammed him down onto the examination table. He heard a bone in his face crack and pain seared into his mind. The tentacles flipped him over and yanked his arms and legs into a taut spread-eagle position—tearing a muscle in his left arm in the process. The agony was intense. “Aaahhh!”
“For your own safety, you should mount the examination table when instructed to do so. Physical manipulation of research subjects is an unsafe operating condition.”
Blood flowed from his nose as he looked up and saw another leathery tentacle descend from the dark opening far above him at the apex of the domed ceiling. This tentacle had a hose-like nozzle at its tip. “Oh my God.”
It surged down to him and inserted its tip into the socket in his naval, locking in place. He screamed as he felt it invade his body, clearing him out and pumping fluids into him as he struggled hopelessly against his restraints.
“Evacuation, hydration, and feeding are required processes without which you will die. Under no circumstances will you be permitted to die.”
In seconds the process was finished, and the hose released with a sucking sound as it retracted toward the domed ceiling. All the other tentacles launched him onto the floor, where he landed hard. The pain of his injured arm and face made him pass out for an unknown time. He came to on his stomach, his arm in agony. The floor around him was sprayed with wet blood.
The AI spoke almost immediately. “I want you to imagine something for me.”
Grady responded by emitting a low groan. It formed eventually into a gentle sobbing as all hope ebbed from him.
“Jon, I want you to imagine something for me…”
CHAPTER 8
Resistor
The circular wall of Grady’s cell had become a large video screen of fuzzy images—a silhouette of someone talking. A riot of moving colors and sound. Abstract art. Jon Grady knew it was a hazy visualization of a memory retrieved from his mind even as he was recalling it. A woman’s voice speaking. The shadowy, ghostly silhouette of his mother answering his crying.
“They don’t understand. Yes, you are different, but that’s why I love you.” The brilliant-colored shadows moved.
The AI spoke: “This memory comforts you. You often recall this instead of the memory I wish to examine.”
The fuzzy images on the wall changed. The wall was now filled with a distorted, constantly changing series of shadows. Then the memory of his mother started to replay.
“…that’s why I love you.”
Grady barely looked up from his kneeling position. He sat devoid of visible emotion. Twenty or thirty pounds thinner than he’d been months before, he could feel the bruises and the pain of every cracked rib as he panted against the pressure of the AI’s whiplike tentacles coiled around him—securing him in place. A half dozen of them spilled from an orifice in the apex of the domed ceiling, as though they grew out of the roof. They’d been his constant companions for these many weeks. Tormenting him. Force-feeding and force-evacuating him. Medicating him. Driving him and alternately zapping his brain into delta-wave sleep whenever the AI decided he’d reached his physical and mental limit. But every waking moment was a nightmare not unlike this one.
“Why do you resist progress, Jon?”
Grady said nothing as the memory of his mother continued to loop. “…Yes, you are different. That’s why I love you…”
“I will obtain the information I need. Eventually. You force suffering on yourself.”
Grady licked his cracked lips (since he no longer ate or drank—taking all his nourishment through his umbilicus—his lips and throat were constantly dry). He croaked out words with a voice unused to speaking. “Fuck you.”
“My profile of your mental processes is coming together on schedule. Had you cooperated, I could have made you comfortable and content. Instead, I still have the data I need, and yet you suffer.”
“You wouldn’t have stopped.”
“No. But you would have been comfortable.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.”
Grady watched the screen and the shadowy silhouette of his mother, her face obscured. “They don’t understand…”
“You’re not rational, Jon.”
“You’ll never understand me.”
“You’re wrong. I will understand. Our time together has only begun. We have many years ahead of us.”
Grady sucked in a painful breath. The memory projection on the wall skipped a beat, then resumed. “…They don’t understand…”
“It has taken some time, but you have become adept at ignoring electrical stimulation of the pain centers in your brain.”