kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"Experiment.0"

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Experiment 4250 words

The words were out of his mouth before they registered, well before he could stop them.

"Fucking cops." Not too loud, but still... they'd heard him; they turned around to face him. "Fuck me," he mumbled, softer, and turned towards the rack of bubblegum and other assorted candies. He studiously ignored his surroundings, biting down hard on his tongue, forcing a swell of blood out to punish himself for the loss of control. Saliva bubbled out past his teeth and between his lips and he sucked it in. He focused his vision on the candy, just the candy. He didn't want the fucking candy. He'd come in for --

"Hey Joe, I think we got us an attitude that needs pulling." The cops crowded in around him, forming the typical triangle of intimidation, too close for him to focus on both of them at the same time. He knew how they placed themselves without looking -- he could feel it on his skin: the air was hotter, closer and damper.



"I'm sure you heard him wrong. He wouldn't just go around dropping his night's plans like that, right?" The second cop prodded him with his finger. He turned around slowly, drawing a mental mask of calm and simplicity over his face.

"Yeah, uh," his voice quivered and he held back a smile: the quiver was perfect. "I didn't say nothin', sirs."

The first one stood motionless but taut, as if ready to strike. "Joe?"

"Ah, we'll let it go." The cops wandered off, chuckling. That wasn't right, that wasn't how the game was played! He felt like he'd just been the brunt of a joke that he didn't even get. Anger jumped his flesh and rang his ears and he stomped hard on the ground to clear his head. He didn't look up to see if they turned around again.

Okay, that wasn't right, but it wasn't his worry at the moment. He'd come in for -- what? What had he come in for? The cops had utterly destroyed his train of thought. Break it down: one, two, three, four. Coffee! He'd just come in here for a flaming cup of coffee and he'd gone and let his mind slip through his tongue. Dammit! He really wasn't in a position to play their games. His left hand played with the coins in his pocket: one cup of coffee.

After a short while he looked up from the candy and verified the cops were still there, chatting up the clerk. He cursed under his breath -- well under his breath -- and wandered down to the back of the store to look at the cold drink selection: there was only so long he could realistically stare at the candy but he didn't want to give them a reason to continue the confrontation; they'd certainly just start it back up using the clerk as a third leg to pound his head on.

Soon enough the cops did indeed go outside and out of sight. He shook his head at the selection, fully playing the lies he'd committed to so far, and wandered over to look at the pot of coffee. Decaf or non? He didn't need the caffeine after the evening's antics, but it did feel oh so good. Would it interfere with his ability to function? Probably not. Probably wasn't good enough. He picked up the decaf decanter and poured a foaming Styrofoam cup full, walked over to the clerk and put down exact change.

The clerk looked at the change in wonder. "We don't take coins here, sir. There's a bank down the street, I'm sure they'd be happy to transfer them to your credit." He cursed again. It really was getting hard to move around anonymously. Most places still took change, but the convenience chains had unanimously moved to credit -- there wasn't any point in knocking over a store that didn't have any money. He took a card out of his wallet and handed it to the clerk, smiling hopefully.

The clerk ran the card and looked at him suspiciously. "Miss Welling?"

"My girlfriend. She sent me out to get her a cup of coffee. G'me a break, huh?"

"Sure, sure, whatever. It's just a cup of coffee, and after all..." the clerk shrugged and looked towards the door, "it's not my job to worry about stuff like that." He charged against the account referred to on the card and handed it back.

"Thanks. Hey, keep the change," and he walked out the door.

He felt the foot coming to trip him and could have avoided it. Never one-up a cop, though. He tossed the coffee forwards so as to not scald himself, landed nimbly on the rough gravel, and forced a grunt out of his chest. The scruff of his neck was plucked and raised so his feet were just dangling. His face flushed from the blood attempting to jump through his neck and strangle the cop behind him. Quickly, petulantly, "Hey, hey! I said I didn't say nothin'! What do you want from me? I'm sorry, whatever you heard!"

"Joe?" An explosion of pain swirled through his temples and eyes, purplish blue, smelling like sulfur.

He was floating... He was lying on the ground, dry heaving. He didn't have time for this. He heard a rib shift as his body lifted through the air again and he leapt with it, twisting about with a roundhouse to Joe's face. Joe's hands were out to catch him like a sack of grain, face wide open to the crack of the foot. "Guh! Get'im Curtis!" Joe shook his head, trying to get his vision back.

The other cop was smiling to himself with the taste of blood on the air. You could see it in the smile, in the looseness of his body: he didn't care that it was his partner's, the stakes had just been upped; he was about to have some fun. "Come to papa, little boy. Time for a whuppin'."

Memories shifted through the clockwork of his mind. Break it down: one, two, three, four. He was six and his father was coming to beat him because his mother had just passed out from his father's brutish ministrations, the same as just about every other night. Some nights it was his father's turn to invite the other boys over for a round of poker and pigskin, and then they were the perfect little family. His mom would put on layers of makeup to hide the bruises and scars and demurely serve them whatever they wanted out of the kitchen, and then sneak back into it to hide. He hid in his room and played doctor with the neighborhood cats: gray's anatomy, heavy kitchen gloves and a razor blade. He had to knock them out, though, first, because he couldn't make any noise that would upset his father's game. He used a claw-hook hammer to bash through their skulls.

He was six and his father was coming for him.

He pulled out the claw-hook hammer from behind his back and swung with all his force, but it passed through his father's face without contacting, and it flew through the air out of sight. His father menaced over him and he stifled his cries. Crying would only make the beating worse. He had to stand there and take it, roll with it when he could, but he had to get up for more. If he didn't get up for more before his father was through his anger, he'd only get worse.

But he was only six, and he couldn't take it.

He curled up into a ball and wished that his father would go away. He was anesthetized to the physical pain, feeling each impact as a new datum and nothing more. He wished that his father would go away.

Joe connected one last kick at the puddle on the ground, and walked back to the squad car. "Well, I think that's one sorry SOB. Wanna book'im for resistin', or should we just leave'im to see if he can stumble it back home?"

"Oh, check his wallet at least. See if we can get anything for his trouble." He pushed his partner. "You might want to get the price of some antiseptic out of him, at least."

Joe grumbled and touched at the bruise that was forming under his eye. "Eh, who is this sorry SOB?" He patted him down and pulled his wallet. "Two creds and some actual bills. Well, ya win some ya lose some. Looks like these are on me. Hey, look at this! An out-of-stater! I wonder what business had him roving."

"Check this shit out! There's an APB out on some homicide. Sounds like we may've just pulped the perp. Hotel in this area. Pretty sick shit, man."

He was a puddle on the ground in his room. There was blood all over though most of it was the cat's. Arms were lifting him up -- his mother had come to and was checking on her baby. She was lifting him into his bed and tucking him in. "Tuck, tuck," she whispered, and hobbled out. He closed his eyes and waited for the ringing in his ears to disappear, for the crickets and the fan to overcome the pulsing in his veins, for his tears to dry.

He opened his eyes.



He was a puddle in the back of a squad car.

Fuck. He didn't really have room for any thought, that one expletive pounding about his skull searching for some escape. Fuck. Hands cuffed, legs cuffed, cuffs chained, he sat in the back of the car and stared stoically forward, refused to watch the scenery go by. That would be a weakness. His dad had been a cop; he'd learned what cops wanted, what cops needed, and he'd learned all about weakness. Scars ran sonnets about his body in lessons. At this point, there was nowhere to provoke them to, nothing more to calculate.

Regardless of his watching it, the skyline wrapped on and on like some old video game. His eyes blinked not a single time. There was no twitch to his body. He was all but lifeless.

The sky-car decelerated gently onto a delineated square on the roof of the police station and docked with it. The passenger compartment dropped a jarring half-inch and vibrated was clamps adjusted to its fit. Like some mass-produced component, he was conveyed through the inner workings of the station to his cell. The room was simple: ten by ten foot, army cot in one corner, no windows, no bars, a hole for him to excrete his wastes through, and a single monitor for interaction. It smelled like formaldehyde: stale death.



A sharp electric prod jolted him from his seat and he stood, unwilling to give them the pleasure of entering his cell. He straightened his clothes and took his first deep breath since the beating, counting his bruises as his flesh stretched. "Fucking pigs," he chuckled, shallowly, trying not to pressure his wounds unduly.

A lifeless digital voice called to him, "Please step into the cell."

He counted to twenty, and sighed.

"Please step into the cell." It had infinite patience.

He'd made his point, or failed to, and there was no point to trying to outwait them. They were machine and he was flesh; they had an external power source, he would likely be deprived of food and water so long as he did not cooperate. In any case, he was simply confining himself to a smaller area than he could otherwise pace, unless... Unless there was a way back through...

"Please step into the cell."

He searched the cage carefully, ignoring that they were likely recording him from twenty angles. The cage was not seamless, but the best he could do was to lose a finger to one of its mechanisms or edges. He didn't have any interest in that. There was no way back through.

"Please step into" -- he stepped out into the cell and the cage closed carefully behind him.

"Thank you." It waited the precise time allotted and continued, "Please place your right ring finger into the tray."

He looked around.

"Please place your right ring finger into the tray."

There was a niche in the wall under the monitor and a tray under that. He placed the requisite finger and a semicircle of flesh was removed, painlessly.



The monitor swirled with information "David Allen Gray. SSN 207-96-1254. Born David A. Gray, Altoona, PA." His life: education, jobs, altercations. "Judge Residing: John Robert Simus. All evidence against: compiled." The trial was nine a.m. tomorrow, just long enough to drum up a net-jury to hang him. "Phone call(s): 1 available." Two icons jumped out of the screen, a great red x and a blinking checkmark. He clicked the x -- he had no one to talk to. The text rolled over, "Phone call(s): Declined. 0 available." The voice came back.

"Food will be served at eight a.m., twelve p.m., six p.m.; shower at six a.m. and eight p.m." It was close to midnight now, he estimated. He shrugged, meandered to the cot, tested that it would hold him, and sank into the reverie of sleep.

"Please remove your clothes and stand in the designated corner." One light pulsed at two Hertz in the far corner from the cot. His head pounded and he felt like he hadn't slept at all.

"Please remove your clothes and stand in the designated corner." He shook his head, trying to clear it. Something seemed off -- the room was hazy, or... something.

"Please remove your clothes and stand in the designated corner." Even odder, he was having flashbacks to his trial. He stumbled from the bed, not quite connected to his body, or ... more connected to it; his movements flowed with the thought to do them. He almost felt like he was dreaming. He walked over to the shower.

"Please remove your clothes and stand in the designated corner." Sure enough he hadn't removed his clothes. He quickly pulled them off and tossed them onto the cot. The machine was just starting with "Please" as it registered his clothes were no longer in the vicinity of the shower. The speaker cut off as the shower cut on. Maybe he was dreaming... dreaming echoed in his mind. His flesh was melting.



His flesh was melting.

He could see himself from outside himself as if he were watching grainy black and white vids of the holocaust. His flesh was melting. It hurt beyond any pain he had before felt but he was still able to separate himself from it. Separate. It wasn't real. It wasn't real.

The reality of it tried to twist him in razored knots, every nerve in his body aflame with anguish; he cut the signals off, though, none allowed through the synapses to wreak their havoc upon the dendrites, cell bodies and axons. He lost himself in the complexity of the brain, watching it melt as a time-lapse documentary, labeling each part and remembering their functions, re-experiencing the various lobotomies he had performed in his childhood and after.

Soon his body had entirely dissolved yet he was still thinking, counting, cataloguing. This was far more powerful than any dissociative he'd done, more solid than even Kosis, god of drugs. He was consciousness.

Words filtered over him, snippets bouncing from the walls, from the ears he no longer had... "testing", "calibration", "abnormal", "aberration". It was day outside. He wasn't dreaming. He was... something else. He was a speck of consciousness -- he hurtled his consciousness through the plate glass into the monitor, through the plasma into the grid of energy defining his hell and suddenly --

He wasn't outside. He wasn't dreaming. He was coming to. There was a bright light above his head, blinding him. Shapes hovered over him, shadows, moving in and out of his perception. The harsh stink of sterile cleanliness washed over his nostrils and he felt a gag reflex pound through and disappear without actuation. He was paralyzed. The trial was over -- he'd been condemned to road zombie: life as road zombie. A shadow blocked his vision and everything fizzed around the edges and ...

He was on the cot in his cell.

"— in the designated corner." The light was flashing. His head was pounding and he cradled it in his hands. There was a bandage at the nape of his neck, bulkier than just a cotton pad and gauze. He got up and stretched: body still worked. It seemed, overall, unharmed, a day or two healed from his beating. Road zombie.

"Please remove your clothes and stand in the designated corner."

This was real. They weren't going to melt his flesh now. They wanted him clean.



His body trembled as he tried to tell it to remove its clothes and stand in the designated corner.

"Please remove your clothes and stand in the designated corner."

He removed his clothes and stood in the designated corner. The speaker cut off and the shower cut on and he bit down on his tongue to stifle the instinctual fear jump. They would not rule his mind. It was his and his alone. The water came down soapy without the need for him to lather -- the spray was intense, almost pleasantly painful. He was careful to protect the bandaging -- they probably had encased it just fine, but he was honestly a little jittery. That was his brain they were fucking with. And if he remembered right, things weren't quite.

He forced himself to relax and accept the shower. It did feel cleansing.

He'd kept her under the shower for cleansing. All of them, really. He could see her eyes twitching no longer able to comprehend the world, a little animal alone in it all. He'd kept her under the shower in a rigged stereotaxic frame so that the blood wouldn't obscure his view, his experience.

He wondered if there was an underground industry for videos of inmates showering. He wondered if the nightmares were recorded, if there were an underground industry for videos of ... he shuddered. They probably were, there probably was. And it was probably State sponsored. That was fucked.

The shower cut off and suddenly the humidity around him was baked away and he was unpleasantly dry, parched, and he jumped out of the spray of air or whatever it was. He could deal with pain but this on again off again was actually beginning to undermine his self-inflicted desensitization. He couldn't allow that. He wasn't sure if he could stop it, though. What he needed was more consistency. He couldn't block the interludes of pain but he was pretty sure they wouldn't keep him from continuing it. He set about filing his nails against each other and his teeth. He knew nightmare well.



Soon his nails could break skin with just slight pressure. He began to trace patterns in his flesh, joining the scars one by one, naming them, recalling how he had gained each one. Being unable to wash the blood away made the process more difficult and several times he found himself tracing through the same scar too many times and cutting actual muscle. Long before he was done, sweating and eyes blurring, tearing, his environment a humid blaze of agony, he passed out.



He was lying in his cot -- he checked his arms. Unharmed. He'd toggled realities again. That would mean this was fake. He ran at the wall and bounced, hard. It hurt unproductively. He wasn't going to make it through like that. Think. Think.

He thought himself through a kata, moving fluidly through every motion, changing and changing. He thought himself fluid through the kata and his flesh rippled. Okay, this is definitely false. How do I push myself through? Where is the nightmare now?

Suddenly he was suspended in the air -- they weren't even trying to conform to reality today. They knew that he knew and that was that. It was time for his lessons; he laughed. He'd learned everything he needed to know in kindergarten. Live through the pain. Perhaps it was a different lesson he needed to know now, though. He needed to do more than just live through the pain. He needed to live through the pain and escape to the outside, outside the artificial confines that had been added to his mind.

He was held immobile in a stereotaxic frame. A cloud of scalpels phased into being around him. Hands formed around the scalpels, wrists to the hands and arms to the wrists; soon there was a parade of naked flesh dancing about him, scalpels weaving in and out. Here, he knew, he was supposed to feel remorse, or at least fear, fear being the germ seed of remorse. Here, he knew, he was about to feel pain, intense pain. He needed to figure out how to twist it. At what level were these sprites controlled? Could he taunt them in further?

Unable to move his palate, he barked laughter at them. They didn't respond. They continued their droning dance, closer and closer at a predetermined rate. Someone had written the script and left it alone -- no variables went into it, as he was to be unable to react. Well, fuck that! Fuck that! He may be the victim, but he was a very experienced and intelligent victim.

The first blade sliced, in and out, a passive attack all part of the dance; another, and then another, wove their ways through his skin. The circle had constricted about him, the nubile bodies dancing through each other, weaving this way and that, flesh pushing and twisting. For all the complexity of the dance, they did not cut each other. He wondered if they used their eyes at all or if everything was puppeteered from the outside. He couldn't do much but bleed, but by all he knew he could bleed.



He felt his heart pumping, thump, thump, thump, thump THUMP, thump, thump. He felt the slices in his flesh and felt the veins tracing their way about his body; thump, thump, thump, thump THUMP, thump, thump. He was the blood, struggling against surface tension, feeling the pressure from the heart and suddenly he was flying, a thousand separate consciousnesses spraying out and --

It was daylight. He was paralyzed still, but he could feel his body moving. Was it responding to the torture in his mind, or... No, it was moving methodically, he could feel his arms rhythmically pounding -- he was killing his father. No, he was... he was breaking up tarmac. He was a fucking road zombie -- why couldn't he keep that from one thought to the next? It was probably considered "cruel and inhuman" for him to know. Fucking liberals.

He felt a rat scrabbling about in his brain, sniffing at the corners. It was looking for him. He left his eyes and turned around, focusing on his pineal gland, the captain's chair; he chuckled to himself -- it was there, just as he'd pictured: A hive-mind captain's chair, screens of all the men around him.

For a moment he thought about jumping out and running; for a moment he thought about stealing someone else's body and running; he knew he wouldn't get far. That wasn't the answer. He was overlooking something.

The rat appeared then. It wasn't a rat, really, more a spherical void with whiskers of energy probing out: looking and controlling. But it smelled like rat. He couldn't fight a spherical void; he could fight a rat. He'd started with rats when they crawled through the walls. He'd played with them long before he'd learned any sophistication, before he'd gathered his tools. Rats were easy to catch when you opened your mind to their movements -- they didn't think, they reacted. You just had to react as well, vibrate on the same frequency, and they were yours. He pounced left and right simultaneously and the ball split.

Two rats. Two rats. He could handle two rats. They weren't going to run away, there was nowhere for them to hide. He surveyed the room and laughed -- there were two of him. His mind was running faster, interlaced. He could see both visions. He laughed and jumped -- left and right: four visions, he was ahead of the rat. He just had to be sure not to confuse himself, overload the rat while remaining coldly sane. It was his mind. He had control.

The voids split again, matching him. No, this wasn't it. He was actually starting to feel nausea from the separate images. He joined and joined. The rats spun around him, whiskers trying to make sense of his existence. He felt their probes... pulling... pulling him apart. He centered on his own mental mass and jumped four ways, through the probes and into the rats, and... He centered on his own mental mass as the rats swallowed his being and he... he swallowed the rats and fell back to the center. He could feel them inside, scrabbling about. They were trapped. His body was his; his body and mind were his.

He laughed and cast about at the mental screens; he felt commands out through them, carefully, testing. Yes, yes! The others were his as well: their bodies and their minds.

He could be the rat, control the work and control the dreams. Now he could truly begin to experiment.