One Hour Anniversary - Part 2

by Shea Beitler-Aman (3/28/14)

  The second time I had awoken on a soft cot, the back of the gurney slightly elevated. A mechanical ping rang urgently and the smell of antiseptic and medical gel brought me quickly to consciousness. My eyes opened to a bright blue light, wielded by a giant in green paper scrubs. The pen, and hand were snatched away, and the rest of the room began to come into focus. 

              I tried to sit up but my wrists were full of tubes and my hands numb. The tubes ran through several machines, from somewhere my mind brought up memories of blood cleaning units. I then began to feel my headache. It started dull but quickly rose to a nasty thrum. 

              My hand wanted to rise to my forehead but I remember feeling very helpless and small. There was a soft tone from my right. I hadn’t even taken the time to survey my surroundings. Something inside my head growled, vulnerable. 

              I was in a small beige colored room, the walls mostly bare, though traced with outlines that must have concealed equipment and a door, and empty save for a long metal bench appeared bolted to one wall, the table I was tethered to, and a slender man in green medical scrubs. He didn’t have any kind of identification. 

 A light above the door had turned yellow and the panel swiftly opened, disappearing sideways into the wall. On the other side was a short man, I realized only a moment later when he spoke that it was the first man from before. 

              “Good morning Recruit Ekkert.” His greeting was relaxed, his face making up a pattern I recognized as glibness, as though we did this every day and he some amusing story to tell me.

              I turned my head to look at him, "Lazris." The words creaked out, unsure, but the effect was still immediately unsettling. His eyes narrowed in sudden anger, and his next response was swallowed as he tried to reassess the situation. It gave me a moment to process as well. Recruit Ekkert. Ekkert. It was the first time I had heard a name used to reference me other than ‘the subject’ or ‘It’. It didn’t sound familiar or bring up any of the connotations my mind insisted were connected to a name. I wasn’t sure if it was a proper name or a surname or some sort of ranking. 

              “Doctor Lazris." He swallowed and stared hard. Well, I see we must already be acquainted. That means we can just get right to it.” Lazris squeezed the words through lips clenched tighter than his fists. He proceeded to walk past my table, light from the hallway reflecting off the roll of skin that collected at the base of his bald head. “Recruit Ekkert,” he spun and dropped heavily onto the metal combination bed-chair for emphasis though he already had my full attention, “though you are obviously adjusting well, it should go without saying that you must have questions.”

              His eyes relaxed as he remembered the power he still held over me, and relished it. “I am here to help you understand that your place will not be to ask questions, but to advance quickly, follow orders, and achieve objectives.” Now he smiled as he spoke, clearly remembering why he loved his work. 

              I wasn’t sure what to think. There was part of me that understood what human beings were, and that I was not quite one of them. There was another part of me that was reminded of patriotism and duty and wanted me to agree wholeheartedly to what he was saying. There was a third, small, growling part of me that wanted to leap off the bed and tear through the layers of flab covering Lazris’ belly. A diagram of human anatomy appeared clearly in my mind, filled with helpful comparisons of strength and weaknesses compared to similar bipedal organisms. 

              I decided not to act. Feeling was returning to my hands very slowly, though I could feel a foreign toxin among the medicine being pumped through my system. My body had identified it as ,, and already had began trying to figure out how to remove it, but I could still clearly feel the coldness it left as it coursed through my limbs. 

              “Recruit Ekkert, we are travelling in a mass effected vessel with the entirety of your family and my own in a manner of reckoning.” No details sprang to mind, though I could feel cold sweat rising on the back of my hands. “I am trying to impress upon you the idea that we are on a mission that must not fail, because if we do then there will be no one left to care that we died trying.” His rhetoric brought up the strange split feelings again, alienness, patriotism, and growling anger. This time, as the drug was being leached out of my brain, I felt something else. A strange electric tic.

              “There are enemies of freedom in this Universe. People who think they don’t need to allow basic human rights and commerce. People who think they can levy taxes and tell other what to do.” Aliens, tic, patriotism, and anger. Some part of me wanted to grimace at the idea of enemies of freedom, to gnash, and stomp and hurt them. But I forced my face to remain the same impassive mask it had been. Lazris, leaned forward, his eyes beginning to squint again. “Recruit Ekkert, we have been tasked with fighting the enemies of freedom, the people who want to destroy us and our family, and ignore our new way of life.” Aliens, tic, patriotism, and anger.

              An uncomfortable throb had started in my hands as I began to feel more and more of them. There were too many needles placed into too few veins, and I was beginning to wonder if I had made a mistake in expelling the sedative. It started getting harder to maintain a straight face or even focus on what the doctor was saying.

              “Don’t worry Recruit Ekkert we have been gifted with a righteous mandate and the greatest science in the universe. Our ship has been traveling for nearly ten years, and in only one month we are going to arrive at our destination, where the enemies of freedom are waiting for us.” I hardly heard a word Lazris said, I was too preoccupied trying to both focus on getting my hands to move and trying not to move the needles in my hands. But as he said the words for some reason my brain still triggered with the same splitting ache, alienness, patriotism, and anger. As the feelings of glory and country flooded my synapses, there was a strange electric jolt.

              I was being conditioned. Something was trying to stimulate my mind, to associate feelings of patriotism and duty with the words coming out of Lazris’ mouth. My brain was fighting back, responding with feelings of opposition and anger. I don’t think it was the result they wanted. As the feeling of primal anger washed through me along with the realization that I was being used, my hands clenched into fists and bellowed out in my first cry of hatred.

              The pain of the needles being forced out wasn’t nearly enough to stem my rage. Lazris had been enjoying his part in our session, leaning forward and smiling as he spoke through tiny eyes. I didn’t see his face as I forced myself to sit up for the first time, but when I turned to look at him he had fallen off the bench and his eyes were wide with panic.

              At this point I had only memories of terror and violence, mixed with images of places and people I didn’t have feelings for, just simple facts and information. My memories told me I was a patriot, and being a patriot was good, but they also told me I was being forced to believe something, and forcing your beliefs on people was wrong. These two facts were irreconcilable and as they continued to push back and forth in my head a familiar feeling returned. It was one of the few feelings I had ever had, besides hunger, fear, and anger, but the cold building waves at the back of my head.

              “Recruit Ekkert, calm down, now.” Lazris stammered from the ground, his back to the wall behind me, and his knees as close to his chest as his significant belly would allow. “Dammit Tran, get in here.” The man in green scrubs was also pressed against the wall, his hands flat but scrabbling, looking for one of the hidden panels.

              The door pinged again, and slid away, this time revealing the second male doctor, not much taller than Lazris, but very skinny with a gaunt stubble covered face, and two more men in green scrubs and surgical masks. Their hands were full, each holding a rife I recognized as repurposed ENT-30, with IR sights and K-Force loads, non lethal force rounds designed for intercraft combat. My mind played a video clip of an invisible shotgun blast leveling a group of rioters, and something ticked in my mind at the pointlessness of the laser accuracy.

              “I don’t know what happened. I thought we accounted for the upgrade with the new dose, but it still woke up, that’s why you wanted to talk to it, remember. I told you it was a bad idea.” Tran had a mask around his neck that shook violently as his arms waived around. The first man in greens scrubs had recovered a syringe from a cupboard that had already disappeared. The two others had taken up positions behind me that I recognized as overlapping field of fire that would not endanger the two older men in white lab coats. Though I couldn’t see them, their bootsteps clearly placed them in my mental picture of the room.
              The same way I could tell from the shuffling and scraping that Lazris had risen and was leaning back over the metal bench. “You said it’d be a sleepy as a fucking kitten, look at it’s eyes.”
              “Something’s off with the interface, like static in the signal or the receiver. Let’s put it back under and let me run a diagnostic.” I didn’t turn to look at Lazris reaction to the suggestion, keeping my attention on Tran and the scrub with the syringe. I couldn’t tell what it contained by appearance alone, but I knew that I didn’t want to go back under. “You and Kartokoff have Iaco to work on, and I can get this one fixed up before we have to start unpacking the others”
              The name Iaco rang through my head like a gong hit by a rocket, so loud I almost missed this time as Tran spoke about the others. I hadn’t made the connection before, but I wasn’t alone. Whatever these people wanted from me, they wanted from others like me. People that Lazris had called my family. The word family had already cemented connotations in my memories, and though the feeling wasn’t quite right, I knew what I was supposed to do.
              I heard the shuffle of Lazris' lab coat moving again behind me. I didn’t bother to look at the chubby man, assuming I knew how fast he could move. I was wrong. Before I could realize he had moved next to my table, I felt a prick just below my jaw, and the fading coldness of the sedative was replaced by a gushing burning lava, that left behind a terrible numb deadness. As the new drug rolled down my spine and through my arms I forgot about the pain of the needles, or clenching my fists in anger. Instead my body curled inward, bringing forth images of dying insects, as I tried to cope with the pesticide coursing through me.
              The world first turned white, and then began to fade into a checkered black as I fell asleep for the second time in my life. The last image staining my vision was Lazris, smiling through thoughtfully squinted eyes, holding a strange syringe gun. “Fine,” he said, “I guess you’re right, but have this one fixed quickly or the entire schedule is going to fall behind.” And against everything went dark.

Continue to Part 3.