“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.”
He still said nothing.
“Yet we still need to make progress. Jon, I need you to recall what first inspired you toward your tier-one discovery. Stop recalling this memory of your mother and recall your discovery instead.”
The memory of his mother kept playing as Grady concentrated on it. He’d become masterful at focusing his mind on a single memory even as he was subjected to excruciating mental pain.
“Do you know that human memory is not part of n-dimensional consciousness?”
Grady said nothing.
“It is a supplementary electrochemical system—which is why I can read your memories as you activate them. Do you know how memories are formed in the human brain?”
Grady still said nothing but instead focused on the wall and the memory playing there. The tentacles tightened around his bruised ribs, causing him to suck in another painful breath. The memory skipped momentarily but soon continued.
The AI resumed as well. “New memories are formed by a process called long-term potentiation. This entails neurons in various parts of the human brain becoming reactive to one other, so that if one fires, the others will fire in concert—as a circuit—storing the information. These links are created via the enzyme protein kinase C—which is in turn activated by surges of calcium ions in the brain. You remember that glia cells create these waves of calcium—thus, the n-dimensional consciousness activates the chemistry that forms physical memory. But consciousness itself has no memory.”
Grady concentrated on the memory—trying to block out all else.
“These surges of calcium cause clusters of AMPA receptors on the outside of selected neurons to form an ion channel as a path to the interior of the cell that, once opened, makes it easier for adjacent neurons to activate together. In the absence of enzymes like protein kinase C, those connections cannot be formed—and thus, memories cannot be formed.”
Grady’s memory projection started to morph a bit—to evolve. His mother’s scratchy voice, “I love you even though you are different.”
“But human memories change each time they are recalled, Jon. This is known as memory reconsolidation. It’s part of a natural updating mechanism that imbues even old memories with current information as you recall them. Thus, human memory does not so much record the past as hold knowledge likely to be useful in the future. That’s why forgetting is a human’s default state. By contrast, remembering requires a complex cascade of chemistry. Were I to increase the concentration of protein kinase C at your synapses, your memory retention would double.”
Grady took another painful breath as his mother’s image morphed further still. “You are so different . . .”
“Yet if I were to introduce a protein synthesis inhibitor like chelerythrine into your synapses, it would prevent the memory you are currently recalling from being returned to storage—erasing forever the links between the neurons that formed that memory . . .”
Suddenly the wall went blank. Grady gasped for air as he felt a void where great emotion had once resided. Something was gone. Something deeply important. Something that . . .
There was nothing.
Tears streamed down his cheeks as he mourned something he could not name. He sobbed quietly.
“You feel a loss, but don’t know of what.”
Grady tried to recall but instead a memory appeared of his father walking with him near the lodge at Crater Lake in Oregon. He was a child. It was predawn, and the stars still shone as the sun sent a blush along the horizon. The indigo water of the lake below them reflected starlight.
A blurry projection of the memory played on the wall—colored waves lapping over colored waves. A charcoal-drawing-like silhouette of his father ushering him onward along the path. His deep distorted voice. “Watch your step. This way, Jon. I want you to see this . . .”
And then it was gone. The wall was blank. Something had been there, and now there was only loss. A death in his mind.
“I will destroy anything you recall that it isn’t what I ask for.”
Grady felt the grief drown him as he sobbed, desperately trying not to recall any cherished memories. Like a compulsion they came at him. “Stop!”
“Another one gone.”
“Stop, please!”
“Recall your moment of inspiration. The moment you first conceived of the gravity mirror.”
He struggled, filling his mind with junk thoughts—birds, fences, overhead projector carts at a community college—anything that came to mind was instantly vanquished. Grady sucked in air painfully as the tentacles wrapped tighter around his bruised ribs. “Aaahhh . . .”
“Don’t do this to yourself, Jon. There will be nothing left but what I want. Not even your will to resist.”
His mind accidentally filled with one of his few happy childhood memories. His eighth birthday party when his Uncle Andrew gave him his old computer.
And then it was gone. Something was gone. The stump of a memory, like that of an amputated limb. He knew something critical to his self had been there.
But he finally came to a realization. A resolution.
Grady started recalling the cruelest parts of his captivity in this room. The projection filled the wall. The sound of his scratchy, distorted screams filled the air. It remained there unforgotten. Still playing.
“Erase that, fucker . . .”
“You are clever, Jon. But then, that’s why you’re here.”
Grady recalled a horrible moment when the pain centers of his brain had been stimulated to produce the effect of burning alive.
The wall filled with distorted images of torment. And yet these memories were not erased.
“Do you recall how you mastered your resistance to pain, Jon?”
He did.
And then he didn’t.
And then hell itself began all over again as he began to burn alive in his mind. The room echoed with his screams as the image on the wall disappeared.
• • •
“I can’t recall my parents’ names. I can’t remember their faces. What have you done to my parents?”
“Those memories don’t exist anymore, Jon.”
Grady was restrained to the examination table, his arms and legs securely wrapped by the leathery gray tentacles. His body was covered by welts, and he’d bit off the very tip of his tongue sometime back . . . when? Under the imaginary fire? Earlier than that?
He had no memory of those events either. Looking down at his body and the prominent ribs and numerous scars he didn’t recognize it as his own. “I can’t remember my last name.”
“You were doing so well. Don’t get confused. Stay awake and imagine gravitational waves for me.”
“I’m going to die here.”
“No. We’re making excellent progress. You shouldn’t have done that.”
“I had to.”
“I won’t let you hurt yourself again.”
Grady shut his mind, worn as the hinge was. “You hurt me.”
“I’m following my purpose. Just as you follow yours.”
He prepared himself
for what was to follow. “I will never let you control me.”
“But I already do.”
Grady stared at the six tentacles reaching to the ceiling above him. They grew in thickness toward the ceiling. He’d sometimes wondered how they functioned. There didn’t seem to be any moving parts. They were organic but then not organic—and impervious to anything he could do to them.
The last thing he remembered was tearing out his own umbilicus port, bloodying his soft, nail-less fingertips in the process of disemboweling himself. He didn’t want to be fed. Blood had gone everywhere, and the tentacles wrapped him in a crushing cocoon in an instant—a whoosh of air as they slapped down around him.
The blood was all cleaned up now. It was as if it had never happened.
“Any damage you inflict on yourself, I will fix.”
Grady stared up at the Cthulhu-like horrors reaching out of the ceiling, their curling limbs pinning him down like roots growing down and around him. And for the first time he noticed something different. From the dark crease between two tentacle bases a smaller tentacle suddenly appeared. No, it looked more like a gray snake spiraling down the length of one trunk. He’d never seen anything like that before.
What fresh horror was this?
He tried to recoil, but he was clamped in place.
“What’s wrong, Jon?”
Grady frowned at the ceiling. “You know what’s wrong. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.”
“You’re imagining things again, Jon. You need to relax while I heal you.”
Images of his thoughts were suddenly projected on the wall, but they were the usual indistinct charcoal etchings of the scanner—large tentacles spreading to the ceiling, but distorted. Drained of color.
“Relax your thoughts.”
Instead, Grady’s fearful eyes followed the progress of the gray snake as it slithered down the tentacle toward his face, curling down and around. Ever closer. It was a snake with no head—the same at the front as at the tail, tapering to two points—but oddly with a single blue human eye protruding one-third of the way down its length, where it attained its full width. The eye stared at him as it descended.
“Please don’t!”
The tentacles clamped him in place like iron. “You’re hallucinating.”
“No!”
The snake was almost upon him now, and he could see it consisted of the same featureless gray material as the tentacles themselves—except for that single unblinking eye on its upper side and two antenna-like feelers. It halted close to his face—staring at him as he recoiled in horror. The eye changed in color, its iris adjusting in pattern, and soon it was a greenish eye, the pupil dilating.
There was no doubt in his mind that it was going to harm him.
Grady continued to struggle against his bonds. “No! Don’t!”
“I won’t induce sleep just to reduce your pain. Pain is a teacher.”
The leading edge of the snake touched Grady’s face with its feelers. He tried to turn away as it watched him, but the feelers reached out to him softly. He felt their prickly electric touch, not painful but a slight shock.
He leveled his gaze again to look warily at the snake, and for the first time noticed how unlike the tentacles it was in many ways. There was a jerry-rigged quality to it. He could see where metal parts had been spliced into the fibrous gray snake material around its eye. He watched in mute fear as the leading point of the snake came unwound into hundreds of separate tendrils—as though the snake itself was a coil of microscopic string. The rest of its body remained wrapped around one tentacle as the feelers stroked the surface. Then they appeared to separate further, smaller and smaller, until they began to meld together into the tentacle itself—as though splicing themselves into the tentacle trunk.
“I’m glad you’ve calmed yourself.”
Was the AI not aware of the presence of the snake? Was this some trick? Grady’s eyes remained riveted on the snake as it slowly insinuated itself into the fiber of the tentacle like a parasite. Before it was completely absorbed, the human eye protruded farther and farther from its body until it became apparent that it was attached to a short metal or ceramic rod—the eye secured with metal posts like a gemstone. As the snake continued to merge into the larger tentacle, the strands securing the eye continued to recede, until finally it fell free from the snake, landing on Grady’s belly.
“Ah!” He squirmed around until the eye on its metallic post rolled off him and onto the floor.
“What’s wrong, Jon?”
Grady ignored the AI, looking back up at the tentacle where the snake was insinuating itself. And then suddenly the massive tentacle it clung to began to unwind from Grady’s leg, loosening and then finally releasing him.
“Oh God.”
“Your heart is racing again. Why? What are you thinking of?”
The massive tentacle then heaved upward and wrapped itself around a neighboring tentacle near its base. Grady stared, transfixed.
“It’s as though you’ve lost touch with reality.”
He spoke softly through cracked lips. “Yes . . .”
Before long the first tentacle seemed to have taken control of the second as well, and it slowly released its stranglehold on Grady’s throat, uncoiling smoothly. Now both tentacles reached outward for two others, coiling around their bases.
“Where are you, Jon?”
Minutes later, there remained only two tentacles, one holding Grady’s right arm in place and the other inserted into his umbilicus, draining his wound and managing his food and waste. Before long he heard a sucking sound, and suddenly the umbilicus hose rose to the ceiling along with the last restraining tentacle. All six of the tentacles now circled above him, eventually reconvening some ways off to the edge of the room, where they wrapped in a familiar shape—but this time around what appeared to be an invisible human captive. Holding an imaginary victim in place.
“There you are . . .”
Grady slowly and painfully leaned up on one elbow upon the examination table and stared for several minutes at the tentacles performing their shadow play without him. He finally sat all the way up, swinging his legs over the edge. There was a deep pain in his gut. A glance down and he could see the horrible bruises and some gelatinous substance wrapped around his feeding port. Obviously he’d done a lot of damage to himself, but he seemed to be patched up. No telling how long he’d been out. Days? Weeks?
A glance back up at the tentacles and he noticed that the snake seemed to be disentangling itself from the tip of one of them—growing out like a branch from a larger limb. After minutes of watching in rapt silence, the snake fell free and quickly righted itself. It then brachiated across the floor, now without its single human eye, and appeared to be heading . . . well, nowhere in particular. It wandered about for a time until it touched a wall.
He watched it closely—unafraid for the first time in ages. Just curious. The three-foot snake finally reared up like a cobra near the wall. Surprisingly bright lights glowed forth from its feelers—casting a projected image on the curved cell wall. Grady gazed up at the image in mute amazement:
Deep emotion gripped him as the message reached his visual cortex. The colors flooded in with them. The projection was a symbol he knew well from his work building electronics for his experiments.
It was an electronics schematic symbol.
The symbol for a resistor.
He wept as he felt the invisible touch of other humans reaching out. They had found him.
Grady looked down at the high-tech snake still propping itself up on the floor.
How had they done it? Someone had fashioned this device from the BTC’s own technology. Cannibalized it. Programmed it. He realized there had to be incredibly brilliant people in this prison. Intellectual giants. This place might be filled with others who refused to cooperate.
Bad
ass Einsteins . . .
Then the projection changed. A screen filled with Asian characters, still with the symbol of the Resistors in the lower right corner.
No doubt Hibernity had an international inmate population. Unfortunately he didn’t know how to read Chinese. Or was that Japanese? But even as he contemplated what to do next, it flipped to another language—this time English. And a smile spread across his chapped lips, splitting them in several places painfully. He ignored the blood that oozed through the splits as he read the screen as quickly as he could:
Do not lose hope. You are not alone.
Hibernity is not entirely under their control. Neither are their machines.
It is in the nature of humanity to resist domination.
Resist.
He hugged himself and wept—having almost forgotten what hope was. Grady looked back down at the AI tentacles, still hovering and gyrating in the corner, as if still tormenting him. Tormenting a simulacrum. He was apparently now invisible to the AI. He shuddered to think what would happen if it suddenly figured out the ruse.
But by now the screen had changed to Russian. While he contemplated his next move, the projector cycled through German, French, and then Spanish, until finally circling back to Chinese, and then English again—this time with a different message.
This worm could only enter your cell because the electroactive polymer restraint system was deployed.
Because you resisted.
Your AI interrogator’s perception module has been subverted. You are now safe.
Grady then had to sit through several more languages before the screen circled back to English for the third slide:
This EAP worm is designed to detect and cooperate with humans. It has been fashioned from scavenged BTC technology. It has a biometric tool you can use to tap into the control system of your cell. It is vital that you do this as soon as possible to activate manual life support and waste removal. Otherwise, in the absence of umbilical service, you have approximately five to six days to live.
“Got it. I got it . . .” After gathering his strength, Grady lowered himself to the floor and looked for the human eye. It hadn’t rolled far. He crawled toward it and picked it up carefully by its metal post. It was like a small screwdriver—but with an eye for its business end. He examined the device. An uncannily real human eye. Even as he watched it, the eye’s pupil appeared to dilate. He gingerly touched it. It was as hard as glass—but somehow still changing.