Chapter 3
Nowadays torture was done within the jelly.
Xolo floated in the jelly. It was a pale blue one. That was the worst kind. It was extremely expensive. Sales of it had gone up ever year since Xolo had begun his reign of terror. Xolo knew these things.
It now filled his lungs, eyes, ears, nose and yes his etc.
It was his world now.
Outside the world, he could make out two counselors. Level 3, it looked like. They were rocking ridiculous Mohawk pompadours of blonde over their blue-black skins. Other than the size of their noses they were functionally identical, although one had sharper eyebrows.
Big Nose and Small Nose were figuring out their interrogation strategy when the little jelly master informed them that the subject had regained consciousness. A lot of people could only torture a ‘Subject’ and not a ‘Person’. This was one of the single tiny grains that gave Xolo any hope for the human species.
How sad is that?
Big Nose stepped to the edge of the Jelly.
“Ambient pain: up!” he barked. Or yapped. If you were as tough as Xolo [or close to as tough as him [I think we’ve already seen that he is at a hard-to-obtain level of toughness]] very, very few yaps ever even got to bark level.
Xolo swam a little in the jelly. This was supposed to be impossible, since it was full of trauma inducing hormones. But he had prepared in a vat of his own. He knew it only FELT like swimming in razor blades. And there was ZERO chance of detaching your nutsack. It was just jelly. And he knew an amazing cocktail, not actually that hard to make (as long as you had pineal glands available) that was an excellent tonic for post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Counselor. Don’t torture me. It doesn’t work the way you want. It ends up with me stuffing you face first into a turbine. This isn’t a threat or a promise. This is the history of the future.
“I’m happy to talk high level though.”
The big nosed counselor put his face close to the glass.
“You know your face doesn’t show up in any records.”
Xolo nodded.
“So, did you alter your face…or the records?” continued the counselor.
Xolo shrugged.
“Both, right? Clever. That’s what I would do.”
(No you wouldn’t. You would never do anything.)
“Anyway,” he continued, “I have to torture you because the psych scanner is showing up some abnormalities and so I have to stress your personality.”
“Don’t think your rulebook will protect you,” said Xolo. A little bloodlust was pooling in him. As someone who killed in microseconds, torture was a particularly alien thing. Well, not alien. It was like a cockroach. In your fridge.
The torture began. The cold torture of a knob you can twist. Intangible pain. Could be fake. Anyone can scream. Who really knows how much pain another feels? Isn’t it possible that what they consider agonizing is my everyday? Maybe I am always in agony and no one knows. Maybe my skull is too small. Maybe I have a cancer that no one knows about that means I am always on the edge. Or I was just born this way. In pain and in tune with pain. Naturally tough and just not making a big deal about it. And what this guy is going through now… that’s what I get while taking a rugged crap.
And so the knob gets twisted.
Xolo felt intense pain. It went beyond the point where you can be sensible about it. His body began to fear reality. When that happens, the mind is suddenly homeless. The homeless mind seeks solace. It runs to the next flesh it can find.
Life
Goes
On
…
Xolo got his stomach pumped, but he was tied up with barbed wire and naked. It was a clumsy scene.
The two counselors watched him from behind glass.
“So what did we get?” said the smaller nosed one, the one who had found something really important to do during the torture but was back now that the would-be-killer had been brain-pulped.
“Okay, I will come right out and say it because I can’t stand the thought of the snide comments you are going to make if I try and hide it: basically nothing.”
“I like how you had to say basically…you couldn’t just say nothing.”
“Counselor Chang, you would do well to hold your tongue. When I ascend to a higher rank, I shall surely remember these indignities.”
“Oh come on,” said Chang, sipping a mint tea. “Whichever one of us gets promoted first is going to have the other one killed. So I might as well enjoy the opportunity to wind you up now. So what scrap did you find?”
“Well, he locked up his brain very tightly, and we started trying to break in the usual way and we were getting plenty of recent memories. Namely, sand. And bumping into those children. Then some images that didn’t fit. A yacht. A beautiful antique yacht, but with modern trimmings. On a very rough and unmanufactured looking sea.”
“Did you like the little yacht, Counselor Boyle? It sounds like you did.”
“Chang, I once found your idiocy frustrating but now I find it comforting, since you have openly declared your hostility to me. It will make your defeat all the easier, and my revenge on you even more satisfying.”
Chang sipped on that tea some more. Although there was a chance that the cup was empty and Chang was faking it as a pose. Boyle would give half of his fortune to discover that it was empty. But then what would his line be? ‘Oh stop sipping on that empty cup, you poser’? That was to the point, but clumsy. ‘Your head is as empty as that tea cup!’ had a touch of flair but it would sort of be coming out of nowhere.
‘More tea, Chang?’ Yes! That was it! But of course he could only use it if he knew with absolute certainty that Chang’s cup was empty. Otherwise Chang would say that he already had tea, was Boyle an idiot but thanks for being my tea-boy. Something like that.
Fuck!
Boyle realized he had drifted away from the conversation into a daydream and Chang looked at him with that all-purpose dick-smile.
Well, the day was pretty much ruined now, so might as well just share all of the torture results.
“We think he is wearing a para-personality. We found all the recent stuff and we found a bunch of tough-guy soldier memories. Plenty of stuff about how he assassinated fifteen other sultan-level individuals. We were starting to get further into his past even though he was fighting hard. But I became concerned that he was about to die, so we only had a few minutes left and I couldn’t stop thinking about that yacht. Because it was incongruous, Chang. Not because of any feelings I myself may have about yachts. Which frankly leave me rather cold, since the topic has arisen. But the yacht meant something. We went back in that area and we found that the alpha waves of the subject morphed when we dug around the yacht. Then I realized what was going on…”
“A parapersonality.”
“Exactly! He’s cloaked. All that stuff about the previous assassinations is fiction. He’s probably some brainwashed yachtsman from the planet Nowhere who has been sent in by…probably by Sultan Menendez…to kill our master and distract and deceive us.”
“Boyle, stop it. You are dangerously close to impressing me.”
Xolo was being encased in a plascrete shell that showed only his face. His face looked waxy and removable, free of any muscular content.
“So,” continued Chang, walking over to the teapot and refilling. “You went under the parapersonality and started digging in on the real deal. What did you find?”
“Ah… well he went into cardiac arrest once we stared looking back for the yacht.”
“Lovely. Well, I’ll handle the second interrogation.”
“There will be no second interrogation.”
“You what?”
“The sultan wants an execution.”
“The sultan…since when is the sultan making decisions. Did someone give him a banana?”
“The sultan did not receive any fruit. But may I remind you that the charter of decisions is clear on this point. An assault on a
sultan is punishable by immediate death. The sultans know this stuff you know.”
“But we’ve already had him for an hour. Can’t we have him for an other half-hour.”
“Sultan’s nap time is coming up.”
Chang regained his cool, smoothed out his point eyebrows.
“Well, whatever. We live to serve. How does he want it done?”
“Arrows in the eyes.”
“Always the arrows in the eyes…”