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Erit of Eastcris
Low-Rent Poet
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2014
- Location
- Elsweyr (California)
A boring, windowless room with bunk beds in one corner and a tiny 'breakfast' nook riveted into the wall and floor across from it; two doors, one leading to a shower and toilet while the other was more heavily reinforced than most bank vaults, a slot along the floor for the thrice-daily nutrient gruel to be slipped through. Every surface a plain, inoffensive bluish-gray that looked and felt as if it was purpose-built to suck the warmth and energy out of anyone contained within them. Perhaps they were, at that; the facility had conducted all manner of other tests and procedures over the last decade. A footlocker was pulled out from under the head of the bottom bunk, left open and with its scarce contents left in disarray after one of the room's occupants had dug out one of the many brain-testing puzzles that had passed through the room over the years. They were meant primarily for the other one—who was currently enjoying a jaunt in their shower after some sort of exhaustive exam she'd been pulled for while he slept left her stiff, sore and grungy-feeling—but they were still something to do to break up the monotony and feel a little less agonizingly bored; reading textbooks and encyclopedias and having pointless philosophical dialogues could only go so far.
Really, they'd kill for a magazine subscription or something.
But Subject Delta had ridden that train of thought before, held his little imaginary adventures and learned that, ultimately, they just made him miserable when he came up for air. He figured that was how depression would get him, just sit around stuck in his own head all the time so he wouldn't have to deal with the reality, but then the lab would just buy or snatch up some other unlucky brat and he'd have left his companion alone. So he pushed the hypothetical out of his head and stopped himself from daydreaming any more than he could help it, turning his focus onto the intertwined rings and how to disentangle them all without just smashing the whole assembly under one hand. Subject Beta had done that the first time, when they were eleven, and the reprisal from their handlers had been the exact opposite of pretty. Delta didn't know if him doing it would matter, but he wouldn't be surprised if they hurt his partner anyway if he did, and he wasn't fond of learning the hard way. So his fingers of a vaguely bronze tone held the rings gingerly and fumbled a little numbly through the motions. But when those fingers, dumb with cold despite the amber-colored strands threading through and reinforcing them, standing out more by their glossy texture than by the hue that mixed with his flesh just shy of perfectly, and despite the ambient temperature of the room, dry and toasty to anyone else, dropped the rings and jumbled whatever progress he'd made, Subject Delta still found the breath to curse about it.
"Stupid fucking implants."
He was rightly convinced that his regular struggles with his body temperature were the fault of one set of his 'adjustments.' A suite of automatic chemical stimulant injectors installed in various muscle groups and controlled by a chip in his brain—the amygdala or something, it wasn't like he could get it out so he hadn't cared enough to listen, and he just knew how to activate it anyway. They were also why the door out of the room was reinforced enough to survive everything short of a full artillery shelling; he could have ripped the one in his old room off its hinges, and had learned very quickly that the walls in this one were lined through with an impact-sensitive electrical barrier. It was a good thing he'd been the one to try, he figured; it meant he could warn Beta about it before she could get herself zapped, once she'd been moved in with him.
The heavy bolt made its distinctive squealing noise like it was trying to wake the dead, and Subject Delta didn't need to look up to know that some white coat in a surgical mask was there with at least two gun-toting goons. He couldn't tell if that made him want to grin or cry, still; they'd gone and made him something they were scared of, which he found hilariously ironic, but that also meant he was well on his way to getting scrapped. Beta, too, probably, with how fucking fast she was getting at these puzzles.
"Beat's done for the day, better luck next time." He drawled lazily in an accent unique to the children of the facility, not looking up from the ring-puzzle, mostly wondering if he could discretely flip this tech the bird without them or the goons noticing. "She says 'hello,' by the way." He smirked at little, the part of him in the other room having raised 'his' other hand to give them the finger from the safety of the bathroom, the other scratching at an itch along 'his' scalp from where Beta's hair was starting to grow back in after the last facility-mandated shave. Had to keep as many data points controlled as possible, after all.
He was, of course, ignored. "Subject Delta," the white coat droned so mechanically it almost reverberated, and Delta had long since dropped his once-ritual retort that his name is Rhett damn it, "scheduled for Procedure Four-One-Six-Apeiron in the Pylon Chamber."
Delta rolled his eyes and made a show of putting the 'toy' back in the footlocker, and the locker back under the beds, dusting off the boring blue-gray jumpsuit he was stuck in and shivering a little in a useless effort to warm up. Maybe the lab was hoping he'd just keel over from hypothermia before he could become a problem. He dragged his feet—bare, none of the facility's Subjects could ever wear anything more than the jumpsuit and whatever got bolted onto them—just a little, forcing them to move just that little bit off schedule this time—they didn't always do it or the techs would start accounting for it—relishing the way the researcher's eyes tightened as he toed the line just enough to not really be in any trouble. Petty victories were an art form, and the children of this facility were connoisseurs of the most refined sort.
It didn't help that Delta hated the Pylon Chamber, had spent enough time in the fucking thing along with Beta when they were paired up. It always left him dizzy and nauseous and simultaneously dead tired and unable to close his eyes for longer than a blink. He didn't know what Procedure 416-Apeiron was, yet, either, but he knew how the naming conventions of this place worked after so long; this wasn't going to be conditioning to start the development cycle of some new technology, it was just another mindfuck to see how his brain lit up while swimming in a cocktail of drugs and synthetic neurotransmitters administered just carefully enough to keep him from having seizures. He'd honestly prefer the bland blue-gray room or the off-white hallway he was being chaperoned down.
He let his artificial eyes roam over the other doors he passed, wondering if Epsilon had been scrapped since last time and if Alpha's spot had been filled yet. The experiments didn't often cross paths aside from himself and Beta, but there were occasions where some of them got pulled for examination at the same time, messages sometimes could get passed around if one of the 'friendly' techs could sneak it around. The glassy black sclera dotted with three bronze chevrons avoided one door in particular, though; the one he knew lead out. Staring at it would only hurt, both for the fact he'd never pass back through it and for the bullets one or both of the goons would put through his legs if he looked like he might run. A downside of being able to recover so easily from those kinds of things was that the higher-ups stopped minding so much if it happened.
Soon enough, too soon for him, the white coat lead them to Testing Room J, where the Pylon Chamber was housed, and ushered Delta and the goons inside. "Place the Subject inside the Chamber in the leftmost position." The tech ordered the guards before turning on a recorder, and Delta scowled through the manhandling as he was corralled into the giant mirrored hemisphere, stripped to the waist and strapped into the reinforced restraints, a cornucopia of pads taped to his skin to measure brain activity, heart rate, muscle tension and so on; they were never allowed to just clamber into the thing themselves, any attempts to do so were punished for 'violating procedure' for some ethereal bullshit reason.
"This is Doctor Brendan McLeod, staff ID Four-Eight-Eight-Three-Q-Three-G, recording on November fifth, testing Procedure Four-One-Six-Apeiron on Advanced Study Subject Delta." The white coat droned into the empty space for the benefit of the microphones and cameras lacing the walls and ceiling. "Initial readings are being recorded and fall within subject's normal baseline when adjusting for abnormalities."
He didn't even flinch when the needles jammed their way into both arteries of his neck and electrodes dug in at various points along his spine, those were all old hat after the first few dozen times at this rodeo; just bit his tongue to stymie the whimper that tried to come up as the hemisphere rotated itself into position for the mindfuck to begin.
"Supplemental note, Subject seems to have acclimated to initial procedural stimuli; further deliberation is required to determine if this is a net positive or not." It was almost like they were surprised by that. He didn't know what verdict he hoped for, honestly; one would see this continue, and the other would seem him scrapped.
This was the first time it started with pain; not a searing, scream-yourself-raw kind of pain, but the sort of dull ache that makes you want to curl up and stop existing for a while, a migraine's wimpy kid brother that started at the back of his eyes and spread along his skull with every beat of his pulse, down his back and up his shoulders. Usually these kind of tests began with something to soften them up and make them amenable, but today was apparently just a 'Fuck you' kind of day. Well fuck them, too, he figured, gritting his teeth and triggering his implants to dose him with enough epinephrine to take the edge off, a pulse of heat accompanying a molten gold shimmer running up and down the threads of synthetic tissue woven through his flesh, shooting through his arms, down his torso and up the weave around his neck. The electrodes clamped around his spine jolted, pushing air from his lungs as the Subject's chemically reinforced muscles spasmed in an ungainly wheeze, and then came the pulses; a soundless tap-tap-tap without rhythm or rhyme, a sensation of something grinding against him but that he couldn't really describe where.
("Four C's and two B's, huh? How... ordinary.")
His jaw strained and fingers twitched, the sound of that woman in his memory sending another flash burning through the 'crystal tissue' that spread across his body like some industry-standardized spiderweb.
("I don't know, he's just so... unexceptional. It's hard to be proud when he isn't anything special, you know?"—"I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking it.")
The Pylon Chamber had disappeared at some point, as had the rest of Testing Room J; a part of him was eight years old again, an ear to his bedroom door as their voices drifted in from the living room through the acoustics of the house.
("It's another boy. He's kicking a lot more, think it means anything?"—"I sure hope so, we wouldn't want another disappointment.")
The pain was gone, but he couldn't tell if it had stopped or just been buried under everything else as the pulsing ground against his mind.
("Not even six months old yet and he's already come so far!"—"At least this one takes after us, huh?")
fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyouFuckyoufuckYouFuckyouFuckYoufuckyouFuckYouFuckYouFuckYouFuckYouFuckYOUFUCKYouFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU—
("Hello, are you with Director Ramirez? Yes, about your company's offer...")
—FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU—
The surgical installation of cybernetic eyes involves the destruction of the tear ducts; this is by design. Artificial eyes have no need for moisturizing and the composition of tears can warp microfilm surfacing, so they're rendered unable to cry to reduce wear. Delta knew this, all the children of the facility knew this eventually, because without the option to become weeping, sobbing wrecks they were forced to, instead, adapt to their environment. In Delta's case, it meant getting used to having facility goons pointing guns at him a lot, when his crystal tissue burned too bright and spooked the white coats because they pushed a few of the wrong buttons in exactly the right order, and being accustomed to getting hurled out of test chambers and deposited in a heap on the floor, frigid laminate robbing him of whatever scraps of warmth he had clung to as the lightshow in his ochre skin slowly and stubbornly died down, leaving him fighting not to shiver and writhe. It never helped when he did, anyway.
"Subject Delta exhibited an anomalously high stress response but did not act in any expected fashion beyond that; neural scan records will be compiled for more in-depth review. The observed reactions show promise, however. Doctor Brendan McLeod, signing off." The white coat didn't even look up from the control terminal before bossing the grunts around. "Take the Subject back to containment."
Delta didn't struggle as the goons snatched him up by the shoulders and hauled him to his feet, or shoved him towards the door. Trying to move independently would just get him shot, and he was already far too tired to be dealing with that shit. He trudged and stumbled, shivering and trembling, back to his cell, and was in a twisted way a little grateful that he got to share one with somebody; the other Advanced Experimental Subjects didn't get that. Beta had her own share of problems, he knew that—he'd been put through more than a few experiments right next to her—but not being totally alone was more comfort than he'd get otherwise. So when the goons shunted him through the door and the bolt screeched closed behind him, Subject Delta finally pulled the top of his jumpsuit back into place before artlessly dumping himself to sit on the foot of the bottom bunk with a hearty fwumph.
"Four-sixteen-Apeiron is exciting." He said with a tone glazed and gilded in sarcasm and the peculiar sort of emptiness that comes when one just can't find the heart to put in their words. "Really takes you back."
Really, they'd kill for a magazine subscription or something.
But Subject Delta had ridden that train of thought before, held his little imaginary adventures and learned that, ultimately, they just made him miserable when he came up for air. He figured that was how depression would get him, just sit around stuck in his own head all the time so he wouldn't have to deal with the reality, but then the lab would just buy or snatch up some other unlucky brat and he'd have left his companion alone. So he pushed the hypothetical out of his head and stopped himself from daydreaming any more than he could help it, turning his focus onto the intertwined rings and how to disentangle them all without just smashing the whole assembly under one hand. Subject Beta had done that the first time, when they were eleven, and the reprisal from their handlers had been the exact opposite of pretty. Delta didn't know if him doing it would matter, but he wouldn't be surprised if they hurt his partner anyway if he did, and he wasn't fond of learning the hard way. So his fingers of a vaguely bronze tone held the rings gingerly and fumbled a little numbly through the motions. But when those fingers, dumb with cold despite the amber-colored strands threading through and reinforcing them, standing out more by their glossy texture than by the hue that mixed with his flesh just shy of perfectly, and despite the ambient temperature of the room, dry and toasty to anyone else, dropped the rings and jumbled whatever progress he'd made, Subject Delta still found the breath to curse about it.
"Stupid fucking implants."
He was rightly convinced that his regular struggles with his body temperature were the fault of one set of his 'adjustments.' A suite of automatic chemical stimulant injectors installed in various muscle groups and controlled by a chip in his brain—the amygdala or something, it wasn't like he could get it out so he hadn't cared enough to listen, and he just knew how to activate it anyway. They were also why the door out of the room was reinforced enough to survive everything short of a full artillery shelling; he could have ripped the one in his old room off its hinges, and had learned very quickly that the walls in this one were lined through with an impact-sensitive electrical barrier. It was a good thing he'd been the one to try, he figured; it meant he could warn Beta about it before she could get herself zapped, once she'd been moved in with him.
The heavy bolt made its distinctive squealing noise like it was trying to wake the dead, and Subject Delta didn't need to look up to know that some white coat in a surgical mask was there with at least two gun-toting goons. He couldn't tell if that made him want to grin or cry, still; they'd gone and made him something they were scared of, which he found hilariously ironic, but that also meant he was well on his way to getting scrapped. Beta, too, probably, with how fucking fast she was getting at these puzzles.
"Beat's done for the day, better luck next time." He drawled lazily in an accent unique to the children of the facility, not looking up from the ring-puzzle, mostly wondering if he could discretely flip this tech the bird without them or the goons noticing. "She says 'hello,' by the way." He smirked at little, the part of him in the other room having raised 'his' other hand to give them the finger from the safety of the bathroom, the other scratching at an itch along 'his' scalp from where Beta's hair was starting to grow back in after the last facility-mandated shave. Had to keep as many data points controlled as possible, after all.
He was, of course, ignored. "Subject Delta," the white coat droned so mechanically it almost reverberated, and Delta had long since dropped his once-ritual retort that his name is Rhett damn it, "scheduled for Procedure Four-One-Six-Apeiron in the Pylon Chamber."
Delta rolled his eyes and made a show of putting the 'toy' back in the footlocker, and the locker back under the beds, dusting off the boring blue-gray jumpsuit he was stuck in and shivering a little in a useless effort to warm up. Maybe the lab was hoping he'd just keel over from hypothermia before he could become a problem. He dragged his feet—bare, none of the facility's Subjects could ever wear anything more than the jumpsuit and whatever got bolted onto them—just a little, forcing them to move just that little bit off schedule this time—they didn't always do it or the techs would start accounting for it—relishing the way the researcher's eyes tightened as he toed the line just enough to not really be in any trouble. Petty victories were an art form, and the children of this facility were connoisseurs of the most refined sort.
It didn't help that Delta hated the Pylon Chamber, had spent enough time in the fucking thing along with Beta when they were paired up. It always left him dizzy and nauseous and simultaneously dead tired and unable to close his eyes for longer than a blink. He didn't know what Procedure 416-Apeiron was, yet, either, but he knew how the naming conventions of this place worked after so long; this wasn't going to be conditioning to start the development cycle of some new technology, it was just another mindfuck to see how his brain lit up while swimming in a cocktail of drugs and synthetic neurotransmitters administered just carefully enough to keep him from having seizures. He'd honestly prefer the bland blue-gray room or the off-white hallway he was being chaperoned down.
He let his artificial eyes roam over the other doors he passed, wondering if Epsilon had been scrapped since last time and if Alpha's spot had been filled yet. The experiments didn't often cross paths aside from himself and Beta, but there were occasions where some of them got pulled for examination at the same time, messages sometimes could get passed around if one of the 'friendly' techs could sneak it around. The glassy black sclera dotted with three bronze chevrons avoided one door in particular, though; the one he knew lead out. Staring at it would only hurt, both for the fact he'd never pass back through it and for the bullets one or both of the goons would put through his legs if he looked like he might run. A downside of being able to recover so easily from those kinds of things was that the higher-ups stopped minding so much if it happened.
Soon enough, too soon for him, the white coat lead them to Testing Room J, where the Pylon Chamber was housed, and ushered Delta and the goons inside. "Place the Subject inside the Chamber in the leftmost position." The tech ordered the guards before turning on a recorder, and Delta scowled through the manhandling as he was corralled into the giant mirrored hemisphere, stripped to the waist and strapped into the reinforced restraints, a cornucopia of pads taped to his skin to measure brain activity, heart rate, muscle tension and so on; they were never allowed to just clamber into the thing themselves, any attempts to do so were punished for 'violating procedure' for some ethereal bullshit reason.
"This is Doctor Brendan McLeod, staff ID Four-Eight-Eight-Three-Q-Three-G, recording on November fifth, testing Procedure Four-One-Six-Apeiron on Advanced Study Subject Delta." The white coat droned into the empty space for the benefit of the microphones and cameras lacing the walls and ceiling. "Initial readings are being recorded and fall within subject's normal baseline when adjusting for abnormalities."
He didn't even flinch when the needles jammed their way into both arteries of his neck and electrodes dug in at various points along his spine, those were all old hat after the first few dozen times at this rodeo; just bit his tongue to stymie the whimper that tried to come up as the hemisphere rotated itself into position for the mindfuck to begin.
"Supplemental note, Subject seems to have acclimated to initial procedural stimuli; further deliberation is required to determine if this is a net positive or not." It was almost like they were surprised by that. He didn't know what verdict he hoped for, honestly; one would see this continue, and the other would seem him scrapped.
This was the first time it started with pain; not a searing, scream-yourself-raw kind of pain, but the sort of dull ache that makes you want to curl up and stop existing for a while, a migraine's wimpy kid brother that started at the back of his eyes and spread along his skull with every beat of his pulse, down his back and up his shoulders. Usually these kind of tests began with something to soften them up and make them amenable, but today was apparently just a 'Fuck you' kind of day. Well fuck them, too, he figured, gritting his teeth and triggering his implants to dose him with enough epinephrine to take the edge off, a pulse of heat accompanying a molten gold shimmer running up and down the threads of synthetic tissue woven through his flesh, shooting through his arms, down his torso and up the weave around his neck. The electrodes clamped around his spine jolted, pushing air from his lungs as the Subject's chemically reinforced muscles spasmed in an ungainly wheeze, and then came the pulses; a soundless tap-tap-tap without rhythm or rhyme, a sensation of something grinding against him but that he couldn't really describe where.
("Four C's and two B's, huh? How... ordinary.")
His jaw strained and fingers twitched, the sound of that woman in his memory sending another flash burning through the 'crystal tissue' that spread across his body like some industry-standardized spiderweb.
("I don't know, he's just so... unexceptional. It's hard to be proud when he isn't anything special, you know?"—"I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking it.")
The Pylon Chamber had disappeared at some point, as had the rest of Testing Room J; a part of him was eight years old again, an ear to his bedroom door as their voices drifted in from the living room through the acoustics of the house.
("It's another boy. He's kicking a lot more, think it means anything?"—"I sure hope so, we wouldn't want another disappointment.")
The pain was gone, but he couldn't tell if it had stopped or just been buried under everything else as the pulsing ground against his mind.
("Not even six months old yet and he's already come so far!"—"At least this one takes after us, huh?")
fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyouFuckyoufuckYouFuckyouFuckYoufuckyouFuckYouFuckYouFuckYouFuckYouFuckYOUFUCKYouFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU—
("Hello, are you with Director Ramirez? Yes, about your company's offer...")
—FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU—
The surgical installation of cybernetic eyes involves the destruction of the tear ducts; this is by design. Artificial eyes have no need for moisturizing and the composition of tears can warp microfilm surfacing, so they're rendered unable to cry to reduce wear. Delta knew this, all the children of the facility knew this eventually, because without the option to become weeping, sobbing wrecks they were forced to, instead, adapt to their environment. In Delta's case, it meant getting used to having facility goons pointing guns at him a lot, when his crystal tissue burned too bright and spooked the white coats because they pushed a few of the wrong buttons in exactly the right order, and being accustomed to getting hurled out of test chambers and deposited in a heap on the floor, frigid laminate robbing him of whatever scraps of warmth he had clung to as the lightshow in his ochre skin slowly and stubbornly died down, leaving him fighting not to shiver and writhe. It never helped when he did, anyway.
"Subject Delta exhibited an anomalously high stress response but did not act in any expected fashion beyond that; neural scan records will be compiled for more in-depth review. The observed reactions show promise, however. Doctor Brendan McLeod, signing off." The white coat didn't even look up from the control terminal before bossing the grunts around. "Take the Subject back to containment."
Delta didn't struggle as the goons snatched him up by the shoulders and hauled him to his feet, or shoved him towards the door. Trying to move independently would just get him shot, and he was already far too tired to be dealing with that shit. He trudged and stumbled, shivering and trembling, back to his cell, and was in a twisted way a little grateful that he got to share one with somebody; the other Advanced Experimental Subjects didn't get that. Beta had her own share of problems, he knew that—he'd been put through more than a few experiments right next to her—but not being totally alone was more comfort than he'd get otherwise. So when the goons shunted him through the door and the bolt screeched closed behind him, Subject Delta finally pulled the top of his jumpsuit back into place before artlessly dumping himself to sit on the foot of the bottom bunk with a hearty fwumph.
"Four-sixteen-Apeiron is exciting." He said with a tone glazed and gilded in sarcasm and the peculiar sort of emptiness that comes when one just can't find the heart to put in their words. "Really takes you back."
