6Within the Glass
- Chapter 1 -
The Doctor
A chunky Alsatian wags its tail, and its matted white coat drags in the snow as it turns circles before lifting a leg. The crinkling of a plastic grocery bag seems to insult the otherwise crisp silence in the frigid air.
"Good boy, Tomkin."
From behind a white scarf the young man looks up to the poplar tree's dwindling yellow leaves. A pair of grey eyes traces the outline of her branches to the naked crest of her reaching arms - then Tomkin growls and draws his attention.
The grocery bag falls to the ground and a stalk of celery and some oranges imprint into the thin coating of winters first frost. Silvery wisps of air escape rapidly from his mouth. Eyes open wide before narrowing with instinctual pre-emptive aggression. The dog snarls and bares teeth at the creature mere feet away, which stops stalking forward only to still in a readiness to strike. The fallen bag crackles from the cold like a heckling laughter, but is soon overridden by the rising hiss from within the creature's gullet.
Within its dark, unblinking eyes the man focuses on the reflection of blue above the manmade canopy. The reputed edifice of forefathers rests within an entanglement of vines, beyond the glow of the environsphere's sky. The urge to observe this rare fissure in its making forces his eyes upwards, where it is visible beyond the canopy of the bright lands terrain. It is a vision of crystalline blue unlike any environsphere's false light.
The hiss grows louder in volume as the tetrapod heaves off its hindquarters and slices at the dog with hooked claws. Tomkin snarls but chokes out a whine as his leash is yanked backwards. The heel of a studded lace-up boot catches the creature's jaw and it spasms sidelong, then hits the ground and rolls quickly to its feet.
When next it looks upon the person, the reflection in its dark eyes is the radiating wreath of blue at the tip of a hand-held weapon. It perches on its hindquarters then hisses open-mouthed, and the trembling of its elongated neck creates a symptomatic rattling. Without hesitation, a blast of electricity discharges at the creature but misses as it lurches diagonally with the force of its extended tail propelling it.
Four serrated digits split the synthetic material of the man's parka and puncture the warm flesh beneath. A waft of breath escapes shaken lungs with intent to scream that turns to a forced heaving-grunt. His body shudders with the shock, and droops forward with a drawn-out moaning as the claws plunge deeper. Heavy-lidded eyes observe their body's blood dripping down into the snow and turning black by the contaminants inside the sphere's snowfall. He regards the leash still grasped in one hand.
"Go Tomkin," he gasps weakly, and a hand shakily levels the weapon toward the dog. A blast chars the ground near the canine's feet, stopping his growling, he then whimpers and scurries backward out of eyesight.
The sickening rattle fills the man's ears and below it is the sound of his own wheezing breaths. The characteristic kill pattern of the creature plays through his mind, as the dull whispers of thought say, 'the Pantharactylus, better known as buzzcraw for their tell-tale kill noise, engorge and then behead their prey. Victims have little time to react before-'
"Oi, over here! Got a taste for us ya scaly-ars shitbag?"
The man looks up between the creature's encrusted appendages and hunched rear legs, to see someone in a black hoodie running closer. Every move the buzzcraw makes emits shock-waves of pain into his gut, and then there comes a slicking sound.
The creature moves away and with intense convulsions his body forces itself inward, until he is bent over his knees and bleeding out into the tainted sleet. There is a vague perception of dynamic movement beyond his sight that degenerates into shapes, and then colours. Before there is time to reason about it, the darkness creeping into the edges of his vision pervades, until the only sensation left is a throbbing pain and the feeling of a wet nose rubbing against trembling skin.
Your first thought when you slip back into consciousness is the way the cold air feels against your bare skin. It sends a shiver through your body that makes that aching pain in your side turn into a throbbing agony.
Before you attempt to comprehend your condition or whereabouts, your mind jumps to your loyal comrade.
Where are you, Tomkin?
"The microchip says Mitch Sadvary of the forty-ninety-eight division, sir."
Eyes open weakly –Sooth, why are they so heavy– to observe the face to the voice suddenly invading your consciousness. You notice he has buzzed hair and a sharp chin. Stands with arms crossed and the microchip delicately grasped in between two fingers, but the energy exudes from him like an animal in chains. He is wearing the black hoodie.
"A rover this far out is unheard of. Must be Lysis' doing," the man addressed as 'sir' says, he has harsh features and wears a beret; he stands half bathed in the blue light of the monitor's surrounding the space. "Let me see the chip, Isiah."
"I thought so too," the man in the hoodie responds with a curt nod, and hands the chip to his superior.
"What is his job class?"
So heavy. Lights play against your eyelids in place of memories – vibrancies matching the intensity of your recalled emotion. You focus on the slow dances of the light and the articulations that suddenly form evoke a feeling you had long forgotten. Run away from.
"Too damaged to tell, sir."
"In what way?" the man in the beret asks.
You open your eyes and turn your head just in time to watch him pass the chip on for a new pair of interested eyes and hands to observe, "you take a look, Rubin," he says to the person as he does.
You feel exposed, as if this person is grazing the naked flesh of your thoughts. But those hands continue prodding and running their fingers over every indent, marking, and fibre that makes up your sequence with discriminating pleasure.
Finally, Rubin says to the man in the beret, "sir," and you must fight to keep your eyelids open.
The person has their back to you but you don't like the calm character of their speech. Anyone with such ease of existence ought not to have opinions of much importance.
"Here. Look-" his thin form moves toward the others. He inserts the chip into the device and then opens a program on the monitor. The light from the screen reflects off his black hair, which is meticulously styled in a bowl-cut with a tapered neckline.
"That's-" the harsh looking man starts,
"Yes… this is exactly the chance we needed."
The slim person turns to you and you are struck by the way heavy brows cast shadow over slender eyes. A light from above reflects in their dark orbits which are now focused on you as he says with an excited smile on his face –
"This man was scheduled to expire."
It is a starkly plain room full of non-transparent windows and phials lit beneath machines on extending mechanical arms. Within is a library of quarter-inch tape labels on measured glass and metal instruments which sheen weakly in the surgical light system.
His black hair is tied up in a high ponytail but reaches the nape of his back. He is shirtless and conversing to himself aloud in a defunct language that has the subtle rise and fall of a hypnotic lullaby. The shrill grind of metal halts his solitary discourse, and a thin man wheels in a person on a gurney. The man with the ponytail sets down his clipboard, and with sure-footed strides motions for the gurney to be positioned beneath the light emitting diodes overhead where he now stands. It is maneuvered to precise location and the other man turns from the gurney to sidle back toward the entrance.
"Upload the chip, Rubin," the man with the ponytail says, and makes a flippant gesture with his one hand while the other grabs a pair of nitrile gloves from a nearby drawer.
Rubin pulls his shoulders back stiffly, and his slender eyes regard the man from beneath dark bangs.
"Practitioner Lathrum, you are under orders to execute procedure without his medical history. The chip itself is damaged but remains active."
Elastic snaps angrily against Lathrum's wrist, and he pulls back the gloves tightly across his knuckles.
"You know I cannot proceed without his chip."
The doors screech open – "this is an off-the-record procedure. Chief needs him alive. Do your best, Lathrum." – and whine shut.
Practitioner Kruyt Lathrum looks down at the stark-naked body with a feeling he has not known since first receiving his job class twenty-three years, four months, and seventeen days prior.
Uncertainty.
Not only is he as mentally unequipped as a child with a stick in his hand without the network's instructions, but the body is uniformly different from any other patient he has treated. The flesh is moon-pale and freckled, the limbs are frail and malnourished, and even the curl and colour of the hair is unlike anyone of this global address. Slight tremors begin in the physician's fingertips, until his arms shake with the velocity of it. The squeak of friction accompanies rubber as it pulls taught across clenching fists.
A gentle blinking of dull green light illuminates the contours of his red-tinged profile and suddenly reaches his conscious awareness, then dilated pupil's glance toward it instinctively. The light flashes on the axis of symmetry of a trilateral three-dimensional holograph. The pattern of wiring burns with the energy contained in its circuitry and the dulled afterglow of impulses.
Oh mother of Virga, I need the network's extract or this boy is….
Even as he thinks it the heat burns beneath his eyes as if his blood were corrosive. Dead. He had never before lost a patient. All those who had expired never made it to his operating table.
I told them only small procedures were possible without the sync to the network. And to carry out a procedure without the patient's chip is just-
The smiling mirror-image of his own corpse looks at him from the morbid recesses of fear. If he goes against the operator's will and is discovered, his fate is sealed. The enforcers' lurk always one step behind the faceless. One step out of line and you are never to be seen or heard from again. Knowledge must be regulated - in the interest of maintaining order in a 'democratic' society, of course.
Why would they deny me the chip? This must defy the operator's will...
The operator - who had deemed him worthy of the knowledge he so desired; gave him purpose, and made him famous among his people. After the ceremony he was relocated, masked, and introduced to the network.
Kruyt glances below the intricately wired device to a small black box and winces.
He begins to recall the first time he had connected, it had been both terrifying and liberating. He felt adorned with purpose and worth. Regardless of this, night after night all he wished for were the familiar faces of family and the smell of home. But steadily he was trained, turned into nothing more than a machine receptive to the network's instructions. And soon it became overwhelmingly clear to him, that whatever knowledge he obtained would forever be guided by the operator's will - never his own.
Then one day he appeared. Isiah Duvernois. One of the most infamous enforcers in this sphere's latitude and longitude. He had received intel about the good doctor's supposed after-work activities. Distributing medicine without granted permission through a sphere-conducted prescription.
He recalls following Isiah to a car with tinted windows. The way his heart beat was all he could hear even as the enforcer attempted to make small-talk. Being led into a normal looking store-front, only to turn down a couple of hallways to find a flight of stairs. Then he was being lead into the dimly-lit underground bunker. His mind raced with scenarios of escape, but his footfalls ever constant, followed the man in front of him.
That was the day he was introduced to the coalition, Ex nihilo.
Who would have thought that one of the most famed enforcers would be a member of a radical separatist movement? The idea of defying those that had granted him with such knowledge, and trying to do away with the network altogether, made him angry at first. But they asked questions. Questions he could not answer.
And those seeds they had sown were soon nurtured, as thought after endless thought infested the doctor's mind.
He eventually agreed to help them on the condition that Isiah would overlook his borderline 'heroic' deeds- as the enforcer had put it - and that he would steer clear of unnecessary risks. He and the chief taught the doctor how to deceive the recall process - a concoction dreamt up by the young engineer, Rubin - bastard child of Ex nihilo. One who has never known the overarching reach of the bright lands influence; or the searing pain that lasts for days that comes with enacting his invention. A virtual 'Phalanx' against the chip's ingrained memory storage function - hence its name.
But why not use the phalanx? If the chip is functional it should be possible. That brat has no clue what kind of position I am in.
Because of his sheltered life, Rubin does not understand the grade of his station – or the ice-pick feel of another mind penetrating a recall, the sensation of disassembling where the parts never fit properly again, or the way the mind sleeps for days even as the body fulfills its procedures. Those hands know only the safety of their organized machines and the lifeless membrane of replaceable contraptions. The more Kruyt considers it, ever more certain he becomes that Rubin knows little to nothing of the supple warmth of flesh, or a gentle pulse so unlike his precious energy beacons.
Or everything that the men and women of the Ex nihilo movement risk on a daily basis.
"T-Tomkin…"
Kruyt swallows the lump in his throat – it's the voice of one no more than five years Rubin's junior – a teenager.
"You are conscious?"
"Come 'ere boy."
The pastel being moves its scrawny arms to dangle off the edges of the gurney. His left arm gets caught against the blood guard and soaks in it from the elbow down.
Transfusion… but his blood-type would be on the chip. How do they possibly expect me to do this?
"Tomkin – is that your name?" the physician balks at his own question. What could he possibly retain without his chip?
He backs away toward the holograph and swallows excessively against the dryness of his mouth. Then he feels for the container attached to the axial rod of the device.
But this way- ...without the patient's chip to match falsified memory to, the phalanx is useless.
His muscles tense so far he cringes at the seizing in his right leg, and then hunches over grasping desperately with laboured breath.
That is it... They must expect that this is the only way.
The cemented cracks between the industrial tiling wriggle like maggots in his blurring, bug-eyed vision.
What could be so important that they would have me do it? I knew Isiah had me on a tight leash, but I never thought he would force me into this kind of situation. Do I risk it, or do I let the boy die? If I cannot save him, will that end our deal? Then what would they do to me?
Standing unsteadily, he leans back on the ledge of the counter and his fingers tremulously caress the surface of the box. He retracts from the touch of cold metal through the gloves as though scalded. The dying boy on the table weakly sobs and steeps in his own blood, while frailly shuddering against the fastenings. Fingertips scrape the metal container and locate its latch only to forcefully push it away.
Kruyt's temple pulsates sorely and his teeth grind as he closes his eyes to the other's pain.
If I am found out, I will-
"I – don't want t- die."
Those words awaken something in him. A memory that is a forgery in his own consciousness, and yet as dear to him as a father's embrace.
He sees a young boy with fire-red hair grabbing the wrist of a man whose face is hooded by a trench raincoat. An overcast sky generates a dreary slate blue atmosphere, which makes the surrounding aged stone structures appear ominously desolate. The boy is soaked head to toe by the downpour as he had run outside with little thought.
Don't let them take me. I can sneak out with you!
The other person tenses and takes a halfway glance back over their shoulder.
Your place is here. – But- – Go back. Quickly. Before they realize you want for betrayal.
The older person grabs both small wrists in one hand and tears them away from their own. They stare in prolonged silence at the child, whose tears now commingle with the wetness dripping from his fair eyelashes. Then the man turns and begins walking, and does not stop even as the boy runs after and grabs the tails of his coat in clenched up balls.
Please daddy, no! I don't want to be with these people! They are scary! They are monsters! Daddy no!
I don't want to die!
"Help m-… don't want to…"
As though possessed, Kruyt turns with formal exactness to release the metal latches from the box. He retrieves a tangled mass of cords and receptors from within before he applies the conducting gel to his temples, the base of his neck, and down his spine accordingly. On to this he attaches twelve self-adhesive pads with practiced precision. Lastly, he sorts the tubes in congruence to the hue of the pads.
In all this, he stops short of pressing a switch which will trigger the launch of the device linked through the triangle's circuitry.
Kruyt takes a deep breath, telling himself this is normal – you always have to mentally prepare yourself before initiation. But as he stares directly into the beacon, the lines of consistently throbbing translucent green liquids begin to correspond to that child's face. He shakes his head.
"That's a lie," and he looks toward the young boy on his operating table, "when it comes to a person's life, I have never known a moment of hesitation. This time will be no different."
He reaffirms the thought with another leveled breath and an assertive nod, and depresses the switch.
Lights blind him momentarily. A spectrum of bright red, green, yellow, purple, and orange shoot past him like arrows toward a distant white light, as though he were the offshoot of some enormous, omnipresent prism. All at once he is torn away from his world of colourful walls until the silvery light seems to envelope him absolutely. Then there is a familiar vocal thought pattern.
L-Lathrum, what is this?
I need your help.
I cannot access information from the chip?
There is none.
None? Lath-...Kruyt, what are you doing? There must be a chip for this to be lawfully sanctioned initiation.
I am aware and yet, think back to what it truly meant to be a doctor. Before the operator took over, before-
Speak no more of the glitch, or you will only dig a deeper hole for yourself when they do find out.
But-
You jeopardize my life as well, Kruyt.
I am sorry… but I must save this young man. There will be consequences but I beg you to help me. I cannot do this without your guidance.
Are you certain that you want to do this? There will be no turning back.
I understand that... and, I am certain.
I feel that you may be making a fatal mistake. But- tell me of the patient's condition.
Thank you.
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