The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Five (10 page)

Why
did
I h
o
ld out, anyway?
Why
didn’t
I answer
all
their questions?
What
would have been
so awful about that?

Bobby.

If I answered all their questions, they would find Bobby.
They would want
information
about all my people, and they would arrest them and try them and put them in jail.
The courts would never understand how I forced them.
All they would see would be the many times they had done what I wanted.
What kind of monster would I be if I betrayed my own? 
I had to protect my people.
I had to protect all my people, but most of all, I had to protect Bobby.

I lay on my bench and tried to pretend th
e
misery
didn’t
consum
e
me.
For the sake of Bobby, I couldn’t give in.

I drifted back into semi-sleep,
an afternoon nap,
dreaming about Bobby.
I dreamed I crawl
ed
into bed with him, snuggling close to his warm, pliant body.

W
hen I curled in close to him,
though,
his body was cold.
I pulled the covers off him and
found
he lay on the bed in a pool of blood.
His cold face was a rictus of terror and agony.
His eyes were wide and his mouth opened
in an eternal tortured scream.

W
orst of all, below the middle of his neck, there wasn
’
t one inch of skin on his body.
Someone had flayed off e
very single bit
of his skin
, and lay
his skin
whole underneath him like a pelt.

And then, as I knelt on the bed, looking at him in shock and horror, I
sensed a
coldness
behind me
.
I heard a slow, strong heartbeat
, and
the low sound of breathing.
I
sensed
the warmth of her body and the chill of her presence.

I turned, slowly, too afraid of what I would find.
And find her I did,
her
sadistic smile, the tiny little knife she used, still covered in the blood of my love.

When
she turned to me,
her
smile grew wider and the stalk began.

I woke then, heart pounding.
L
ong moments
passed before I
regain
ed
control.

At least th
is
time, I remember
ed
where I was.

That’s when I lost my temper.

I roared, cursed, tried to break through the doors and walls, started a fire when they turned off the lights, and utterly lost my temper when they turned on a set of fire sprinklers cleverly recessed into the ceiling.  By the time I finished the cell was trashed, half my exercise equipment useless and the water fountain dribbled water endlessly to the floor and into the nearby drain.

Okay, I knew my temper tantrum was childish.  I knew it as I trashed the place, but I needed to do something to quiet the beast inside and fight off the damned whispers.  About an hour afterwards I faked a total breakdown, complete with tears, sobs, pleas about juice and the once magic words of “I’ll do anything!”

My faux breakdown didn’t even merit a response from my captors.

I lost track of time after my temper tantrum, alone in the dark with my thoughts and nothing else.  Food turned out to be an endless supply of military rations, recent vintage MCI rations, edible but otherwise indistinguishable from their wrappings.  The guards pushed them under the door in loads of twenty, at random intervals so I couldn’t tell the time from the visits.  The cell’s darkness was total.  The bastards also tried to harass me with repetitive soft music, but they didn’t know ignoring audible distractions was one of my strengths.  I tuned out their music before the second repeat finished.

Funny, I never did tune out the never-ending ‘murderer’ whispering, though.

I ached for juice.  Not a bad ache, just the juice monkey ache from thinking about the juice for too long a time.  Four or five days remained before I would start suffering from debilitating low-juice effects.  That’s when they would break me, if they were going to break me before I went right to the edge of withdrawal.  They would need a trick, though; otherwise I would hold out right to the edge of withdrawal.  I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction otherwise.

Of course, I could end up dead from my stubbornness.  I didn’t care.  I worked through all the options of what they might do with me and most ended up with me spilling my guts and later dying in withdrawal or by firing squad.  My welfare wasn’t in their interest.  They kept me in a locked room with absolutely no chance of escape.  If they were going to get real information out of me, which seemed inevitable, I wanted them to pay - with juice - to get the information.

Phooey.  I didn’t believe a word of my thoughts.  Instead, I expected the person behind this would use some sort of psychological trick to break me early, and my stubbornness wouldn’t be tested.  Hell, after a couple days of this sort of treatment even Focus Teas would have been able to come in and break me with her half-assed charisma.  Of course, if as I suspected a Focus was behind my current torment, she might not realize how devastating low juice was to an Arm’s willpower.

My darkest fears, that either Officer Canon or Teas’ boss Patterson was now the Focus in charge, I banished to the depths of my mind.

Speaking of Teas, I spent a long time in the dark thinking through the last six months of my life, looking for information to exploit and memories to keep me sane.  Teas said Focuses could tag everything.  Well, I had never heard of Arms tagging anything, but I was willing to try anything by then.  I tried tagging the unseen guards (useless; it didn’t work), the air (something moved, juicewise yet impermanent, so I flagged the trick for later investigation), my own body parts (an advanced trick my instincts told me I wasn’t ready for), and objects.  After I successfully tagged a twenty-pound dumbbell from the remains of my workout equipment, I recognized what I had done.

This object tag had nearly the same feel as when Bobby and I did our ‘I’m yours’ ‘you’re mine’ games.  The juice trick I did with Bobby had been a tag!

I got excited, and stayed excited, for I have no idea how many hours on end.  Many.  Perhaps over a day.  I investigated what I did, tried every imaginable variation and examined what I created in every possible way with my metasense.

The bad news?  My discovery wouldn’t get me out of my cell.  The good news, muted by my incarceration problems, was I had figured out Arm tagging.  Arm tagging declared something yours and meant it, establishing dominance over the tagged object.  Tagging made something mine.  This is what Keaton should have done to me the instant I escaped from the St. Louis Transform Detention Center.

I now understood why I experienced those memory dreams a few nights ago.  They were all about Arm tags, or, in particular, the lack of one on me.  My subconscious had been trying to tell me something.

Arm tags sucked when used on inanimate objects, fading away after a few minutes.  If the object tags did anything in the real world, I couldn’t tell, but I doubted they did.  Most of what I learned came from tagging myself, which I figured out might be a dangerous thing to be doing as an experiment, alone, in a dark room, with nobody to save me if (and when) I fucked up.  Lost in the excitement and knowing my general worth to the universe now, about zero, I took the risk anyway.

An Arm tagging herself gives her dominance over herself, a level of control I easily recognized as the end-state of an hour or two of meditation and visualization, Zielinski-style.  After thinking about what my discovery meant for a few minutes, everything else just fell into place.

Unlike the Focus tags that functioned as thunderbolts from heaven, allowing the Focus to miraculously move juice from one Transform to another, an Arm tag served as a goddamned shortcut.  But what a shortcut, if the tag allowed an Arm to establish dominance over another Arm without the dominant Arm having to beat the snot out of the lesser Arm every time they came back in contact with each other.  The same timesaving benefit appeared to be true for all the Arm tag effects I figured out in my cell.

Keaton took four long and bloody months to do to me, and my rebellious mind, what she would have been able to do in an instant with the Arm tag.  Oh, there still would have been blood and pain, and I would have had my rebellious moments, but the tag would have cut down the sheer number of my problems with accepting my place, which caused many of the problems Keaton had with me.

The Arm tag also neatly solved the mission Lori had given me.  So how do you keep the Arms in line?  You only deal with Arms in a dominance arrangement; you negotiate with the most dominant Arm and the rest have to follow.

Eventually the excitement wore off and the grinding annoyance of low juice crept back in.  I had solved the greatest mystery I knew of about Transforms, how Arms got along with each other, and my findings were stuck with me in my damned no-hope cell of doom.

I hoped Keaton liked my tag
discovery
. 
If
I ever managed to get out of this place, the first thing I
would
do
would be
to patch things up with Keaton
, in person
.
I wanted her to tag me.  With the tag,
I
would be able to
set up a relationship with her
preserving some part of my
free will
, and, better, a relationship protecting me from her
own
dark beast
.
I
understood
the parameters – with Bobby tagged, when I hurt him I hurt myself.
  I suspected the tags would be good enough to stop even a Keaton psycho attack.
  Unless I deserved punishment, I would be safe. 
Big if, yes, but
I hoped.

Everything I
ha
d experienced since my graduation
and everyone I had talked to
reinforced the idea that Arms couldn’t
survive
on their own…and despite her psychotic breaks Keaton was still the person I trusted the most.

What a mess.
Almost a year ago, Zielinski
had
told me Arms were social creatures,
and should be able to get along better, but I
hadn’t
underst
oo
d
his point
.
I thought keeping Keaton on the other end of a phone would suffice, but it hadn’t.  We still argued and couldn’t get along.  Worse, we still felt compelled to stay in contact, or at least I did. 
T
he Arms, like the Focuses,
were
indeed
instinctively
social. 
I doubted I
would be able to
convince Keaton she needed me, but I sure as hell needed her.

T
he tag discovery
would give me
something to offer her
besides
myself.  I remembered Mary Fouke, the baby Arm from way back when Keaton train
ed
me.
I
ha
d hated her from the moment I first saw her.
I thought I had
legitimate
reasons at the time, but looking back, I realized
my hatred was
simply
an
excuse for my immediate visceral reaction.
Keaton should have had her tagged…and perhaps I should have had her tagged as well.  The problem
w
as simple: Fouke was an Arm, a competitor.

My analysis
was
emotionally correct.
N
ature
had
equipped
us Arms to be instinctive competitors with each other,
and had supplied us with
instinctive needs to socialize with each other.  The Arm tag was a necessity.

How to get the information out, though?  I had nothing to write on or with.  I did, however, have myself.  A long shot, yes, but when
you’re
cornered and there’s no way out,
you
fight, despite the impossible odds.  I
sh
ould
be able to
burn the information into my memories, a gift for whoever ended up owning me.  They might pass the information along to Keaton or Lori.  I did a little experimentation until I proved to myself my idea would work, and I burned in those memories.  This trick cost me a couple tenths of a point, juice I didn’t have to use.
  I managed.  I succeeded.  Someday, somehow, these memories would surface.