By POW

Unical date: 3752.563.24 (seventeen days until scheduled arrival at Kappa Redulans)

It was morning, or morning-enough given Sam’s lack of concern for actual clock readings.  He got out of bed, dismissed the bedroom, brought up the bathroom, then dismissed that, then had a nice breakfast from a buffet at another of Mr. Featherstone’s most-visited places, and then left the simspace to attend to his “work day”.  Two minutes to verify that the engines and navigation systems were still chugging along, five minutes to drop out of warp to send and receive “plan still on track” status messages, done.  Then it was back to the simspace.

The previous night, while lying in the blissfully-comfortable simspace bed, an idea had occurred to Sam of what he could try next.  It would be a longer scene than any he had done so far, but he deemed it would be safe to try.  The key, he was thinking, was to avoid the pre-programmed sims and go with something that had a bit of randomness built in.  Sort of like his instructions to the trio of holo-stars: “do this to me, then ignore anything else I say except X” only expanded well beyond the scope of a sleepsack.  Maybe that would make it feel more real.  To that end, he spent the morning designing and laying in the program parameters himself, building up characters and settings pulled from the library, defining a range of possible options but only in the vaguest of terms, leaving the actual implementation to be determined randomly by the simspace AI at run-time and making sure to leave himself clearly-defined exit conditions.

With the program laid in, Sam spent an hour at the lake reading to give his subconscious mind a chance to register any objections to his plan.  It seemed foolproof enough – he would be bound at times during the scene (actually, he would be bound a lot during the scene), but never gagged and thus he could always end the program if things got out of hand.  If some restraints remained in place after ending the program, he could summon up Fred or Keck or the coach or pretty much any other character to set him loose.  And as extra backup, the level 3 setting should ensure that whatever he got into, it couldn’t be life-threatening.

Just to be obsessively careful, he did one more navigation and message check before starting.  All clear, of course, and no new messages since his last check a few hours before.

OK. No reason not to go for it, then. Sam returned to the simspace.  A quick salad for lunch, nothing heavy, a half hour of reading by the lake to let his stomach settle and then: “Pyrellia, activate program.”

The warm pool under the purple sky that Bareem had first showed him shimmered into being.  Sam lowered himself into the soothing water.  Now it was just a matter of waiting.  The next steps would kick in at some point between ten and forty minutes after he got into the pool.  He had programmed in a delay but left some uncertainty in exactly how long.

The water felt great at first, but it was tough to relax, knowing what was coming, so the pool’s heat did not soothe his muscles the way it might have.  Instead, he was restless, and found himself standing up from time to time, wanting to pace around but with no room to do it in.  The ominous red-purple sky overhead was not helping, and in fact added to his feelings of unease.  He debated whether he should move the hot tub to his lakeside cabin setting, dithering for a while before deciding not to change the plan now.  Being tense was perhaps a good thing for what lay ahead.  Also, he wanted his lake house to be a place of comfort and peace, unsullied by the memories of what was about to happen.

Over and over, he anticipated the moment and how it would play out when it finally arrived.  Despite all his false alarms, he was still caught by surprise, just for a moment, when it did.  With no warning, the air shimmered, and suddenly, violently, four figures materialized into being on the flat rock surface near the pool.  Each was dressed in chameleon armor, a form of active camouflage that blurred and broke up the outline of the man wearing it, making him difficult to see.  Flashes of background shone apparently right through the soldiers’ bodies, making it even more difficult to get a fix on where each was standing, and they did not hold still to make it any easier.  The moment they appeared, they started moving and shouting, barking orders and commands at Sam that he had no possible way of understanding, let alone obeying.

His heart leaped up into his throat and his pulse began to race.  This was exactly what he had ordered for the afternoon, evening, and subsequent night: a ferocious, unstoppable take-down that he had no chance of evading or resisting.

Bring it on, muthafuckas.

He surged up out of the water with a vague hope of dodging around the soldiers.  The effort was hopeless, just as he had planned it to be.  His one asset – and it was a tiny one – was that his skin was wet and slippery.  His liabilities, on the other hand, were numerous but could be summed up in one short phrase: one naked man against four strong, heavily armed and armored opponents.  If this had been a level 4 scenario – or, stars forbid, actual reality – he would have genuinely feared for his life against these guys.  One itchy trigger finger and it would be game over for Sam.  As it was, they would be able to rough him up a bit, but there was no risk of him dying from their actions.

I hope.  All bets are off if the stress gives me a heart attack!

He aimed for what looked like a gap between the ever-shifting camouflage of the men’s armor, hoping to slip away for at least a few seconds and maybe lead them on a chase.  (One naked, barefoot man vs. four strong booted soldiers.)  Alas, the gap turned out to be an illusion, a fact which he discovered when his shoulder plowed right into an invisible obstruction, probably the thigh of one of the soldiers.  He lost his footing on the newly-wet stone and crashed to the ground.  The soldiers were instantly upon him, swarming over his face-down body and rapidly establishing full control over him.

He tried to squirm, hoping that his wet, slick body would slip through their fingers and give him some chance to escape, to make these guys’ jobs at least a little bit of a challenge.  He scrabbled against the stone ground, trying to use his arms and legs to stand, or at least crawl.  It was not to be.  A crushing weight came down on his knees, then another on his shoulders.  Legs and chest were both pinned to the ground.  All the while they kept shouting at him, though he could only catch bits and pieces.  “… down, down, I said head DOWN!” and “… you fuckin’ move…” and “… shut your goddam mouth…”  Shut his mouth?  Sam hadn’t even realized he’d been shouting too.

His arms were wrestled into position behind the small of his back and he felt cuffs being applied with two quick ratcheting sounds, palms facing out.  Simultaneously, lower down, more chains were clicked into place around his ankles.  Once his limbs were secured, a black bag was yanked down over his head and a string at the neck was pulled taut to hold it in place.  The fabric was thin enough to breathe through and he could even see patches of light and dark in a few places, though he had nothing that could be called actual vision.  Another chain went around his waist (cold!) and the cuffs were locked to it.  Then a chain was fed down from there to his ankles.  When he felt the hands at his feet lift free he tried testing his bonds and found that his ankles were shackled very close together with perhaps only 20 cm of chain between them.  He was not going to be running or even walking anywhere quickly, even if he could manage to stand up from this position, which seemed doubtful.

Rising turned out to not be an issue.  The men hauled him to his feet, two strong grips seizing each of his upper arms.  Damn, that felt good!  Being manhandled by these faceless, anonymous commandos was incredible.  They got him upright with his feet under him, then dragged him forward, not bothering to give him time to take the small, mincing steps that were all the ankle shackles would allow.  His wrists chafed against the steel of the cuffs as they were pulled upward and his toes dragged along the smooth rock.

He couldn’t see the scene change but knew it would be happening.  He was dragged over to a stone wall and left to stand as best he could.  Balancing would have been tough if he had been in the middle of the floor with no vision and feet shackled as they were, but with the wall to lean on he was able to stay upright.  He felt hands fiddling with the string at his neck and then, abruptly, the bag was yanked off his head and he squinted into bright lights aimed straight at his face.  He could see nothing but glare as he heard the clicking sound of holoimages being made of his arrest… capture… abduction… whatever the right word was.  Then the bag was yanked back down and tied off and he once more found himself in darkness.

Next he was dragged off somewhere else where fingerprints were taken.  They didn’t even unlock his wrists for this, just ran a scanner over each digit one at a time.  Just to be a prick, he tried clenching his fingers into fists to block their access.  This earned him a slap to the face, a fist to the solar plexus, and more obscenities screamed into his ear.   Meanwhile, strong fingers grasped his own and forced them one by one into position to be read by the scanner.

“Look, asswipe,” one of his captors said when they had finished, “you can make this easy on yourself or not.  Up to you.”

I know! Sam thought, grinning beneath the bag.

After the fingerprinting, he was subjected to a cavity search, both oral and rectal.  They lifted the bag just enough to inspect his teeth, tongue, and gums with rough, gloved fingers, then sealed him in again.  The fingers that performed the search at the other end were similarly rough, though they did grant him the small mercy of applying lube first.  He squirmed and danced on the impaling digit as its owner performed a thorough and comprehensive search for contraband.

After that he was made to wait.  They chained his neck to a hook in the wall and left him with no instructions or information, no idea of when they would be back for him.  (Well, except that he really did have an idea – Sam The Sim Programmer had specified a duration of between one and two hours.  But Sam The Captive wasn’t supposed to know that.  It was hard to pretend not to, but he tried to sink into the sim and imagine he was really living out these events.)  He stood there for minutes, then tens of minutes, then what had to be more than an hour, growing increasingly fidgety as his body’s desire to change position grew.

Occasionally he tried calling out.  He could hear his abductors around him, occasionally talking among themselves in voiced pitched too low and soft for him to make out words.  They ignored him the first two times he opened his mouth.  The third time earned him another punch in the gut, which he could not see coming and thus could not brace himself against.  His body’s instinct to curl in on itself was not helpful in this position and he pulled hard on the neck chain for ten or fifteen seconds until he was able to force his spine to straighten and get his feet supporting his weight again.  He kept his mouth shut after that and just stood, patiently waiting, a tethered beast of burden with nothing to do until its masters had use for it again.

“Cell’s ready,” he heard one of them say at last.  A minute or two later, he felt hands unhooking the chain from the wall, though it remained locked in place around his neck.  At the same time, other hands were working at the chain connecting his ankles.  “Move,” one of the voices said.  The sound was accompanied by a pressure on the chain, pulling him forward.  He shuffled his feet to keep his balance and found that he could take larger steps.  Not full-length strides, but more than what had been possible before.  His progress was still slow, but he did not stumble as he blindly followed the pull of the chain.

They threaded their way through halls with sounds echoing off the concrete walls all around.  The floor was cool on his bare feet, but not cold.  Occasionally the timbre of the sounds changed and he supposed he was moving past cell doors, either open bars or solid steel.  Eventually he was turned to the side and the pressure on the neck chain eased.  He was pushed rather than pulled forward, then ordered to stop.  Behind him, he heard the solid clank of a steel door closing.

“Back up till you touch the door,” the voice ordered.  He stepped backward one half step, then another, until he felt steel bars against his skin.  “Stand right there.”  The chain was removed from around Sam’s neck, then the hood came off.  While the guard worked on removing the handcuffs, Sam looked around.  Just as he had specified, it was a bare cell.  There was a cot flat against the wall that could be folded down and a toilet / sink combo in the back.  Light came from a bare caged bulb overhead.  The walls were concrete, as was the floor and ceiling.  The atmosphere was both too bright from the lone bulb and yet dim and oppressive at the same time from the dark grey walls.  Perfect.

The guard finished uncuffing Sam’s hands and left.  Sam’s only remaining restraints were now the waist chain, the ankle shackles which he found allowed him to separate his feet to about shoulder width, and a chain leading down from the small of his back to the center of the ankle chain, supporting it a bit.  A second door slammed shut behind him and he turned to look at it.  There were two doors, it seemed: an inner one made of bars with a slot that wrists or dishes could be passed through, and a solid outer one that blocked all sight and muffled most sounds.

Not all, though.  From far off in the distance, a voice was calling out: wordless, pain-filled cries.  The sound of a man being tortured.  Which, as it happened, was on Sam’s agenda for tomorrow morning.  He found himself both anticipating and dreading the experience.  The purpose of this whole scene was for Sam to be the target of an interrogation, one that had the potential to become somewhat harsh.  He was going to attempt to keep secret a six-digit code, while the soldiers who had taken him were going to try to extract the code from him.  They would know whether or not they had successfully broken him when they tried keying the code into a custom-designed device and it either opened or it didn’t.  The interrogators were free to use whatever means of non-life-threatening “discomfort” they were able to come up with… and the library contained many, many examples from both history and fiction for them to draw on.  Sam had not specified what particular techniques would be used on him, thus the dread.  He wasn’t sure whether to psych himself up for “The Pit And The Pendulum,” the Hanoi Hilton, or a Kartashivan truth squad.  The sound of another man’s torment seemed to be itself part of Sam’s own torture, a bit of mental softening up before the physical work would begin.  It was working: the sounds were unsettling to hear and he couldn’t tune them out because they would stop for a while, then start up again and the volume constantly varied.

He spent a few minutes exploring his cell and discovered nothing that he hadn’t already seen from his first glance.  It was a bare, cramped, barren space, long enough to lie down in, tall enough to stand in, and wide enough to turn around in with no adornments other than the stains on the walls.  There was not much room; he could place both palms flat against the side walls with bent elbows.  When the cot was folded down, it would fill the entire width of the available space, so he would have to be standing either by the door or in the back with the toilet to lower the cot into position, then climb onto it from either the head or foot end.  The sense of enclosure was powerful, as if he was in a coffin buried far below ground level.  Only the steady whoosh of air through the vent overhead reassured him that he wouldn’t eventually choke to death on his own recycled breath.

Nothing happened for a very long time.  Sam stood or paced or sat on the floor, listening to the distant screams, staring at the cell walls.  He used the toilet, took a drink by dipping his face into the stream from the faucet at the sink, paced some more with slow clanking steps.  It was a suffocating place and more than once he wondered whether he had bitten off more than he could chew.  But he forced himself to stick with it, knowing that if he bailed out he’d regret it two minutes later.  Nope.  He had to set aside the knowledge that he had designed this scenario if it was going to do him any good.  He had to get into a mindset of believing this was all real or else there would be no point to doing it.  And so he worked at it: this was his cell, this was his fate.  He was stuck here and would just have to deal with it.

The endless hours left him bored and restless, though, and so when the outer door at last swung open with no hint of warning, he was itching to break the monotony any way he could.  A guard appeared on the far side of the bars and Sam got his first good look at one of his captors without the chameleon armor.  Black uniform shirt and pants, black leather belt and boots and gloves, a black helmet with a dark grey face shield so Sam could not see his face at all.  Not a bit of skin showing anywhere.  Definitely human (that romp with Keck had been fun, but had also reaffirmed for Sam where his tastes truly lay).  The man’s shirtsleeves could barely contain his muscled upper arms and his thighs looked as though they could support a rhino as easily as a man.  Mmmm… hot stuff, yes indeed.

The guard pushed a bowl through the slot in the barred door.  Sam, who had happened to be standing by door when it had sprung open, glanced down at its contents: some sort of stew, brown in color but not in a rich-hearty-beefy way, more of a past-its-prime-possibly-decaying way.  He looked up into the guard’s blank face mask.  “I thought I ordered the filet.”  The guard did not react at all.  Emboldened, Sam reached out and took the bowl.  The guard stared at him impassively while Sam tried to think of another wisecrack to try to puncture that impenetrable armor.

“Eat,” the guard said before Sam could come up with anything.  “You have two minutes.”

“Or what?” Sam countered.  As wisecracks went, it was not inspired, but it was the logical response and it came out of his mouth before he could to stop it.  An instant later he wished he could pull the words back in.  This was not a schoolyard playground scene and in the role of prisoner he had almost certainly just crossed the line between mouthing off and noncompliance.  Noncompliance was bound to have consequences.

Sure enough, the guard’s opaque helmet turned to the side.  “Scorpio, gimme a hand.  Fucktard here’s got an attitude.”  A second guard appeared.  They palmprinted the lock open and slid the door to the side.  Sam reflexively backed away, but there was nowhere to run.  They started barking orders at him as they swarmed into the room.  “DOWN ON THE FLOOR!  NOW!  MOVE!  DOWN, DOWN, GET DOWN!”  Sam’s heart started pounding again – this was NOT what he had in mind as the outcome of getting sassy with a sexy guard!  He started sinking down, but either he wasn’t moving fast enough for them or they just wanted an excuse to rough him up some more, so they pushed him down faster.  He was able to set the bowl on the floor off to the side before their weight landed on top of him.

Once again, the cuffs went on, securing his hands to the small of his back.  Then the chain connecting his waist chain to his ankle shackles was pulled up short and locked in place.  He was hogtied – or hogchained – flat on his belly on the concrete floor, heels tugged up toward his ass, arms pinned helplessly behind him.

All he could see were two pairs of boots near him.  One of the boots reached out and nudged the bowl toward his face, then right into his face.  Sam was forced to lift his head to avoid getting smeared with the viscous liquid.  “One minute left, genius,” the guard informed him.  Sam got the point.  He lowered his mouth into the bowl and started inhaling, swallowing the stuff as fast as he could manage.  It was at room temperature, which didn’t increase its appeal any, and when it hit his tongue he discovered It had no seasoning at all.  He struggled to get the flavorless mush down.  I think this is actually worse than the synthesizer food, he pondered as he swallowed.  Wouldn’t have thought that possible.

It must have taken him more than a minute to eat everything in the bowl, or at least as much as he could.  Much of it had gotten smeared all around his mouth rather than going inside it.  But his captors apparently felt like they had sufficiently humiliated him and intimidated him into compliance because they did not attempt to force-feed him or yank the bowl away.  He finished licking it clean, then tried to clean off his lips and chin with his tongue.  Lacking hands, that was impossible and he could feel the liquid slowly drying on his face.

A gloved hand appeared from above and picked up the bowl, then the boots started moving toward the door.  “Get a good sleep, asswipe.  I got big plans for you tomorrow.”  With that, the inner door closed, then the outer, and then the light went out.

 

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