Note from Metal: We about halfway through this story, which is LONG but it pays off! For best results please start at the beginning by clicking here. The setup takes a while to ramp up, but it will enhance your enjoyment and understanding of the later chapters. If you ARE enjoying this story, please DO say so by leaving comments so that the author can see, in the comments section at the bottom.

By POW

Unical date: 3752.563.26 (ish?)

Sam had no idea how long he slept, but he was awakened by the sound of the door banging open.  His adrenaline surged… but it was only time for another meal.  Some sort of tuna and rice mixture, heavily spiced so that it made his tongue and gums tingle and burn.  There wasn’t nearly enough of it; Sam could have eaten two more bowls just like the first, fiery spice and all.  Once the guard was gone and the door was closed again, he drank mouthful after mouthful of water from the tap and slowly, gradually the fire died down.

He was too keyed up to sleep again, so he paced the cell, wondering for the thousandth time why he was doing this to himself, and also marveling at the hypocrisy of his situation.  Here, waiting alone and bored in his cramped cell, he was anticipating, eagerly, he might even say, the next round of active torture.  Of course, the moment it began he would be just as eagerly looking forward getting dumped back in here for another break.  It was madness – he constantly wanted to be wherever he wasn’t.

And the worst part was the knowledge that he had the power to end this any time he wanted.  It was only his own willpower that kept him going.

Clang.  The door slammed open once more.  They rigged his restraints for transport mode and dragged him off to the interrogation room again.  Sam’s resolve was not as robust as it had been at the start but he told himself he could do it.  Just gotta make it through one round, one round at a time.

They strapped him into same chair as his first session, the one with the sturdy leather belts to hold him in place and the absence of seat between his thighs.  As before, the hood came off and he was staring at three bright lights that dazzled his eyes so that he could not see anything else.

“Got a special treat for you today, faggot.”  This was different – Bad Cop was starting the session.  “You’re gonna loooooove this.”

“Come on now, my friend.”  Sam listened hard this time.  The voices were indistinguishable.  The only thing that Sam could use to tell them apart was the sneering tone of the one versus the gentle, compassionate tone of the other.  The compassion was fake, of course, but genuine-seeming enough to be convincing.  Sam wanted to believe that Good Cop truly liked him and didn’t want him to hurt.  It took an effort of will to keep reminding himself that both of these guys – no, all of these guys – were equally his enemies.  “Spare yourself this unpleasantness.  Just give me the code.  That’s all.  It would only take a few seconds.  Give me the code.”

They could see him – his face was lit up in spotlights – but he could not see them.  They could read every expression on his face, and he was almost certainly not doing a good job at holding a blank mask.  They would know that while he wasn’t near to cracking, he was definitely considering that possibility more seriously than at his first session.  It really was going to come down to time.  Would Sam be able to resist long enough for the clock to run out, or would his willpower collapse before then?

“Such a pity,” Good Cop said after a few moments.

“Not from where I’m sitting,” Bad Cop said with glee in his jeering voice.  Sam felt hands pressing at his head, pushing it forward.  He felt some sort of device being placed on his head, covering the back of his skull and the nape of his neck.  Straps dangled at the sides and the hands began fastening one set across his forehead.

“Ridendri neural stimulator,” Good Cop explained as they worked to buckle the straps in place.  “Since you seemed so disdainful of one of the classic tools of persuasion, we thought you might appreciate something of a more recent vintage.  You’re familiar with the Ridendri civil war?  Terrible time in that planet’s history, but like many conflicts it sparked a wave of technological progress, including this handy gadget.  It taps directly into your spinal cord.  Once calibrated, it can reproduce pretty much any sensation that your nerves are capable of generating.”

“And you know we’re not gonna generate the happy ones,” Bad Cop added.

The straps were all now in place.  Sam wore a leather cage on his face with straps on his forehead, his chin, and between his nose and mouth.  Vertical connecting straps held them in place so that he wouldn’t be able to shake the equipment loose by contorting his muscles or biting through one of the straps.  He felt tiny pinpricks at the base of his skull.  The pit of his stomach dropped a bit knowing that his skin was being pierced, his body’s shell breached, but the effect was more psychological than physical; it didn’t actually hurt much at all.

“One last chance.  The code.”

Sam closed his eyes and shook his head just a fraction, steeling himself for whatever was to come.  What came was not what he expected… not that he could have said what he was expecting, but this wasn’t it: his left index finger twitched.  Then his right.  Then nothing for a bit, then his left leg twitched as though a doctor had hit that spot under his kneecap with a rubber mallet.  Then the right.  Then more twitches in varying places such that he lost track of them all, they were coming so fast.

“Calibration at fifty percent,” Bad Cop’s voice came from over and behind his head.  Then it came again from under the light in front of him.  “Halfway there.”  Dammit, were these guys all identical clones of each other?

More twitching, then weird sensations from deep within his body, then the word “done,” from behind, followed swiftly by “All right, go,” from in front.  Sam didn’t even have time to brace himself when suddenly, his right hand was on fire!

He looked down at it.  It looked fine – the skin was its usual color, the fingers still had their normal shapes, the dusting of hair across the back of the hand looked no different than it ever did.  And yet he could feel it burning, so realistically that he would have sworn he could smell the scent of roasting meat.  He tried moving it within the limits the restraints allowed, and the muscles all seemed to respond to his will, but the sensation of pain changed and worsened with every motion.  He was compelled to hold the hand as still as possible because every movement only made the flaming agony worse.  He heard himself shouting something, some wordless cry of anguish.

Then, as swiftly as it had begun, it was gone.  A second later, Sam’s shout turned into a gasp of relief.  His hand was fine, absolutely fine.  He looked down and squeezed his fingers, half-expecting the pain to flare back up the moment he did… but there was nothing.  Not even a lingering after-effect of the brief ordeal he had just experienced.

“Do the left,” Bad Cop in front of him said.  “Give him a matched set.”  Just like that, the flames burst into life on the other hand and Sam immediately forgot all about the right, consumed by the horrible distress signals the left was sending out.  Only the signals weren’t coming from the hand, were they?  No, they were being generated directly in his spine by the fiendish device attached to his skull.  With the little bit of focus available to him, he concentrated on that fact: the pain in his hand was an illusion; the real source of the problem was attached to his head.

So he tried to shake the device off.  He thrashed his head left and right, trying to ignore the burning agony in his palm and fingers.  The neural stimulator refused to budge.  The straps held it securely in place no matter how he moved.  He kept trying, though, even after the fire in his left hand disappeared.  Next came needles under his toenails, then knives slicing ribbons into his chest, then something stretching his rectum wider than it could possibly be stretched, all completely unreal and yet all as real as anything else Sam had ever felt, at least until the sensation switched off and the pain vanished as if it had never been, leaving Sam gasping and heaving during the brief lull before the next one started up.  At some point he realized he had stopped trying to shake the demonic thing loose and was just focused on enduring the torture.

Throughout, every three or four breaks he got, one of the guards would say flatly “the code.”  Sam didn’t trust himself to speak at all, so he said nothing and merely braced himself for the next assault.  One inevitably came a few seconds or as long as a minute later, and the long breaks were actually worse than the short ones because he had time to build up his anticipation, which only made the waiting worse and when the pain finally hit – and he could never predict where it would strike – it was almost a relief to be done with the waiting and just get on with the suffering already.  Then, of course, as the pain went on he would crave the breaks again, a miniature repetition of the cycle he had noticed back in the cell.

When he was a quivering wreck, they stopped.  Sam barely noticed the straps coming off or the belts holding him to the chair being unbuckled.  He only noticed the bag being thrown back over his head when the color of the light he was seeing changed.  His eyes were closed and suddenly the red of the glaring lamps shining through his eyelids was replaced with black.  They hauled him to his feet and had to half-carry him back to his cell because he couldn’t seem to get his feet working well enough to cooperate in the effort of walking.

Back into the cell where he collapsed onto the floor.  They didn’t even swap his handcuffs around this time but left them behind his back and the hood on his head.  He sat on the floor, numb.  There wasn’t even a tiny surge of elation at having outlasted his captors for a third time.  His body ached all over, which was puzzling since he hadn’t actually been harmed by the neural stimulator.  Eventually he figured out that he had been straining against the straps the whole while and his muscles were exhausted.

All he could think was: this is crazy, why am I doing this to myself, this has to stop.

 

Still unical date: 3752.563.26 (or thereabouts)

More hours of boredom in the cell, boredom accompanied by steadily-increasing hunger, then they came for him again.  He was feeling a bit stronger after the rest, but was by no means certain he could withstand another round of this.  The system may be preventing the guards from endangering his life, but they were certainly demonstrating that they were capable of causing him a great deal of suffering while staying well short of that mark.  It was one thing to know that he was theoretically capable of enduring three days of this abuse.  It was something else entirely to contemplate actually getting through one or two more.

He realized as they walked him through the corridor that he had no idea how far away the finish line was.  If he could be sure that this was the last session he would face, perhaps that would make it easier for him to endure.  But that seemed optimistic.  Very likely he still had another whole day of this ahead of him, and possibly more.  That thought was absolutely deflating.

Same routine: the chair, the straps, the bright lights.  After so long in the bag the glare was particularly harsh and he squeezed his eyes shut against it.

“That’s it, get that in while you can,” Bad Cop sneered.  What?

“This is getting tiresome, my friend,” Good Cop said.  “Why put yourself through this ordeal?  You have the power to end it, and I wish you would.  For your sake.”  Goddammit, it didn’t help that the silky words were the very thoughts that Sam was already thinking!  He could end it.  Six numbers, he just had to say six numbers and it would be over.  No more pain, no more uncomfortable cell, no more abusive guards.  He could go back to his lakeside haven and read about adventures instead of living one.  Could he still respect himself afterward if he caved in now?  Would he emerge from the simspace to find that he had endured two full days of torture?  That would do, he figured.  He could live with that outcome, probably.  Two days was a decent interval.

But what if it hadn’t been two days?  What if it had only been one and a half, or not even a full day?  His internal clock was totally off now.  He had no idea how much time had passed since the soldiers had abducted him from the oceanside hot tub.  Had it been two meals, or three?  Three, yes, two of the stew-like substance and one over-spiced tuna mix.  But how many meals were they feeding him each day, spaced how far apart?  And how long had they let him sleep?  Waking him mid-sleep was just another part of the torture, keeping him off balance, and there was nothing like a day / night cycle here in this windowless, stone-walled prison.  He could be seconds away from freedom, or days, there was no way to be sure.

“Still playing it tough, then?”  What?  No, he didn’t… had they even asked him for the code yet?  Maybe it was implied.  Shit!

One of the torturers lowered some sort of device, different from the last, down over his head.  This one covered just his eyes, leaving his nose, mouth, and ears free.  The guard strapped it firmly into place behind his head and under his chin.  There was nothing pressing onto Sam’s eyelids, but he could see only blackness.  Then he felt fumbling at his crotch.  He tensed up as hands did something to his balls, but he could not tell what they were doing.  After a minute or so, the hands backed away.

“There’s only one rule, maggot,” Bad Cop said.  “Don’t blink.”  With that, light suddenly stabbed into Sam’s eyes.  The eyemask was some sort of projection device; he was looking at a blank blue field with a small set of light grey crosshairs right in the middle.  “Look right at the crosshairs and do… not… blink.”

Naturally, the moment he was told not to blink, that was all he could think about.  Awareness of his eyelids made him desperate to do precisely the one thing he had been commanded not to do.  It was only seconds before he gave in to the urge, flashing the lids shut for just an instant before opening them again.

“Shit, couldn’t even make ten seconds!  You’re gonna be hatin’ life real soon, you keep that up.”

“What my colleague hasn’t told you,” Good Cop clarified, “is that the wires connected to your nuts are going to start zapping you every time you blink and every time you look away from the target.  And the intensity and duration are going to increase with every repetition.  They’ll only go up a tiny fraction each time, but those tiny fractions are going to add up.  Please, my friend.  Don’t subject yourself to this.  Give me the code.”

He almost did.  Sam understood the implications immediately: this was going to be insidious.  This was different than the previous sessions where they inflicted pain on him and he endured it.  Now they were making him do the work of torturing himself.  He was going to strain and strain to keep his eyes open and focused on the crosshairs while they sat back and did nothing, and when he inevitably failed, because of course he would, over and over, he would be the cause of his own distress.  And it would get steadily worse as the session went on, which meant he had to work extra hard now at the beginning when the consequences of failure were small.

He almost broke down… but he did not.  He could endure one more go-around, right?  One torture session at a time.  Don’t think about the next one, think about getting through this one.  So he fixed his eyes on the target crosshairs and tried not to blink.

It was almost comical how hard it was.  He would go as long as he could, but the fact that he was concentrating on not blinking made him keenly aware of the need to do just that, a vicious self-defeating feedback loop.  “As long as he could” turned out to be five, six, ten seconds at a stretch, a laughably short amount of time.  Then, despite his best efforts to will his eyes to stay open, his body’s autonomic reflexes would take over and his eyes would flick shut and open again.  And the worst part was that he got no sense of relief from each blink.  A second or two later, he’d be ready to close his eyes again.  The effort was constant and required his full attention.

At least there was no penalty for failure yet.  The electricity may be steadily ramping up with each blink, but it had yet to reach a point where he could feel it.  Unfortunately, this gave Sam little incentive to try to keep at it.  The penalty for failure was purely hypothetical with no actual consequences and so it was easy to rationalize any given blink as no big deal, pretend that it would be the last one and that he was starting for real now… until it happened again five seconds later.

As time passed, the other feature of the setup came into play.  He found his eyes more and more tempted to wander away from the crosshairs.  Keeping them aimed at the same point became harder and harder to do and his vision began playing tricks on him.  The crosshairs would appear to drift up or down and he would flick his focal point to compensate, only to discover they hadn’t really moved at all and he fought to re-aim his eyes on the target once again.  He had no way of knowing how much variance he was allowed before the system monitoring him would register a failure, so he may have been racking up violations faster than his count of the number of blinks alone would suggest.

And, of course, as was bound to happen, eventually the hypothetical penalty evolved into something much less hypothetical.  It happened gradually, of course, starting perhaps five minutes into the session, five minutes that felt like thirty as Sam fought against his own body’s reflexive urges.  The first hint was a tiny tingle in his balls, so faint that he wasn’t sure it was even there at all.  But it definitely was, as was proven ten seconds later when he blinked again and the tiny tingle came back, just a hair stronger this time.

Sam squirmed in the straps, but they held him firm.  He tried shaking the eyemask loose, but only half-heartedly because the wires would still be on his balls and that’s where the real danger lay.  He tried to stretch his fingers toward his crotch, groping around for any wires he might be able to grab and pull until it came free.  Nothing.  No wires, nothing but empty air.  And the effort of reaching of course made him lose his concentration and his eyes wandered, drifting upward away from the crosshairs, and that’s when he learned exactly how far he could let them go – not far – because the tingle started up and stayed on until he got his eyes aligned on the target again.  And no way to disconnect the current.

Experimentally, he tried closing his eyes for a whole second.  Sure enough, the tingling current remained on the entire time, and it was definitely strong enough that he could detect when it was on and when it was off.

Fuck!  The only way to not get his nuts fried was to do exactly what Bad Cop had told him: stare straight ahead and don’t blink.  Which sounded so simple, and yet actually doing it second after second, minute after minute, was far from easy!  He tried another experiment: closing one eye at a time.  As expected, closing either one was enough to trigger the electricity.  The sadistic bastards had anticipated that potential loophole and closed it.

Time ticked on.  His body kept betraying him, blinking against his will, and every blink was now accompanied by a brief jolt, definitely detectable, not quite painful yet but with the intensity clearly inching its way up each time.

No sounds from his captors.  They were sitting back, watching him or ignoring him, blinking whenever they fucking well pleased without even thinking about it, while Sam drove himself crazy trying to use mere willpower to override instincts that had been honed by evolution over millions of years.  It was a hopeless task.  Maybe he should just give up…?

No.  Not yet.  Soon, no doubt, but he still had a bit of reserves left in the tank.  If he could just make it through this session, they’d drag him back to his cell again and he could decide to give up before the next one… maybe… or maybe he’d be strong enough by then to resist one more.  One session at a time, that’s all he had to do.

But the “one at a time” philosophy was pitifully weak against the ongoing nightmare of trying to keep his eyes open and focused on a single spot.  He could never take a break, never rest in his efforts, and it was draining him.  The current on his balls was growing stronger and the jolts were definitely lasting longer than when he had first noticed them.  He realized he was developing a reflexive association between eye movement and ball pain.  Blink, zap.  Blink, zap.  Shift focus slightly off-center, zap.  He found himself anticipating the moments when he could no longer stop the blink reflex and tensing up milliseconds before the jolt would strike.

For all the suffering he was enduring, it couldn’t have looked like much from the outside.  He was just sitting in a chair, not moving, looking into what amounted to a VR headset running the world’s most boring entertainment program.  Insidious indeed.

There came a time when he simply couldn’t do it any longer.  His eyes needed rest, he couldn’t force them to remain open.  Deliberately, knowing he was going to suffer for it, he clenched them shut, and the response was immediate: the current turned on and stayed on.  His balls felt like they were being stepped on, crushed between steel plates, stung by a thousand bees, and he gritted his teeth and groaned through the pain because his eyes desperately needed the break.  After a time that felt like a minute but was probably more like half that, he pried them open again, got them focused on the crosshairs, and at last the current shut off.  It had grown noticeably stronger during that interval, so subsequent lapses would no doubt be punished more severely.

A booted foot nudged him in the balls.  “That looked like fun, do it again.”  It wasn’t hard to guess which interrogator had spoken.  “There’s plenty more juice where that came from.”  Good Cop followed up with “Come on, my friend.  What’s the point in resisting?  You’re going to give me that code eventually.  Be reasonable.  Make it easy on yourself.”  Goddammit, more silky words echoing Sam’s own thoughts!  He could feel his resolve slipping.

Blink, ZZZAP.  Now the jolts themselves were strong and long enough to make it harder for Sam to sustain his focus.  A tenth-of-a-second flicker of the eye muscles was met with half a second or longer of punishment, during which he had to fight even harder to keep his eyes open and aimed at the correct spot, and so one failure cascaded into the next.  He would get three or four punishment jolts right in a row before he could manage to regain control long enough to stop the cycle.  This has to end, I can’t do this any more.  And yet, stubbornly, he bit down on his lip and refused to give in, not quite sure why, proceeding on mulish inertia more than anything else.

He was on a steady downhill slide now.  His slip-ups grew more and more frequent and the jolts stronger and longer, and every jolt made it harder to force his eyes to focus.  Eventually there came a point when the current was on more than it was off and he just gave up entirely, closing his eyes and letting himself sink into the combined sensation of blissful relief for his sore, dry eyes and screaming agony in his balls.

Then it stopped.  He tried to open his eyes but they didn’t want to do it.  He forced the lids apart to find that the blue screen and its demonic crosshair target were gone.  He blinked, still conditioned to expect a blast to the balls when he did, but they must have turned off the power.  Hands undid the straps on the headpiece and the restraints.  Without saying a word, they re-chained and re-bagged him for transport, then frogmarched him once more through the corridor and deposited him in his cell.

No more.  Sam wanted out.  Whatever enjoyment he was deriving from this “man up and take your torture” scenario he had set up for himself, the cost was too much.  It wasn’t fun anymore, not even a little bit.  He was done.  He should have set the time limit to two days, or even one.  Three was just too long for something like this.  He was even ready to call on the simspace’s AI to just shut the whole thing down, but then decided he wanted to see it through.  The scenario he had set up had a win ending and a loss ending depending on whether he held out long enough.  Might as well play it out to the end and take his lumps.  He knew he would feel better about himself afterward if he played by the game’s rules rather than flipping the table over and walking away like a petulant child.

He used the toilet, took a very slow and awkward drink from the faucet through the fabric of the hood, lowered the cot into place, and tried to sleep the time away until they came for him once more.

 

Unical date: 3752.563.almost.definitely.27…probably

This time he was awake and staring at the blackness of the bag over his head when the door started to make clanking sounds and then swung open.  It could only have been an hour or so.  Maybe they were getting desperate because the deadline was looming?  He almost reconsidered then and thought about trying to tough his way through another torture session.  But no… the thought did not appeal.  Even if he was only one round away from victory, he could live with accepting defeat.  It wasn’t fun any more, so there was no reason to keep bulling his way through.

Into the interrogation room where they laid him down flat again, tipping him over onto his side to start the process of removing the handcuffs.  “Wait,” Sam said.  “I’ll talk.”  The guards paused in their movements and Sam heard low voices murmuring words he could not make out.  Then Good Cop’s voice sounded from somewhere behind him.  “I’m happy to hear that.  Go on.”

Sam suddenly got cold feet.  Was he really going to just give up before the next round of torment even started?  No, that would… yes.  Yes, he was sure.  He had had enough.  It was time to wrap this program up, take a break, and begin a new one, maybe something where he was the dom.  But then he went to say the code and he couldn’t think what it was!  His tongue froze in his mouth.  His brain had seized up; he had absolutely no idea what the numbers were.  The irony – four torture sessions of keeping the information secret, and now when he wanted to give it up, he couldn’t even remember what it was.  He tried to clear his head so he could think, but he must have taken too long because suddenly Good Cop was talking again.

“I’ve been patient, my friend, but my patience is wearing thin.  Perhaps a preview of what lies ahead for you might help you remember.”

Bad Cop took over.  “Got a two-for-one special for you today, shit-for-brains.  The rack plus the Ridendri gadget.  I’m gonna get you stretched out nice and tight, and then I’m gonna set your dick on fire.”  He roughly patted the organ in question as he mentioned it, causing Sam to flinch.  “Think that’ll jog your memory?”

Sam started to get panicky.  “No, don’t!  I said I’ll talk!  I’ll tell you what the code is.”

“You’ve got five seconds, and then my patience runs out.”

And then, as suddenly as it had come, the mental block vanished and the numbers making up the code came effortlessly to mind: 106193.  Oh, sweet mama, thank you.  Sam spit the numbers out in a rush before he could forget them.  “One oh six one nine three.  That’s it.  One oh six one nine three.”

Nothing happened for a moment, then Good Cop’s voice came.  “Stand him up.”  Sam was hauled to a vertical position and left to support himself, though one of the guards remained behind him and kept a hand on the connecting chain of the handcuffs, wordlessly communicating that freedoms granted could quickly become freedoms revoked.

“We’ll see if this code checks out, my friend,” Good Cop said.  “But before we do that, I want to clear up a possible uncertainty.  There is a possibility that you have given me a false code to try to save yourself some suffering.  That course of action would be folly.  You see, I have the device right here and it will immediately tell me whether the code I enter into it is valid.  So any relief you buy yourself by lying will last for two minutes at most.

“And another thing, this device only allows three bad attempts before it locks itself up and permanently scrambles the data inside, so we have a limited number of attempts we can make.  If you’ve given me a bad code, wasting one of those attempts, I will know it right away, and if that happens, I will let my colleagues here take an hour or two to do whatever the fuck they want with you.  And then some time after that, we will try again, and if at that time your lips are too bloody and swollen to speak, well then you’ll just have to fucking tap the numbers out on the floor with your forehead, am I making myself clear?  So before I type this code in, is there anything at all you want to tell me?  You know, in case your memory might have been spotty due to the stress you’ve been under recently?  If so, now is the time to speak up.”

What the heck?  This was not part of the script.  It hadn’t even occurred to Sam to try giving them a fake code because as Good Cop had just pointed out, the lie would be immediately detected.  Any relief from the torture that he bought himself would be fleeting and they’d double down on him in response.  But this “three strikes” thing?  That was not something Sam had programmed into the scenario.  The system seemed to be ad-libbing and now was not the time for that kind of thing.

Sam swallowed.  “No.  That’s the code, the real code.  One oh six one nine three.”

“You’re certain?  You’re as sure as you can be that you have not made an accidental error?  That is good to know, my friend.  I thank you.”  Sam heard rustling and a soft thud as people and objects moved around him, but the hand on the reins behind him maintained its light, steady pressure, so he didn’t dare try to go anywhere.

“All right, here goes.  One… zero… six… one, nine, three aaaaaaand: enter.”  A soft chirp of satisfaction blirped into the quiet.  “Well, whaddaya know, our boy here got it right.  Gem, why don’t you take this over to the boys in recon?  They’ll know what to do with it.”  Footsteps faded off down the hall.

It was over.

Sam sagged a bit and the hand between his wrists tautened up a fraction, anticipating a move, but Sam wasn’t going to run.  There was no need – in about sixty seconds this would all be a fading memory.  He figured the first thing he would do once he was out of here was call up a real bed, a comfortable bed, and sleep until forever, and then he’d go find something to eat, maybe go to that bistro in Rome and actually sit at a table wearing clothes instead of chains, surrounded by other people laughing and enjoying themselves.  He’d had enough of solitary confinement and interacting with no one but enemies for a while.  Maybe he could play some bondage games after that, but for now it was time to take a break and enjoy some normal life for a bit.

“Now, as for you, my friend… thank you for your service.  You made the right call and we appreciate what you’ve done.”  Fingers groped at the bag over Sam’s head and slowly lifted it free.  For the first time Sam got a clear look around the interrogation room.  There wasn’t much to see.  The rack was behind him and therefore out of sight.  In front was the sturdy seatless chair with its array of lamps pointing at it, and elsewhere was just stone and steel: a few hooks and eyebolts and chains attached to the walls and ceiling, which were made of dark, stained concrete just like his cell.  Not much more.

Good Cop was standing directly in front of him wearing the standard black uniform and helmet with opaque visor.  Bad Cop Number Whatever was still behind him.

“But before we let you go,” Good Cop continued, “there is one other bit of information I need from you.”

What?  There was more still?  Sam looked at Good Cop’s face to try to read his expression but it was impossible to see anything through the visor. Then he realized it didn’t matter anyway: this scene was over, and this person wasn’t a person at all, merely a created character, and his thoughts and opinions were irrelevant because soon enough he’d be back in inactive storage along with Coach and Keck and the Damoclan dude and the rest of this entire simulation.  Sam had done his time, he’d played by the rules he’d set for himself.  It was time to be done with all this and go have a beer before bed.

“Pyrelli– ooooof!”  Good Cop’s arm moved like lightning and his fist caught Sam right in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him and sending him curling inward on himself.  While he struggled to draw breath, hands reached around from behind and jammed something into his mouth.  It was a ball, large enough to force his jaws wide open.  Those same hands then fastened straps in place behind Sam’s head, ensuring he couldn’t expel the ball though he was too busy trying to force oxygen into his lungs to even try.

“Ah, ah, ah, there’ll be no need for that,” Good Cop said while the hands worked.  The nickname was feeling less and less appropriate with every interaction they had.  “I apologize for the discomfort you’re currently experiencing, but you were about to say something you shouldn’t, and I’m not quite ready to just up and disappear.”

Sam’s brain was still operating on short nutrition, sleep deprivation, and stress, and most of his brain was focused on trying to convince his traumatized diaphragm to start working again, so it took him more time than perhaps it otherwise would have to understand the implications of what the guard had just said: a character in the sim was talking about the sim itself.

Only a few seconds later, a second realization occurred to him: it was therefore possible that the gut punch and subsequent gag might be more than just routine abuse of the sort he had experienced over the past few days.  They prevented him from telling the AI to end the sim, leaving him trapped inside this imaginary but all-too-real world.  It was frightening to think that that might have been the whole point, that depriving him of control was the deliberate, intentional purpose of these non-sentient NPCs.

Well, there was more than one way out.  He had read the manual, after all.  Simspaces were usually voice-controlled, but there were other possibilities.  He wouldn’t be able to summon up a control console with either a keyboard or a touch screen, but there were other options.  The most useful right at this moment was the non-verbal kill switch – a chopping motion with one hand held like a blade striking the other palm, repeated three times.  He should be able to manage that, even with cuffed hands and it should have the same effect as telling Pyrellia to end the program.  He’d be left with the cuffs and the gag, but he could deal with that once his tormentors were gone.

But the moment he tried, the guard behind him blocked his way, keeping his own hand between Sam’s two to prevent him from bringing them together.  Fuck!  This was definitely deliberate!

“It’s amusing that you keep trying,” the guard in front of him said.  How had he known?  “But I must stress: it won’t work.  I know all the ways out, and I have blocked them all.  I am going to make sure you stay right here with me until you give me what I’m after.”

“Hunhga nng anghkha?” Sam said through the gag.

“I couldn’t understand a word of that,” the guard replied with a shake of his helmet, “but it’s pretty clear from context.  What I’m after is…”

He stepped in close, looming over Sam, and tapped him twice on the chest.

“… your authorization code. The code that grants you root-level access to Pyrellia’s Wing’s systems.”

 

Click for next chapter

Click for previous chapter

Click to start at Chapter 1