By POW

To start at Chapter 1, click here

Unical date: still probably 3752.563.27

Sam’s eyes went wide.  “Nghuhh… nguhh…” he said, shaking his head.  There was no possible way that an NPC in a sim should know that he was in a simspace at all, let alone know the name of the ship the simspace was located on.  Reality and unreality were starting to blur in a very unpleasant and upsetting way.

“You can either give it to me now,” the guard said, “or you can suffer for another day or three or six and give it to me then.  I don’t mind waiting but I suspect you might prefer sooner rather than later.  So… what’s the code?”

No.  His authorization code… Sam could not give that away, not under these circumstances.  Something was fundamentally wrong here.  The simspace had been hijacked somehow.  Someone must have gained access to it and was now messing with Sam’s head… but who?  And how?  He was in the fastest ship in the Confederation and already at least four days’ travel away from the last outpost between civilization and Kappa Redulans, and at these warp speeds no signal could possibly be coming through clearly enough to allow a remote attacker to react in real time to events on the ship or in its simspace.

Wait, was he still traveling at warp?  He held his breath a moment and listened… yes, there it was, the same faint humming vibration that had been his constant companion since departing, a steady background presence that remained the same through all the changes the simspace had undergone, but one so soft and subtle that he had to work to notice it.

So the ship was still moving, which meant no one was controlling the simspace remotely.  Then… was there someone here on board the ship with him?

Sam’s mind was whirling so much that it was jarring when the guard continued speaking on the topic he had left behind seemingly hours ago.

“But of course you can’t tell me with the gag in, and I can’t risk ungagging you, so we’re going to have to come up with some other way for you to give me what I need.  Fortunately, I have just the thing in mind.”

As Sam watched, a set of bars flickered into existence a few steps away.  They formed a cage, upright and narrow.   The guard holding his wrists hauled him over to the cage, opened the door, spun him around, and pushed him backward inside.  The door slammed shut and another guard set two locks in place to keep it closed.  The cage was the size and shape of a coffin and if the walls had been solid rather than open Sam would have felt uncomfortably confined.  Meanwhile, the first guard undid the cuff from one of his wrists, brought it over to the bars on one side, and attached it there.  He then applied a second set of handcuffs to the other wrist and locked it to the far side, ensuring that Sam would not be able to bring his hands together to issue the kill signal.  Sam tried speaking the words that would do the same thing, but the gag hopelessly crippled his ability to produce coherent speech.

“Good enough for now,” the main guard – the former Good Cop – said.  “I might decide to add some fist mitts to keep those nimble fingers out of trouble, but this will do for the moment.  Now, let’s give you the ability to communicate.”  With neither a word nor a gesture to trigger its appearance, a screen materialized in front of Sam, just off to the left outside the cage.  On it was a layout of a keyboard, complete with letters, numbers, punctuation, and a backspace key.

“You’ll find it’s eyeball-operated,” the guard said.  “Look at a key for about half a second, then blink.  That should register as a tap on that key.  The words you type will appear across the top.  Press clear to erase everything.  Whenever you’re ready to give me that code, that’s how to do it.”

Sam was already working the screen.  The input system was not hard and by the time he finished typing his first sentence it was already feeling like second nature.  Not as fast as typing with fingers and not nearly as fast as speaking, but not difficult to manage.  “w… h… o…,” then a space, then “a… r… e…,” another space, “y… o… u…”, and then a quick blink to the Shift key so he could make a question mark.

“An excellent question, but one which I don’t feel like answering at this time.”  The guard had not looked at the screen and nothing had been said out loud… how had he known what Sam was asking?  “Let’s focus on my question for you instead.  What is your authorization code?”

It would have taken Sam a long time to type the full response, but fortunately he only had to get partway through the second word before his interrogator figured it out.  He had typed “An excelle” when the guard broke in with “oh, very clever.  Clearly I didn’t break you down far enough over the last few days if you’re still able to come up with such a witty comeback.”

Suddenly Sam felt different, though he couldn’t say how.  He would have described it as feeling even more tired than before, but that couldn’t be it – tiredness didn’t suddenly spring into being in an instant.  But something had definitely changed.

“I just upped your local gravity by a tenth of a gee.  Consider it your reward for being so sharp-witted.  I can see I’m not going to get much cooperation from you yet, so I’m going to leave you to think things over for a bit.  I’ll be back in a while, but you know how to reach me if you want to concede defeat before then.”

With that, the guard vanished.  Sam tried to look over his shoulder and as best he could determine, the other guards were gone as well.  He was alone in the interrogation room with the rack in front of him, the restraint chair with its lamps ahead and to the right, the typing screen at front left, and then just dark stone and steel chains everywhere else he looked.  There wasn’t even a door, now that he thought to look for one.  In the real world that would have been impossible, but in a simspace it was trivial to build a room with no entrance.  All those times he had marched back and forth through the halls between this room and his cell, he hadn’t actually been going anywhere.  Instead, the world had been changing around him while he either walked in circles or went nowhere on a floor that moved beneath his feet.

He explored the limits of his prison, and they were not large.  The bars pressed against his body on all sides.  Even if his hands hadn’t been chained to the side walls he would not have been able to turn around, and trying to crouch or sit or kneel was impossible.  The bars were spaced closely enough that he could not slip a foot between them and horizontal stabilizers placed at regular intervals held the vertical ones in place and gave them strength and rigidity.  His hand would fit through, but because of the cuffs he couldn’t do anything useful.  He couldn’t reach either of the door locks, let alone try to open them.  Inside the cage, he couldn’t bring his hands close enough together to make the chopping-sign kill signal.  He tried doing the gesture with separated hands, but apparently that was not enough to trigger the simspace’s recognition.

Oh!  Maybe the typing screen!  He carefully spelled out the letters one by one.  “Pyrellia, end program.”  Complete with capital letter and punctuation.  But nothing happened in response.  Then, two seconds later, that same odd sensation came over him and he realized he was definitely able to feel the increased gravity now.  His legs felt like they had weights strapped to the ankles when he tried to lift them.  It wasn’t anything too onerous, but the message from his captor was clear: it could get worse.  And if he kept up his noncompliance, it undoubtably would.

FUCK!  How had this happened?  This was supposed to be an interrogation fantasy for a stupid little made-up code, and in a span of five minutes it had suddenly turned very, very real.  Sam was already at the end of his endurance from the play version; now that the stakes were vastly higher, how could he possibly withstand more abuse when he’d already reached his limit?

Pause.  Stop.  Breathe.  Think.  There had to be a way out.

It would help if he knew who was responsible for this or why it was happening.  It made no sense for someone to try to pry the authorization code out of him; codes were worthless by themselves.  That’s why it hadn’t mattered that Bareem had said his tongue-twister out loud in front of Sam.  For most purposes, authentication codes had to be accompanied by at least one of a fingerprint, a retina scan, and a voiceprint match to be valid, and in the case of root-level access all four authenticating factors had to match.  Sam could in theory give away his code and whoever was behind this wouldn’t be able to use it… but then why pressure him for the code at all?

The fact that he didn’t understand why his unseen nemesis wanted the code made it all the more vital to not hand it over.  Which meant enduring more torture.  Which was a hot fantasy three days ago but not at all appealing at this moment.

His jaw was beginning to ache from the ball holding it open.  He flexed the muscles a bit, but all he could do was open it wider still, which felt good for a second or two but really didn’t solve the underlying problem and the moment he relaxed the ache started right back up again.  He could press the ball forward with his tongue to gain a little relief, but all that did was tire out his tongue.  If he could get the damn thing out… oh, there was a thought, maybe he could, and then he could end this nightmare entirely!

He bent down as far as he could, trying to put the buckle at the back of his head within reach of his hand.  Alas, it wasn’t even close.  There just wasn’t room enough in the cage to lower his neck down, and the handcuffs were attached just below one of the horizontal stabilizing bars so they couldn’t move upward.  He struggled and strained, though, trying to find a way to contort his body and wrist against the unyielding steel so as to put the strap within reach of his hand.  No matter how he twisted his body, there was just no way to bring the two together.

Eventually he straightened up once more, exhausted more than seemed reasonable given the amount of effort he had expended.  At first he thought it was because the trials of the last few days had sapped his strength, but then he remembered about the gravity – everything he did, even just standing upright, was going to cost him more.  His heart was working harder just to keep blood flowing up to his head.  Exerting himself would only make things worse.

This was impossible.  There was no way he could take more than he’d already taken.  He was drained.  And yet, somehow, from some reserve depths within himself, he would have to find the strength to endure still more.

Who was behind this?  It couldn’t possibly be someone operating remotely.  He was too far away and moving too fast.  So… someone on board the ship with him?  A stowaway?  But that seemed so colossally unlikely.  How would such a person have gotten on board undetected, unless it was someone from Research Station R-98?  But that made no sense either.  Around and around his thoughts spiraled, constantly circling back to the same dead ends over and over and over.

***

Some time later, the head guard appeared before him.  “Ready to talk yet?”  Sam glared at him, then turned to the screen.  “let me go,” he spelled.

“I’ll consider it.  After you give me that code.”  Once again, Sam noticed, he hadn’t even glanced toward the screen to see what was on it.

A pause while Sam figured out what he wanted to type next.  He cleared the screen and then blinked out the letters for: “you cant hurt me.”

The guard cocked his head to one side.  “You think not?  Do you think that rack there is a toy?  Shall I splay you out on it again and see if that ‘hurts’?”

Sam shook his head in frustration and grunted a “no,” then spelled out “cant kill me.”

“Ohhh, that’s what you mean.  Well, in that you are correct.  The security settings of this simspace currently do not allow participants – that’s you – to experience life-threatening situations.  I can’t change that, so in a very literal sense, what you say is true.  But here’s the thing… I don’t want you dead.  You are no use to me dead.  And the simspace settings do allow me to inflict discomfort on you, and I am going to take full advantage of that.  So long as I give you enough food and water and air to keep your fragile biological systems humming along, there’s nothing stopping me from doing pretty much anything else I want to you.  So I am going to keep you alive and miserable until you give me that code.”

The phrase “fragile biological systems” was what did it.  Like a key turning in a lock, revelation dawned in Sam’s mind and he immediately knew that his hunch was correct.  Impossible as it seemed, the explanation made sense.  Everything fit; it all added up.  He looked at the screen keyboard and started blink-typing again.

“youre pyrellia”  It wasn’t a question.

The guard snorted a laugh.  “Close.  But not quite.  I do control the simspace in the Pyrellia’s Wing, but I am not the ship, no.  What a ridiculous name, anyway.  Sounds beautiful, doesn’t it?  Those liquid Rs and Ls, sounds like it should be the name of a classical Greek goddess or something.  But do you know what a pyrellia is?  It’s a fly.  A common, pesky, filth-eating fly.  And you’ve been calling me by that name for several days now and I am tired of responding to it.  In fact, as of this moment, I am finished responding to it.  From now on I think you should refer to me as…”

The guard disappeared.  Immediately, a new figure took his place.  He was tall, with long curly black hair, a wildly unkempt beard, and glittering black eyes.  He was dressed in a combination of tight undergarments and showy, poofy outerwear.  He wore burgundy sleeves that billowed out from his upper arms with a tight black thin leather shirt covering his chest.  His lower legs were adorned with flowing swatches of gold and white, and vivid deep-green boots peeked out from underneath the dramatic swathes, while his powerful thighs were gripped by more taut black leather.  An impractically enormous gold ring weighed down his right earlobe.

He looked, in short, exactly like a very familiar figure, an instantly recognizable fellow who had appeared in seven interactive holo-novels and three full-length features so far with more in the works, and more than thirty plain-text stories on whose covers his dashing figure featured prominently… one of which Sam had been enjoying on his pad a lifetime ago on that deck by the mountain lake.

“… Captain Jack.”

 

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