Ludo Brax: Intergalactic Gig Worker (Chapter 44)

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When I looked up again, there was nothing but a barren wall.

I was someone else again, but somewhere else too. A cramped room. A holding cell.

I was already sitting. At first to be provided a chair struck me as thoughtful, until the weakness in my legs made it obvious why. This place was nothing if not responsive.

They'd arrive soon, I was sure, speaking in solemn tones about the moment at hand, assuring me all the while how important I was.

Yuck.

My disgust, his disgust, was so visceral, so strangely familiar to me, I forgot for a second just what I was doing. How I had gotten there.

I grasped at the fraying edges of my psyche, trying my best to center myself, to unify myself with something like clarity, but with each passing second it became more and more confusing just whose effort it was.

The inundation of feeling was so profound it threatened to swallow me up entirely. His feelings, his thoughts, his memories. His mind was so expansive I felt my vocabulary improving. The heft of his notions was so grandiose I began to imagine that I had ideals, too.

Outside the door, I could hear the sounds of the ceremony finishing up, everything tightening and accelerating, headed straight for the edge of the cliff.

At the sound of approaching footsteps, unease at everything I'd been carrying was overtaken by something else, raw and unresolved.

From my strange vantage point I could feel his despair as if it were mine, but I couldn't begin to fathom the depths of it.

It weighed on my weary frame as I rose to my feet at the click of the lock coming undone. My body moved without resistance. The robes I was wearing were real, heavy, more palpable on my skin than the earlier costuming. Though I doubted somehow I had picked them myself.

My face twisted into a scowl as the guards approached. I didn't bother to fix it.

They were the kind of flunkies that had done everything around here lately. Blank-faced mannequins.

For a second, I wanted to bash their heads together. But the feeling drifted off almost immediately, leaving only the weight of utter defeat.

This was happening, whether I liked it or not. It was best to get it over with.

I'd built a lot of my life — and more than a few tattoo ideas — on thoughts like that.

**

As the two rubes led me toward The Obelisk, a hush fell over the rest of the hall.

They guided me forward, tripping over their feet every so often, like they hadn't quite gotten used to these bodies yet. As I staggered along with them, I craned my neck around, eager to glimpse the faces of the ones I'd been earlier.

When I looked out at the crowd, though, I was greeted only with bowed heads. Whether they were reverent or ashamed, I couldn't really tell.

Betrayal was a strange feeling to pin on people I'd only just recently controlled.

Still, I could feel the seed begin to sprout in my chest.

The things that had happened, they were my fault. But if I was standing here now, all three of them had said yes.

I had known they'd agree, counted on it. And still.

All three. Only three.

I felt the absence then. A festering, unclosed space I didn't dare press on. Like that cut on my leg I hid for most of my twenties.

Only this one wasn't something I could fix by finally admitting that insufferable doctor had a point.

My captivity, this spectacle — it was tied to it, inextricable. And still, to both him and me, it was kept remote, unreachable.

Approaching now, finally, the massive, uncanny Obelisk, I noted with bemused recognition the three data drives inserted into it, each vibrating and flashing with a dramatic flair that eagerly signposted "something important is happening."

My three former companions had taken their part in the annals of history, doing what was required of them. And now it was my turn.

I wasn't to be given the dignity of hardware, though. No.

Ceremonial upload, solemn duty. Those were reserved for the others, the ones who had done what they should've.

I, I realized, or remembered, just in time to break my fall, was in for something a bit more… involuntary.

The black metal met my hands with a dull thud. Despite its sleek metallic appearance, it was warm, almost hot.

I could feel the machine hum beneath my palms, uneven, overworked. It staggered. Stuttered. Caught itself.

This procedure, I somehow knew, wasn't unprecedented. Extraction. Compression. Processing.

Reintegration.

But whether this hunk of metal, this slapdash monument to desperation, could manage it was another matter entirely, I remember thinking as my skull was wrenched violently forward, vindicating me and dislodging several of my molars in one fell swoop.

The voices of the flunkies, now flanked on either side by solemn figures in powdered wigs, were warbled and indistinct.

They were reading from a document, an ostentatious piece of parchment right out of history class.

A proclamation. A decree.

Its edges were perfectly yellowed, its ornate calligraphy rendered so well I could just barely make out words like "PROGRESS," "JUSTICE," and "HOLD FOR APPLAUSE."

I went to laugh, but a shrill hiss pulsed in my eardrums, crowding out everything else as the corners of my vision turned black.

Through the narrowing iris, The Obelisk was the only thing I could see. My long, slender fingers, still clutching its edges, lost all their feeling.

My body, his body, went suddenly numb.

"My fellow Citizens," a voice rang out, crystal clear through the fog of confusion.

"Let the Update commence!"

The sudden blast of pressure behind my eyes was so intense I felt as if something inside my head might pop off like a cork. I fought violently against the momentum, like trying to hold in a sneeze that contained my soul.

I could feel it in my feet, the upward pressure, the Obelisk greedily tugging at my insides like one of those metaphysical vacuums they banned a few years back.

What little grip I had on myself was starting to fail.

Then something broke loose.

It burst out like a cannonball, shooting up toward my mind's eye with impossible speed. It was so dense with thought and feeling that I felt my insides — that intangible, ineffable stuff those corporations were always droning on about — dragged forward in its wake.

Well, I thought, as this torpedo slammed against my frontal lobe, this was new.

It exploded outward, unfurling like a tarp across my sight-line. New sensations crowded my mind:

The cold, sterile light of a laboratory. The steady drone of machines, the familiar smell of something scorched and chemical.

It was nighttime, or just before dawn. After hours.

Sweat soaked through a shirt I seemed to have been in for days. I was disheveled, unclean.

My body felt heavier than before. A coiled-up mass of feverish energy.

An urge rose in me to smooth down the wild strands of my greasy hair, a tic toward outward composure I'd picked up in that Militant Youth Movement I'd joined because I'd liked the pants.

But when I tried to lift my arm, it stayed where it was.

I tried again. Still nothing.

I zeroed in on the sensations in my body, his body, realizing as I did that this portion of the spectacle didn't allow audience participation.

There was no longer an us, only him. No longer lived history, only memory.

If I was going to get anything out of this experience, glean even one bit of insight from the latest twist in this deranged extravaganza, I was going to have to be content to sit back and watch.

And once I did, the picture sharpened.

**

At first glance, it looked like a break-in.

The hour. The frantic efficiency of his movements. Nothing about the way he tore around the room suggested he should be there.

He was treating the space like it owed him something.

Sequences punched into terminals with impatient blows. Stacks of documents tossed to the side the second they gave up their answers.

It had none of the romance of the hacker cliché. Which was good, because this was a theater I couldn't walk out of.

He seemed annoyed with physical reality itself, wrestling with the machinery as if deigning to do so at all was a waste of his time.

With each sequence he forced into place, he dared the devices to object. And with each hurdle passed, it became clearer and clearer to me that it was never going to happen.

Wherever this was, he had been here before. Many times.

It was what he was doing that was new.

Where earlier there seemed to be fear, I found instead giddy anticipation.

Where his shaking, sweaty frame suggested hesitancy, I uncovered elation bordering on ecstasy.

His ragged, panicked breaths, I realized, belied a steely resolve.

He charged across the room toward a sealed-off section on the far wall.

The secured outer door accepted him wordlessly, responding to his presence with faint beeps of recognition and a mechanical exhale as its panels slid aside.

And as the fluorescent lights flicked on one by one, with each ghastly inch of the interior revealed, I fully grasped with stomach-churning understanding just what I was looking at.