Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After the Rise of the Elder Gods (8 page)

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Two days later, the medics wouldn’t let me go to the rec-room with Donny and Angie. Ten minutes after they left, Katya Kravtechenko walked out of the darkness and stepped lightly over the tile. She had two red-guards with her. They opened the door to my cell. She went in alone.

I smiled as pleasantly as I could.

She just stared at me through her Class Four eye-shields.

She was very young, maybe thirteen. “Shouldn’t you be in school right now?” I said. My mom used to talk about schools, something like banks. You put money in banks and kids in schools.

She smiled shyly at me, shrugged

“I’ve never heard that one before. Tell it again," her voice had a luxurious Russian accent.

The red-guards walked in.

“So, how have you been doing?” she said.

“Oh, pretty well, I guess. I’ve learned which lever gives me the cheese and which doles out the electric shock.”

“ECT doesn’t work in most cases for people who have Reality Perception Disorder.” She looked at me thoughtfully through her mirror shades then shrugged. “Maybe more study is needed,” she motioned to a red-guard. He pulled out his tazer and shot me full in the chest. They ran so much juice through me I swear I was lactating before they turned it off.

I was lying in a pool of my own spit when I heard her speak again.

“Do you feel any better now?”

I wanted to answer but I couldn’t make human noises.

"I see," Katya said. "Mick, would you like me to recommend that if

Dr. Malhan needs a new subject for ECT tests that he should get you?”

“N-n-no -o no,” I managed.

“Do you have any more jokes or unpleasant remarks?”

“No, Katya.” I had heard she liked to be called by her first name. I heard she was a reincarnated Siberian shaman. I heard a lot of things about Katya and the other sensitives who sat on the Council.

“Sit down in the chair, wipe your chin. Your SK tests have only gone up 4% since you began standard treatment. The medical specialists feel that you are still a recoverable resource. Would you like to be recovered? Do you want to be a patroller again?”

Oh yes, yes indeed. Respect, next to the Council and Katya herself. Action! Adventure! To get laid every night again.

“Yes, that would be nice. That is what I would like.”

Ordinarily, the doctors always make you fill out forms and papers whenever they give you a treatment, session, injection, or what have you. Helps them keep track of what works and what doesn’t. Katya wasn’t a doctor.

She reached up to remove her Class Four eye-shields.

The last human being’s eyes that I had seen were my mother's before I went in to get the VR rig bolted to my head. I looked down, almost instinctively. So many rumors floated around about Katya.

She pulled them off casually, folded them on her lap.

When someone has Reality Perception Disorder, or gets the gaze, their eyes are... different. The pupils are huge, and unsettling visions leap out and snare the mind of anyone who looks into them. Everybody wears shades now, because you never know when somebody suddenly goes RPD or Mad Hatter.

Her eyes were a beautiful nondescript brown. Cool and sturdy like the bark of a great tree. We still had some trees on the surface, pretty things. I clenched the arms of the chair.

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The mole dream goes something like this:

We’re tunneling underground, trying to go underneath a river. We’re all down there, digging, moving earth. Some have tools, some use hands, some use teeth. We’re all wearing the full gear. VR goggles, I knew via dream knowledge, don’t really work. Nothing we see is really what
we
see; it’s what the VR goggles tell us we
should
see. Lately, they've been cutting out more and more of what is really in front of us.

Anyway, there we are, gradually going blind and tunneling. You know, like moles. Sometime after we go blind, the VR sets start to show us what’s up on the surface. One of the Others, a big one, a really big one, is up there. The VR rig works well enough, so the Other just comes across as a big solid black pyramid. Sometimes it extends parts of itself out into the city around it. The crazies run all over the place, of course. It has a pitchfork. It waits until it feels the ground move – the moles digging around – and it stabs down into the pavement.

In our tunnels, we sometimes feel when the person next to us gets impaled, pulled up through the roof. We don’t see it of course, but we hear it: a loud crash, a rodent-like squeal, and the sudden rushing of bodies trying to escape.

We all try real hard not to think too much on the mole dream. Rumor is that you never, never, ask Katya about it.

After she visited, I had the mole dream a lot more. On the plus side, my SK score went up by a whopping 10%. Ten more and I’m back in the mix. The visits from the medics get fewer and farther between after Katya talks to you. The medics don’t really like Katya. But boy, the psychs won’t leave you alone for five freakin’ minutes.

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“Actually Angie, the only really tangible effects that I’d felt were that no matter how disturbing my dreams or memories were, they seemed distant, like they belonged to someone else. Sort of like having a VR assembly over my mind’s eye.”

She nodded, scratching at her chin before lifting her eye-shields and rubbing at the corners of her eyes.

As long as we were sharing, “So what got your arm?” I asked.

Angie dropped and started doing her one-armed push-ups.

“No, really," I said. "I’ve heard a lot of different things. Tell me the real story.”

“One of the Big Boyz came along," she said, dropping down.

She pushed back up, “Search-and-Snatch mission at the zoo.” Down.

Back up. “No way something the size of that thing could fit into the tank it came out of.” Back down.

“They’re bad about that,” I said, speaking from experience.

Up. “Probably two-hundred crazies, easy.” Down.

Up. “We unloaded on the crazies, I mean really let ‘em have it, grenades, shells, you name it.” Down.

Up. “What we didn’t know was there were three Pink-Spots.”

Down.

Nobody who was sane really knew what a Pink-Spot was. It was just some creature that the VR rig covered with a bunch of moving pink spots, thus the name.

Up. “Came out of the north end of the reptile house.” Down.

Up. “Six Nar Tips and four D-fluxes was all we had to start with. Most of those we use on the Big Boy." Down.

Up. “The pink-spots tore into us like a tank-car through crazies.” Down.

She stayed down. “Crazies pulled me to the ground and broke two ribs. One of them bit through my boot heel, even. One of the Pink Spots cleared ‘em off. I reached for my gun. I had to reach over two big pieces of rubble. It brought its foot, or tentacle, or whatever, down right on my arm, breaking both bones between the rocks. I think that someone set off a D-flux, drove the thing back. I tried to run, but the crazies got hold of me. I think they pulled the rest of my arm off while I tried to get away. I can’t really remember it all.”

“I see,” I said. Even though I couldn’t see her eyes, I knew she was lying.

The Others are dangerous to even look at. The crazies had been caught in the initial wave, turned and looked, and lost what little grip on sanity they had. The Others were dangerous to listen to. If they had crossed over, or spawned, or landed, or whatever the hell they did about fifteen years before they had, we would have all been fucked. Fortunately, our technology – my mom’s generation’s technology – had come so far that we didn’t really need to rely on our flawed natural senses. The VR rigs filter out all the Others, keeping your mind fairly safe.

The patrollers, fight, and secure resources from the surface. Sometimes, when things are going really well, they bump you up to Owsla and you get to go on a wide-patrol and search for a. . . a starport, or a temple, or
something
. Something to explain it.

I’ve never gone on a wide patrol. There have only been two since I became a patroller, and both right after Katya led her group from Four-Corners to us. Not bad for a ten-year-old.

Those were good times, busy times, making room for all the newcomers and doing good works for our fellow sane men.

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They finally came for Donny and Angie: two red-guards, one of whom was almost old enough to shave every day. They handed them the stylus. Donny just about shit himself, he was so excited, but Angie didn’t seem too happy about it.

She signed in, and the guard looked at her SK result.

“Please write your real name,” he said in as expressionless voice as he could muster.

“Go home to mama,” she spat back.

His partner tagged her with his Taser. She jumped about three feet off the ground, crashed into the cage wall, and slumped to the floor. Donny had a look of almost comical shock on his face as they gathered her up, cuffed her good arm to one of their belts, and slapped her around a bit to wake her up. The reds led them away. Donny was happy again by the time they left the light circle.

It gets mighty boring when you don’t have anyone to talk to, or share your perverted fantasies with. Group masturbation is, of course, out of the question. Solo only does so much.

Like I mentioned, even the meds don’t like to talk to you once you’ve talked to Katya. The standard treatment was pretty dull, too. There were almost no other treatment candidates. Those that did come in during those long, awful weeks were what I’d risk calling unrecoverable.

One of them – her name was Jamie, I think – was in the circle of lights with me for a while. She didn’t sleep, not once in three days. On the third day, when she was on one of the exercise bikes in the rehab center, she suddenly spun around and held her water bottle in front of my face.

“Is this half full or half empty?” she demanded.

“Oh, a little from column ‘A’, a little from column ‘B’.”

“It’s half full!” she shouted at me.

I started doing push-ups, deciding that I didn’t really want to know anymore.

“It’s half full of half-piss!” she added. “Not a problem if you’ve got enough water! Enough minds! Dilution is the key! The big if, the
plan
!”

The red-guard Tazered her, and she lost her footing on her cycle. The pedals kept spinning and her legs got all tangled up in them. It was really funny in a disturbing way.

I don’t know where she got off to after that.

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I knew the reds were coming for me. They gave me the SK test. Didn’t bother to do a confirmation test, just looked at the result, smiled and told me I was ready to be a patroller again.

It was really odd, since I signed in under a completely different name, one that had all consonants. But then, these were the two reds that Katya usually had with her.

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I got a new VR set screwed onto my head. They didn’t use those special anchoring sleeves after all. It really hurt. I mean, it hurt a lot.

In my four months in the cage, things had really fallen apart. I could tell because nobody bitched about how bad things were. That meant things were fucked-beyond-funny.

I was outfitted and got my first patroller assignment before the blood had even dried.

It was nice to be back in the patroller section of the Underground again. I got to see it for about five minutes. Sinh Tong was still there, distributing the tools of our trade.

“Hey Mick, good to have you back. We missed you.”

“No need to shout Sinh, I’ve got a headache,” I said, pointing to the fresh anchoring screw.

“One standard patroller rifle.” He held up the beautiful thing, opened the main chamber, the spear-chucker chamber, and the grenade chamber to show they were all empty.