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After a while, they leave you alone, curled around your wounds. They always do. It gives you time to think about what they have done to you, more importantly about what else they have not yet done. The fevered imagining of what is still to come is almost as potent a tool in their hands as the heated irons and blades themselves.
When you hear them returning, the echo of footsteps induces such fear that you vomit up what little bile you have left in your stomach.
Imagine a satellite blow-up of a city on mosaic, 1:10,000 scale. It’ll take up most of a decent interior wall, so stand well back. There are certain obvious things you can tell at a glance. Is it a pla
But there are some things you will never know from that picture. However much you magnify and reel in detail, it can’t tell you if crime is generally on the increase, or what time the citizens go to bed. It can’t tell you if the mayor is pla
Digital Human Storage hasn’t made interrogation obsolescent, it’s just brought back the basics. A digitised mind is only a snapshot. You don’t capture individual thoughts any more than a satellite image captures an individual life. A psychosurgeon can pick out major traumas on an Ellis model, and make a few basic guesses about what needs to be done, but in the end she’s still going to have to generate a virtual environment in which to counsel her patient, and go in there and do it. Interrogators, whose requirements are so much more specific, have an even worse time.
What d.h. storage has done is make it possible to torture a human being to death, and then start again. With that option available, hypnotic and drug-based questioning went out the window long ago. It was too easy to provide the necessary chemical or mental counterconditioning in those for whom this sort of thing was a hazard of their trade.
There’s no kind of conditioning in the known universe that can prepare you for having your feet burnt off. Or your nails torn out.
Cigarettes stubbed out on your breasts.
A heated iron inserted into your vagina.
The pain. The humiliation.
The damage.
Psychodynamics/Integrity training.
Introduction.
The mind does interesting things under extreme stress. Hallucination, displacement, retreat. Here in the Corps, you will learn to use them all, not as blind reactions to adversity, but as moves in a game.
The red hot metal sinks into flesh, parting the skin like polythene. The pain consumes, but worse is seeing it happen. Your scream, once disbelief, is by now gruesomely familiar in your ears. You know it won’t stop them, but you still scream, begging—
“Some fucking game, eh pal?”
Jimmy gri
His face changes abruptly, turns sombre.
“You keep reality out of this, there’s nothing for you there. Stay removed. Have they done her any structural harm?”
I wince. “Her feet. She can’t walk.”
“Motherfuckers,” he says matter of factly. “Why don’t we just tell them what they want to know?”
“We don’t know what they want to know. They’re after this guy Ryker.”
“Ryker, who the fuck’s he?”
“I don’t know.”
He shrugs. “So spill about Bancroft. Or you still feeling honour-bound or something?”
“I think I already spilled. They don’t buy it. It’s not what they want to hear. These are fucking amateurs, man. Meatpackers.”
“You keep screaming it, they got to believe it sooner or later.”
“That isn’t the fucking point, Jimmy. When this is over, it doesn’t matter who I am, they’re going to put a bolt through my stack and sell the body off for spare parts.”
“Yeah.” Jimmy puts one finger into his empty eye socket and scratches absently at the clotted gore within. “See your point. Well, in a construct situation, what you got to do is get to the next screen somehow. Right?”
During the period on Harlan’s World known, with typical grim humour, as the Unsettlement, guerrillas in the Quellist Black Brigades were surgically implanted with a quarter-kilo of enzyme-triggered explosive that would, on demand, turn the surrounding fifty square metres and anything in it to ash. It was a tactic that met with questionable success. The enzyme in question was fury-related and the conditioning required for arming the device was patchy. There were a number of involuntary detonations. Still, no one ever volunteered to interrogate a member of the Black Brigades. Not after the first one, anyway. Her name—
You thought they could do nothing worse, but now the iron is inside you and they are letting it heat up slowly, giving you time to think about it. Your pleading is babbled—
As I was saying …
Her name was Iphigenia Deme, Iffy to those of her friends that had not yet been slaughtered by Protectorate forces. Her last words, strapped to the interrogation table downstairs at Number Eighteen, Shimatsu Boulevard, are reputed to have been: That’s fucking enough!
The explosion brought the entire building down.
That’s fucking enough!
I jackknifed awake, the last of my screams still shrilling inside me, hands scrabbling to cover remembered wounds. Instead, I found young, undamaged flesh beneath crisp linen, a faint rocking motion and the sound of small waves lapping nearby. Above my head was a sloping wooden ceiling and a porthole through which low angled sunlight flooded. I sat up in the narrow bunk and the sheet fell away from my breasts. The coppery upper slopes were smooth and unscarred, the nipples intact.
Back to start.
Beside the bed was a simple wooden chair with a white T-shirt and canvas trousers folded neatly over it. There were rope sandals on the floor. The tiny cabin held nothing else of interest apart from another bunk, the twin of mine, whose covers were thrown carelessly back, and a door. A bit crude, but the message was clear. I slipped into the clothes and walked out onto the sunlit deck of a small fishing boat.
“Aha, the dreamer.” The woman seated in the stern of the skiff clapped her hands together as I emerged. She was about ten years older than the sleeve I was wearing, and darkly handsome in a suit cut from the same linen as my trousers. There were espadrilles on her bare feet and wide-lensed sunglasses over her eyes. In her lap was a sketch pad shaded with what looked like a cityscape. As I stood there, she set it aside and stood up to greet me. Her movements were elegant, self assured. I felt gawky by comparison.