Five more Masks came over to Rhodes’s conversion station. One of them held up a device, touched it to his chest implants, and a shockwave went off inside him.
He yelled out in pain and then a torturous wave of soul-crushing defeat buckled him to his knees. He would have fallen over, but the prongs held him up.
He crumpled, but just as fast, The Grid activated again and he snapped into another landscape somewhere else.
He had half a second to see ruined buildings and bomb craters surrounding him before more grid lines surrounded him from somewhere.
They came out of the nearby ruins, snaked into the grid lines of his body, and ate away at him from the inside.
He didn’t see what they were doing, but they tore him apart from the center outward. He bellowed in pain and thrashed back and forth trying to get away from that feeling.
He jerked and spasmed right there in the streets of some destroyed city. A second later, he snapped back into the Masks’ lab. That’s what this was. It was another lab. They must be experimenting on him and his implants.
He heard his people screaming, roaring, and cursing down the line. He couldn’t even turn his head to see what the Masks were doing to them.
The tearing sensation of those grid lines pulling him apart didn’t stop when he appeared back to the lab. The Grid showed up right in front of his face. He had to watch those lines burrowing into his body even as he saw the Masks tinkering with him. It all happened simultaneously.
“Fisher!!” Rhodes bellowed. “Fisher, help me!!”
Fisher’s face appeared on The Grid in front of Rhodes’s eyes. Rhodes couldn’t remember where Fisher had been before this.
“I’m trying to help you, Captain!” Fisher replied. “The Masks’ stations are overriding your motor functions.”
“I know that!!” Rhodes roared and then dissolved in wordless howls.
The lines wrapped themselves around the grid lines of his body and pulled them in all directions. The pain escalated to the breaking point and past it.
Rhodes tried to struggle against the prongs, but like Fisher said, whatever this station did, it stopped him from moving at all.
He could move his mouth and the muscles of his face just fine. He could yell and scream and curse and then fall apart just trying to survive this pain.
He snapped back into The Grid. He could only stand and stare as the lines ate their way into his chest.
They took hold of some part of him he didn’t recognize. He didn’t even know if he had a heart anymore.
In that moment, dead silence fell over The Grid and he heard his own pulse beating in his ears.
That pulse got slower and slower until it barely beat at all anymore. He collapsed against the prongs and all his energy drained away. His eyes drifted shut. He couldn’t fight anymore. He didn’t want to.
A blissful feeling of relief enveloped him. He was finally about to get what he wanted. It would all be over soon.
He tried one more time to make eye contact with Fisher, but the SAM wasn’t there anymore.
Rhodes’s heartbeat slowed just a little more. The silence between beats got longer. Was that the last beat? Would it even beat again? Was that it? Was Rhodes dead now?
The Grid changed before his eyes again and his heart instantly started beating normally the way it did before.
It hammered away as if none of this ever happened. Was it even happening? Did he imagine all of this?
Stolen novel; please report.
He flicked rapidly from one scene to another. He blinked into a mountainous wilderness towering with conifer forests and bubbling rocky streambeds.
He recognized the area instantly. It was the same countryside he’d drawn in his picture of Lauer and his family riding horses together.
Rhodes wasn’t riding a horse. He was a horse. He galloped across the grasslands with the wind streaking through his mane and shivering down his sides.
The sensation exhilarated him as never before, but it switched again in a split second. His grid lines changed him back into a Striker flying through the stars in an epic battle against enemy attackers.
Huge spherical battleships loomed right outside a reddish-yellow plasma vein. Two space armies battled for control of the vein and one side tried to stop the other from penetrating inside the vein.
Rhodes recognized this landscape from one of the battalion’s training sessions, but he didn’t have time to figure out why he was even here.
Gunfire smashed into him from his right. He wheeled that way to return fire, and just as fast, he snapped to another Grid landscape.
This one was a bustling street in downtown Alazara, the city on Preinea where Rhodes’s family lived.
He found himself walking down the sidewalk seeing all the familiar sights and smelling all the familiar smells.
Shopkeepers greeted him and a few passersby stopped to shake his hand. “Welcome home, Corban,” an old man told him. “How long are you on shore leave before you have to deploy again?”
Rhodes started to say, “I don’t know. I have to wait for my next orders….” when the landscape vanished again.
He wound up back in the Masks’ lab. They kept messing with their controls and touching their electrodes to different parts of his implants.
Each one of those touches produced some sensation. Most of them blasted him apart with pain or some other devastating wave of emotion.
Some sent him back into The Grid, but he didn’t react the way he did before. He wilted against the prongs and completely gave up on life. He couldn’t escape this.
Whatever the Masks were doing to him combined all the worst malfunctions he and the battalion suffered all these long, excruciating weeks.
This was worse than any malfunction because it was all real. He wasn’t malfunctioning. The Masks did it to him on purpose.
He surrendered to the inevitable. The Masks would keep testing him and his people—maybe forever.
Maybe the Masks would harvest the battalion’s implants, discard whatever pulp of human flesh remained, and then Rhodes’s problems would finally be over.
He couldn’t even get excited each time the Masks sent him back into The Grid. They ran through dozens of his memories—either from his time at Coleridge Station, random battles from his Legion career, or from his childhood or family life on Preinea.
All those overpowering emotions became too unbearable for him to cope with. He crumbled into a ball of despair, but he couldn’t escape them, either. The Masks kept sending him back into them again and again and again. Would it ever end?
He heard his people roaring in pain and then sobs broke out from somewhere. Who was it? He couldn’t tell.
He didn’t even try to interface with his subordinates. He didn’t dare to see how bad it was for them.
He didn’t see Fisher through the whole ordeal—thank God. Rhodes didn’t want anyone seeing him like this, not even Fisher. Fisher wouldn’t be able to help Rhodes anyway.
Rhodes couldn’t access any of the other SAMs without the interface. Were they all hiding from the Masks? He didn’t blame them.
The next time the Masks sent him into The Grid, they ran him through all his memories from Coleridge Station and beyond.
Every excruciating, agonizing detail from his time in Battalion 1 played back in front of his eyes—and not in front of his eyes.
He relived every terrible minute of despair, horror, frustration, rage, and all the pain—both physical and mental—as if it was all happening again right now. It was happening again right now.
It happened in real time, too. It didn’t go super-fast so he could skip it and get past it. It dragged one brutal hour after another.
It eventually came to the part where the Emal tried to remove his implants. The pain became unbearable and something snapped.
He dropped into the black Grid with just the green lines dividing the surroundings into black squares. Before he could move or even decide what to do about this, another tangle of grid lines appeared in front of his face.
This looked like the beginnings of a SAM, but it didn’t form into any definite shape. Its lines shot toward him and stabbed into his body before he could stop them. He didn’t know how to stop them.
They dug into all his systems, his mind, his blood—whatever was left of him. The lines didn’t tear him apart the way they did before. They burned him from the inside.
He tried one last time to struggle and failed. He slumped against the prongs and heard that deafening thump of his heart beating in his ears.
It slowed…..and slowed. Every resounding throb pulsed in his brain. The lines tightened around his insides and slowed his heart a little more.
He collapsed in defeat and shut his eyes, but The Grid still showed him all those lines twining through him, clutching him, and squeezing the life out of all his systems. He really was dying this time.
The last thing he saw before he passed out was Fisher reappearing in The Grid. The SAM floated in front of Rhodes’s eyes. Fisher studied him extra closely.
“Fisher….” Rhodes choked. “I…I can’t hold on…..”
Fisher didn’t respond. Did he even hear Rhodes?
Rhodes couldn’t stay awake any longer. He just wanted to sleep—real sleep—not a conversion cycle. Now he finally could.
End of Chapter 2.