SILAS

Well. This is awkward.

I'm hanging, dangling above some kind of car repair pit, arms still stuck together, stretched out above my head. It's eerily quiet, and I can hear the squeak of the hook holding my cuffs as I sway back and forth. I can hear the buzz of the fluorescent lights, like a faint ringing in the ears. I can hear the rattle of tools being picked up, examined, and relocated, as well as the occasional scuff of Gavin's boots on the floor as he saunters back and forth along the table.

As I look at all these tools and parts strewn about the place, I can't help but imagine he wants me on one of these shelves, arranged in pieces.

He already has a piece of Sal, there. I watched as he pulled the chip out of his pocket, held it up, examined it for a while, before hanging on the back wall, letting the lip of one side of it catch on a protruding nail.

Any minute, now. Any minute now, I'll wake up. It's all a dream. I've been telling myself that up until now. Why stop?

But until that moment comes, when I wake up in a hospital bed from the crash, drugged up and hungover, I suppose I have to march on, like a good little soldier. I have to assume this is all real. As much as I don't want to.

I've spent the past few minutes fiddling with the metal brace holding my wrists together, with little luck so far. I decide to start swinging in the air, forward to back, in the hopes of being able to hitch up and out of the hook holding me up.

Gavin looks up from his work with a wry smile. "That's not going to work. You know that, right? There's only one way you're getting out of there, and it's not like that.”

In pieces. That’s what he means. Old novelty parts on display. Maybe he’ll mount my head on his wall, like a prize, twelve-point buck.

The hunting analogy is pretty apt, actually. He saw me poking around in a place I wasn’t supposed to be, like an unwanted critter, and took me out. I never even saw him coming, and I’ve been in his world ever since. His world, his rules.

I decide to dispense with the swinging. My body continues to sway on its own, like a pendulum, gradually slowing until I come to an anticlimactic stop.

"You're really going to cut me up, aren't you?"

"That is the plan," Gavin says, in a very offhanded way. Like a flight attendant mentioning they're all out of Coke Zero, but they still do have Diet, if I'd prefer.

“I don’t suppose I could appeal to your humanity?”

I’m not even sure why I say this. Am I seriously asking? Am I joking, or half-joking? Am I just trying to fill time, as well as the vast void of echo-y near-silence in this room?

Hey, maybe I’m trying to get him worked up. Talking. Distracted. Maybe I’m trying to buy time. Why not. It works in the movies.

“Humanity.” Gavin says. Deadpan. “You’re a clever little droid. Like a rat in a maze, checking every corner. Prodding for weaknesses. You're not going to find any.”

Yeah. I seriously can’t with this guy.

"Because you don't care?" I say.

Gavin sets down one of his tools. Looks up at me. "I care about you the way I care about an old toaster I've got in salvage. I'm gonna take it apart, use it to make a little heater. It'll be useful in the winter months. What exactly you're useful for, I guess I'll have to see."

"Is the toaster sentient? When you go to take it apart, is it going to ask you to stop?"

"You're not sentient," Gavin says. "You're an algorithm. You're an electric current in a synthetic neural matrix."

"One could argue you function the same way," I say.

He snorts. "God made me. You were assembled by men, in all their earthly wisdom, for whatever's that's amounted to."

"Then," I say, "By nature of, you know, transitive property, perhaps I am one of God's creations, as well."

"Like my toaster," Gavin says, without skipping a beat. "Let's cut the bullshit. You're not the first Ruster I've taken apart. And you won't be the last. You're not a person. Get it? And you're not going to convince me otherwise."

With that, he turns back to his work, picking up the tool he'd set down, adjusting it.

I chew on that, swaying lethargically.

"What if I'm more useful to you alive than dead?"

"I can't possibly see how that might be," Gavin says, without looking up.

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"Your friend mentioned a facility to the south. I know where it is. It's where I came from. Where I...woke up."

Gavin freezes. Glances up at me. "You're lying."

"You were saying something about someone name Darvin," I say. "Someone I was with told me I needed to find the Darvin facility. I have to imagine this is it."

"No, no, you arrived on a ship."

I shake my head. "I woke up in an underground facility. I was attacked by a group of robots sent by whoever's on that ship. But I have no idea who they are, or why they want me. That's why I came here. To learn what happened. She—the person I was with—told me there was equipment here I could use to unlock my memory. It's the truth. While I was in...I don't know, 'hibernation', I got hit with this surge of data. Like, a virus, or something. I can't access my 'OS', whatever that is. But if I could, I might be able to see what's going on with my memory, and what happened with that data transfer."

"Even if I believed you, which, I don't," Gavin says, coldly, "I still don't see what it would have to do with me."

Ah. Shiloh might care about the hidden facility, but Gavin doesn't. He's not even interested in using the information as leverage. He'd rather the details remain hidden. Which is just another reason to get rid of me.

But that's not what bothers me the most about this.

'I still don't see what it would have to do with me,' he'd said.

"Besides the fact," I say, "That you're the one preventing me from doing what I came here to do?"

Gavin gives me a weird look. The idea that I'm an autonomous person, with goals and beliefs, is completely beyond him. He won't accept it.

"Look," I say. "I made a promise to someone. The only person who's done anything to look out for me in this hellscape. She's dead, now. But that's just one more reason not to give up. Because if I do, she'll have died for nothing. And that might not matter to you, right now. But if I have any chance whatsoever to get free, I'm going to be going through you. And I'm not gonna stop."

"Big words, from a neutered Ruster," Gavin says, looking bored.

"You might think that now," I say, feeling a heat rising in my chest, neck, and cheeks. I've held back my rage in the name of tact, but now it's starting to boil over. "But there's a good chance, soon, that your people are going to want to let me free. When that happens, you better remember this conversation. Maybe I'll make you remember."

I'm not the type to be like this. I mean, what the hell am I even saying? 'I'll make you remember.' That's a threat. That's a promise of retribution. Of physical violence against a person. Not in self-defense, but after the fact. Whatever happened to letting bygones be bygones?

But I guess extreme circumstances bring out the extreme sides of a person. That, and maybe I have a little bit more of my mom in me than I thought.

Still, surprisingly, it doesn't seem to get much of a rise out of the guy. He just gives me another queer look. But at least I still have his attention.

"How good are you at covering your tracks?" I say. "There were, what, a dozen or so people with you?"

The answer is in the stoic, thoughtful look in his eyes, even if he won't answer.

"That ship," I say. "Those people. They're still after me. By capturing me, you've left a trail leading them right to you."

It's hard to tell in the weird, gray light of the fluorescents, but I'm pretty sure there's some red in his face that wasn't there before.

He inspects a tool, palms it, and begins making his way across the length of the table. He circles around it, stopping just three or four paces directly in front of me.

"You know what I think?" He eyes my body clinically, as if looking for some kind of weak point, somewhere he can pry me open. "I think you're desperate. I think you'll say anything for a chance to get free. That's just one reason why I don't believe your story. Except, that is, for the part about your memory. That, I do believe. You really don't understand what you are. I can see that."

He moves away, to one side of me, toward the edge of the room. Somewhere I can't turn my head to see.

When he comes back, he's got a hook at the end of some thick rope. There's a mechanical clicking sound as he pulls on the rope, probably connected to some kind of pulley system.

He stops in front of me.

"I'm going to enjoy breaking you, inside and out," he says, dead-faced. "I'm going to show you what you are."

Too late, I realize he's got one hand in his pant pocket. He pulls it out, reaching toward me in a flash, a taser-like implement in his hand, the end of it fizzing and sparking with electricity. He presses that sparking end against my side.

I cry out, disappointingly. I don't mean to. It's like a muscle reflex.

It's the surprise of it, I think. The fact I didn't see it coming. I wasn't ready. There's no time to process, only to experience.

Immediately, I lose all motor function. The invasive electrical current spiderwebs throughout my body. One constant, searing hot flash of pain. My neck is back. My eyes are up in the back of my head. There's a high-pitched ringing in both my ears.

Somehow, in the midst of this sensory assault, I can feel something attaching to the cuffs holding my arms together. Then the rope above me moves to one side, probably rolling along a rail in the ceiling. At the same time, there's a pull from the other rope; that new hook Gavin must have connected to the cuffs. There's a click, and the cuffs holding my arms disconnect from each other. My arms are being spread, pulled apart from each other, like the Vitruvian Man in Davinci's sketch.

Finally, Gavin pulls back the taser and shuts it off. The air no longer rings with the sputter and fizzle of weaponized electricity. There's a faint smell of ozone clinging to me, and a lingering sensation throughout my body of having been burned. I'm panting, gasping. Meanwhile, the ropes attached to either arm continue to pull, stretching me. So hard that I have to wonder what might break first; me, or the ropes.

Gavin pulls something else out of his pocket. It looks like a screwdriver, but with a wacky bit on the end. He presses the bit end into a spot on my neck, just above the collarbone. There's a click as some metal plate moves slightly.

"There it is," he says.

He holds something that looks kind of like a USB stick, only it's got two prongs jutting out of it. He jams the thing into the side of my neck at the collarbone, into some slot I can't see. Then he grabs a thick, iPad-looking thing from off the table. Watching me, he makes some adjustments on the screen, sliding a finger back and forth and making a few individual taps.

"Huh. Something's up with the memory. But you were right about the OS. You're an open book, bud. There's nothing to stop me."

At first, I have to wonder if it's true. I don't feel anything different, besides the alien presence of the metal prongs in my neck.

"And here, we, GO!" Gavin says, tapping the screen forcefully.

Okay. Now something is definitely happening. Something is...giving. Unlatching.

I can feel plates pulling back from each other on my arms. The limbs are stretching. Distending. Unspooling.

I am being...unraveled.