They weren’t fed. The helmet heads never brought food to MACHINE HEAD, no matter how many times his gut twisted, ached, churned until a corrosive acid was eating at him from the inside. Although, like the rest of his discarded memories, ‘food’ had become just another abstract concept. He knew that it existed, and that one ripped it apart with their teeth before letting their organs squeeze and dissolve it. He used to wish he could still remember their taste—the pleasure dazzling the tongue, a tang other than that of coppery salt and rusty mould.
Until eventually, he forgot that wish as well.
There was nothing to do in the cage. Crawling, sleeping, scratching meaningless marks on the walls, didn’t get one far. MACHINE FACE sometimes found himself just staring at his other cage mates. Like him, their bodies lay motionless the majority of the time. Except one of them. Always springing around. Spring-eye Jack, MACHINE FACE had started to call him—why the name ‘Jack’, only because it sounded catchy to him, for some reason.
Of course, MACHINE FACE only ever called him that in his mind, he never said it out loud. He and his cage mates never spoke with each other. They never spoke at all. Not because the helmet heads pulled their teeth out when they did it, but because there was no need to. There was nothing to discuss, no great conversations to be had, when your world and all of eternity was an empty, faceless cage.
At least for MACHINE FACE, silently observing Spring-eye Jack provided a smidgen of entertainment. Spring-eye Jack had these metal rims sunk in around his eyeholes. They looked painful. They were painful. All their metal growths were. Despite that, the rims didn’t really seem to impede his vision. His pupils always appeared to be looking intensely at the far corner of the cage, when they were actually side-eyeing the one security camera welded to the ceiling. And all the time, he had his fingers bouncing up and down, all idle and innocent-like, but when the cage door opened his eyes would be the first to spring to the door, and his fingers would twitch, contract. Like they were strangling an invisible neck in the air.
And then the helmet head’s metal arm would sizzle and Spring-eye Jack would relax his hand and go back to staring at the corner, deciding to bide his time. Waiting for another opportunity. Those opportunities used to come often.
Every few weeks, perhaps months, maybe years—it could’ve been any of those, since there was no way to track the passing of time there—the door would scream and the people in white coats would be there. They were always accompanied by twice the usual number of helmet heads. Each white coat would cradle a flat device in their arm, which shone a pale light on their inexpression—a tight-lipped, calculating gaze that pierced the specimens of the cage.
The white coats would cast a finger at one of them. Subsequently, the helmet heads would approach the lucky one, beat him with their metal arms until the scent of charred flesh made the rest of them deaf, and then drag the burnt remains out the cage. They used to be dragged along shrieking and kicking. The futility hadn’t been lost on them, and so from then on they stayed deathly silent whenever the helmet heads took them.
Needless to say, sometimes MACHINE FACE was the one taken. Outside the cage, a white coat would immediately inject him with a sweet coldness—a fluid entering his body that wasn’t oil nor blood, which would make his heart halt and his circuitry cease. It felt heavenly. He always enjoyed it, even though he despised the beatings. It was the closest he could ever get to a true, permanent death.
And then he would awaken, alive again, strapped down to a metal table with his eyes blinded by a harsh beam. White coats would surround him, a sea of faceless masks in the dozens. Their fingers squeezing the hungry instruments, whose polished surfaces would bear the warped reflections of his raw skin. Pieces of MACHINE FACE would be taken. Things would be done to him, things that made the cage a dreamlike escape. Things he will never utter or think about.
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No matter what the white coats did to them, they wouldn’t—couldn’t die. That was their greatest curse. The limbo in the cage broke their souls, and the experiments outside broke their bodies—ground them down to the itty bitty pieces that they would sometimes be returned to the cage as, hauled in a wheelbarrow. Whenever the others came back that way, they’d be dumped on the floor like pig feed. Then their parts would jiggle, meld back together slowly. The rest would try to help: giving a slight kick here, a nudge there, to shift a leg part closer to the pelvic bone or something.
MACHINE FACE was slightly more fortunate than the others, in that regard. His body would already be half-formed in the wheelbarrow before reaching the cage. The helmet head pushing him found it gross, but otherwise ignored the anomaly, oblivious to the fact that MACHINE FACE state’s was underdeveloped but also undrugged—making him cognisant of his surroundings. Cognisant enough to know that the corridors outside the cage were also cramped, but longer and more winding. At one bend, he felt a blistering heat, and at another, a pleasant breeze. He made a mental note of the directions the wheelbarrow took. It was easy to commit it all to memory, when his memories stored so little else.
One incident his memories did store occurred just after a visit from the white coats. Spring-eye Jack had been taken away, and when he returned, he was acting springier than usual, as if his head hadn’t sewn back completely the right way. His eyes had started to spring. And then his fingers sprung around inside with them. Gouging inwards in circular motions. Attempting and succeeding at getting to the pink stuff at the end. Screams resounding like grinding metal. Screams that did not die out because he did not die out.
That certainly hadn’t been the first time any of them had tried to leave the cage, tried to do the job that even the helmet heads with their blunt tools and the white coats with their sharp ones could not. But it had been an instance most memorable to MACHINE FACE, because of what he noticed soon after that.
Spring-eye Jack didn’t look the same. Something was… off. The metal rim around his left eye had expanded into a disc that entirely replaced the eyeball. A peculiar, quiet ticking emanated from it. On its circular face was a twitching, foetal wire. A clock. Spring-eye Jack had grown a clock in place of an eye.
At that, two thoughts immediately overcame MACHINE FACE. First, was that they could finally tell the damn time in there. Second, was the question if he, too, could spring strange objects from the metal in his flesh.
The white coats took Spring-eye Jack away the very next day. He never returned. And over the period of time after that, the white coats kept coming, way more than usual. No one in the cage was spared. In addition, the procedures they performed on them… escalated. Drastically.
It had all been too much for the others. From then on, they dared not shift in even the slightest motions, and they never left their corner of the cage. MACHINE FACE was the sole moving one, twitching and crawling on the floor. It was probably prudent, on their part. Spring around too much, as Spring-eye Jack did, and the white coats might come knocking again.
But the white coats stopped coming. It must have been a recent development, because MACHINE FACE still recalled what one of them had been discussing during their last visit. Not that he had understood or even cared about what had been said, anyway.
“Subjects 1–4. Failure. Subject 6 showed some promise, given that it’s the only one other than Subject 5 who can hold up to the new procedures. And it exhibits a remarkable capacity for tissue regrowth. But, alas…”
The white coat spoke at a pleasant, plodding pace. Like a scalpel softly sliding into skin. MACHINE FACE seemed to remember hearing this same voice every time the white coats were around. Speaking over all the other voices. Giving them instructions.
“Subject 6. Failure. Recommend termination, followed by immediate dissection. We’ll schedule it… sometime next month.”