“Now,” the man said with a mirthless smile, “again.”

Goodie had seen enough cop shows to understand what the man was doing. He had been made to repeat his story several times already, and the man calling himself John was looking to see if he slipped up anywhere in that retelling.

“I got sick. A chemical factory exploded, or something like that, sent a whole bunch of shit into the air. Stuff made a lot of people sick; me included.”

There had been an explosion. The usual combination of corruption and incompetence that ended up with everyone else paying for the costs.

Goodie sighed, then.

The media had its minute of madness while the politicians slunk in like jackals, promising anything and everything to resolve the whole mess for good press. What they actually did was the bare minimum, using the various donations to pay for the latest breakthrough in medical technology to sweep the whole mess under the rug.

“My aunt and uncle signed me up for some program to get me better. Or so they promised…”

The tone of his words made his disbelief in that promise more than clear.

The stasis bed; a glorified coffin that essentially halted the flow of time for anyone lying within.

And so, he and the town, the half of it affected by the pollution, were all locked-up—with the promise of being released once a cure for their condition could be found.

He could only guess at what happened after that, but they probably dumped everyone in the nearest warehouse and forgot about them, those would be saviours then moving on with their lives as the media moved on to some other disaster…and then he and the others were then left to rot away while the centuries slipped by.

Two hundred and twenty-one years…

“Next thing I know, I wake up in some facility; then a bunch of doctors start cutting on me over and over again…start putting things inside of me that shouldn’t be there…then they made me do things I didn’t want to, under threat of death. I was not the only one there, wasn’t the only one to be made to do these things, but I was one of the few to submit. Which is why I’m alive and here and those others are not.”

[Add in a new detail. One of the names of the surgeons. Lee is generic enough to mean nothing.]

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

His eyes darted to the left as the messages came in—an unconscious reaction he had yet to get control over—a series of images of the people who had operated on him cycling next to it.

“No-no,” John said, snapping his fingers, “look at me.”

Goodie returned his sight to the man in front of him. Thankfully, that man seemed to mistake his hesitance to look at him as a sign of weakness or insecurity rather than for what Goodie was truly doing.

“Then I woke up to a bunch of people cutting into me,” he repeated, “putting things inside me that did not belong there. I remember one of them had Lee written on their chest. Then I was shown off like some prize dog to their bosses, made to do tricks to entertain and amaze. Other than that, I was kept in a chair in a very tiny room.”

His captors…his previous captors had once left him in that room for a month. No light, no food, just himself and his heartbeat. Were it not for some of the things inside him doing whatever it was that they did to him, he would have long succumbed to starvation or dehydration as some of the others had.

“Time passed…then, something changed, got the people in charge in a twist. They sent a bunch of death-squad-looking thugs to take me somewhere. Then, when we got to the underground parking lot, everything went to shit. Explosions, gunfire, and then people dying around me, a lot of people. I curled up, at first—foetal position—but at some point, I was running away. I don’t remember when or even how, I just ran. Then you…well, he,” Goodie said, nodding his head towards the late…other man calling himself John, whose corpse still lay where the man had ceased to be. “…he grabbed me with his van, a robot arm yanking me off my feet and tossing me in the back. Then he brought me here.”

The truth…technically.

What Goodie had failed to mention was what happened in the time between those specific incidents.

Finally finishing his story, again, Goodie then cleared his throat for the seventh time, not to address any dryness or blockage, but for the uncomfortable presence of the object that had been placed there and the constant annoyance of its quirk.

The people who had put things into him had used faulty goods, or possibly second-hand ones. The device in his throat—or was now his throat—in particular being slightly larger than what was comfortable, the sensation of his throat being swollen a near-constant distraction. Beyond that, there was also its annoying habit of defaulting on its settings. He did not need to guess as to the implant’s abilities as he had been both instructed and forced to utilise it for the amusement of his owners, the device allowing him to mimic any voice or sound that he could imagine…with a little practice. The oddity was that it kept returning to the sound of a young woman, a voice that sounded like it belonged to some twenty-something, blue-eyed blonde, whose bust overshadowed her I.Q.

Funny, if you were not the one that had to live with it. Were it not for it and some of his other additions’ obvious presence, he would not have mentioned his implants at all to the man across from him, a man who looked for all the world like a used car salesman, one who would hock Goodie, or at least the expensive parts of him, for anything the man could get.

It was not the only change that had been forced upon Goodie. Not all were unwanted, but all had been done to him without his consent. No matter how many benefits some of them brought him, no matter how much he would have desired such things before his awakening, having them forced upon him against his will tainted any positive feelings he could ever muster over such additions.

“The suit? You said it deactivated?” John asked.

“What? Oh, yeah, it was invisible…I mean, it made me invisible—but about a minute or two after I started running it just…shut off,” Goodie replied, looking down at the strange, full-body suit that still covered him, the garish grey of its material visible to all, as apparel normally was.

John just nodded.

“Well, your story seems to hold up enough for me to believe you,” he started, “but then of course, I’m not in the business of trust, so we’ll be taking a peek inside regardless of that belief,” the man stated as he pointed a finger at his own chest, “see what’s what. Once that’s done, then I’ll decide what to do with you.”

The way the man said it made it more than clear that this was Goodie's last chance to fess up to anything he had mistakenly left out.

[SAY NOTHING] [SAY NOTHING] [SAY NOTHING]

‘No Shit!’

As if he really needed to be told the obvious.

Goodie said nothing.