The priest in the decrepit cell pats Ortis on the back. "This is your chance to show your worth to the Crowndom. If you pass the coming test, you will never have to sleep in this prison again."
Ortis's legs are tied to a chair, and his arms are strapped with leather strips screwed into the aluminum table. Together, they easily keep him secure as he faces the contraption on the table. Inside a clear box, two vials of liquid are strapped to each other, with a button on each. Blue on the left, and red on the right. Plastic tubes extend from the vials, both inserted into Ortis's arms.
The priest continues. "One of the guards saw you levitating a piece of trash. If you have special abilities, this test will be the easiest thing you've had to endure here."
A cord snakes out of the metal dome strapped on top of Ortis's head and into a machine printing a long receipt describing his brain activity. As the priest dangles part of it in his fingers to read, footsteps echo through the cell door.
He can hear voices, but nothing is clear enough for Ortis to understand.
The priest drops the growing receipt and fidgets with his long, curling fingers. "He's coming." He looks at the door and then to Ortis, and frail form trembles. His back straightens, and any movement is rigid and precise. "God keep both of us safe." He hurriedly draws a crown on his head with his index and middle fingers.
Ortis perks up as on the other side of the door, gears turn, and locks hiss with steam as they disengage.
The beast of a man has to duck to fit the door frame as he lumbers into the room. His wide brim hat brushes against the ceiling. Even after lowering his knees onto the floor, he still maintains eye level with the two of them as the priest takes a seat.
"Warden Juri, I trust your trip from the dark side of the moon was uneventful as always..."
Two glowing yellow eyes glare from beneath the warden's furrowed brows, and the priest chokes on his words before he can finish.
"Enough boot licking, eunuch. You will not waste any of our precious time."
Juri's gaze settles on Ortis next. "Be honest. Are you aware of any... psychic abilities you can wield?"
Ortis stares back into Juri, and feels him staring back, endlessly analyzing even the slightest move he makes. Even if he were to lie, the truth would inevitably be discovered. All he can do is hope to survive whatever fate is waiting for him.
"Well?"
Ortis nods. "Yes... It started out small, but over time-"
"I've heard enough." The way the warden interrupts him makes his stomach clench, burning like a knife slowly twisting itself inside. "You will undergo a precision test. If you pass..." He points at the open door. "You will never sleep in this prison again. Your crimes will be erased, and the Thorn Crowndom will find the best use for your psychic abilities."
He continues. "The test is simple. In the red vial there is poison; in the blue is its antidote. With too much of the poison and no antidote, your insides will melt, painfully killing you."
The priest shrieks as the warden stares three inches deep into his head, and trembling and sniffling. A soft moan escapes the priest's lips, but no words come out; only the faint sound of gargling phlegm.
Warden Juri harshly whispers, echoing his thoughts inside the priest's mind. "Hold down the red button."
The priest's arm jerks awkwardly, like a puppet with tangled strings, as he takes a raspy breath and pushes his thumb down on the red button.
Juri turns to Ortis. "The test starts now. Use your ability to stop him from poisoning you, then push the button for the antidote. Do this, and you will be taken from here."
Ortis panics, fighting his restraints. The red liquid travels quickly down the tube, already half the distance to entering his body.
"No! No! Shit! Please-"
The liquid reaches his arm, and the sensation of agony hits him like a shuttle slamming into the ground. An overwhelming, feral sense of terror tunes his instincts; survival is the only idea strong enough to persist.
"I won't die!" He roars at the priest, whose nose has begun bleeding as his will is bent by the powers of the warden.
Ortis screams, pushing against the restraints with so much ferocity the table creaks and groans. Pebbles and pieces of lunar debris on the floor bounce and float. The priest's moans become louder, then give way to shrieking as his eyes and nose gush blood and mucous.
"Please, let me-"
As Ortis screams, all of his focus converges into a needlepoint in the center of the priest's forehead. Bone shatters beneath the flesh with a wet, muffled crackle, and he collapses into the table, bleeding, and dead. Ortis desperately reaches out with his mind again, pushing his energy into the blue button.
The blue liquid flows. Eventually, the pain inside his body subsides. The antidote quickly extinguishes his burning organs. An involuntary sigh escapes Ortis, from the gratifying sensation of his body cooling from the inside.
"Good job. You passed the test."
"Passed the test..." Ortis's breaths are labored. "What happens now?"
"You will be transferred immediately. Once there, a psychic development facility will accommodate you during your transformation into an asset for the Crowndom."
Warden Juri stands up, and Ortis limply sinks into the seat and its restraints, completely exhausted, but relieved.
The warden shouts commands to the guards in the hallway as he leaves, ducking under the door on his way out. Minutes later, two armored guards enter the room and unbind Ortis.
"Can you stand without help?"
To Ortis's surprise, his body feels completely fine as he pulls himself out of the chair and onto his feet. "I think I'm okay."
The guards walk behind him, leading him down the twisting corridors of the prison and onto a ship to a psychic development facility a few hours away.
Ortis's second pleasant surprise is the incredible view of interlocking supernovas through the ship's cell window. For the first time after seven years of imprisonment and torture, he allows himself to cling to a small flicker of hope. If he proves himself to be trustworthy, maybe he could even earn his freedom.
A loud, rhythmic tapping on the door jars him out of his dissociative state. His back shivers as a guard enters with a leash.
"Congratulations on the transfer. The ship will be landing in a few minutes. Follow my lead as soon as we exit."
Ortis doesn't resist as the leash is fastened to his uniform.
On the planet's surface outside the ship, dead trees pepper a desolate desert of ash and snow. Black, jutting shapes of machinery spiderweb off of the enormous facility tower. It hangs over the building and the snow like a broken umbrella.
Unfortunately, the guard doesn't care to let Ortis gawk at the soulless architecture any longer. The guard yanks on the leash, urging him to follow into the much warmer depths of his new home.
After being hosed down with near-freezing cleaning fluid and dressed in a tight-fitting harness, he is led into a dimly lit, narrow hallway. Another chain leash connects to him and pulls him along, pulled by a geared gutter in the ceiling.
The chain guides him along, passing dozens of rooms, all containing mind-boggling experiments and operations. Through the thin panes of glass in each room, Ortis observes test subjects growing, mutating, and fusing with weapons of mass destruction. Most subjects appear to be alive, but all who are writhe in agony.
He hopes for the best as he wonders what they will do to him. A little prayer muttered under his breath is heard by no one.
The chain comes to an abrupt halt, and the sudden change almost topples him to the floor.
A flat voice plays from a speaker hidden somewhere. "Subject Ortis. Stand by for development."
He looks for a window, but this room has none. And unlike the doors before, this one has no sign of any computers to unlock it from his side.
"Must be something really important here."
"Subject Ortis. Stand by for development."
Air hisses through the cracks as the door slides down into a slot in the floor. Some of the air gets into some of Ortis’s mouth, leaving a chemical aftertaste behind. Is it a cleaning agent?
Intensely bright lights completely cover the ceiling, blinding him at first. When he uncovers his eyes and looks up, he sees a woman in a lab coat and a suit of silver armor. Her smile is framed by matching silver lips. “Welcome to my circus, haha. I apologize for how everyone else has probably treated you so far.”
He keeps his guard up, but the way she speaks seems genuine. Could she actually be sympathetic? She breaks the uncomfortable silence. “I'm here to help you get ready! But first…”
Ortis trembles when she reaches for his collar, but is relieved when the chain leash is removed.
“Good boy! Come this way, please.” She guides him through the strange room lined with white paneling and chrome highlights.
The left side of the room is lined with desks. Each one only bears a laptop, and is occupied by another woman in a lab coat and silver armor. In front of each woman is a long line of subjects taking turns being interviewed, and an open door leading to an escalator going down is behind her.
The other side of the room is hidden behind a curtain.
“Sit.”
He is put into a chair, and after a few minutes of invasive medical questions, he is led towards the escalator.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“Come on! You’re so close!”
He looks to the curtain. He hears groaning from the other side. “Wait… what’s going on over there?”
The curtain, nearly sixty feet tall, obstructs the view of a screaming man being subdued by chains. His shrieking, like a sick bird, ends as abruptly as a gunshot assaults Ortis’s eardrums.
“What was that?!”
Her friendly demeanor slips as a frustrated glare peaks from her eyes. “I’m afraid that’s classified. Come on, now. Be a good–” Her grip on his arm lingers on his wrist long after he yanks it away, leaving a red mark. Her reaction is too slow, and he grasps the curtain and dives into the floor.
His head bounces. With a repetition of ping, ping, ping, ping, more and more rings holding up the curtain break from the rod. The curtain topples to the floor like a blanket fallen from a bed.
As Ortis pulls himself to his feet, smoke is still billowing from the gun in one of the doctors’ hands.
The overturned table the dead one had fallen from is surrounded by dozens more, all with mangled amalgamations of organs and machines. The room stinks of dark magic, worse than when a psychic inmate at the moon prison had tried to escape.
He doesn't have to turn around to recognize the killer grip, and its digging fingernails in his shoulder.
“You will come with me,” she growls, “and you will go down the escalator.”
Looking at the gory arrangements of people encased in layers of bionics, something snaps inside him.
“Not yet.” He puts his hand on hers, and digs deep inside, unbottling the years of pain and anxiety into the air. He takes a deep breath, and follows the flow of the energy out of his body through his arm and out of its pores, shattering the bones of the woman’s arm. Her bleeding skin muffles the crackling like glass breaking inside a cloth sack.
She presses a button on the side of her head as she somersaults back and sputters. “Deactivate pain reception! Fuck!”
She lunges towards him, but as he holds his palm out, her body freezes in place. The surrounding air shimmers as it pins her body in place. The air presses and vibrates tantalizingly against her lips, but offers none of the life-saving oxygen she craves. The breath in her lungs turns stale, and Ortis approaches one of the living subjects.
She, and other nurses and staff, watch in shock as they wait for security to come.
The test subject beneath him wears a mask feeding her medication, and he tears it from her face. She gasps and coughs. The hose attached to the mask wriggles and spews the red fluids across the floor.
He stares into her eyes as they flutter open and shut.
“We’ll all be weapons.” She gargles phlegm between whispers. “We’ll be used to kill anyone we're told. It won't matter if that's pirates or rebels, or even children and families. They'll bend our minds, and we'll kill anyone they ask us to. Anyone in the solar system.”
“But are you alive?”
She chokes, surprised. “Alive?”
“You’ve got your priorities twisted.”
An armored guard tackles him to the floor, slamming his head repeatedly against his boot. “Get in the fucking escalator!”
“It doesn’t matter what we’re used for!” He chokes on his words as he mumbles a revelation. “It doesn’t matter who we kill or fight, or obey.”
The guard smirks at Ortis’s sudden submission. As the guard drags him by the ankle towards the escalator, Ortis ogles the corpse of the man who tried to escape.
The man who had screamed and been shot in the head; he didn’t know how to play along. Escape will come, but not with the frail, incomplete body Ortis resides in now.
I need to evolve. I need more than their trust- the Thorn Crowndom needs to see me as a powerful weapon, exceeding all expectations. I need to…
His grandiose fantasizing is interrupted by being tossed down the escalator.
The guard, Eric, groans to himself as he walks away from the escalator and surveys the mess Ortis made. Now all the subjects, on both sides of the fallen curtain, have begun spiraling into howling maniacs. Outnumbered five to one, the guards will have their hands full for a while.
Eric is handed a bucket full of handcuffs and restraint harnesses with a gruff “Fix this now” from a superior. As soon as the supervisor's greasy face is turned away, Eric’s calm mask warps into a hateful gaze.
Useless motherfucker, making everyone else do the hard work. Someone should–
He stops, scheming as he glances back at the escalator Ortis had taken a tumble down, then to the maintenance door a few feet to its left.
He looks back to the entrance to the room, where guards and subjects crowd against each other, locked in conflict. No one is watching.
His gaze can’t stay away from that damn door. Still, no one watches, and power fantasies run wild in his mind.
All he needs is put in a good word with the subject; convince him of the opportunity at hand. Maybe even apologize for kicking the ever loving shit out of him.
Eric’s hand aches from the force he uses to slam open the maintenance door and barrels down the rickety metal plates that shake with every stomp of his plated boot.
Meanwhile in the escalator, Ortis covers his mouth as waves of uncontrollable laughter burst from inside. He’s almost to the bottom now, as it juggles him towards the bottom in a rolling heap.
“Hahaha…” His neck burns as it jerks against the last step, ending in a long drop into hot, steamy darkness. The cold winds of a cave are killed by the industrial heat of a surgical production line. Before he can hit the hard, spiky floor, a multipronged robotic hand catches him by all four limbs. Ortis waits for the sting of a needle, but is never drugged or knocked out, and is instead dropped into a tiny white box.
Lying on its sterile plastic, pain and exhaustion rack his body. The box’s floor distorts with the bumps of a jerking conveyor belt, and the longer he lies still, the more the agony sets in. Broken bones poke tender flesh. Bruises blossom on his damaged skin. His right eye throbs.
The ticks, beeps, whirs, and hisses of steam are almost enough to muffle the screams and protests of other subjects in their own boxes. The box just ahead of him in line is especially distressed.
Ortis tries to ignore it, curling into a ball. His fractured arms tremble under his throbbing stomach, trying his hardest to conjure a daydream that this is already over. Turning his head to rest it on the floor, he spots an open slot in its walls. It's just big enough for him to peer through.
The person in line ahead of him paces inside, still howling about some lost son. The slot is aligned with his ankles, and Ortis watches as the pair of bare feet stomps and kicks in a hopeless tantrum.
The conveyor belt lurches to a stop.
Kachunk, kachunk.
The boxes unhinge, rearranging as magnetic waves distort them to transform into an all encompassing restraint perfectly fitting each subject’s body. Steel and plastic plating shift and hover to pin them down to the conveyor belt in a spread eagle position.
Kachunk, kachunk.
Keeping them in position, everyone in the line is lifted with the restraints. Ortis notices not everyone is clothed, staring blankly at the bare, bruised body of the man ahead of him in line. He is no longer screaming, but a long, drawn out moan of exhaustion lets him know the stranger is still alive.
Another limb zooms along its track to the front of the line. Just before ramming into the one ahead, it brakes with a speed that would kill any normal person. It's too far away to make out the small details, but this limb is equipped at the end with a blossoming array of tools, blades, and syringes.
One of its appendages swirls through the air in a blur. Not a sound, not a whimper, is made as a rigid criss-crossing pattern of, skin deep, is sliced into him to loosen the layer.
Blood drops from the lines, running down in streams.
Ortis watches in horror as a hot, orange, sticky liquid is sprayed over the man in a fine mist.
As it settles, the skin throbs and rises in heat, ripening into a melty sludge. The spasms and shaking of the body stop as he passes out into a motionless slump. With a chilling carelessness, the entire layer of epidermis is ripped from muscle. Quick, and with the ease of a fruit peeler in a kitchen.
The skin clings his body with webs of stringy, congealing blood, like a line of snot being pulled farther, farther from a toddler’s sticky nostrils.
A head splitting scream rattles Ortis’s throat; he hadn’t wanted to allow himself the weakness of admitting his fear, but the limit has finally been reached. Before, the injuries from the violent beat down and the escalator had completely killed Ortis’s thoughts of attempting escape; he knows it would be impossible.
As the peeled piece of meat is whisked away to be upgraded, Ortis’s animal instincts strip away all reason. He growls and pulls at the restraints, desperate for any escape, but it is impossible.
He cries when his restraints carry him to the end of the line. The limb’s countless ends caress his wounds like a vulture sizing up a dying animal.
Its voice, programmed to a serene, artificial whisper, announces, “Subject damaged. Accessing…”
Ortis thrashes against his mechanical captor as it pokes and prods him, weighing algorithms and calculating his fate. His lips are pulled back to inspect bleeding gums, and burning ointments are spread on his bruised stomach before infrared lights flicker from a projector.
“Please, I don’t wanna do this…”
He remembers what he had told one of the others tied to the stretcher; arrogantly asking, ‘but are you alive’?
He knew becoming whatever living weapon the Crowndom wants would be pain, but not like this.
“Resolution: Degloving will now commence. Damaged tissue is irrelevant.”
“Wait! N-no!”
The bladed attachment glitters in the reflection of thousands of displays and safety lights filling the metal abyss. Each beautifully curved piece of metal branches from the center reflects Ortis's terrified expression with different distortions. All Ortis can do is wait as it heats up the special concoction of chemicals which will make his skin malleable and melted, just like the one before.
On the maintenance catwalk parallel to the production line, Eric sprints with the last of his breath and slams a ‘CANCEL’ button. As Eric catches his breath, Ortis has lost the grip on his emotions, finally releasing them. He sobs from the pain of his skin burns from the grid of incisions lining his body. The sobs play in speakers inside the small controls booth, urging Eric to pull himself back up and poke his lips against the microphone.
“Sorry for kicking you earlier.”
Beam pictures himself lifting his head to look for the source of the voice, but his body won’t move. “Help… help…”
The rogue guard continues. “You were planned on being another psycho-droid, but I have something better in mind. I just want you to tell me something before I help you.”
“Tell… you?”
“Just tell me you want it.” Eric gloats. “And you can owe me one big favor. We can keep this between us.”
“Please, just help me! It hurts so bad!”
Eric smiles as he utilizes the touchscreen, reprogramming Ortis’s production line. He clicks icons and edits code lines, resulting in a new protocol. “This is still going to hurt for a while longer, but now you'll retain your identity. And a significantly higher amount of your flesh intact.” He disconnects both of their microphones and opens the shack door, following the production line to its end. The last shack’s interior walls are covered in screens documenting the transformation of Ortis into a super soldier.
Tiny extensions of the arms swiftly run a needle and thread through the incisions covering him. Moving him along, they then plant screws through him, and into a metal cross. Razor blades cruise his vital veins. The pouring blood drains into the deep chasm of the factory, and black, sticky oil begins to pour. Its shape has a glowing white aura, burning brightly inside Ortis. As the oil settles in his veins, the incisions are sewn shut.
He heaves a sigh of relief. The pain has begun to subside. He suddenly feels cold as ice. Then, his entire body goes numb. The numbness lulls him into a trance as buzz saws disconnect his arms from the shoulder down. The oil spurts out until two titanium arms lock into place.
His right arm ends with an industrial grip gauntlet, and his left seems to be a cannon, leeching his energy. It isn't until he looks down that he finds his old body is cut off at the halfway point of his stomach.
The same replacement process happens with his legs. Steam hisses as the metallic hips settle and bolt into him. A visor is screwed into his shaven scalp, and the bionics undergo final preparation. He is placed again on a conveyor belt, running up through a loop, back to the room he had fallen down from.
Now, the crowds are under control again, and another guard anxiously stands at the door frame he walks in through. “That’s not the product this one was supposed to come out as.” He steps up to Ortis, who now stands eight feet tall, and looks up into his visor. “Anyone in there?”
Ortis does his best to play dumb, pretending most of his brains have been rooted out. “Affirmative. I am here.”
The guard laughs and slaps his new metal thigh. “Hah, must have been some kind of bug in the production line again.”
Ortis grunts as he remembers the guard who had ‘helped’ him. While it is true, whyever the guard had for suddenly changing what he would become - it had to be for his own selfish reasons. For now, all Ortis can do is follow the beck and call of everyone else here. He has become a weapon, and he will do his best to be successful no matter what they point him at.
It’s exactly as he had told the failed experiment, lying on the cot. No reason to get his priorities twisted. He may be a weapon, but he is still alive, and for now that is all that matters.
Eric watches Ortis follow the other guard back to the hallway, and share a knowing nod.
The time will come, they only need to wait.