// MEMORY / MOVEMENT 1 |

       With no mask, your pale and pimpled face is offensively bare to the world. It is riddled with exhaustion and childishly soft, framed by choppy, lusterless clumps of dark hair. After everything, you spitefully kept it shaved to the skin, but these last few months froze that anger over.

       Who are you, anyway? The small square of plastic tacked onto your file declares your name, but nobody has called you that in months. Maybe half a year. Maybe ever. Time is strange. It flows all at once and not at all. The current moment lasts forever, three months ago feels like yesterday, and the future… Do you even have a future? Nobody else around here has one, why are you any different? The station is where the should-be-dead pretend otherwise, where the prisoners are just as trapped as their wardens. Beyond its walls lay a frozen wasteland, and beyond that is a world in decline. If things go as they should, .

       Your head hurts. Your skull is too small and blood pounds behind your eyes. Ten days ago, you were beaten into a concussion by the armor-clad man-things currently escorting you. They are terribly upset about your survival, about the fact their brutality did not go unnoticed. If you could see their faces— the guilt from one and the resentful glare of the other— the weight of their utter disdain would eat you alive. You can’t see anything beyond their dark-visored masks, though, so you bask in the bliss of ignorance and focus on keeping pace. Collapsing is not an option. You would rather avoid being dragged around like a disrespected corpse.

       Not that they would dare subject you to that. You are an asset now, enough of an asset that the Head Doctor— dark and faceless, dressed in sterile white— spent the last ten days monitoring your health with the utmost worry. She drew your blood and fed you vitamins and dimmed the lights in your room to help with the pounding headache you surely had. When she asked about the source of your concussion and you did not reply, she made a fuss about how a week was not nearly enough time to recover. Her theatrics bought you four more days of rest. Or, they should have.

       This morning, you were shaken awake and warned there would be dire consequences if you were not dressed in fifteen minutes. The Head Doctor apologized profusely. She said we don’t have time, and, you have to go now. Her eyes were wide and watery and on the verge of crying. Your brain, on the verge of bursting, barely noticed. You shut your eyes to dull the sound and nodded along.

       It's been half an hour since then, and you still haven't said a word. You are… What are you? Angry? Anxious? Afraid? Your face is set in stone, dark eyes too unfocused to read, but fear would not be a stretch to assume. Every condemned before you was afraid, terribly so. Their cries echoed down the winding metal and concrete halls, they begged mercy to the uncaring and prayers to the unhearing. The loudest were sedated to incoherency, but never enough to fall unconscious. It preferred its meals moving, aware, or so rumors claim. The comparisons remind you of a cat playing with its prey.

—

       Ten days ago, you returned unscathed and were questioned for hours. Your survival was unprecedented, and it refused to say why it deigned to spare you as opposed to the hundreds it had killed without a second thought. So the Head Researcher— tall and bony and terrible — turned to you for answers. He demanded, with words that blurred into nonsense. He kept you locked in an interrogation room until you passed out, then apologized when you crawled your way back to consciousness.

       You aren’t sure how the apology went, but the cheap ceiling LED silhouetted him like a halo, painful and holy. He held out his hand and you did not take it. You think you locked eyes, but your leaking brain lashed out and his features turned to forgotten mush.

       He said, “”

       And, “”

       And, “”

       You did not reply. Even if it would save you, the words stuck in your throat and threatened to choke you out. That doesn't mean you didn't try, lips parting to mutter—

       I don’t know why I’m alive. I don’t have a reason. You’re hurting me. Please stop.

       —and failing to even make a noise. You shut your mouth in shame, and he took your silence as an admission of guilt.

       And thus came your penance. He claimed it demanded your return, but you were not blind to the satisfaction on his lips when reading out your sentence. Make no mistake: this event is part retribution, part bargain, and part sickening curiosity to see if you will return again.

—

       The deeper you descend, the less you recognize. This is to be expected. Once you hit the sublevels, the station changes at random— an unfortunate side effect of what was trapped within. Hallways leading nowhere, rooms that disappear when you blink. Certain areas are unchanged, but it always ensures the path there is never how it was before. Sometimes you’d see pieces of it: sinewed tendons chaining pipes together, fatty growths of blood-tissue creeping up from cheap tile. Like some malformed, half-finished reflection of your own internals.

       The station beneath is perpetually in flux, but the bloodbag you follow navigates it effortlessly. All of them do, because it is a part of them. The smart and terrible people in charge devised a means of implanting the horrible reflection into humans, linking them to a building-wide neural network of something that should not exist. The bloodbags roam its halls freely and cannot be killed by it— a necessity and a death sentence. Medication keeps it compatible with the human body for a time, but time dwindles quickly.

       The one leading you stops. You nearly slam into its backside. It turns to face the other, and they exchange low, harsh words in a language you should understand, but can’t. A laugh follows. Then, the one leading puts a gentle hand on you, and your chest tightens so suddenly you fear it might collapse into a black hole.

       If you were bigger, if you were bolder, maybe you’d lash out at the unwanted touch. It would not be the first time such an event had occurred. Desperation turns to violence, with the powerless beating their fists against the wall imprisoning them. Their hands will bloody and break before anything changes. The only death that can truly free them is their own.

       “... be able to handle that…?”

       You blink. The wall sighs and repeats itself.

       “IS ate the last cleanup crew they sent down, so Central Processing is gonna be a massacre.” He sighs like a bored teenager at a part-time job. “Bodies, blood, probably some stray organs. The works. You know how it is.”

       Blood and bodies. Bodies and blood. You do, in fact, know how it is. The smell makes you queasy. The sight makes your eyes glaze over. You’ve seen more than enough viscera for your lifetime and every lifetime following, but the world seems determined to show you more.

       The last sentence is too loud and overly enunciated, because he’s picked up on your tendency to lose yourself in thought. Or maybe he thinks you're an idiot. “Can you handle that?”

       Can you?

       You pause in consideration, real consideration, then realize your answer does not matter. If you say no, the only change would be how your captors see you. The confrontation itself is inevitable. Your comfort is and always will be a rarely indulged second thought, and honestly is a weakness to be cataloged and preyed upon.

       So you nod, half lying. You can handle anything if you distance yourself enough.

       “Alrighty,” he says, with enough pep to make your ears hurt. “You’re technically supposed to be in there alone, but one of us can tag along like we do for maintenance and cleanup crews. Might keep it from getting too aggressive. How’s that sound?”

       You shake your head and think, I hope it kills me. He takes your silence as misplaced confidence and whistles. “Kid’s tough. Damn. No wonder they sent you here.”

       It’s a half-compliment, half-jab. You don’t care enough to notice either. They share another laugh, then the first steps to the side of you. Behind him is a large, sealed bulkhead door plainly marked:

       Another hand, this one nudging you forward. You take a wobbly step— then another, and another, and another— until you cross the threshold into nothing. The outside light frames you like some wretched, divine thing. You struggle to breathe.

       A moment passes, and the door closes as painfully as it pulled apart, unwilling to risk your escape. You aren't stupid enough to try, but you do spare a final glance at your would-be murderers. Your eyes are pleading and your mouth is a thin line. Maybe if you were honest, they would have saved you. Probably not.

       The first says,

       “Don’t die, pipsqueak.”

       And waves a mock salute. He and the light are swallowed by slow-moving steel.

—

       In the darkness, the door settles. Outdated machinery seals the bulkhead in place, grinding against itself like old bone on old bone. Their movements echo twice as loud through the pitch black, until abruptly silenced by a low, warning hiss.

       You think about calling out. You think about begging. You think about how unfair it is that you are going through this again. Sweat sticks your shirt to your back, and your vision would be blurred if you could see anything. You bite your cheek until you taste blood.

       You wait.

       And wait.

       And...

       Then, light. Bright, cold light, abrupt and painful, bathing the room in blessed clarity. The sharp pain behind your eyes is a relieving and unfortunate reminder that you are alive. Disoriented, but alive. You scan your tomb in mute shock.

       The tomb is less a tomb, moreso a halfway point between a dingy office and the inside of a computer. It is clean and comfortably small, but the air is stale and carries a faint undercurrent of something sour. The floor is dark linoleum and the ceiling is cheap tile. Two thin LEDs burn above. Scratched panels and bundles of red wires decorate the walls, neatly outlining everything in a hundred thousand circuits.

—

       Ten days following the day you are meant to die, you find yourself trapped once again. Across the room, the terminal flickers on.|

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