Anli
Literate Addict
-PLOT-
A mark of blood was left on the metal door as he pushed it open, walking in to the faculty headquarters. They knew who he was. But it didn’t stop them from snatching his hand and scanning the barcode etched on his wrist. “Ah… ASTEP 05736E. We’ve been expecting you,” said the scientist as he released Jamie’s hand. His teeth were already gritted so as to stop himself from showing pain. They gritted more as he breathed a required response. “...Sir.”
He looked over at the wall of screens. A slight bitterness flowed through him as he noticed a woman. They were going to make him do that again, weren’t they? As if the first one wasn’t enough. It wasn’t surprising. They lived to torture him and all the others.
After the white-clad man rattled off his new assignment, he nodded quietly. It was what he expected. The woman was a misplaced NOBER and it was his mission to take care of her. It was a pain in the ass to babysit her kind. But it was an even bigger pain when they made one of the sample 13 people do it. There was always more to the story than they let on.
Taking his leave, Jamie walked lethargically back out to the hall. Blood soaked through his bleached shirt and trailed down his arms. The past six hours had been nothing short of hell. Everything still bothered him. It would always bother him. He placed a fist against the wall, pausing to gather strength to continue walking. They had applied first aid, wrapping bandages around his wounds, but it wasn’t doing a good job damming the mighty flow of blood from his body. They would’ve been better off micro-sizing a few beavers and injecting them into his veins. At least, that’s what he thought as the dizziness overtook him.
Another thought crossed his mind as he pushed off from the wall. There would never again be a time he could look at himself without feeling a sense of nauseating disgust. It was funny. All these years, he had actually felt human. He felt like Jamie Canton—the guy who convinced himself that he wasn’t a monster. No, he wasn’t a monster so long as he believed he was human. Now, he no longer believed that. This skin contains nothing. Just an animal compelled by instinct. Tamed… and pathetic.
There was a lot of time to recall his failure as he wandered to the room she was in. This would be painful. He knew it. But there was nothing he could do about it except carry on. So, marking another door with his blood, he entered the room and lowered his head in fake respect. He took care to keep his voice even as he spoke his preordained lines. To have his voice break would be an even greater disgrace than the wounds covering his body. Weakness wasn’t accepted in his kind. “Name’s Jamie Canton, Miss... I’ll be assigned to you henceforth.”
The doors stood parallel to each other in the long abandoned hall, stationary as though photographed within a sorrowful waltz. They wept tears of splintered wood while the walls bled scraps of old wallpaper and chipped paint. Greasy black rats crawled through the musty walls like ghosts through a crumbled yard of graves. The rats….they were the sentinels of a thousand broken doors. Each guarded their ruined world as a ghoul would their broken stone. Although it isn’t much, even a shattered thing is worth protecting when it’s all you possess in the world. People learn the hard way to value what they have. Some never learn at all. But the rats have learned. They learned long ago.
A soft sound shivered through the doors and ricocheted off the walls. Soft, uncertain footfall… a woman’s footsteps. The rats knew. She was another one that would the hard way. The woman wasn’t happy with her life. Seeking a new one, she passed the threshold of reality and came to the hall of a thousand doors. Whatever one she picked would give her what she wanted. A new life. A new world. New people. Each door contained a chance to get whatever the woman wanted. A chance to forget the past and grasp a new future.
But every door was broken, and every world the doors contained shared the same fate.
When the woman seized her handle and passed the unstructured threshold of the door, a strange new world awaited her. The darkness slowly succumbed to dim light as cold rain assaulted her skin. She stood alone on a dark paved road. Alone in a world she knew nothing about.
Alone.
Until white clad men came and took her away in a heavy car to a heavy building. They asked her strange questions she could not answer and argued over what they should do with her. She didn’t understand all of the words they uttered, but she could guess what they were doing. It was rather obvious, given the situation.
In the end, they called her a NOBER and started treating her a bit nicer, talking softer and giving her a blanket and some water to drink.
And that was how it all began.
A soft sound shivered through the doors and ricocheted off the walls. Soft, uncertain footfall… a woman’s footsteps. The rats knew. She was another one that would the hard way. The woman wasn’t happy with her life. Seeking a new one, she passed the threshold of reality and came to the hall of a thousand doors. Whatever one she picked would give her what she wanted. A new life. A new world. New people. Each door contained a chance to get whatever the woman wanted. A chance to forget the past and grasp a new future.
But every door was broken, and every world the doors contained shared the same fate.
When the woman seized her handle and passed the unstructured threshold of the door, a strange new world awaited her. The darkness slowly succumbed to dim light as cold rain assaulted her skin. She stood alone on a dark paved road. Alone in a world she knew nothing about.
Alone.
Until white clad men came and took her away in a heavy car to a heavy building. They asked her strange questions she could not answer and argued over what they should do with her. She didn’t understand all of the words they uttered, but she could guess what they were doing. It was rather obvious, given the situation.
In the end, they called her a NOBER and started treating her a bit nicer, talking softer and giving her a blanket and some water to drink.
And that was how it all began.
He looked over at the wall of screens. A slight bitterness flowed through him as he noticed a woman. They were going to make him do that again, weren’t they? As if the first one wasn’t enough. It wasn’t surprising. They lived to torture him and all the others.
After the white-clad man rattled off his new assignment, he nodded quietly. It was what he expected. The woman was a misplaced NOBER and it was his mission to take care of her. It was a pain in the ass to babysit her kind. But it was an even bigger pain when they made one of the sample 13 people do it. There was always more to the story than they let on.
Taking his leave, Jamie walked lethargically back out to the hall. Blood soaked through his bleached shirt and trailed down his arms. The past six hours had been nothing short of hell. Everything still bothered him. It would always bother him. He placed a fist against the wall, pausing to gather strength to continue walking. They had applied first aid, wrapping bandages around his wounds, but it wasn’t doing a good job damming the mighty flow of blood from his body. They would’ve been better off micro-sizing a few beavers and injecting them into his veins. At least, that’s what he thought as the dizziness overtook him.
Another thought crossed his mind as he pushed off from the wall. There would never again be a time he could look at himself without feeling a sense of nauseating disgust. It was funny. All these years, he had actually felt human. He felt like Jamie Canton—the guy who convinced himself that he wasn’t a monster. No, he wasn’t a monster so long as he believed he was human. Now, he no longer believed that. This skin contains nothing. Just an animal compelled by instinct. Tamed… and pathetic.
There was a lot of time to recall his failure as he wandered to the room she was in. This would be painful. He knew it. But there was nothing he could do about it except carry on. So, marking another door with his blood, he entered the room and lowered his head in fake respect. He took care to keep his voice even as he spoke his preordained lines. To have his voice break would be an even greater disgrace than the wounds covering his body. Weakness wasn’t accepted in his kind. “Name’s Jamie Canton, Miss... I’ll be assigned to you henceforth.”
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