Chapter 5: Chapter 2: The Specimen [2]

2.

The next moments blow by in a haze. Andre watches I.O and the Suits until his vision fogs up and the pod screen builds up with ice.

Then darkness, cold and empty. 

Later, he hears fast-spinning tools – the dentist's sort. Then high-pitched beeps – I.O, most definitely – and droning, robotic voices. He can’t make out exactly what the voices are saying, but he knows it has something to do with an operation; there are a couple carefuls and handle-with-cares in there. 

Even though it feels as if no time has passed since Andre encountered the Suit outside his school – or, at least, not that much time – he somehow understands that this particular civilisation, this organisation of cosmic collectors – bots, interdimensional travellers, and perhaps alien species – has been operating on him for quite a while. If this procedure is supposed to be as dangerous as it sounds, and Andre is supposedly a valuable asset to whatever it is they have planned, then it would only make sense that they would spend time deliberating the safest possible way to transfer his mind into this “prototype”. 

But what is this prototype?

A machine. Surely.

Regardless, this whole situation feels surreal. Part of him hopes he won’t survive the procedure – he doesn’t want to give this civilisation the satisfaction of controlling him. What could they want from a fourteen-year-old boy anyway? Yeah, he’s a little smart, but it’s not like he can do great things with his intelligence outside of solving equations and perhaps having a great memory when it comes to absorbing information from science books, articles, YouTube videos, and so on. 

They must have something big planned. Intelligence must be necessary, especially if it’s all this civilisation cares about. Hell, it was even the first stat listed on the screen: Upper Echelon 0. What the hell does that mean? 

Eventually, dull lights flicker in the absent darkness of his thoughts. Like bubbles popping in and out of existence, they cultivate a series of disconnected images – perhaps of the blue room with pods – becoming clearer as time progresses. A minute later, what looks like a dental surgery emerges: white walls, high-standing cabinets, and dark gurneys comprising all sorts of tools. Cutters, syringes, and something he’s never seen before: a long, spindle-shaped object with a bulbous canister in which thick purple liquid sloshes. A hand grabs it. Andre makes out a dark figure with a bright hexagon rotating in its chest. The mysterious tool comes down. The drilling grows louder. 

He tries to say something, anything, but once again it’s as if his vocal cords have been torn out. All he can do is blink. At least he can do that much.

The drilling stops. The figure pulls the dental light away. A Suit, dressed in a white lab coat with an LED-embedded headband. It pulls the gurney over towards the left-hand side and approaches a terminal hanging from the ceiling. Rapidly, it begins typing. 

Andre realises that he must be living inside the prototype – in fact, he’s nearly certain that’s the case. Although he can’t angle his head to get a good view, he can just about see the tops of his toes at the end of the dental engine pointing towards the ceiling; they’re grey – not with skin – with a familiar metallic overcoat. Steel-tipped, no doubt. This means he’s no longer in his old body, and that’s terrifying to think about. 

Once again he tries to say something – Let me go, you bastard! – but, of course, nothing comes out. 

The Suit turns away from the terminal to face him. ‘Your brain activity is optimal,’ it says. ‘Specimen Zero-Two.’ With a quick finger, and without looking away from Andre, it presses the ENTER key on the terminal keyboard. 

There’s that surge of electricity again, suffusing his body. Andre blinks. ‘Let me go,’ he shouts. ‘You bastard!’ 

The Suit flashes him a thumbs up. ‘Vocal status operational. Excellent. How are you feeling, Andre?’

Andre didn’t realise he spoke until the Suit mentioned it. ‘I can speak?’ He sounds muffled, almost like the Suit, but his tone is nowhere near as robotic. But what about his arms, his head, his body? He still can’t move.

The Suit nods. ‘Are you afraid, Andre?’

Andre takes a moment to respond. No strong emotion at all. No fear, no anxiety, no stress, and yet his mind tells him he’s in great trouble. ‘If you think you can strap me to a dental chair and get answers out of me for your little experiment, you’re sadly mistaken, asshole.’

The Suit hums, turns back to the terminal, and inputs something on the screen. ‘Perhaps increasing your senses will help.’ It presses ENTER.

Electricity surges through Andre’s body again, this time violently, causing intense pain. He winces and screams. For a moment his voice sounds deeper and more like a broken machine. 

‘How do you feel now, Andre?’ the Suit asks. ‘In pain? Perhaps afraid now?’

Andre grits his teeth. They're heavier, straighter, and sharper. ‘Very afraid.’ He brings a hand up to his afro and runs his fingers – wait, no, he doesn’t. His hair is rock-solid and unable to be contorted. Then he realises.... By God, he’s able to control his body again. Slowly, he sits upright on the dental engine and looks at his legs and torso. He’s wearing the same spider-web fabric, only he doesn’t have a rotating hexagon, and as far as he’s aware there’s something blocky on his head mimicking the shape of his afro. He touches it again. Is that supposed to be my hair?

The Suit opens the bottom drawer of the gurney and pulls out a large circular mirror. It hands it to Andre. 

Andre gazes at his reflection. He’s still the same boy, and his features are almost exactly as they were in his previous body. There’s his afro, although cleaner and, as expected, made entirely out of metal; and there’s his face, oval-shaped with a curvy nose, but he has no eyes or mouth or ears. His skin is made entirely out of this Suit material. Horror sinks into him. 

How is this possible?

He can see, he can hear, he can even smell. He puts a hand up to his cheek, then trails a finger around where the eyeholes should have been, feeling nothing. Andre starts thinking hard. ‘How did you do this?’

The Suit presses a button on the dental engine and Andre’s headrest rises. It walks back to the terminal and begins typing again. ‘You’re a highly intelligent specimen, Andre. Has anyone ever told you that?’

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Andre sits with his legs hanging over the dental chair. Despite being in this new body, it’s clear that he’s still five-foot-eight. ‘So that’s what this is,’ he says, knowing full well that it was since the beginning. ‘You realise that solving an equation isn’t anything special, right? If your civilisation had any more than two brain cells then maybe they would have figured that out and maybe they would have stopped kidnapping species. I know what you do already. I heard you in that little space lab.’

‘There are billions of Travellers, Andre. I’m only one of them. You’re soon to be another one.’ The Suit presses another button on the terminal and Andre suddenly stiffens. He can no longer move again. ‘I’ve installed a behavioural chip in your frontal lobe—’ It taps its forehead. ‘—meaning that, while you're here, you will be under Echelon’s control. And about solving that equation: I’m surprised you haven’t figured this out already, but The Missing Egg was never part of your high-school textbook. In fact, it featured a level of complexity often only solvable by the most intelligent species in our galactic system. Travellers especially.’

‘So you put it in there?’ Andre says, dumbfounded. ‘How did you do that?’

‘When Mark Stephenson threw it in the puddle,’ the Suit says. ‘A Traveller opened a micro-rift and swapped the books. Before that, he copied some of the book’s contents while you were sitting in the foyer of your school. I bet you didn’t notice that every page from one to one hundred and fifty were completely blank, but the Traveller knew you wouldn’t look there. He knew you would look at the final solutions pages, and perhaps at the original question. He was confident that you wouldn’t even swipe through the book, because you have a way of doing things neatly. Isn’t that marvellous, Andre?’

‘I don’t understand,’ Andre says. ‘Why do you think solving an equation makes me a genius? Or, rather, why does it make me worth kidnapping?’

‘You haven’t been kidnapped,’ says the Suit. ‘To be kidnapped is to be denied the ability to leave. You have the power to leave, Andre, but only if you do exactly as we say, which is why I inserted behavioural control into your brain. But to answer your question, every intelligent species has its way of developing its civilisation. Some more than others. Humans are somewhere in the middle of stupid and smart on a galactic scale, but not ingenious. We saw how quickly your civilisation was progressing and decided to run a planetary scanner over what you call Earth. 

‘Now each brain, both yours and mine, carries a certain level of brainwave. It’s called the Impulse Aura. Those with more neural links have stronger brainwaves, and those with less, well, they have little to none. Our scanner picked up your Impulse Aura shortly after beginning the scan, which was a surprise. Normally, when we scan Earth, it takes a couple hours, but your aura was so strong that it immediately touched base with our system.’

‘I get you,’ Andre says at last. ‘I don’t agree with your system’s way of thinking – in fact, it sounds really stupid – but I take it I’ll have to live with whatever it is you people want me to do so I can leave. That how this works?’

The Suit nods. ‘Correct.’

‘So you will eventually let me go home? To Earth?’

‘Eventually.’

‘How long?’

‘At minimum,’ it says, ‘a couple hundred years. In this new prototype, you should well be able to exceed that point.’

Andre’s eyes fly wide. ‘What?’ he shouts.

The door to the surgery slides open and another Suit steps through. It’s smaller, much curvier, and strikingly more feminine than usual. It holds a tablet with an electronic pen, staring at Andre as if not expecting to stumble across him. ‘Hi Zef.’ Sure enough, it sounds like a woman, of course with the robotic voice and robotic monotone. ‘Is Zero-Two working successfully?’

‘Ask Andre yourself,’ says the Suit. 

Zef is a strange name for an emotionless robot. 

‘Andre,’ says the female Suit. ‘My name is Athena. Can you understand what I’m saying?’

Andre chuckles. ‘Hi Martin, nice to meet you.’

Zef presses ENTER on the terminal keyboard.

ZAP!

There’s the electricity again. Andre winces and screams. When the shock ends, he can smell that strange odour of smoke from earlier. It must be emanating off of him. ‘Nice to meet you, Athena,’ Andre says with a strangled voice. 

Athena starts fiddling with her tablet. She then gets him to list some details, such as his full name, age, planet of origin, and so on. He answers successfully to each of them. ‘Excellent. Are you able to use your limbs?’

‘Yes. I can.’ He raises an arm and opens his palm.

Athena gets Andre to copy a series of hand motions, leg movements, and gestures that she performs herself. He does so successfully once again. ‘Excellent.’ She notes something down on her tablet with the electronic pen. ‘With the basic motor tests complete, you can come with me, Andre.’

Zef reaches into the side compartment of the terminal, pulls out a small keycard, and connects it to the computer using a small USB plug. He spends a good thirty seconds typing. When he’s finished, he unplugs the USB cord, disconnects the keycard, and presses it firmly with his thumb, making sure to point it at Andre before doing so. It causes an electric shock to bolt through Andre’s body again. ‘I’m just making sure it’s operational,’ Zef says. ‘Sorry, Andre.’ But he doesn’t sound as if he is. Not at all. He hands the card to Athena.

‘Come with me, Andre,’ she says.

Strangely, despite him not wanting to, his body forces him to comply with her wishes. He steps up from the dental engine as if all control has been lost.

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