Shift (Rewrite)

 

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The Material we use may look like us, but remember, it is inferior. 

It has not fought in battles like you have.

It has not lost comrades like you have.

Its ancestors haven't fought and died to shield billions like your ancestors have.

It has not earned the Integration you have suffered to earn. 

And even with that great gift, most Material isn't even worthy enough to survive the Integration. 

And even if it does, it will not be thankful for the chance at greatness that it has lucked into. 

No, it will wail, moan, and whine. Cursing us instead of falling to its knees and thanking us. 

Do not pity the Material we process. It will detest us regardless. 

And always remember that even while we give it the best we can spare, no Material has ever achieved more than mediocrity.

It will always be inferior.

• Defence Magi-Captain Erik DeBoer #A01TCP677170062

***

The door slid shut behind me with an audible hiss, cutting off all light coming into the tiny room. 

The place's smell finally registered after my first few lungfuls. It reeked of hospital disinfectant. 

Instead of worrying about it as any sane person would, I silently stood in the dark, listening to the constant droning orders telling me what to do and silently replying that I obeyed while very carefully piecing together what had and what was happening to me. 

The very first thing that came to mind while I was chewing my lip was that whatever the droning commands were, they had to be forcing me to keep what had to be a full-blown hysterical episode bottled up inside me. 

Because let's be fair, this was something that would break someone with special training -I think-and I'm just an average person. Regular job, ordinary family, awful -but still typical- breakup. I had no experience whatsoever with being kidnapped, mutila-

Obey. Trust. Keep calm. Be silent. Surrender. Obey.

I Obey. 

Fluorescent lights flickered on while I was making my obedience clear, and I reflexively snapped my eyes shut at the bright light moments before a warm viscous liquid sprayed over me from all sides. It reeked of industrial-strength disinfectant. 

Immediately when it touched me, the stuff felt like it was scalding my skin, burning me as if somebody was using metal brushes to scrub me raw. Likewise, the cuts and scratches on my face felt like battery acid was poured into them.   

All I could do was clench my jaws, purse my lips, and squeeze my eyes shut while covering my sensitive areas as well as I could. Which wasn't very well. 

It lasted minutes, and I felt like I was being slowly dissolved before dozens of what felt like high-pressure hoses rinsed me off thoroughly, and I finally dared to open my eyes again.  

What the actual fudge is happening?!

It took a while before I recovered enough to register that I was standing inside a two-by-two-by-three-meter metal box. The walls and ceiling were probably at one point painted white but were now badly faded and showed patches of bare metal. Dozens of nozzles peppered every surface, many still dribbling water. The bare metal floor also had drains still swallowing the water and whatever the burning gunk was. 

Behind me, I saw the raised edges of the sliding door I'd entered through, and after a moment of inspection, I saw the same in the wall in front of me. 

"Verlaat de kamer," a tinny voice ordered from the upper right corner of the room -where I hadn't seen anything that could be a speaker- and I was automatically moving before I'd even parsed the words. 

My foot stuck to the floor for a moment, and I glanced at the partially dissolved remains of what used to be my shoe and sock drooping off my foot without stopping my forward movement. 

The sliding door hissed open just before I would have walked into it and slid closed as soon as I was through. 

A claustrophobic hallway stretched out in front of me. It was a little less than a meter wide and a little more than two meters high and extended for at least five meters. The hall was also painted a faded white, and I saw drains in the floor and slightly different nozzles than the shower room's in this room's walls and ceiling. 

"Loop naar het einde van de gang," the tinny voice said again, and I started walking toward the end of the hall. 

The door slid closed behind me with another hiss. Simultaneously, hot air started spewing from all the nozzles surrounding me. It was like walking through one of those air-blade dryers, and I was dry by the time I reached the end of the hall and stepped through another of the sliding doors. 

"Wacht," the robotic voice said again from the upper left corner of the room, and I settled in to wait as the door hissed closed behind me again. 

This even-more-claustrophobic room was less than a square meter by a little over two meters high. The walls were a slightly less faded white, and apart from the doors' edges, the only distinguishing feature in the room was a large black XII marking both sliding doors. 

Room twelve? 

I stopped consciously staring at the numeral and concentrated on what was happening. Slowly I edged myself out from... well, beneath whatever made me follow without question. It was... well, the closest thing I can describe is like a hand or something, wrapped around my head and forcing me to look in a specific direction. But then, not only with my head, but my entire body and thoughts. 

How is this even possible?!

I'm not sure how, but I somehow felt the hand tightening at that thought, and I quickly refocused on studying the numeral before it clamped down again. It didn't seem to mind what I was thinking as long as I wasn't too focused on what had been done to me and kept my emotions in check. 

I can handle that. Probably.

The first thing I did was just breathe. In. Out. In. Out. Ensuring every breath out was one second longer than the preceding breath in. 

It was a simple technique and utterly superfluous when whatever they were doing to me was already keeping me unnaturally calm. Still, I'd learned how to deal with stress and panic attacks years ago, and breathing was always the first step. 

The second step was breaking whatever was causing my distress down into small chunks. 

Even insurmountable problems can be reduced to things you can deal with by breaking them up and tackling them one at a time.  

Breathing and making lists had gotten me through university, dad leaving, coming out, chaos at work, breaking up, and hundreds of other things. I was good at this.

Okay, what do I know?

I dug through the last of my hazy memories before waking up on the slab.

I was coming back into the office after having lunch with my coworkers and friends. My best friend Joanne -Jo- had been at lunch, the only one who didn't work at the lab with me, and we'd made plans for my birthday. 

Well, Jo made them and dragged me along with her. 

There had been the usual issues with the Purists, but it had gotten worse when we were passing security. 

Ben, the company's stupid security guard, had been giving me his Purist rhetoric again, but he'd seen Reae and Ron blatantly holding hands when they came in, so he'd started screaming at them about their perversion. Reae had started shouting back at him, and she verbally eviscerated the bigot. 

I'm pretty sure she was about to jump over the counter and hit him.  

And then... I think something... flashed? I'm sure there was smoke.

I don't remember anything until I woke up on the slab, and then...

Breathe in. Breathe out. 

In. Out. 

In. Out. 

In. Out.

Okay, List. No reaction from the docile-ing hand, so it was allowing me to think things through. Good to verify. 

Controlling somebody like that should be impossible, shouldn't it?  

Maybe it's a nightmare? 

An excessively detailed, long, and convoluted nightmare. 

Yea, okay. Moving on. 

Fact one; I was being mind-controlled. Fact two; I could somehow feel what was controlling me. It was like I had a new hand and could move it as naturally as my regular ones. 

The questions of how I had it, what it was, and why I knew how to move it, I parked for now, delegating them to future-Lana to find answers to. 

I moved my right hand up and extended my arm together with my 'new hand' and started trying to feel for what was keeping me controlled. 

My physical hand hit the roof just before I fully extended it, but that didn't stop my new one. That one kept going up... no, to the side? No, diagonally? I frowned while trying to parse a direction that wasn't an actual direction before deciding that answer wasn't something I needed now. 

I concentrated on very carefully moving my phantom limb further outwards until it brushed up against something slick; it sort of felt like cold, wet glass. 

I froze the instant I touched it, waiting to see if it reacted to me poking around, but all I could feel was a sense of power -a sort of electricity, maybe-, being held back from lashing out at me. I'd kind of touched it before in a reactive way, and it ignored my tentative probing as I tried to map out what it was. 

It had initially felt like a hand, or at least that's what I'd mentally made of its shape, but while feeling around it, my mental image changed significantly. 

It was in a single direction, but simultaneously, it surrounded me completely. I delegated the answer to how the heck that was possible to future-Lana again. What I'd taken as fingers were like pseudopod extending from the thing and were most definitely connected to me. Though again, I'm not sure how. Just when I started poking around that area, the room I was in shook with a metallic grinding sound, and I instantly pulled my not-hand away from the thing encircling me. 

But I was now aware of it, so I couldn't un-feel it anymore. 

The room shook again, another hiss sounded, and the door in front of me slid open, revealing another large metal room, even if the white of this one was slightly less faded than the previous ones. 

"Loop naar de circel en sta daar stil," A gruff voice said from within. I noticed that one of the pseudopods connected to me pulsed, and I knew he had said, 'Walk into the circle and stand still'. 

Three others also rhythmically pulsed, and I was already moving into the room before my eyes snapped to the man who had just spoken. I quickly covered myself as best as possible with my hands, but the pseudopods forcing me to comply didn't allow me to stop moving forward until I stepped into the circle the man had indicated. 

The man was wearing brown and grey armour -in the same style but less bulky than the guard outside- and was working on what looked like a touchscreen console. He ignored me completely while I stood there in embarrassment for almost a minute before another man wearing identical armour entered the room through another sliding door. 

"Armen en benen uit elkaar," the new man ordered while walking over te me. The pseudopods pulsed, and I knew he said, 'Spread your arms and legs.'

"No," I was able to force through gritted teeth while keeping my arms where they were, pushing back against the order. No way I was going to expose myself to th-

Four of the pseudopods pulsed in unison, trying to force me to comply. I pushed back. 

Obey. Trust. Keep calm. Be silent. Surrender. Obey. 

No. 

All the pseudopods attached to me pulsed in unison again, and I pushed back with everything I had left.  

Obey. Trust. Keep calm. Be silent. Surrender. Obey.

N-

A dozen extra pseudopods attached to me pulsed in unison again. 

OBEY. Trust. Keep calm. Be silent. Surrender. OBEY.

I Obey.

What I wanted was swept aside. My legs spread, my arms fell to the side, and I could not move beyond what I had been told to do. 

The man roughly grabbed my arm and methodically started probing the flesh around the metal plate on the inside of my wrist. Then, after nodding in satisfaction with whatever he found, he retrieved a long bracelet connected to the device the other man was standing behind by a thumb-thick cable. 

He then aligned the bracelet with the metal plate in my arm and locked it around my wrist. He continued probing my arm, following something hard from the plate up my arm and towards my back until he reached my metal spine and examined its edges.  

A doctor?

The thought should have given me slightly more peace about exposing myself to him, but even the enforced placid tranquillity could not stop my shame from heating my cheeks and my anger at what was being done to me from simmering. 

"Het is er klaar voor. Wat voor taal heeft het?" the maybe-doctor behind me finally asked the other man. A translation didn't follow. I suppose it only did that when they were talking to me. 

"Een soort van Engels" the other answered and then began tapping the screen with practised ease.  

The one I considered the doctor stepped in front of me again, then looked me in the eyes. 

"You will answer truthfully. What is your age?"

"Twenty-seven years." I croaked in reply. The surprise of one of them speaking English and allowing me to talk didn't stop me from instantly answering when half a dozen pseudopods pulsed. 

"Are you part of a military, security, or guard organisation?"

"No." I tried to tell him I was a simple lab technician, but the pseudopods pulsed, and my mouth wouldn't open to add the information. 

"Do you have combat training?"

"Self-defence courses during college, jujutsu when I was a teenager."

"Do you have any disabilities?"

"I am nearsighted. My left leg was broken when I was eleven and still hurts when I stress it. I am... imp... Impure." I tried to stop myself from uttering the final confession, but the pseudopods pulsed again, and I couldn't prevent my mouth from forming the words. The doctor raised an eyebrow at me. 

"What is Impure?"

"My mother is Japanese. My father is Irish. I am of mixed heritage. One of the Impure."

"Achterlijke barbaren," he muttered in his harsh language. Then, he turned towards the other man and glanced at me before asking, "How is its integration?" 

The man behind the touch screen gave the doctor a questioning look before shrugging. 

"Barely even started," he tapped on the touch screen a few times, "eleven per cent beyond minimum viability. Like this, it'll take weeks before Integration has reached its achievable levels. We'll not even get a useful nest from it this way."

What Integration? The implants? I can move, so that's eleven per cent? Or the minimum viable? What does he mean by a useful nest? 

My thoughts raced, but my mouth refused to ask the questions I had. The doctor turned back to me and said, "What's the compatibility?" 

I frowned at him, not understanding the question, but I wasn't compelled to answer either. 

"Probable Tine, rated two, with..." the man behind the computer answered before trailing off while staring at his screen. 

"Paul?" The doctor asked, snapping the other man from his thoughts. 

"Het fluctueerd tussen Drie en Vierling potentie, de integratie is nog niet ver genoeg om zeker te zijn, maar minimaal drie " the doctor's assistant answered in their native language. The doctor turned to me, surprise apparent on his face. 

"Drie of Vierling..." he muttered before shaking his head, locking eyes with me and addressing me again, "You have no combat training. This is bad. You are tiny and weak. This is bad. Your Integration is very slow. This is bad. Your direction is Tine. This is so-so. Your rating is two. This is bad. But your potential is very high. Triple or Quad. This is very good. The best. You will continue."

He grinned at me with too many teeth, then unclipped the thumb-thick cable from the bracelet covering half my lower arm with practised ease. 

"Enter room three and dress yourself." 

As soon as I heard I could get dressed, I didn't even have to be pushed to rush to the door with the III inscribed on it. 

 

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