Dissonance - Book One

eight

"She's coming to!" a voice frantically shouts. This scene is all too familiar. I'm trapped in my nightmare, reliving the past, only it feels much too real. The pain. Oh god, the pain! This is not a dream. This is different. This is real!

"I told you she needs a stronger dosage! She's not human. She's a mod!" a familiar voice shouts. It's the nurse, from the plane. I try to lift my head, but my forehead is shoved back down. I feel a sharp prick in my arm. A liquid is thrust into my body, coursing through my veins at a furious pace until I no longer make out the voices, only the muffled sounds of my tormentors as I drift off to sleep.

***

My mind is groggy and my eyesight cloudy as I awake and begin to take in my new surroundings. There is a man standing to my right and one to my left, but to my surprise, they are not doctors. They are soldiers. They're heavily armed and their faces are stone cold serious as they stare forward into the dimly lit room. I'm sitting upright in a wheelchair and when I try to reach my hand up to rub my eye, it's yanked back down. My wrists are bound once again. To them, I'm a prisoner, not an injured victim, and they are treating me as such.

"Still shackled I see," I say to the men standing at my sides as I try to adjust in my chair. Instinctively I flinch, expecting to feel a searing pain rip through my abdomen, but instead I feel nearly nothing. I'm either dead and in hell or I've been healed by Environettix doctors and I'm at their mercy. Either way, I'm in the hands of the devil.

A door swings open in the far corner of the room. A figure steps inside. The clacking of heels reverberates off the concrete walls as the person approaches. I squint into the fierce light that's pointed at me like some sort of interrogation tactic during wartime. I'm unable to see who stands before me.

"Untie her," a woman's voice says, but the men don't move. "Now!" she says with force, and they reluctantly oblige. She waves for them to leave and waits until the door slams shut behind them.

"The illusive Ever Attwood, in the flesh. I've been looking for you a long time," the woman says as she moves amongst the shadows. "You put up quite a fight, but I guess I should have seen that coming. You were always rather stubborn."

She circles around me, and although my vision is becoming clearer as the drugs wear off, I can't quite make out her face. Her comment however, implies that she knows me. And the familiarity of her voice, tells me that we've met.

"Who are you?" I ask.

"I'm the person who has been tasked with debriefing you on the current situation and unfortunately, we don't have much time to get you up to speed. You took longer to get here than I expected."

"Well it's hard to get somewhere when you don't know where you're going."

I take in my surroundings as quickly as I can, trying to assess the best possible escape route, while talking to her. Nothing is familiar and yet everything is familiar at the same time, including the voice of the woman who is clearly toying with me. It's fine though. I'll play along with her little game. The more time she wastes, the more time I have to regain my wits and formulate a plan.

"True," she continues. "The memory re-imaging was a surprise. I didn't expect that. Your brain has been scrambled so many times I'm surprised it still functions. It was truly genius of them, but I shouldn't have expected any less. They would do anything to protect you. You were always their favorite," she chuckles, and the familiarity of her laugh rings in my ears. "I have to admire their tenacity. It definitely interfered with the retrieval system technology."

"Retrieval system?"

"Every third generation mod was implanted with a retrieval code, an ingenious little device stored in your amygdala: the area of your brain which interprets fear. The code can only be triggered by the sympathetic nervous system, commonly known as the fight or flight response. This means that if a third generation Mod tries to escape, they'll just run right back to us. It was initially designed for inmates, but that proved problematic and Environettix realized it was far more useful in other ways. Fear is a very powerful motivator. The only issue is that it has to be triggered by a severely stressful situation, such as fighting for your life, like say...in a tsunami."

"What did you just say?" Images flood my brain of the day I stood and watched that gargantuan wave swallow my neighborhood whole, killing hundreds of innocent people, including my parents.

"If it weren't for that event, and the retrieval code designed by your uncle, then we may have never found you."

"My uncle designed it?" My head is spinning with new information overload, trying to process it at lightning speed, and make sense of how all of this is connected.

"Yes, or more correctly...our uncle."

Confusion fills my brain at her odd comment as she steps into the light.

"Aveline?" I blink several times in complete and total shock over the ghost that stands before me. She died. I saw her die. I saw her bloody corpse that day thrown from the truck, strewn amongst the corn stalks. I've mourned her every day since, been tortured in my dreams by the last remaining images of her before her life was ripped from this world, and yet here she is, standing before me. My sister.