Project Devilgama

Eighteen

Mhaz's chest billowed and shrunk arrhythmically. His eyes were sealed shut with the eyelids pulsing. It almost seems like he pursued awakening while his body forbids it. His hands jerked slightly, a couple of times beside him, seemingly involuntary reflexes.

He was awake deep inside.

On a synthetic gel-like padding of a gurney, he had been put to lie with his arms and legs held. His hands strapped in black bands. A ring-shaped thing in polymer fairing lined with rugged lamps encircled above his cranium. The segment of green light the lamps emitted had revolved constantly for an hour. There was a strip of white on both sides of his temple that seemed to glint every time the light went past his forehead. And it started soaking up sweat.

"He can't give the most out of it, you can't be serious," said the woman.

"Just stand by," he responded tensely, "We'll get them this time."

"What else will you give to him?" Her eyes met his, fatigue hinted on her face, "What else can I give to him? I am running out of dilemmas."

"Well, put him back to sleep,"

Nathan inserted a tube of clear liquid into his pistol-shaped injector. He peeked once at the man, then flipped the safety switch off. Calmly, he strode to the bed.

Mhaz's eyes pry open suddenly. A bloodshot pair of ones burning away Nathan's confidence. "STOP!" A penetrating yell came out of him, automatically, "Nate, I know your entire business was full of crap. Get this thing off me!"

"For the sake of humanity, sir. Calm down."

"That's not how you do it!" Mhaz shot his sight toward the woman, "I am tired of these things! Let me tell you, it is not how you do it." He realized the speech drained the energy from him, the last words almost turned into blank gasps when they came out.

Nate turned to the woman. The same rosy-faced woman Mhaz had seen on top of the holed building. She had the look of a deadlock. She was draped in a loosely-fitting medical coat this time, rendering Mhaz into imagining if she and her partner had cut his skull open and operated on the brain. No. At least, there was not any red on her white yet. She uttered to Nate, "It is enough. We are not hurting him. We have gotten what is needed."

And his face went back to Mhaz, "Okay. We're good and ending this little neuro-wizardry, Mhaz. Let me shed some light for this might help a lot."

"Go on."

"This is your entire sequence of DNA." Nate pinched up a rectangular piece of black the size of an old-fashioned SD card. "It shaped the benchmark of your memory. But it was only the vessel, which is still empty. What we did was fill it with your exact past experiences. And for this, we must figure out how you react to certain problems."

Mhaz blew a thick breath out and shook his head.

The woman walked up to the gurney where Mhaz remain supine. Her hands gripped the side handlebar and began slowly dragging him away from the untidy pile of electronic scanning units. She explained briefly as she unwound the straps on Mhaz's arms, "What you saw after the blackout was my past. Such a bad one, ain't it?" She chuckled and took the tiny card Nate passed on, "and based on your reaction to that, we mapped your sympathy, empathy, flight-or-flight responses, senses, et cetera. The good news is, we now have your memories filled up inside this card."

Mhaz lifted his left arm. Then he took the black, little thing she handed. "I'm sorry for your childhood. But why do this?" He inquired as he scanned it.

"For the same reason that drive was invented." The woman pointed at Farad's drive with a look in her eye. It was rested on a steel cabinet beside Mhaz, among the trays of spent glass tubes and ampules, in front of an old Waker clock that showed half-three.