I was ushered out of the lab and into an exam room that was dominated by a machine that looked kind of like a MedBed. It had an upholstered reclining seat, diagnostic and treatment cuffs, a tangle of bio tubes, a scanning array, and a bunch of other equipment I didn’t recognize.
One of the soldiers shoved me into the seat and flipped the chair’s arm and leg cuffs in place, locking me down tight. The other soldier checked his partner’s work and then nodded.
“What is this thing?” I asked.
The soldier who shoved me smiled evilly. “You’re about to find out, asshole.”
The good doctor had called it a ‘gyr,’ but I had never heard of anything like that.
“Not even a hint?” I asked.
“Let’s put it this way, dimbag, whatever you did to piss Molda Prundt off, you’re going to be regretting it until the day you die.”
“Which might not be very long.” The other soldier laughed.
Great.
Doctor Tarsch returned. He stared at a datapad, checking something that was obviously very important to him, while the soldiers stood at attention.
After a few moments he put the datapad down, walked over to where I was locked in the machine, and checked several things. Then he nodded to the soldiers. “You may go.”
“We need to log prisoner receipt.” One of the soldiers hesitantly extended his wrist pad.
“Why did you not do this with Lieutenant Messer?” Tarsch sighed loudly, but placed his thumb on the soldier’s pad. “Now leave me. You have already made me late with your dawdling.”
As soon as I was alone with Tarsch, I said, “My name is Jannigan Beck, and I work for Beck Salvage. I’d like to know what we’re doing here.”
The doctor turned to look at me with a bemused expression on his face, as if I was a chimp who suddenly started to recite Shakespeare. Or sing a Stones song, for that matter.
“Mr. Beck, what we are going to do here is what is known as a forcible NAT. I don’t imagine that you are familiar with that procedure, are you?”
I thought about it for a moment. There were so many abbreviations. NAT didn’t ring a bell.
“Neural Array Transfer,” Tarsch said with a smug smile.
My heart jumped in fear. That was what my father did in order to survive on Bandala. He loaded his consciousness into a clone bot. Voluntarily. This psycho wanted to do it to me against my will.
“I don’t believe you,” I said, as calmly as I could.
Tarsch laughed and turned away to his datapad.
“I don’t believe you have access to Aanthangan technology.”
He spun back towards me. “You know about this?”
“Of course,” I said, trying to remember what the Sean bot had explained to me. “Atomic resolution neuro scanning.”
“Hmm.” Tarsch looked me up and down. “What was your position at Beck Salvage?”
“Oh, a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. Mostly I was kept around because I’m Sean Beck’s son.”
“That is good to know.”
“Why’s that?”
“It makes what’s in your mind that much more valuable. Doesn’t it, young man? The Jarl will be pleased. Very pleased indeed.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. Jarl Tuddon was the most psychotic of all the Mayir. Naturally he was their supreme leader.
“To answer your question, we have had some limited success with NAT. Of course, none of our subjects have survived the procedure. But who knows? Maybe you shall be the first, Mr. Beck.”
“How about you let me out of here and I tell you anything you want to know?”
Tarsch barked out another laugh. “Since you have some familiarity with NAT, you will know that one of the great advantages of the resultant array stub is that we remove the friction in the communication process.”
“Friction?”
He moved a headset harness down so that the electrodes rested on my temples. “When you say that you will tell me anything I wish to know, that is friction. Friction of autonomous thought.” He flipped a large switch on the control console and the machine surrounding me hummed to life. “No one likes friction.”
This situation was getting worse with each passing second.
“I respect your position, Doctor,” I said. “Can you tell me one thing, though? Does your procedure account for unconscious knowledge? Because most of what I know about, well, most everything, has been implanted via automated learning and neurocrene dosing. Truth be told, it was the only way. I’m a lousy student.”
“Nice try, Mr. Beck.” He snapped on a VR rig and looked at me through big bug-eyed, multi-faceted goggles. “We’ll be scooping it all out. Conscious, unconscious, and everything in between. Now if you’ll excuse me.” He pulled on a thick pair of headphones and sat back into a controller’s seat.
I was screwed. Tarsch was going to give me the equivalent of a brain enema. But unlike my dad, I didn’t have any choice in the matter.
13
I pressed against my bonds with all my strength, hoping—against all odds—for a faulty maglock mechanism on one of the cuffs.
No such luck.
But I kept trying.
As the machine spun up, I could feel the reverberation in my body. I wondered what it would be like, having my consciousness cored out of me.
Would I just die? Suddenly?
Or would I go insane?
I looked over at the doctor. His hands traced patterns in the air. Precision settings via VR. Too fine for a datapad, I guessed.
I pushed again, scraping the skin on my wrists.
This couldn’t be the way I died.
It couldn’t.
A pounding welled up in my temples and I could feel a trickle of sweat run down the side of my head.
I blinked, trying to focus my eyes, but a red cloud obscured my vision.
Something was happening to me.
I fought against it, but my stomach careened and I felt like I might be sick.
A rushing sound filled my ears as I imagined my mind draining out of my skull into the electrodes and then into the machine that was sucking the life from me.
My chest convulsed
