Day Twenty-Nine
The end is so close, and it tastes so sweet. Tomorrow this novel ends, and I start showing it off. Thanks for reading, you crazy readers. Let’s keep the fake support going as I cross my own personal finish line tomorrow, and I hope you all had a happy November!
Word Count: 74,039
Boarding was beginning. If they didn’t gather their things quickly, they would miss the flight.
The plane was cramped, but welcoming. Walters fell asleep for the entire flight, for the few hours he could squeeze in to get a decent sleep.
Walters groaned, not wishing to open his eyes. Where was he? He was somewhere bright and familiar, but his eyes would still not open to view the place. It was not the airplane. He had long ago gotten off the airplane. For some reason this fact eluded him; he did not remember getting off the plane, or getting into a bed, where, by feeling, he could tell was where he was. It felt like the bed inside his apartment. He forced his eyes to open: it was.
It had been a dreamless sleep with no end to it. He had not eaten dinner on the plane, nor as far as he could remember woken up at all after getting on it. He could not refrain from asking himself if he had gotten on any plane at all or simply been driven back to his apartment, brought to his room and put to bed as if still a child. His memory seemed to be constantly failing him and nobody else. He looked outside through the bright window that had awoken him. Carpenter was nowhere in sight outside, but her car was parked nearby. She was not in the apartment, but Walters felt that she was somewhere close.
His wife was still not in the apartment. Walters began to worry for her, but not for too long. It felt peaceful with her yet again gone. He lavished in the feeling of freedom, of being young – at least in form – and being single for a moment. It was as though he’d never gotten married, never done anything with his life but start it over again. The fresh start excited him, and he vigorously ate breakfast, not encountering any headaches from the milk, or any headaches throughout the day. Eventually, though, he grew to miss his wife, even if he had only partaken in joy of her missing for a short while. When he came to, it was a miraculous epiphany: He had just scorned his wife, celebrating her being lost. He felt as though he were becoming some maniacal, twisted being categorized by evil.
If nobody was around, then there was nothing for him to do. He had completely forgotten about the lapel pin, even though it was still in his pocket. He had forgotten many things, so many things, and yet did not seem compelled to remember them. It was the strangest thing he had experiences – or not experienced – since the start of his endeavor to cure himself. It was a cleansing, a relieving feeling washing over his body, but part of him still urged to use its last breath to stop it. There was nothing that could be done to stop it. Soon he would be mindless, overtaken by the pin Genome, by itself, by the system and by society as a hole. Humanity had fought and lost.
No, he told himself. There was still hope. He could see Dr. Reedy, he could discuss attempting a shapeshift, attempting anything to even slow it down. He had seen what he very well might become, he had seen the pseudo-Walters. He was unsure if Greg Walters was even his own name anymore, or a name that the pin had given him and his colleagues accepted. For all of his better knowledge he could have been some other person, yet not have the memory.
Oh, but it would have been grand to keep the memories, too! He would have boasted the fact of having been someone else, having survived the ultimate transformation before plummeting off of his spire to Earth, saving himself from crashing and creating only a small crater on the surface. He wanted to see Carpenter, who supposedly still had a hold of the ancient pin Genome. He wanted to tinker with it, to see if it would have any effect. He would record his observations in a journal – if anything should happen, he would surely know and take immediate action! Yes, this must have been the solution. There was nothing else to try!
Outside was not familiar to him. He only knew what was familiar. The pedestrian road was familiar. The NSGR was familiar. Carpenter’s shop, still the busiest on the road, was incredibly familiar for some odd and unknown reason. And there still lingered an immense connection to Carpenter that he could not figure out, something that she might know that he didn’t, or a force that mysteriously linked the two. It was a weak force, but it existed. After all this time thinking he could still not determine what it was, what had happened between them to create such a connection. It was even more lost now than it had been before – or perhaps it had always been this lost, he could not quite recall – and his heart yearned for him to revive the memory, to call it back and explain everything that was going in perfect sense and four-part harmony.
He paced along the pedestrian road, noticing the alarming amount of inhabitants for this early in the morning. He did not know how long he had been asleep for, but he was confident that it had only been that one night, and not a fictitious ten thousand years. The shops still stood, and the calendar on his watch read that it was indeed tomorrow, or today as it were presently. The only thing to do was to find Carpenter, to ask what had happened, whether he had passed out before getting off the plane or otherwise.
Carpenter was not in her store, which was still open this early in the morning. He did not know where she lived, either. She had always come to his apartment, never the other way around. He had no way of finding her.
He paused. He did have a way of finding her.
Jenna had once used the phone to call her up. Somehow she had retrieved her phone number. It was either written down or in the call history of their phone. Somewhere in his apartment was located a link to Carpenter, a method to finally fix everything. His hopes that had fallen since yesterday rose – even if he couldn’t fix his physical condition, which by now he was thoroughly used to and even enjoying, to a point, perhaps he could fix his Alzheimer’s-like affliction.
He rushed back to his apartment in record time to look at the call logs in the phone. Buying a phone with a large screen had proved useful for once in his life. he could not tell any number from another, however, making them all useless. He checked the caller ID, in hopes that Carpenter had called once.
Luckily, she had. He looked at the date - it was from last night. He couldn’t remember ever talking to her last night – all he remembered was sleeping and more sleeping after that, his deep, dreamless and ultimately satisfyingly refreshing sleep.
He picked up the phone and pressed the call button. The phone automatically dialed Carpenter’s supposed number. However, after several rings, nobody picked up the phone. Walters was curious as to whether or not this was truly Carpenter’s house, but the answering machine answered all of his questions – there was Katrina’s delicate voice, clearly instructing that she was not home. He tried again after half an hour. Nothing. He wanted to try again another time, but there was never an answer, never any hint of her being around.
His other option was to see Dr. Reedy and inquire about any last-minute operations that could be done to slow it down, any sort of prescribed medication he could take, but he did not want to be caught in the Twilight Zone halls of the Hospiten yet again. The place was menacing, ready to chew him up and spit him out. Although he had made one friend (two, counting the janitor at MARS), he could still not trust the entire building to treat him with respect much less for the place to be cleaner and more hospitable as a whole. It was still the most chilling building he knew of in the city, regardless of whether he supported shapeshifting or not.
It was therefore his consent to do nothing but wait and live. He would go to work and perform his usual tasks. They had all by now gotten used to his transformation. He had been one of the few workers who did not come into work looking different every once in a while, but because his shapeshift had taken place slowly they all knew who had changed. Ordinarily one would need documents to prove that they were the people they claimed to be, for once one shapeshifted their appetence was seamless, leaving no trace of their previous form, and their voice was different, leaving no resemblance to their original voice. Everything except their personality and memories were left intact, and these were all untrustworthy. Anyone could mimic a personality or have heard a story of someone’s memories. They could not be used to identify a person.
But they had all watched Walters transform, curious as to why he reacted so slowly to the procedure, all thinking he had done it the same way that everybody used to do it – in the hospital. If it had truly taken as long as it did by normal means, they would have had kept Walters in the hospital for further study, but this was not the case. He was freely roaming the Earth, the NSGR; a walking defect that nobody could understand.
His tasks set forth that day were not many, yet Walters did not know why. He had ceased receiving glances from co-workers, from getting attention in general. It was as though nobody had noticed him enter the building, nor cared enough to give him a good work day’s worth of error analysis. It was a shame that, on this particular day, he felt ready to work on the genetics of shapeshifting. He was fully prepared and excited to cure someone. It was only by a strange twist of fate, guided by Murphy and his absolutes, that today was the most mundane and workless day he’d faced during the course of his job.
One case was a woman who had complained about deformed breasts. One was larger than the other. Walters chuckled at this, but knew that it wasn’t a real problem. To correct it, one only had to get a second shapeshifting, which was usually free of charge if the person had done it in a hospital, and certainly free of charge if they owned an ATC. ATC’s that could shapeshift entire bodies were now being sold to rich folk who could afford them. Hospitals saved money on these ATC’s, which spread the use of shapeshifting even further across the nation. There were more recent plans to ship worldwide in the coming months.
The world had seen shapeshifting, and the world loved shapeshifting. It was beginning to prevail more in foreign countries, giving way to foreign adaptations of the GSS and its subsidiaries. It was all over the news that day – the birth of a new era, a reform in the world’s culture. It was said numerous times that “the age of computers was leaving us for the age of ambiguity.” Reporters knew not what to call the age for shapeshifting. I various cases it was not a compliment – mostly conservative news stations referred to it as an age of ambiguity. Other stations called it the age of promise, the age of ability, the eternal age, the New Enlightenment, and the less intelligent simply the age of shapeshifting.
Walters was still working on that same case, dragging it on and on, preventing his own work – possibly losing pay as well – when the loudspeaker boomed through the hallways.
“WALTERS, GREGORY, PLEASE REPORT TO THE LOBBY. WALTERS, GREGORY, PLEASE REPORT TO THE LOBBY.”
Walters was relieved to put down his work on the incredibly mundane case to go downstairs. He rested his equipment down in a position that would surely not cause any damage and left, walking carefully yet eagerly down the halls, wondering what awaited him in the lobby of such a large building. He pressed the elevator button, calling it up to him, and waited. Seconds passed before it arrived, opening its doors for him to step in, and welcoming him into its world.
For the first time he felt imprisoned in this elevator, cursing it for not letting him see outside into the lobby that it would soon land on. A bump; then silence. The elevator had stopped. There was a chime, and the door opened as gently as it had before.
The lobby was filled with light and life. If the Hospiten had glass walls that let the sun shine through, it was nothing compared to the sunlight in the lobby on that day, just before he went to the front desk to see what was calling for him. There were no windows, but the room was drowned in sunlight. It came from everywhere; it permeated the walls, penetrated the ceiling, and ripped clean through the existing small windows.
He was told to go outside. There was a visitor for him that could not come inside.
He stepped through the doors. Immediately he was seized by law enforcement in deep blue uniform, with the GSS crest on their chest displaying itself proudly. They grasped his arms, cuffed them behind him, and put him in a car. This car was not a police car, nor was it an ambulance, nor was it anything that resembled any sort of official vehicle of an organization. Instead, it was just a car, a navy blue, almost black car that sped down the road at lightning fast speed, taking Walters away to some mysterious and unknown place…
* * * * * * *
He was unsure of where he was again. He had been taken by force, but must have been knocked unconscious after being shoved in the vehicle. It was a small building, but more than likely larger than he thought. Originally he had found himself in a jail-like cell, painted white, with no windows. It was like his own laboratory in the NSGR, but empty of equipment, empty of life. He did not know why he had been taken, just that he had been taken. He had committed a felony, had done something inherently wrong to disturb the system. They reserved the right to hold him in custody; the GSS controlled everything. If they wanted to hold him captive, they could without any question from the authorities. They could even do it without the authorities knowing, as they had with Walters.
They allowed him to walk the halls in the middle of the day. He had been held captive for several days, a hostage of sorts, not having interacted with any people for the duration of the days. Everything around him was whiteness – the hallways, the rooms which he could not enter, and the rooms which he could. He could very well have been walking in a straight line or in a circle, but the whiteness of everything stretched far beyond the walls, vanishing at infinity. He felt as though he could walk through the walls, into an empty space of whiteness and emptiness, escaping from his prison.
He could fight the imprisonment, but something inside him understood why he had been brought here. He was an outcast, a trouble-maker. He was conservative, and he possessed something liberal. He had the lapel Genome. It was an object so mysterious that the GSS must want their hands on it, or their hands back on it, considering it was initially theirs.
For a prison, he was kept very well. They tended to him in every way possible, not, of course, treating him royally, but with enough care as to keep him comfortably alive and feeling well. The intent must have been to stop him from getting too angry about his predicament, because the only thing Walters could consider worse than having shapeshifted after an entire life of abstinence from the deed was being held as a prisoner for no apparent reason. They must give him a reason to stay here, or when they could not do that, they must give him a reason to stay calm until their business was done.
He could have been a test subject as well. His reactions to the pin could have been recorded. Was it intentionally given to him? Had the GSS been watching him so closely, and how? Everything he had done up until this very point could very well be in the hands of the GSS as he sat and thought. Thinking was his only reserve in this prison, in this building where he did not know where he was or where he would be going. He could have been across the state or across the country, but it did not matter. He was not escaping. He had no plans to escape – he saw the guards, the same relentless and irrational security guards that the Hospiten had. It was in their eyes, a fiery menace that would club any innocent bystander just because they looked funny. Walters was a potential suspect for some crime, then he must have been twice as likely to stir up anger in these guards, all of whom where bulky big-muscled men just itching to use their power on something.
He daren’t cross them. He obeyed every word, even if at least half of his body and mind disagreed with what was going on. The other half was still contemplating, leaning towards the awful acceptance the other majority half of his mind feared so much.
Lunch each day was comparable visibly to the food he’d seen a patient eating at the Hospiten, plastic wrapped and mass-produced, but in reality tasted far better than anything he had been eating in the last few weeks. Whatever they were serving, he hoped they would continue it, because it certainly aided them in accomplishing their goal of keeping him there. They had done nothing to harm him yet. As the days passed by, Walters wondered how long that would last, what this place’s policy on torture was. If it was the GSS, then they could probably set their own standards for beating prisoners without much outrage from the public. Then again, the public probably didn’t know about any of it.
There were no mirrors for him to see himself, not even in the small, white restrooms. His reflection would not show in a pool of water, and there was no way of plugging a drain to build up enough water to make a reflection visible. Throughout the days he was never able to see himself, never able to look at his unchanging face, continually losing confidence in his appearance. His appearance was most crucial as well, because that was, presumably, why he was here now.
It was not long before he found out where he was. He was, as far as he could see, the only person being held in the building. At night, however, he heard feet moving in the distance, not the trampling, heavy feet of the night security guarding his cell beyond the thick, windowless door, but the feet of a normal person just beyond the walls of the rooms. They were always so close by, yet completely unreachable. He was in a ward o the building that nobody knew about. Either nobody knew about it, or it was prohibited to enter. In a worst case scenario, he had imagined it all, and there were no feet scrambling outside of his cell.
He had no way of proving any of these. He huddled up each night in his cot, scratching the wall with his elongated fingernails, listening intently for a sign of life beyond the security guards. It was hard to imagine that there were wards emptier than those of the Hospiten and more difficult to follow than the Hospiten. There was an inherent coldness throughout the halls, a menacing force lurking behind any given person at all times, like a man with a gun, stalking them intently, just about to pull the trigger on a life-freeing bullet.
Yet there was an aspect of this place that glittered and shone brilliantly. There was a part of Walters that accepted it as a holy place, a place that he should be thankful for, and thankful for its existence as a whole. Without it he would not exist, and without him so would not it. Such a symbiotic relationship could not be broken. It was a type of connection that he felt he shared with Carpenter. He thought about Carpenter. Where was she right now? She could possibly be missing him, looking for him, wondering why he had called her home that day of his capture.
It was, at the time, unknown whether she knew of Walters’s capture or not. It did not matter. As long as he was here, imprisoned from society, from the world, none of his contacts made any difference. He could have mourned them, he could have cursed to the walls and to the guards, who may very well had beat him for it, but chose not to. He chose not to because there was nothing to grieve for. If this was a temporary state, he would see everyone again. He might even see everyone here. If he was captured, it was only a matter of time until they took Carpenter, Reedy, Jenna. The clock had already seen enough ticks for there to ample time to capture every last one of them. They could very well be scattered about the premises, unknown to him.
He would not focus his thoughts on them; he refused to do so. He kept picking at the wall, every morning and every night. He had more trouble sleeping; the cot seemed to have brought back his headaches, though they sometimes appeared even when he was not resting on his cot, or nearby the cot, or nearby his cell in general. He held his head in earnest of his situation, looking for a dark space when it was not night. There were windows, but they were small, about the same size as the windows present in MARS and the NSGR. It gave him another clue as to where he might be, but he couldn’t be sure. He was in some sort of station, some station large enough to have a forbidden ward, or a station small enough to be its own forbidden ward entirely, without any actual research materials or rooms inside, but a GSS-run penitentiary.
As the days wore on his escapes from the cell were less and less. The guards were more often in front of it, as though expecting something of him to let him out. His headaches had increased at least tenfold. He had grown quite a beard as well without having been able to shave for what must have been about two weeks. Every day was so monotonous and repetitive that he had lost count. He got up, was given breakfast in his cell, was then given free time to roam the halls for a bathroom break or just for some “fresh” air, then was guided back to the cell until he fell asleep early, only to wake up early and repeat the process again. But there was less free time, and less to do. And in his pain, he couldn’t do much.
He desperately tried to keep a hold on his sanity. It was slipping – a second force inside his body was pulling it away, capturing his sanity had the GSS had captured him. He had been given no word as to the whereabouts of his wife and friends, or been relayed any information about the outside world at all. He was starved of this information deliberately. The GSS did not want him knowing about their more recent developments, as though he were a constant in their grand scheme, an unchanging variable in their experiment to prove a grand hypothesis, though nobody knew what that hypothesis was or what it would say when its knowledge was spread worldwide.
If he knew their developments, their ideas, he would become inconstant, changing. He would get his own ideas about this technology, and try to develop something from it. He was a geneticist, after all – he could manipulate their blueprints, their raw ideas, into something useful, perhaps something that could revert the doings of the lapel pin Genome. It was worth anything to get his hands on, and yet he could not under any circumstances. He feared the guards, so he did not ask them. He feared the higher ups, so he did not try to contact them. He feared everyone above him, and everyone in this building was in such a state. Even the janitors seemed to be above him in pride, though he’d only seen a janitor cleaning the halls once.
It was actually nice to see a familiar face. At least, he thought it was. It looked like the janitor that had worked at MARS. Perhaps this was where he’d gone to, but Walters was never able to figure this out. It was the first and only time he saw any person other than the guards, save one higher up.
The higher up had been patrolling the halls, presumably checking on the prisoners, if there were any besides Walters. Walters doubted that there were, he being presumably the only person with a recent lapel pin Genome, or the only person with one at all in all of the world. On one hand, he felt special, having such a rare and prestigious object, but the other side of the argument made him feel absolutely terrified, because it was something that didn’t belong to him. A thief had been the one to drop it, an ambiguous figure that he was now not even sure existed, yet was completely sure of its existence. It could very well have been stolen technology, but the fate of him picking it up – he could not deny this. It was a feeling inside that told him he would have received this pin no matter who had dropped it. Perhaps God had dropped it from the sky for him. Perhaps the Flying Spaghetti Monster created it and gave it to the thief, then informed the GSS. It did not matter. He would have gotten his hands on this pin someway, somehow. It was inevitable. He reached into his pocket and felt the inevitability in its physical form.
He was moved to another cell of unknown distance from his old one. He knew not where in the building he was. They went up and down floors, either or, but it was hard to tell which. Things did not move up or down in this building, they merely moved. Where they moved was irrelevant; everything looked the same. Every floor was the same. Walters could have very well been put on the same floor as he’d began, but likely not; however, he could not tell the difference. The chilling white that burned the two corners of his head like the lit end of a cigarette constantly annoyed him, but while it was day every light in the building was lit. The lights were intense and unforgiving, reserving their malice for Walters and him only. Nobody else seemed affected by the lights. He noticed, however, that some security guards wore sunglasses.
When he questioned one of them about this, the first time he had directly addressed a security guard in the building, they would not answer. They told him to keep quiet and to keep moving. Those were the two things that, they said, he must keep doing at all times when being transported. The guard said no more after this.
He was placed in a new cell, exactly like the old one, but slightly smaller, and slightly less white. The walls were made of a painted stone instead of concrete and brick like the previous cell. He ran his finger through the large grooves in the wall where it had been tougher to paint. An odd question about how many cans of paint it must have taken to paint the entire penitentiary white ran through his mind, remaining unanswered. Because he did not know how big the building was, or where he was in the building, there was no way of knowing how many cans of paint it would take, even if, mathematically, he could figure it out. It might have been an effective way to pass the time. If he had a writing utensil, he would have written on the walls an equation and solved, just to pass the time. It was the most mundane action, and yet it was quickly becoming the most interesting and consuming thought.
It was still unknown what they were about to do to him, but it was becoming ever apparent that some sort of date was being set down for him to be spoken with, or to be released, or for something significant to happen. He would be forced to wait out the days until then, not knowing whether the date was a day from that point or a year. It still did not matter when it was. As long as he was there, he was safe. He was invincible inside this building; it was as if he were in his own home. The rooms were familiar, but the scent was not of his home, nor the outside appearance.
A chorus sang doom in the back of his mind. He was losing his inner battle; the outside forces had begun to claw his back, his front, his eyes and feet – every part of his body was ripped to shreds by this nameless force. He broke down, still fighting it, clutching his head and all of its pain in attempt to keep it inside. It was no simple task. By the end he was on the floor in a half-fetal position, tucking his head inside his body and grasping it for dear life, calling out to the nameless figure to make the pain stop. There was no medication for it, no aid that could be given to him. The fact that he knew this only made his pains seem all the worse. The fact that he’d also thought the headaches had subsided long ago lowered his self esteem and trust in himself. That seemed to be another goal of this prison – to break down one’s spirit, but not by means of torture or bad treatment.
It was just the opposite.
They kept him well fed, clothed, always in a large room that was climate controlled so as to be warm. If the place wasn’t so strikingly kept white and did not have the feel of a prison, he might have thought he’d been placed in a nursing home or something to that effect, albeit a very strange nursing home devoid of any members but Walters himself.
He was being transferred again, but this time to a much larger cell. He knew now that this one was going down below the ground, which meant that the building had numerous floors above and below ground to go to, making it a normal-sized GSS Station building. The elevator door opened, revealing a pathway that was no longer starch white, but a dirty, constant off-white. There was rust on areas made with metal, as though it were an incredibly old ward or had numerous unfixed leaks, all which made Walters wary of the quality of what he was about to experience.
He was led through an odd and quiet path until the hallway burst open into a large, rectangular room. An oddly shaped pentagonal cell, its large base against the cinder-block wall, jutted out and revealed its barred walls. There were only a few dim lights to show him that there were two other people inside the cell.
All of Walters’s concerns about quality confirmed when he was put in this larger cell. He was able to catch his first glimpse of people beside himself in the prison - every last one of them was a surprise. As much as he’d thought about their appearance, he had only been able to imagine it, thinking it purely fiction that one of them should end up here. But there they were – Reedy was in the cell, struggling to stay sitting up in the corner. He looked incomplete without his hubris, which seemed brought only by the white doctor’s coat he had worn. Now he was just normal Marcus Reedy, a desperate man in a prison cell. Reedy looked at Walters.
“You did this, old man?” were the first words out of his mouth, breathy and weak. It sounded as though he could barely speak. Every word was of dire importance – we would not speak them if they did not mean the world to him. “If I get out of here…” he began, “…screw it. You ain’t worth the time. I may as well die a martyr.” Even his style of talking had changed, reduced to slang and contractions instead of unabbreviated terms, to save his breath on someone he now had lost all care for.
There was yet another figure in the cell, whose presence startled Walters. It was not Jenna, nor was it Carpenter, but it was the character whom he had most recently met – the pseudo-Walters. He sat there in total confidence, looking exactly as Walters had, with the same beard and long fingernails, and fed yet starved looking physique. He now had the only mirror in the building, the clone of himself. The person who, despite all odds, had become another person and subsequently became the object of Walters’s scorn was now the most helpful and reassuring thing he had seen since being captured. He did not know how long it had now been – perhaps a month, even two. It still did not matter.
There was another character appearing that Walters had not counted on, because he had not seen her already. Out of the dirt in the wall came the one person he had been thinking about the most during his time alone. Outside of all of the cells, working alongside the GSS, was Katrina Carpenter.
She was clad in a new uniform that displayed her loyalty to her connections. Higher ups took their jobs so seriously that they worshiped the GSS as though it were a country to be patriotic for. It was clear what Carpenter was. She was not a traitor, but she had been a higher up. If she hadn’t been a higher up, she was now one, but like time, the past was irrelevant as long as he was in this prison. He wanted to hear good news; that she had followed him in here, stalked him and was going to set him free. He wanted to hear that she had figured it all out and there was time left to save him and his body, as well as his faltering memory.
He heard not one word of reassurance from her. Instead, her looks remained stern. The deep blue uniform she wore with the GSS insignia on it stood out and made a point. She had to protect her job, no matter who was being held prisoner for it. She looked at Reedy, and then at Walters – both of them. She knew not which one was the true Walters, but after careful examination picked out the correct one. Then she walked away.
Why she had left was unknown, but she would, presumably, be back. She might be back with a weapon to interrogate Walters. She might be back with the key to free him and Reedy. He expected that she couldn’t bring herself to physically hurt him, but had also learned during his life never to underestimate the depths of humanity, and how blurred the line had more recently been. Humanity was a shallow puddle in its present state; currently being both jumped upon by eager children and dried up by the harsh sun.
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