Thursday, October 1, 2015

Serial Fiction: Part Five

Through the Yellow Doors.  To his team.  Memory was returning now-- the whos, the whats and the whys.
But he had to keep it cordoned off.  They were still in his head: their chips, his chip, his own meat brain.  All of them were trying to make him do different things, and he needed to break each bit into a different part of his psyche.
Shatter himself to save himself.
Through the Yellow Doors.  Three cryo containment units, lined up against the walls, and four goons tending to them.
"How is he up?" one of them said, drawing out a stun gun.
"Won't last," another said, pointing at Drake.
Drake, he thought.  My name is Drake.
"The bed is waiting for you," the goon said. Code phrase.  Their chips lit up in his skull, sending his body the message to doze off, stand peacefully to be led back to his place, so they could start all over again.
The message was sent, but the compulsion didn't come with it.  Drake broke off that part of himself and locked it in the closet of his psyche.  It could come out when it learned how to behave.
But Drake did what their chip wanted.  At least, he let these goons think so.
Hands loosely grabbed his arms, about to lead him off.
Like lightning, he twisted his arms around the backs of the owners of those hands, and before they could react, cracked their heads together.
He grabbed the stun gun off one of them as they dropped, and took down the other two in a heartbeat.
Three containment units.  Three of his people.
First one had Arthur, his loyal back-up for as long as he could remember.
Second one had Crowley, best damn infiltrator he'd ever worked with.
And the third... had Aurora.
But Aurora wasn't real.  She was a figment they had fed him.  But there she was, in the cryo unit, clear as anything.
The units were daisy-chained together, encrypted shut-down sequence.  He could force a unit open, but that would cause the other two to fail.  Saving one of his people meant dooming the other two.

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