Free The Orion Plague by David VanDyke

moot.
    There was a high thin window, too small for
anyone but a child to get through even if the meshed glass was
somehow removed. He stood on the chair to look, seeing familiar
pastureland and trees. I’m still in the same place, he
thought with something like relief.
    Searching his door, he could find no way to
open it, so he took to examining himself. There must have been some
reason for his ordeal, the things they had put him through. He
blushed with shame at what he remembered, and he felt an unwelcome
stirring of desire. Forcing his thoughts away from Shari I want
you he stripped off his clothing and turned the cold water in
the shower up to full.
    Shivering under the icy blast, he felt his
heart race and his blood pound. Like a sonar ping, this pulsing
sensation revealed things amiss in his own body. Reaching with his
senses, he stepped dripping from the shower and stood in front of
the mirror – a glass mirror this time – and looked at his own
face.
    One patch of oddness was in his right eye. He
leaned in closer, probing at it with a fingertip. His Eden vision
allowed him to move in closer and closer, focusing at a range of
just inches, even to the point of seeing the end of his own nose in
sharp clarity. More interestingly, he could see something within
his right eyeball, a hexagonal matrix that hung behind his cornea
like the wire mesh within his cell’s window.
    Some kind of camera, or sensor, he
surmised. That’s how they knew what I was doing. They did it
that first night when I smelled the pine scent of the gas. But what
else did they do?
    Another oddity resided in his chest cavity.
He located the thinnest of scars, something that would soon go away
as all scars did in Edens, but it proved they had done something
there. He had no idea what, but his guesses included tracking
devices or transmitters, deadman charges, even a bomb big enough to
turn him into a suicide weapon.
    His left wrist pulsed also, and he felt a
kind of nodule barely beneath the paper-thin skin over his tendons
and nerves there. Digging at it hard bloodlessly popped the living
sheath of his epidermis, and revealed a fine retractable line with
a universal plug on it.
    What happens when I plug that in, he
wondered. More from speculation than feeling, he ran his hands over
his head and was surprised to find week-old stubble. His head had
been shaved, he faintly remembered, and assuming it was done only
once, now he had a general idea of how long he had been under
Shari’s care.
    More importantly, he found traces of scarring
there, too. He could see them in the mirror. They had performed
surgery on his skull. What had they put in there? A hard drive?
There was no reason for it to be in his head. It could just as
easily be in his chest. What needs connecting to the
brain?
    Suddenly he knew. Pain and pleasure. Direct
neural stimulation. Why hurt the body when you can go direct to the
seats of reward and punishment, the brain itself? That’s what they
did – push a button and he was immediately in hell or heaven:
instant fire or orgasm or seizure or opiate dreams.
    Even then he felt the lure of the rewards,
the fear of the punishments. Academically he knew he might someday
be rescued, but part of him didn’t even want it. Part of him just
wanted to go find Shari and bow before her and plead with her for
more, and more, and more.
    The other part was horrified and sickened at
this very weakness and at the fear and nausea, terrified of the
pain when he tried to disobey and contemplated rebellion. Even now
his stomach cramped and his head filled with a low humming, and
fire began to run through his body, recalling his first treatment
in the Burn Room.
    They altered me, rewired me, he
realized. I’m a cyborg now, with bionic implants and nerves I
can’t shut off, that force me to feel everything they want me to
feel. But why? What do they want me to do?
    Shoving the wire back into his wrist he
watched the skin scab over and heal within minutes.