Free Mindguard by Andrei Cherascu

of
the Enforcement Unit, the commander’s voice lingered on:
    ‘Mr Kantil is
now your colleague. He is no longer your instructor, and least of all your
friend.’

Chapter 5
     
    Mission objective:
Prevent delivery of information package – completed.
    Mission objective:
Retrieve information package – failed.
    Location: Carthan
(Djago Desert)
    Notes: Carrier Sophie
Gaumont eliminated before information could be retrieved. Elimination carried
out by Field Unit Commander Tamisa Faber, self-defense against physical
aggression.
    Other casualties: Sheldon
Ayers, Mindguard (elimination carried out by Field Unit Commander Tamisa Faber,
self-defense against mental aggression), Maclaine Ross, Bodyguard (elimination
carried out by Field Unit Commander Tamisa Faber, self-defense against physical
aggression)
     
    Final Mission
Report – Mission QWAY:17496 – Field Unit Commander Tamisa Faber
     
    Returning from
his usual evening walk, the doctor found Brother Elias waiting for him in front
of his home. The house was painted entirely white, made from volcanic rock and
partially carved into the mountain, to help protect against the blistering
heat. It was of a simple beauty that the doctor greatly appreciated, for it was
one of the things that made life easier on this godforsaken island, where he
chose to serve his self-imposed life sentence.
    Brother Elias
did not share the simple beauty of the house. The left half of his face
appeared to be melting off - a suitable illusion given the heat - while the
other side was covered in horrible boils, common to victims of Soixtet’s
disease. His left hand had withered into an unusable lump and his right one
looked like it probably wished it too had withered. Instead, part of its skin
had died and fallen off - a spectacle of pain and decay.
    The doctor
remembered how bad Brother Elias had smelled when they had first met.
Afterwards, he met some of the others and realized that all of them smelled
equally bad. Now the stench no longer bothered him. It was part of the
environment, completely undetectable by the brain.
    The entire colony
looked like it was home to corpses that had tragically come back to life. He
wondered if Lazarus had appeared similar, when the Lord Savior woke him from
death. He ultimately decided that he probably hadn’t, otherwise the
compassionate Christ would have taken pity on him and left him to slumber with
the eternally breathless. 
    Unlike the
biblical Lazarus, these men were dead only in appearance. Their bodies were
still very much alive and very much suffering. Soixtet’s disease was so
incredibly violent, that the fact that the doctor hadn’t contacted it in the
two years he had lived on the island was an occurrence he attributed to divine
intervention. He felt nothing but love for these people, especially for Brother
Elias. Love and pity, profound pity.
    “Brother Torje,”
the suffering man called out. The doctor greeted him from afar with a gesture
of the hand. The islanders called each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister’. It was not
because they were siblings, or belonged to any religious order, but because
they had all been sent to this place to die their horrible deaths. This common
fate created a closeness that could be rivaled only by the bond of sharing a
mother’s womb.
    The doctor was
not ill, but he too was destined to die on this island, so he too was to them a
‘brother’. The difference between him and the others was that they had been
shipped to this place against their will, as part of an IFCO program for
disease control, whereas he had come here by his own volition. In time, though
neither dying nor disfigured, he had become one of them.
    That was the
story of why they called him brother. The reason they called him ‘Torje’ was
because he had given them a false name. He had done that for fear of ever being
found out and promptly murdered. Even with the new identity, that fear was ever
present. During his usual evening walk, as he