SELECT * FROM Shane

Welcome to Volume Two of The Tube, in which Shane will learn considerably more about the strange city in which he finds himself, and might even see a glimpse of the opportunity foretold by Doctor Wattle…

THE TUBE

Concept by Michael Winters and Shane W Smith
Written by Shane W Smith

Recap of Volume One

Shane has it all. Not only has he won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to his field, but he has a beautiful wife and a growing family. Life is good… except for one thing. The once-attractive and lucrative contract he signed with his employer has been sold during a hostile corporate takeover. The ironclad agreement is about to whisk him away from the family he adores, and the life he loves… and he might never come back.

He takes desperate action to avoid losing everything, in stark violation of the law and of his own moral code. The plan backfires and he wakes up to find himself locked in a tiny apartment in the experimental city they call The Tube… screaming.

After having been subjected to what seems a never-ending onslaught of mental torture, Shane discovers that he has signed a contract to erase his family from his memory for the duration of his contract. Although his captors seem determined to ensure that this undertaking is completed, Shane decides to resist the mind-wipe – no matter the cost – as a life without his family is one he cannot even bear to contemplate…

For a few days, there was a vague routine. At night, they would attempt to steal his most precious memories, and he would resist them vigorously, protecting his family with every ounce of mental strength he possessed. Each morning, despite feeling exhausted and poorly rested, he would dutifully haul himself out of bed and take stock of himself. Most days, the consequences were minor: his mother’s maiden name; a recipe for homemade pizza dough; and probably some other trivialities he could no longer remember ever having known; all memories that fell to the haphazard Motivator as it scorched the brain matter around the target zone.

One day, they tried to introduce a second involuntary sleep cycle to his day, and he fell asleep on the floor at lunchtime. He awoke with blood running from his ears, and after a strictly professional check-up from Doctor Wattle, the second mental assault was not repeated. (The doctor, under careful watch and heavy guard, had made no further attempts at covert communication, either in person or on the hidden phone.)

The revelation that he could come under assault at any time left Shane nervous, and when coupled with his long-term solitude, in time caused him to become wild-eyed and paranoid. Presently, he forgot to shave, forgot to bathe, forgot to change his clothes. Once he even forgot to visit the bathroom; when the urge took him, he just urinated onto the window and laughed as he did so. A small detached part of his mind recognised his mental degeneration for what it was, but intervened not at all, appearing to be perfectly content observing… just so long as his resistance remained steadfast; and so far, it did.

On what would later be revealed to him as Sunday, he left the apartment for the first time, but was flanked by heavily armed guards who bound his hands behind his back. He was led through a narrow corridor to a nearby MRI machine, where he was scanned and dumped back into the apartment without having heard a word from anybody.

That night, the mental assault was particularly brutal, and though he lost nothing of Katherine or Anne that night, he could feel the cracks appearing in his world when he awoke. No longer was the Motivator targeting the periphery of his memory; now he had totally forgotten the face of his college roommate, and all but the first letter of his name: L; he couldn’t recall the colour of his own hair, and was vaguely surprised by his appearance in the en suite mirror when he went to check; and entire years of his life were fast becoming empty gaps to him.

Things were reaching tipping point, and faster than he had hoped. He couldn’t help but wonder if he would be reduced to a drooling vegetable before his opportunity to break free arrived; or if he would even remember the doctor’s words of advice by then; or if he would be so broken that…

…that she wouldn’t want him back.

The morning after this particular , head pounding and exhausted, he hauled himself out of bed and had struggled into his clothes for the day before he even realised that he wasn’t alone in the apartment.

“What do you want?” he asked of the stranger, though in his dazed state, it might not have been quite so clearly enunciated at that.

The woman stepped forward with a charming smile and an outstretched hand. Though her body language was relaxed and friendly, her business suit betrayed her affiliation with the OmniTech executive. Shane shook her hand as if it were a live snake: quickly, and then he dropped it.

“Shane,” she said. “My name is Clarissa. I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to visit you yet, and welcome you to this –” and here she waved her hand towards the window, indicating the great expanse of city that stretched far in every direction “– this grand experiment we call The Tube.”

–Continue to part 17–
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