THE TUBE

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

Using one of The Tube’s many surveillance cameras to monitor the emergency, it took Graham about five seconds to realise the depth of his plight. The emergency itself was a fake; a test to see if Shane’s intuitive grasp on the technology had survived the weeks he had spent in the Motivator.

Almost immediately after the alarms began to clamour, Graham felt his chest tighten with fear. The confusion on Shane’s face was obvious, and the man stood there, rooted to the spot, transfixed with fear. He watched with interest – but no recognition – as Mike called up the schematics on the main console and ordered a vent of one of the cooling towers.

The alarms stopped and Graham watched Shane heave a sigh of relief. There was no such relief in Graham’s lungs, though; in fact, despite having quit many years ago, he found he was itching for a cigarette, desperate to be doing something active, even if it wasn’t so productive.

He knew what he had done. By exhibiting a rare flash of initiative, by continuing the Motivator project long beyond its original scope, he had damaged the subject’s brain irreversibly. If his bosses found out the truth, Graham’s career was over… and maybe more than that, too.

His thoughts were staccato as he paced the room urgently. He bounced back and forward between different courses of action, half-baked plans, and desperate self-serving excuses, but nothing seemed adequate for this situation. If the meeting he’d been called to a few days ago was any indication, this would not stay secret for long, and the ramifications would be of the utmost severity.

Bordering on a full-blown panic, Graham sat back down in the chair, his brain rocketing around madly, scrambling blindly for a solution to the problem. His eyes drifted to the surveillance screen, and he watched as Mike put his arm around Shane’s shoulder and began to whisper to him. That woman from PR stood off to the side, looking a little miffed to be excluded from the conversation. Graham turned the audio up as high as it would go, but soon felt equally miffed: the machinery drowned out their conspiracy entirely.

But as he was watching, a germ of an idea appeared in his mind. He leaned back slowly, and carefully turned it over this way and that, mulling over the possibilities and potentials, the ways in which it could go wrong, and the consequences of success.

In the end, no better ideas had occurred to him, so he decided to go ahead with his plan.

It was clear to Graham that approaching Shane directly was a path fraught with peril. Not only was the man openly hostile to him, unstable and unpredictable, but he was also the subject of considerable scrutiny from a wide range of people. Direct contact could scupper this whole thing before it even started.

But Graham had an alternative. He had seen a lot in the last few minutes; and had learned plenty. The path to Shane led through this Mike fellow. Graham had noticed the signs of a long-term friendship in their greeting… but more importantly, he had seen the flicker of resentment that crossed Mike’s face when he had first seen Shane. He guessed (correctly) that although the two men had a personal connection, there was a little professional animosity, and Mike would probably not be averse to seeing Shane removed from his workplace.

There was no shortage of risk in Graham’s scheme, but he thought he probably had some little time; he could take a few steps to mitigate some of the jeopardy. And he knew just where to begin. For he had noticed something else through the surveillance feed: the furtive and somewhat embarrassed way in which that woman Clarissa kept glancing at Mike…

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THE TUBE

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

Many years ago, Shane and Mike had attempted to recall the circumstances in which they had met. Although they had agreed that while in high school one of them had saved the other from a group of angry adolescent thugs, they argued reasonably good-naturedly over which role had belonged to whom.

In years to come, they would revisit the argument several times, but each time, there was something new under the surface bubbling away, some stored resentment for a minor slight or another. Nothing in and of itself, but when combined, it began to add up.

And when Shane had taken out the Nobel Prize a few years back for work that Mike maintained they both did, the whole thing had boiled right over. The argument had been bitter: Shane insisted that the credit he had given Mike in the acceptance speech was sufficient, and Mike argued that he deserved an equal share in the prize and the prize money.

In the end, it got so ugly that Mike’s marriage dissolved, and he only kept his job thanks to Shane’s intervention. He attracted some bad debts, which Shane had paid off without being asked, but the gesture served only to weaken their friendship further. Shane, utterly intransigent, refused to budge on the Nobel issue. After a great many heated discussions, and a drunken fistfight that landed them both in lockup for the night, they reached an uneasy equilibrium in which they agreed not to discuss the Nobel issue at all. As time went by, they began to patch up their friendship, but both sensed that there was still a time bomb ticking beneath the surface…

But they had made it work. Mike had gone to great lengths to get himself back on track, and had devoted himself to his career.

He had actually been working on some new research when OmniTech had bought out his contract that Shane knew nothing about… and never would. Here in The Tube, he didn’t have a lot of time to work on it, but OmniTech knew it was there, and had indicated that he might have time to devote to the project in the near future.

In the meantime, though, Mike had been tasked with fitting out a generator that could power the whole city in an entirely sustainable way. He knew that OmniTech would have preferred Shane to do the job, and it rankled a little to be their second choice… but at the same time, the opportunity was one that he had no intention of turning down.

The job had taken months, but he had loved every intimidating minute of it.

Every now and again, he would look up at the huge array of cooling towers and energy converters, and think back on the early days, when he and Shane had been kicking around design ideas. Some of those ideas had been scrapped for the smaller devices they had made to date (including the Nobel-winning design), but Mike had needed to avail himself of a few to make the generator’s capacity sufficient to power the entire Tube.

Every now and again, he would wonder where Shane was, or how he had apparently gotten out of his OmniTech contract, and he would be touched by ambivalence. Sometimes, wistful nostalgia won out, and he missed their near-lifelong friendship; other times, he felt profound relief that there was no-one here who could steal his ideas and accomplishments. This huge generator was his own personal triumph, and it would win him the acclaim he so sorely desired, and deserved.

Today, he’d had a moment over breakfast when he had felt the latter.

And now, seeing Shane just standing there, looking around at the room like he owned the place, Mike felt a stab of resentment, convinced that he was about to lose control of the good thing he was on here.

“Shane?” he’d asked, the word coming out with the appropriate level of surprise, masking his anger admirably. His hands gripped to fists in his pockets, though.

Then Shane had turned, and for a moment, Mike thought that Shane didn’t recognise him. In fact, after just that moment’s pause, Mike realised that he could see very little of the friend he remembered in Shane’s face. None of the light, the energy, the focus, almost nothing remained of the man he knew so well… it was almost like someone had scooped him out with a giant spoon before dropping him in here.

“Mike?” The word was tentative, and confirmed Mike’s suspicions in his mind. In an instant, all of the pent-up anger fizzled away to nothing, and he extended a hand for his friend to shake.

Before their palms met, however, alarms began to blare all over the generator room. Another instability. Mike felt a stab of fear, but recalled Shane’s encyclopedic knowledge of the systems, and relaxed a little.

At that moment, he realised just how relieved he was to have his safety net – his friend – back. But at that moment, he looked across at Shane and saw naked panic and total confusion on his face… and Mike’s fear returned tenfold.

–Continue to part 27–

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The publishing schedule might slow down in the next week or so, but it will not stop. The Tube has an ending; I even know what it is. It just might not be coming out daily for a little while. With that in mind, enjoy this slightly longer-than-normal instalment of The Tube.

THE TUBE

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

How long had he been here in The Tube? A fortnight perhaps? It astonished him that it hadn’t been longer; in some ways it felt as if an entire lifetime had passed him by while he had been here; indeed, in a sense, one had.

He had lost himself, he knew that. The Motivator had stripped from him almost every experience that had shaped him into the person he was, leaving him a hollowed-out wreck of a man. Fragments were returning to him, slowly, testament to the brain’s power to protect itself, but everything was hazy, like a dense fog in his mind, and most of it was lost forever.

A great deal of whatever had survived was free of context, fragmented and often nonsensical. There were gaps in his mind that he just couldn’t bridge, couldn’t leap over; his memories were floating marooned in a void, divorced from each other. He was no longer a cohesive whole, but a truly fragmented self, and in many ways a stranger to himself.

Even Katherine, his centre, the sole reason for his steadfast refusal to embrace the madness that bore down upon him from all directions, was beginning to fade a little. Her face, her radiant smile, still shone brightly in his mind, but he could no longer recall her scent, nor could he clearly call to mind the sound of her voice.

Learning that he might never get these memories restored had hurt him, wounding him more deeply than he could have anticipated. Throughout this whole experience, he had at least believed that one day, he could be restored, that there was at least a chance of it. For two nights and a day, he lay on his bed, clenching his jaw until it throbbed with pain, pulsating with hatred for OmniTech and everything it stood for; bitter resentment for everything it had taken from him, and everything it had tried to take.

If the Motivator had clicked on again that night, he would have given up; let it take everything he had. But it didn’t, and by morning he’d gained a little perspective.

His goal remained the same: to find his way home to them. He would need his wits about him if he was going to fool OmniTech for long enough to get that opportunity… and it started today.

He knew who his next visitor would be, and he was ready for her when she arrived, her face a mask of concern.

“How are you feeling this morning, Shane?” she asked.

He forced himself to respond with a cheery tone. “I feel fine.”

“They- they told me the experiment had been successful.”

“That’s what they told me too.”

He knew that he was convincing; yet, her smile wavered noticeably at this last, and she averted her eyes from his. “Do you feel up to finishing that tour of The Tube we started last week?” she asked.

“Of course,” Shane responded with exuberance (though not so much as to appear suspicious). “Lead the way.”

As soon as they were out of the apartment and standing out on the open walkway, safe from surveillance among the noisy bustle of The Tube, she let her guard down. Light rain began to fall around them.

“I know what they did to you,” she said suddenly, still facing away from him. “It’s not right.”

Before Shane could register any kind of surprise or formulate a response, she pressed on. “I don’t want to know whether the experiment actually succeeded. I’m going to tell them that it was; hopefully that will be the end of it. Certainly no one I work for was happy when I told them it was still going.” She ran one stressed hand through her hair, an unconscious indicator of her agitation. “I’m not sure what else I can do for you, other than encourage you to play along for as long as you can manage. They mean serious business here; I’m sure of that now.”

She turned to face him, biting her lip nervously; she lowered her voice to a whisper that he could barely hear over the traffic. “And when you get out… take me with you.”

He had no idea what to say; his jaw flapped ineffectually until she added, “Just think about it. I don’t need an answer from you now. Just know that no matter what else happens, you’re not alone here.”

Touched somewhat, Shane was about to say something, but Clarissa was already walking away. Quickly, too; they were nearly at their destination by the time he caught up to her, almost five minutes later.

They had stopped outside one of the more industrial-looking buildings. Clarissa waved her ID card in front of a scanner and they retreated inside from the rain.

“This is where you’ll be working, Shane,” Clarissa said. “It’s the generator you designed, modified and expanded to generate enough power for the entire Tube. You’ll be running general maintenance for a while, until you get used to things and familiar with the variations; eventually, though, we’ll get you on R&D. Our ultimate goal is to upgrade this device to remove its unpredictability and occasional volatility, and to improve its efficiency beyond its current optimum.”

It was nothing less than he had expected; however, regarding the network of cables and mechanics in front of him, he came to realise just how unfamiliar the generator looked to him. He looked around himself, with absolutely no clue about where to start. With a stab of fear, he wondered what might happen to his family if he ceased to be of any use to OmniTech…

“For the first week or two, you’ll be working under one of our technicians,” Clarissa continued, oblivious to his confusion. “After that, we’ll revisit the working arrangements. Ah, here he is now.”

“Shane?”

The man’s face was unfamiliar to him, but the sound of the man’s voice unconsciously called a name to Shane’s mind.

“Mike?” he said.

–Continue to part 26–

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THE TUBE

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

“I feel okay,” Shane insisted.

Doctor Wattle smiled humourlessly. “Your scans say otherwise,” he said, pacing across the room towards the monitor. He entered a couple of commands into it and turned back towards the boy.

For a moment, the Doctor felt guilty about having enlisted Shane in his schemes, but the feeling passed quickly. The boy needed an ally more than anything, and who better than Wattle to fill that void? The price he asked was minor in comparison to what Shane had endured so far. And besides, Maddie – Maddie! – remained unavenged; and this consideration trumped all others in his mind.

After a bit of a pause, Shane couldn’t hold back. The fear was evident in his voice as he asked, “What do the scans say?” and Doctor Wattle felt a considerable pang of sympathy for him.

Wattle consulted his chart as he answered; he had already memorised its contents, but couldn’t bear to make eye contact with Shane as he rattled off the laundry list of symptoms.

“You already know most of it. The last session with the Motivator was one too many. Your brain’s pathways have deteriorated considerably; at the moment, it just seems to be memory that’s affected, but don’t be surprised if your body stops obeying you so easily in the future.

“You will certainly have difficulty recalling your past. The fact that this morning you couldn’t recall your name, but now can is a good sign. Some of your past might return, if you’re given the opportunity to rest and heal. I cannot say for sure, however; we are pioneers in this world of mind rape.”

The venom with which he had enunciated this last had caused his furious spittle to spot the paper in his hand; he wiped it off absently. What they had done to Shane was reprehensible, abhorrent; and yet nothing lower than he had come to expect from OmniTech… and nothing when compared with what had happened to his Maddie.

“There is actually damage, too,” he said. “Scorched tissue. It will leave scars on your brain; the effect of this is hard to guess. If you’re really lucky, it will be mostly cosmetic, with only minor impairment.

“Some of this damage will be permanent,” Wattle warned. “You might have difficulty retaining new knowledge. You might feel shadows of your past flicker in your mind like déjà vu. Overall, you’ll probably never be as quick-minded as you were in your Nobel-winning days.

“You’ll almost certainly end up with some form of dementia… and probably not especially late in life, either. Probably some sort of neurological degeneration too.”

“And what about restoring my memory?” Shane asked, already knowing the answer. “It was in the contract they showed me.”

“We don’t have that technology,” Wattle said flatly, his voice tinged with sadness. “We have no way of retrieving what the Motivator has stripped from you, especially given its haphazard response to your resistance, and even if we had, to my knowledge, we don’t have the capacity to heal or restore the physical damage done to you.

“Even if there was some way of – for want of a better word – injecting your memories back into your mind, they would probably just leak out again, like water through a sieve. Your brain is no longer equipped to store them – and that might never change.”

“So they lied to me,” Shane said.

“You’re surprised?”

“No. Just… just exhausted.”

Then he heaved a big sigh.

“I brought this on myself,” Shane said morosely. “I remember sitting there in my kitchen, turning the empty tube around and around in my hands. It’s one of the few truly vivid memories I still have. The tube I filled with my blood and turned over to OmniTech… I did it voluntarily. I asked for this.”

In Shane’s despair, Wattle could hear fragments of Maddie, and his heart twinged with pain. Again, he wondered whether using the boy was the best thing, but there was no other way that he could see… and it was Shane’s only chance at freedom besides.

“You didn’t ask for this,” Wattle said. “What they’ve taken from you – no one would ask for it.”

He made a couple of notes on his chart. “I think I can sell this,” he said. “If you are willing to keep up the charade.”

“No more Motivator?” Shane asked.

“As long as you can pretend that the experiment was successful.”

“I can do that.”

Wattle nodded to himself. “I’m going to put you down for one more day’s rest, and then they’ll put you to work.”

Now he looked up and peered at Shane through his glasses. “Remember: once you get out and about, keep your eyes open. They’re clearly not watching you as closely as I thought. Your opportunity might come sooner than we thought.”

In fact, he would see to it.

–Continue to part 25–
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THE TUBE

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

It was possible that if her superiors had recognised the level of discontentment in Shane, they never would have assigned him to as junior an official as Clarissa. The man seemed to hate The Tube and resent OmniTech; Clarissa had been thrown off-balance by that realisation. How could anybody hate what was going on here? An experiment in self-sufficiency, for the benefit of mankind; and with comfortable conditions for its volunteers, no less.

His intransigence and unwillingness to co-operate with her had been surprising, but rather than take it as a personal affront, Clarissa had been intrigued by the challenge he represented to her: a chance to flex her average PR skills.

On orders from her supervisors, she had taken possession of the small phone he had illegally hidden in his apartment; Clarissa did not understand why the phone was illegal (she herself had three), but it was not her place to question orders… not if she wanted to get ahead, and make her parents really proud of her.

And yet, as the days wore on, Shane had not warmed to the idea of living in The Tube at all; instead, he had worked some sort of magic on her, spinning a story that seemed so ridiculous on its face that she had initially concluded that he was insane, that the experimentation he had signed on for must have something to do with treating mental illness. The notion that The Tube had armed guards was just as ridiculous as his assertions that his brain was on fire, both of which he attempted to convince her of.

But she had slowly come to believe his story; he told it with such conviction and seemed otherwise so perfectly lucid, that she took it upon herself to investigate further. Not wanting to advertise her confusion, she had sought out social drinks with a couple of lower-level technicians working on the Motivator project. She even went to bed with one of them; not a big sacrifice, although probably not an action her parents would have approved of.

She didn’t know Shane’s importance to The Tube, though it had been hinted at before. But some moral imperative that had remained dormant her entire life, something Clarissa had never had to call upon before, kicked into action and she began to wish better circumstances for this man, who by all appearances, was being held against his will in The Tube. When she told her supervisor some of what she had heard about the ongoing experiment with the Motivator, the woman had snapped into action quicker than anything Clarissa had ever seen before.

Through the walls in the ensuing hours, Clarissa had caught snippets of phone conversation, including the phrase “The experiment was supposed to be complete weeks ago!”

That afternoon, she had been pulled from her duties with Shane, and for a day or two, had assumed she was in trouble. She spent the nights with a sick, twisted-stomach feeling, certain that she had let her parents down, that she had messed up, again.

After two days with nothing to do, no duties to perform, Clarissa was beginning to feel like her old, average self again, when an expensive bottle of something bubbly was delivered to her desk. The handwritten card said, “YOU HAVE SAVED THE TUBE. THANK YOU.” Clarissa had wept with relief, and was directed to return to her duties the following morning, bearing the welcome news that the Motivator experiment was over for good, and that Shane could begin to settle in without fear of further assault.

When she arrived at Shane’s apartment and found him trembling on the bed, his ears and nose leaking blood, insensible and incoherent, she realised that this wasn’t over. The problem wasn’t solved: it had just been covered over.

OmniTech was up to something, and in a flash, it had become clear to Clarissa that she needed to investigate further, to find out what they were doing to Shane, and what they had planned that had made this all necessary.

Unsure of what she could do for him, she pulled out her own phone and dialed a medical emergency.

Then, while waiting for EMT to show, she withdrew the phone that had been confiscated from this very apartment what seemed like a lifetime ago, and carefully taped it back onto the side of the basin in the en suite.

–Continue to part 24–

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THE TUBE

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

Fresh from university, Clarissa had begun her career just a few years ago in public relations. She’d accepted the first job offer made to her without vetting her employer too closely, grateful simply to have found employment. Her parents had sacrificed a lot to get Clarissa a tertiary education, and every day spent unemployed felt to her like she was betraying their expectations of her. Of course, her mum and dad were far too kindly to think like that, and although she knew that she was projecting a demanding nature upon them where none existed, she continued to strive for achievement, for distinction.

In some ways it was a shame she had such lofty ambitions for herself (though in some ways it was inevitable), because Clarissa was a thoroughly average person.

In terms of her grades, she had remained fixedly in the middle of her class and had graduated high school, college and university with marks that barely deviated from the mean. So completely had she faded into the scenery that it had not been unusual for her teachers to forget her name, even two-thirds of the way into the school year.

In terms of her looks, she had certainly never attracted the attention that her friends had, but she had spent more time with a boyfriend than without while at university. Not the best guys, to be sure – and certainly no one worth pining over now, years later – but she felt like she’d done all right.

And in terms of personality, she had been average: not exciting and not dull. She had chosen PR as her major in order to learn how to project and advertise a better version of whatever she was promoting, and by extension, a better version of herself. Once she had learned the value of a winning smile, and the power of a confident act, she had become able to pretend and broadcast a better-than-average Clarissa to the world. To her, it felt empowering.

She had dyed her mousey-brown hair and straightened her imperfect teeth, donned an expensive suit that showed just the right amount of leg, and had landed a PR job with a small firm very quickly. If she had done a little more homework, she might have learned that the company was in the middle of a receivership when she had been hired (against a hiring freeze), and that after just two weeks in her new role, she would find herself working for the biggest corporation that had ever existed: OmniTech.

(Had she known this, she would have gone ahead with it anyway: a company as large as OmniTech could post her anywhere in the world, and an overseas position would show her parents just how far she had come. To her, the reputation that OmniTech had acquired for itself represented a PR challenge more than it did a moral quandary.)

Regardless, she’d taken the acquisition in her stride, signed herself over to OmniTech, allowed her projection of confidence to shine through, and had been promoted rapidly to a junior executive position in The Tube, in charge of personnel settlement.

She had thought it was a great thing, though occasionally she missed contact with the outside world. Immediately prior to being sequestered here, she had heard that her father was very ill. Because of her importance to the great experiment occurring in The Tube, OmniTech had declined to grant her requests for leave, and to this day, she did not know whether her daddy was okay. Whenever she stopped at night to think about it, she allowed a single tear to roll down her cheek to expunge the day’s grief and fear for the man she loved more than any other. She sometimes wished she could be with him; but that was tantamount to admitting failure, something she was not prepared to do.

Because all in all, the work was fine, the pay was good, the prestige of working for such a large organisation in such a responsible position was entirely satisfactory. If the price of making her parents proud was to lose contact with them, it was a price that she would pay – however reluctantly.

It seemed strange to her that in the nine months she had been in The Tube, she had never once questioned the rightness of its existence. Never before had she had cause to doubt the efficiency and contentment that radiated from every fixture in the city.

Not until she had been assigned to Shane.

–Continue to part 23–

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THE TUBE

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

The world was perfect on the day they got married. Well, it wasn’t perfect; in fact, it was the same level of violent, depraved and selfish that it had always been; but it seemed perfect to Shane and Katherine.

The forecasts had been warning of rain for more than a week, and because of the drought, most people were hoping it was true. When the downpour began slightly after dawn, they had each smiled and shrugged it off. In a nod to tradition, they were in separate buildings at this time, but later learned that they had each looked out at the rolling black clouds and thought with joy of the other one at about the same time.

When the photographer they’d hired popped around to take some preparation shots, and found them calm, despite what seemed to be calamitous weather and the general raw-nerved nature of a wedding day, he thought they had indulged heavily in sedatives.

It was pouring rain when he arrived at the church, but it cleared up in time for her limo to arrive (fashionably late, of course; just tardy enough for him to regret the paucity of deodorant he had applied that morning, but not so tardy as to cause him serious concern).

After the nervous priest had accidentally called him Katherine and her Shane, and the various readings had been performed, it was time for the vows. Standing for so long had caused one of his legs to begin cramping, but he didn’t even notice as he turned to face his near-wife and repeat the stock-standard words that would bind them together, followed by a commitment to honour those words.

He opened his mouth to say “I do,” a big smile on his face, but paused as he noticed something.

Stepping away from his bride for a moment, he peered out the window and his jaw dropped open in surprise. The stained glass began to crack, and then burst inwards, showering the church carpet and the wedding guests in sparkling shards. The heavy clouds outside the window began to change colour; before he could completely register what was happening, the sky had transformed into a sea of roiling flame.

The hot wind began to blow, and the church roof was torn away as if it were paper. Pain surged down from the sky like a wave, accompanied by a shriek that drowned out all else. He was dimly aware that he himself was yelling in terror, but found himself moving towards Katherine, aware somehow that this had something to do with her; with him; with them.

Operating on pure instinct, he clutched her protectively, oblivious to all else but her safety.

And the world around them began to burn.

All the important people in his life – family, friends – were drawn into the air by the malevolent breeze. They cried out in pain and terror as they disappeared into the flames in the sky, and then… nothing… as if they had never existed in the first place. Shane could feel the fire licking at his mind, scorching his brain; vaguely aware that this experience was a parable for what was happening in what could conceivably be referred to as the ‘real world,’ he was able to infer what was happening, and recognised how powerless he was to stop this from happening.

Katherine’s eyes never left his for a moment. Not to watch her own parents fed to the flames; nor to shed a tear; and barely to blink. In some way, she – or what she was standing in for – seemed to know that he was the only one who could save her… and that she was the only one he could save.

He held her tight as the wind lifted them from the ground. At the mercy of the hostile weather, they whirled and whipped back and forth, edging ever closer to the oblivion that had claimed everything else. The ground that had been under their feet broke away and evaporated, until he couldn’t remember anything except for fire… and for her.

Through the fire that tore at his mind and devoured his world, he held on to her; even as he himself began to feed the flames, he held on. For an eternity, they writhed in agony, not daring to let go for an instant.

The concentration he poured into maintaining his grip on her removed all other barriers from his mind, and the fire consumed it all…

When he woke up the next morning, his entire body was shaking uncontrollably and it took him over half an hour to remember his own name.

–Continue to part 22–

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THE TUBE

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

Shane didn’t move for a long time. The sun began to set behind the cityscape, drenching the apartment in red light, giving the place such an appearance that it almost seemed to have bathed in blood.

His mind reeling, he attempted to place his thoughts into some sort of coherent order.

There was something else in this city, he was sure of it. Why conduct secret experiments on unwilling subjects, using what might well be forged documents? Why hide the existence of armed guards from citizens like Clarissa, if not in an attempt to present The Tube in a much more favourable light than the truth could manage?

If this was just some new vanguard of civilisation, why would OmniTech not allow him to bring his family? Why go to all this trouble and expense to retain him sans wife and child? Although – clearly – there was some leeway in the organisation for people like the doctor or Graham or Clarissa to have their own agendas for him, but not for him to have for himself.

He wondered what forces had enticed others to The Tube; most of the pedestrians he had seen so far seemed happy, or at least content, so they had likely not been kidnapped. If the doctor and Graham were to be believed, the Motivator was still in testing phase, so the city was unlikely to be populated by the lobotomised. It was probable that Shane himself was one of only a few folk who didn’t actually want to be here.

He recalled the doctor’s words, and his level of mistrust for the goings-on here, and became even more sure that something was wrong, a feeling that only increased his unease and disquiet.

If he succumbed to the Motivator tonight, all this could go away. No more anxiety or worry; he could wake up tomorrow with a clean slate and hope that OmniTech chose to restore his mind to him upon the completion of his term of service. He dismissed the idea as quickly as it formed, though; he had long suspected that OmniTech would never release him from service, and the events of the last few days had only cemented that suspicion. If he gave in to their mind-wipe, he would be their willing drone forever.

But if he resisted tonight and engaged in the subterfuge that Graham had suggested, he’d become a spy, it seemed; almost as if he was committing to fight against The Tube and what it stood for, overtly or otherwise.

And yet, it seemed there was no choice. The course he’d chosen days ago was still the best one available to him: he had to fight, if he was to retain any hope of ever again seeing Katherine or Anne or meeting his unborn son.

But he didn’t know if he was up to the challenge. The light was there at the end of the tunnel; after tonight, regardless of the outcome, the Motivator would go silent. The idea filled him with hope, but he knew his own mind to be so badly damaged that even that one final night might break him.

Night approached inexorably, and he still had no plan better than the one Graham had suggested to him. He had no way of knowing whether the man was genuine or not, but he had to believe that if he survived this one last night, he would be in the clear, at least for a while.

After fixing himself a bite to eat and having a quick shower, in an attempt to be as fresh as possible for this final trial, he made himself as comfortable as possible in the bed and waited for OmniTech to drive him into sleep.

–Continue to part 21–

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THE TUBE

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

For a while after his dressing down, Graham had felt sorry for himself. When he had decided to go along with the subject’s determination to resist, he had thought it a decent compromise that would not affect the integrity of the Motivator experiment. It wasn’t his fault that no one had told him that the subject’s brain was otherwise important to OmniTech, and should be preserved from unnecessary damage.

Until that woman had gone to them, they had seemed happy with Graham’s project and its ongoing progress. But in the last two days… endless scrutiny, questions, and veiled accusations had prompted the revelation that perhaps no one had been paying so much attention to his work to begin with. That his work appeared to have been going unnoticed stung more than the notion that his progress and methods had been unsatisfactory.

And then he had been called to a meeting. He recognised the faces of course: they were important ones; though stern: they were not happy. In a short, one-sided discussion, they expressed their ‘disappointment’ that he had deviated from the parameters of the experiment, that other vital OmniTech projects within The Tube might be jeopardised by his actions, but that they had ‘confidence’ that he would take the correct steps to rectify the situation. The implicit threat was crystal clear: fix it fast, or you’re out.

His knees had been trembling when he left the boardroom, and he had sweat running down his armpits, distraught by this setback, and devastated for not having had the chance to blame someone else for the errors that had occurred (all he had had a chance to say was “good aftern… yes, but… yes… yes, but… but… yes… I will…”).

And all because someone had decided to meddle in a department not her own. Bitch.

He saw it as an intolerable intrusion on his turf; in that opinion, Graham would not have been alone, as the world is full of petty men of narrow self-interest, with little concept of or interest in any kind of bigger picture. Nonetheless, his interest in the matter remained focused tightly upon the impact on his career trajectory; he spared little thought for the ongoing pain of the subject, and none at all for the moral quandary that Clarissa had found herself in once the truth had started to become clear to her.

The course before him was a simple one – though fraught with the potential to become quite sticky – and that was more complicated than Graham had hoped for. His thought process was coldly logical. If the subject could not be forced to submit; if the Motivator could not overcome his resistance without irreparably damaging his brain; if the only other alternative was shutting down the project and declaring it a failure; Graham could see only one course of action open to him. (Failure was not an option; he had seen it too often in his time at OmniTech, and it was a result not easily forgiven.)

When he had accepted the role as the Motivator’s project manager, he had been thrilled by the promotion, the responsibility, the money and status his new position afforded him. If someone had told him then that he would commit himself to forging the results of the experiment in a ridiculous attempt to keep his career going an extra week, he would have laughed the notion away in public, and in private he would have reported the messenger to his superiors for re-assignment.

But now… the unfathomable was happening. Now, he was wondering how hard it would be to get the project’s physician, Bottle (or something like that), on board to forge an analysis of the forthcoming night’s brain scan…

–Continue to part 20–
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THE TUBE

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

Every night, the Motivator clicked on and began to raze his memories. Though he held on as tightly as he could to the important things, he had to let so much fall to the fire. His high school years in their entirety; the ceremony in which he had received his Nobel Prize; the circumstances under which he had come to work at GenTech: all gone.

Every morning, he woke from restless sleep, his head pounding all the way through to his sinuses, and his brain on fire. While concentrating on his memories of Katherine had worked so well the first night with no ill effects, his mind was starting to weaken against the relentless nightly onslaught of the Motivator and throbbed with a constant ache whenever he was conscious. One morning he awoke with no memory of his father-in-law at all, and realised with certainty – for the first time – that he wouldn’t be able to hold out for long, and certainly not for as long as he’d hoped.

And every day shortly after he awoke, she came back to talk with him. At first, it seemed she was attempting to browbeat him into accepting his situation, but eventually she began to ask him about the way he was being treated, and seemed genuinely concerned when he told her in some detail about what the Motivator was doing to him.

They didn’t leave the apartment that day, and he thought little of their conversation after she had gone… but that night, the Motivator remained switched off, and he had a full night’s rest. His dreams were fragmented and broken, like a cracked mirror, but Katherine was there in some form for most of the time, though she seemed so far away, like he was trying to see her through a dirty lens.

He surmised that this night of relief was Clarissa’s doing, and was surprised when his visitor the next morning was not her, but was instead Graham, the large man who had shown him the contract he couldn’t remember signing.

The presence of an armed guard prompted the revelation that Clarissa had always visited him unescorted. Either she didn’t fear him, or she was unaware of the true nature of the situation; maybe even naïve to the true functioning of The Tube itself. It dawned on him that if she were not aware of the presence of armed guards in The Tube, she might become a potential ally.

Graham afforded him little time to dwell on the possibility, however. Not even waiting for the guard to clear the room first, he strode right in and waved a threatening finger in Shane’s face; he seemed angrier and more aggressive than at any other time he had been here before.

“You signed the contract,” he said. “You signed it. You agreed to the parameters of the experiment – hell, you were the one who defined the parameters! Based on your commitment, funds were allocated, staff were reassigned, and project plans were drafted. I don’t think you understand the true scope of what you’re messing with here, the people your unreasonable and unconscionable resistance is affecting.”

He began to pace back and forward, running a hand through his hair, his rage giving way to obvious anxiety. He appeared lost in thought, almost entirely oblivious to anyone not two inches before him; he had certainly stopped paying any attention to Shane. If not for the guard at the open door, Shane would have taken the opportunity to sneak out, for sure, and he probably would have made it, too.

Eventually, Graham appeared to have reached a decision. His face was flushed with stress, and he had mussed his own hair well out of its typical neat arrangement. He stopped and pacing and addressed the guard at the door: “Leave us.”

When they were alone, and before Shane had had a chance to absorb his mild surprise, Graham was squatting down next to him. “Listen to me,” he murmured. “For my part, I don’t really care if you resist or not… insofar as the project should be seen to be a success. But I can see what’s happening; the reports are clear: the Motivator is breaking you. This is naught to me, but I have recently received information that you have a use beyond this experiment.

“But I’ve been told that you possess vital knowledge that cannot be jeopardised. If you resist, you risk losing that information, and your primary utility to OmniTech. Should that happen, I would certainly incur a significant backlash, and so too might you… or your family.”

He paused to allow this implicit threat to sink in, and then continued in a low voice. “I’ve been sent here to get your co-operation. One more night with the Motivator to erase your family and get you back to work, your vital knowledge remains intact, and you go to work.”

He licked his lips nervously, apparently debating whether or not to say more. “One more night,” he repeated, and then, dropping his voice to a whisper, “even if you resist, it’ll be just one more night. You will need to pretend it worked.”

And with that, he stood suddenly, jerkily, as if he had caught himself doing something he shouldn’t have been.

“Do you agree?” he asked in a loud voice, apparently performing for whatever recording device he thought was present.

Acting on instinct, Shane made a show of nodding hesitantly. “I agree,” he said, attempting to sound downcast and resigned.

Graham nodded once, sternly, and left without a further word. The door slid shut, and clicked into its typical locked position. Shane stared after it, his mouth slightly agape in astonishment.

–Continue to part 19–

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