Encrypted Soundbite Transmission on wavelength 451.7

Oh I really, really hope this thing is recording! And that it’s sending the recording somewhere! I don’t know where I am in the cosmos for sure, but I’m in a— —Scarship base, and there is so much that I’ve discovered. With some more time, I could find material to write at least three different dissertations on the things I’ve seen. Their technology— —is both ingenius and incredibly unethical. Mental note to further consider the fact that I’ve gone from reacting to this situation with panic to finding refuge in academic zeal. Oh wow. I’ve never sounded so much like Silas in my life. I think I’m a little manic right now. Maybe a lot manic. Regardless, I am in a Scarship base. We arrived… I don’t know what— —time. The sound cutoffs are distracting. I tinkered with the broken comm and got it to record longer sound— —bytes but it still cuts out once in a while. Anyway, we arrived, and the first thing that happened after they dragged me from my locker cell was a full decontamination, in a real decon— —tamination chamber this time. Wait, I should back up and give more details. Who knows what will be relevant information? When I heard them coming, I really didn’t want to lose the comm, so I did the only thing I could think of. I put it in my mouth. They covered my head with a pillowcase (I guess they’re civilized enough to have pillowcases) and took me through the ship— —and an airlock tunnel. It was an old pneumatic one; I could tell because of the way our gravity disappeared as we passed through and the way sound bounced around the accordion walls of the tunnel. Two Heartless escorted me through the base for a good, long way. I lost track of how many turns we took. The corridors were strangely humid for a space vessel, which makes me— —think this is either an old vessel or a non-atmospheric geobase. Maybe on an asteroid or something. They shoved me into a decontamination chamber about as big as a phonebooth, and then a soft-laser system cut my clothes and the pillowcase off. The soft-laser system needed— —to be recalibrated, because the lasers burned me. Just a little! I’ve still got lines across my skin that feel like sunburn, and I think they fried off a few chunks of my hair! Let me check… Yes, they definitely did. The decon chamber sprayed me down with some horrid blue chemical that smelled like banana candy and looked like toilet bowl cleaner, and then an auto shower blasted that off with all the gentleness of a powerwash. Then a mail-slot in the door spat out a set of blank gray scrubs. The floor hadn’t drained yet, though, so they splattered into some of the blue chemical and otherwise got— —Very damp. I didn’t want to put them on, but I really, really, didn’t want to be naked in a Heartless base, so I put— —them on anyway. I left the comm in my mouth, even though I was starting to get nervous that I might swallow it by accident, or that I’d choke. If nothing else, I— —really hoped that my saliva wouldn’t damage it. Come to think of it, maybe that’s— —why it— —won’t— —rec— —ord more than a— —few sec— —onds. Oh, darn, it’s on the— —fritz. I’ll— There. Okay. I hope it’ll work better now. Details are important, but I may need to speed this up. I don’t know how much time I’ll have. After decontamination, a Heartless with lots of fresh skin-graft scars across her arms put me in cuffs and clipped those cuffs to a rack in a dark little side room. The ceiling was low, and the steel walls were lined with other racks like that. I was left alone in the room for a minute or two, so I spat out the comm and dried it off on my scrubs. The seam on my sleeve was unraveling, so I pulled out a length of string and bit it off, then used that to tie my hair back and stuff the comm into my hair poof. I’ve never been so happy to have curly hair. The Heartless woman with the skin grafts brought in more cuffed people, all varying ages and appearances and backgrounds. There were a few scruffy-looking pirate men, who I guessed were here because they crossed the Scarships. Another was an ashen-faced woman who looked like she hadn’t eaten in a week, a pair of boys who couldn’t have been older than twelve, and an old lady whose gray hair went all the way to the floor. The tips of her hair still dripped with the blue chemical. When the Heartless woman stepped out again, I tried to call to the boys. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you?” They just stared at me with the most hate I’ve ever seen from a child. I wonder what they’ve gone through. Where they came from. They looked thin, and very suntanned, and their hands and arms had what looked like scars from recently-healed sores. I think wherever they’re from, it isn’t a good place. I caught a glimpse of the Heartless woman as she latched the door to this room, and then with a creak of machinery, the room started to move. It slid sideways, like a roller coaster car being ratcheted into position by a chain, and whatever mechanism accomplished that made the floor rattle. The cords of our cuffs clattered against the racks, and my wrists started to itch from the vibration. “We’re going to the boiler,” one of the pirate men told the boys, grinning through sugar-brown teeth. “Heartless boil people down into soup and inject it into their veins. That’s what their suits are for.” “There’s no need to be cruel!” I said. The pirate man turned his grin to me. His eyes were flat, like a puppet’s, and somehow that scared me more than the Heartless I’d seen so far. “No sense playing nice now,” he said. “Our gooses are cooked, every one of us. I bet you’d taste good in a soup. You look like you’re stuffed with pastries and cream.” I looked away, a shiver running down my spine. The room ground to a stop, and when the door opened again, it was to a blisteringly white room. The kind of spotless white expanse you see in movies when a character meets God. A Heartless man stepped through the doorway. The lower half of his face was robotic, a steel jawbone riveted below his ears and lined with metal nubs for teeth. The flesh of his cheeks curled up just below his cheekbones, and I could hear his breath hissing through his teeth as he passed by me and unclipped the pirate man’s cuffs from the rack. The pirate man laughed a giddy, panicked laugh. “Look at this specimen! Had some Heartless tech blow up in your face, huh? What’d you do, try to feed a dictionary into your shredder?” The jawbone man hauled him out without saying a word, and the pirate man kept jabbering as he went. They disappeared out of my line of sight into the white room. I stretched to try to see what was going on, leaning out at a weird angle, the cuffs digging into my wrists. I could see about half of a reclined chair, with a headset and restraints, which the jawbone Heartless strapped the pirate man into. It must have been some sort of inspiration extractor, but it didn’t look like any models I’d seen. At least, not in person. The skull-cap design of the headset, with the halo of diverting wires, reminded me of the technical models I’d seen of early, experimental extractors in textbooks. The kind of extractors that hadn’t been refined to only inspiration yet. The kind that sometimes wiped memories or seeded paranoia by altering neuron pathways. It wasn’t one of those, though. In the mound of tubing, chunky machinery behind it, I could identify newer components. A neuron pathway mapper. A softgel feedback buffer. A lot of the modern safety features, but not all of them. And there were a few features that I couldn’t identify, formed from the unpolished steel that the Heartless seemed to use in a lot of their machinery. A woman in crisp, wine-purple scrubs pushed a steel medical cart into my view, focused on the pirate man in the chair. She was about my height, with long brown hair hanging in a ponytail, and an unscarred face. “Drain and chip,” she said. Someone else’s hands, maybe an attendant, clamped the headset around the pirate man’s forehead. “Chip what? You—” the pirate man started to say, and then with a pitchy whine, the extractor turned on. His jaw dropped to his chest so that I could see every brown-stained molar as he screamed. He screamed for a long time. Maybe it was just a few minutes. I don’t know. But I couldn’t stop watching him the whole time. It was worse when he stopped screaming, because then he switched to whimpering. Staring up at the ceiling, his mouth still hanging open, he moaned with every breath, and his grubby hands shook against the armrests. The woman with the ponytail shifted her weight from one hip to the other, and I saw that she was holding a tablet. On the screen was a 3D model of a brain and a series of rapidly shifting charts. Sound finally died from the pirate man’s throat, and he only shook with a convulsive twitch every few seconds. Saliva ran from the corner of his mouth, and his eyes never stopped staring, though I don’t think he was seeing anything anymore. At last the woman with the ponytail raised a finger and twirled it in the air, and the extractor wound down. A flicker of color caught my eye, and I spotted the shimmery sheen of inspiration energy, but in a sickly orange shade. The orange inspiration drizzled into a canister, not so different from the ones we used on the Sojourner, except I thought I saw some kind of wire structure inside it. The inspiration gravitated toward the wires, like steel files to a magnet, and soon they resolved themselves into a sort of hazy network within the canister. It was like looking at an unrolled version of the 3D brain the ponytail woman was studying. My brain scrambled to figure out what that was, and I started to feel sick to my stomach. I think it was more than inspiration energy. Inspiration energy is pure, because it takes nothing with it. Nothing from the person’s mind. Extractors are very, very carefully calibrated to make sure nothing comes with the inspiration energy, because early models sometimes did that. It used to be common for someone to forget chunks of the book they’d just read for inspiration, because the extractors took memories related to the inspiration along with it. You can tell when inspiration energy was extracted with a blacklisted extractor, because the energy has a bit of chromatic affectation. This stuff was vividly colored, so it took a lot with it. Maybe everything. Maybe that’s what those unidentifiable parts of this extractor were for. That was the ‘drain’ half of her instructions. The attendant unlatched the headset from the pirate man, who didn’t blink or move a muscle. Holding his head steady, the attendant pressed a device to his forehead. It reminded me of an old-fashioned computer mouse. A high-pitched whir came from the device, like a dentist’s drill, and the attendant and the steel jawbone Heartless hauled the pirate’s limp body out of the chair. I heard them dump his body on the floor, and then the jawbone Heartless lumbered back into our little room. I jumped back toward my rack, so he wouldn’t know that I was watching. Maybe that didn’t matter. Maybe he wouldn’t care. Next, he went to unclip the two boys. As soon as they weren’t tethered to the wall (even though he still held their cuffs in either hand!), the shorter boy sent a sharp kick to the back of his knee, while the taller boy aimed a punch at his jaw. Both blows connected, and he staggered. But then he lashed out with a backhand that knocked the shorter against the wall, cracking his— —head against the corner of a rack. The taller boy howled and leaped on him, grabbing onto his head like a crazed monkey. The jawbone Heartless peeled him off with one hand and tossed him against the wall, too. “No!” I squeaked without meaning to. The jawbone Heartless turned to look at me. His eyes were pale blue, almost clear. On the floor behind him, the two boys writhed, pressing hands to their heads and trying to find their feet. The shorter boy had a bleeding gash where his forehead connected with the corner of a rack. The ponytail woman poked her head into our little room. “Hmm. Those two go to eval.” The jawbone Heartless scooped up the boys like two duffel bags and carried them off to the white room, but the ponytail woman stayed in the doorway, watching me. Studying me. I almost stopped breathing. Was she going to gut me? To fry my brain like she’d done to the other guy? “Does that extract memories?” I blurted out. The woman raised an eyebrow. “What’s your profession?” “Assist… assistant artship chronicler,” I said. “Educated!” She closed her tablet and tucked it under her arm. “You’re experienced with extractors?” I nodded, but then froze. I could feel the comm trying to fall out of my hair. “You have a practical understanding of inspiration theory?” “Yes,” I said. She snapped her fingers and pointed to me, and the jawbone Heartless sidled past her to unclip my cuffs from the rack. He led me into the white room. Now that I could see— —more of it, it resembled a sort of depot. The awful extractor sat in one corner, and in the other three corners were steel boxes, a medium size between the locker they’d kept me in during transportation and the prisoner room I’d just left. I guessed they were another kind of transportation pod. The pirate man still lay limply on the floor, a small puddle of drool collecting under his mouth. As I walked past, the device on his forehead dinged, and the ponytail woman stooped to peel off the device, pocketing it. The pirate still stared into space, and now there was a fresh pink surgical scar about a centimeter long in the middle of his forehead. The jawbone Heartless pushed me into— —a pod and— —Oh no, not— —again— —please work— —erly— —come on, co— —ome on! Keep it together for a few more seconds! The jawbone Heartless pushed me into a pod, and before it snapped shut and shuttled me off somewhere else in their base, the ponytail woman smiled at me. Her cheeks dimpled. She was young, I realized. Not much older than me. We could have been classmates. “Don’t worry, you’ll be back here soon,” she said.