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Reflective Vision
Part One
By Soshika
:Test Subjects
:738
:784
:785
:Now Testing Subject 782
The words on the computer screen scrolled idoly along, tired and sleepy. The people in the room looked sleepy too. Everything was moving slowly again, like it did before he saw his numbers.
Be brave, one voice in the back of his mind spoke, sounding soft. He hated his number, it meant pain and fear and strange things. Last time there was his number, he'd had the skin on his legs burned almost completely away. It didn't hurt. They kept asking him that, always. Unless everything hurt always, he never knew the thing they were asking for. The words he was seeing were not before him. Before him was a room with glowing orange specs dotted with purples and other colours, all moving at a speed just as slow as the words in his mind. His mind had shapes and colours and ideas that he could never see with his eyes. At first the things in his mind confused him, and scared him. They still did, sometimes. She was always there to explain, though, since he was born.
He, of course, could remember the first few things that had happened to him. Rough hands, harsh words, and the screaming cries of those who were like him- but somehow horriably unlike him. There was some void that seperated them that he would never know. Inside his head he saw horriable things, heard horriable things. He saw things that looked vaugely like the coloured shapes he saw, but had no limbs or extra limbs, or there were strange marks all across their faces. At the same time he saw himself, from a thousand different angles. He knew his one great flaw- his eyes- was also visable from the outside. They all felt and saw his eyes when he moved them around, they all feared them. What he saw of himself, he too feared. He didn't like how he looked. He was a white, a sick and fading white, while all the rest of them were a sort of fleshy colour, a toned down colour of blood.
They were coming today again, he could tell by the way his thoughts were crawling so slowly and the way she was talking in calming tones. He could feel the air around him, see how the purples and reds in the other shapes pulsated faster and faster despite the slowing they were causing. They...did something. They went inside him somehow and did something.
Sometimes their thoughts weren't in numbers but just of him. Of him dying, becoming cold and his eyes finally dark. The images themselves didn't worry him, he was used to seeing himself- and many others- die mentally over and over again each day. What scared him was that he never changed colour. He stayed the same colour, dead or alive. Also what scared him was the cheerful voices and thoughts that came with these images. People did not like him, they did not want him there. Deep inside, a part of him kept sending these images too.
She never let him go to these places in her company, she was left behind. He had to learn to take the pain, she told him. The world would be much more cruel, and this was only to keep him alive. He did not like the images he saw when he came back and others saw him though. Their shapes would flare red for a moment and he would get flashes and pictures. His pale skin would sometimes be cut away, sometimes be streaming red, sometimes be burnt torn or marked in other strange ways. He never knew these things. At first, these images, like the ones of his death, would worry him. Gradually, though, he began to see them as commonplace and normal. He became nervous if the mental images of himself were whole and unbroken.
There were other images too. Images of he and other shapes like him fighting, watching the blood that had leaked from him spray in all directions. Sometimes he would be sat and told to watch things he couldn't see, not through his eyes. Through other eyes he saw the grainy images of wars and killing. These were interupted by personal thoughts of people, mental conversations they had with themselves. A question here or there, a recolection. It began to become hard to understand anything unless it leapt from place to place.
War, Death, Blood...they were normal. They were normal, but the thoughts that happened before them..they were not. They scared him, they worried him. The smells before were not normal, not natural and all parts of him rebelled against them and pulled in every direction.
At the same time there came words...words he would always know. He was not like them. He wasn't a human. He was a demon. He was a tool. A soulless creation. His name was Grey, but only to her. To them...to all of them...he was only subject 784.
"Sedate and cuff him, we had trouble with struggling last time."
He tried to snap up his head when he smelt them coming, but his body wouldn't move with the speed it wanted to. Everything was a thousand times slower. Deep down, a hating part of him started shouting. It was in the food, in the food, they'd drugged the food! The voice sounded so far away, though, he hardly felt it. His eyes opened so slowly, the shapes in front of them trailing their own colours. Reds leaving ribbons across the room as two larger red shapes stalked towards him. Simoltaniously he saw two images of himself- one from closer and one from farther behind. He was curled on the floor in a corner- he remembered curling to sleep, but the thoughts he was gaining from them were negative. Animal instincts, they were saying. Corrections needed. Another image he was getting was of one of the larger shape's backs. His skin was alive, unlike Grey's. His hair was light and his coat was a blinding white, like the glow of the shapes. There was a tug on his shoulder and he saw himself being lifted and heard them telling him to walk. He moved, everything slowed.
He could feel all their eyes upon him, the images of his death flying at a speed that dizzied his mind. They were old, they were normal. He wasn't afraid of them anymore. Her voice whispered before she vanished, whispered quietly in the back of his mind. Be brave!
"Trying-" he muttered, his throat feeling dry and his voice cracking. He wasn't used to talking. No one to talk to. One of the large shapes must have thought he was speaking to them and shoved him harder.
"Keep moving, you disgusting demon. We'll get through with you quick enough."
"Demon.." He whispered quietly to himself, repeating the strange word that he'd heard in his mind but never in his voice. "Demon?"
One of the shapes growled and something pressed into his arm. He got the image of a sharp shaft- a needle- going into him and flooding his body with some blue liquid. He felt it go through his veins like a wave of sleep as his arm fell asleep. With a sudden blink back to his own eyes, he saw the shapes glowing brighter and brighter in his vision until they filled his world, blending together into a whirlpool of glowing colour. His knees felt light and he fell, oblivious.
