“Does your head hurt?” a voice
asked me. It was a soft voice, in contrast to the hard pain floating
in my head. My eyes were closed, and I knew that opening them was
what was expected of me, but I've always been a general pain in the
ass when it came to such things.
“No,” I replied, my voice dripping
with sarcasm, “I'm just confusing utter delight with biting pain.
I'm sure it'll pass.”
“Well, he's awake at least,”
another voice said. A man's voice. Older, more hardened. Smug. I
could just tell he and I weren't going to get along well. “You
might as well open your eyes. There's no point in keeping them
closed. It's not like we'll go away if you do.”
“I should be so lucky,” I muttered
to myself. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes, and wasn't too surprised by
my surroundings, which were nothing, an empty black. They hadn't
built it yet. They were waiting on me.
“See, that wasn't so bad now, was
it?” said the female voice, and I turned to look at her. She was a
pretty young woman, in her mid twenties, easy on the eyes but
certainly fit, the build of a runner or a gymnast, with coppery hair
pulled back into a ponytail, a dusting of freckles on her face and a
pair of deep blue eyes like cobalt. She couldn't have been more than
5'2” or 5'3”. She was wearing a set of hospital scrubs in a faded
green, and she made even that simple attire look good. “I tried to
pick a form you'd find pleasing, but without full access to your
memories, all I had to go on was a pattern of your previous
relationships and interests. That and your internet browsing history,
of course,” she said with an apologetic smile. “But at this
point, you have to assume we're going to know an awful lot about
you.”
“Naturally,” I said. I could see
where bits and pieces of her derived inspiration from previous lovers
I'd had – the button nose that Jenny had, the slight Scottish
brogue that had haunted Kirsty's voice even after years of living
stateside, the body was straight Natalie down to the slight wiggle of
her hips. “So that'd make you 'good cop,' I'd guess, hm?”
She offered me a winning smile, fifty
thousand watts on high, trying to win favor and get me to lower my
guard down. “You really shouldn't try and think of it like that.”
I turned my gaze towards where I'd
heard the other voice a little bit ago to see the second person. “And
that'd make you 'bad cop' then.”
The man there was dark skinned, in his
late forties or so, large and muscular, but not aggressively so. He
had a gentle giant look to him, and stood at least four inches taller
than me, and I'm no slouch in the height department. He, too, was
wearing hospital scrubs, but he looked a lot less relaxed in them,
his powerful arms folded over his chest. “I'll wear that if I have
to, but she's right,” he said, “you shouldn't try and think of it
like that.”
I put my hands on the inky black matte
floor, or whatever it was, and pushed against it to stand up, with a
bit of effort. The room was spinning a little, so I widened my stance
to get a better balance.
“Easy there,” she said to me,
“you've been unconscious a bit, and sometimes there's some
disorientation along with the pain.” She took a step towards me,
but I raised a hand towards her, palm out, to signal her not to come
closer. “As hard as this might be to believe, we do care about your
health.”
“My health,” I muttered. I spat on
the ground, but the ball of spit disappeared before it reached the
floor. “If you care about my health so much, we don't need to do
any of this, now do we?” Looking past either the man or the woman
was like staring into the abyss – only black nothingness peered
back at me, space with no stars. “It's not like I'm here
voluntarily.”
“Well then,” the man said to me,
“you probably want to get out of here as soon as possible. And all
you have to do to make that happen is to let us in.”
I scowled at him. “What do I call
you?”
“What do you want to call us?” he
replied, a smug grin on his face.
My scowl deepened. “Fine. I'll call
you Janus, and I'll call her Apate. That'll do for now.”
“That's not very kind of you,” she
said, a frown crossing her pretty face. “But I suppose it's your
right to call us whatever you like.”
“It's not really going to matter much
anyway,” Janus said. “Sooner or later, you'll give us what we
want. Haven't you heard? Everyone breaks, in the end.”
“Well then,” I replied, my turn to
have a grin on my face, “you won't mind me seeing it out until that
end, now, will you?”
He offered a weary shrug, as if he knew
this was coming, but there had been nothing he could do to avert or
avoid it. “You're the one who gets to deal with all the pain.”
I glanced back at Apate, waving my hand
around at the emptiness around us. “All a bit primitive, isn't it?”
She nodded, a touch glumly. “It
always starts like this. It'll get easier as it goes along, more
lively. Eventually you won't even notice the walls breaking down, and
one day, we'll have everything we need from you.”
“Your name is Henry James Adams the
Third,” Janus said as he started to pace around me, carefully,
methodically, Apate starting to pace as well, the two of them
orbiting me like moons, rotating around and
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