2022-11-29: Subject: Dispersal
- Cutscene: Subject: Dispersal
- Cast: Yuliana Kafim
- Where: The North Pole (And A Memory)
- Date: 2022-11-29
- Summary: Yuliana remembers why changing her name is so significant. (Content warning: Medical torture.)
Each of them, in this facility, are top of their class; they were selected for this project based on their excellent performance in basic training.
Each of them signed the same release. Each accepted the possibility of adverse events.
They are less than they were, now, by the count of four.
"... I heard Sung folded during PT today," that's Zhao, pausing in eating the nutrient sticks they're allotted. People use their last names, here; they're all, functionally speaking, still recruits. It's an easy culture to adopt.
"Really?" Dian frowns, not even halfway through hers. "But she was doing better than any of us yesterday. Were you in her troika?" They pair them up in threes, but rarely the same three each time. When they're not going through procedures, they're permitted to mix in the common areas -- and expected to eat.
Dian can't quite stomach this excuse for a meal, though.
"She put too much effort in too quick," Nguyen shrugs, as she puts away her own bar. "People's hearts just, like... they give out. Especially with the electrical leads. How are those impulses supposed to help our reflexes, anyway?"
"I heard humans used to be able to sense electricity," Zhao says, as they finish their meal.
"No, that's magnetism," Nguyen shakes her head. "You're thinking of magnetism. Humans can sense north if they get an implant, because the genetic coding's still there."
"I think it has something to do with helping us feel the changes in air vibration when something's moving around us," Dian supposes, wagging her nutrient stick, instead. "You know, like -- physics. They're sensitising our skin so we can react quicker. It's like, you know... using a conductor to make sure you've got a good signal between two chips."
"But how is that supposed to help in the field?" Nguyen rolls her eyes. "Like, god, they can't be zapping us constantly."
"Yeaaah, how about you don't give them any great ideas," Dian frowns, to her.
"They're not gonna keep doing it all the time," Zhao shakes their head, leaning back on the bench. "They want to expand our awareness so, like -- you know, this whole 'Newtype' thing? They wanna do that. They just gotta trick our brains into working like that, and then we'll be able to tell when someone's about to shoot us even if they're in another wanzer."
"Do you think they can do it?" Nguyen asks.
"I think I can do it," Dian replies.
"Surprised you're still so keen after the last round of therapy," Nguyen remarks, dryly. They weren't always so unsympathetic, towards each other; they weren't always so aware of each other's failures. "I could hear you crying even from my block."
Dian frowns, grasping at her arm, still with that stick still nibbled in her fingers. "Who cares? I don't have to tell you how pushy they can be in there. I didn't give you a hard time after you disappeared for a day to sleep yours off."
"Yeah, come to think of it, we thought you'd be next," Zhao points out, mercantile.
"Like hell I'll be!" Nguyen yells, and she is angry. "Dian's gotta be next on the chopping block -- she's not even eating!"
"I was talking," Dian scowls, and chomps down the rest of her bar, as if to prove the point.
It's a decent enough excuse. Her mother taught her all about those.
And more and more, she's having to survive her cohort just as much as her training.
...---...
They don't train in threes, any more. There aren't enough of them left. They've gotten past the basic sharpening, now, in any case.
They still eat together, though, and they still talk.
When Jeong emerges from his block, he is sallow-faced and distant in his gaze; the others speak of him as if he isn't there. It's Begam, who speaks up, first, as she frowns: "What happened to him?"
"Put him in the tank again," Vinogradov scowls, folding and un-folding the wrapper of a nutrition bar. "I heard them talking when they were taking me past... said they were getting promising results with him reaching out across the distance."
"With that weird doctor, right?" Dian presses, looking over, as Jeong sits next to her on the benches. "You know, that... what's her name, Dr. Chen? Isn't she supposed to be a Newtype, too?"
"I dunno," Begam shrugs. "She does seem nicer than the rest of them. Maybe she gets it."
Vindograv shrugs a shoulder. "I wouldn't count on that. I heard she was the one who broke Zhao, yesterday."
"She was the one who..." Begam frowns, and lifts a hand, to grasp at her opposite arm. "Mouuu... when does this end, already?!"
"You signed the release," Vindograv unfolds the paper, and folds it again. "You chose this. We're gonna be the next step of humanity -- better than them! If you can't give up everything to get the power to change the world, you should've just signed up to infantry like everyone else!"
Begam shakes her head, clutching herself tighter. "I know. I know! But they never said it would be this hard! I just-- I just keep thinking -- when the blackout clears up, are they gonna tell my mom to come collect my corpse?!"
"They won't do that," Dian remarks, dour. "There's a crematorium in the basement. I heard one of them talking about it last week. If we fuck up, we'll probably just disappear."
And Jeong clutches his hands to his head, and starts to scream, wordless and pained. Dian, beside him, looks to him with alarm, and shushes him sharply. "Shut up! Shut up! Do you want them to come running in here again?!" But he just twists himself about, and yells, and Dian looks to the others -- just as hapless as her -- before she finally scooches in closer and just wraps him up in her arms.
"Hey," Dian insists, again, firmly. "Hey. Hey! Listen, it's fine," she forces her own voice not to shake, as she clutches his head to her shoulder, and strokes his hair. "It's okay, you're okay, you're fine. Shh-shh-shh, come on, calm down, oh, how do they say it..." The scientists are really very good at getting them to comply, but the words don't sound nearly as impactful, coming from her lips. "You got this far. You got this far..."
"I'll disappear into forever," Jeong sobs, though at least he sobs more quietly, now.
"I know," Dian assures him, and shoots a glare at Vindograv, before he can interrupt. "I know it feels like forever. But we're only ever in there a few hours, I promise. We'd dehydrate if they locked us in there too long. It just feels worse since you can't see anything," or hear anything, or smell anything, given the isolation tanks are well-built to ensure that all physical senses are thwarted. Dian doesn't labour on the details. "But you're out. You're okay."
"Everyone's too sad," he chokes out, the sound wet against her gown.
"It's not forever," Yuliana promises him, closing the distance in her mind.
The next day, Jeong disappears for the next stage of treatment.
He does not return.
...---...
By the time they lead Dian into the treatment room, she's been eating lunch alone. They strap her onto her side; they inject something into the port they've set into her wrist. It's so normal, she barely even thinks of it; besides, her mind's still raw from that last round of therapy, so she's hardly in a position to protest.
(She hasn't been in a position to protest for some time.)
Dian registers, distantly, the words they say to her, as her gaze lids. Their tones are even, but aren't they pressured, anyway...? Everyone else has gone downstairs...
She's frightened, and in that moment, it really only seems like there's one person who sees that. Her fingers fan, as she tries to reach for Dr. Chen; the woman steps forward, and grasps her hand. Yuliana looks at her, green eyes on brown, and her fear breaks like the waves they keep invoking to shatter her; through the drugs her fingers can't quite tighten, but certainly they try. (Numbing agents, she reflects, with effort.)
Help me, she cries out, though her lips don't part.
It's okay, Dr. Chen's gaze replies, as she places another hand over Yuliana's fingers.
But even here, between them, her self-conceptualisation is a doctor.
And she looks behind Yuliana, and she nods.
"Phase one initialised successfully," another doctor says, distantly, and the words catch at the edge of Dian's consciousness. "Initiating phase two."
The pain of a needle inserted into her spine is horrific in and of itself, and she hears her voice crying out, beside herself. In an instant that sting is a gnat next to a whale, as SOMETHING pushes through the syringe, into her spine. "AAAHHHH--!" Dian hollers, grasping tightly to Dr. Chen's hand, and her horror translates so cleanly through her fingertips. "Stop! Please! I'm burning up--!!" She cannot writhe, under the drugs they've pushed into her, yet it feels like she should. She sobs, she cries, "no! No, no, no! Oh, God!"
That horrific feeling, boiling inside her, rises up through her body --
And suddenly it feels as if she's grasping Dr. Chen's hand from behind an iron curtain, and she looks about with wide and panicked eyes, because she closed them, and she can't see her any more. When her eyes find her again her horror only redoubles, as she realises there's nothing there, nothing to her, all that regret and sympathy dissipating to the wind. Her eyes scrunch tightly closed, again, but she cannot escape from seeing the hollow carved around her, the place that connection ought to be.
And behind her eyelids, in that stark emptiness, she glimpses for a moment fifteen eyes, and she feels a gaze fall over her.
There's nothing there. There's so MUCH nothing, there.
She twists, and grasps Dr. Chen's hand with a more vicious grasp; the leather bindings creak and SNAP, not designed for this level of protest, as she lifts a hand to grasp onto her lab coat, lifts another for her throat. All a sudden she's laughing, the full-throated, betrayed laughter of what cannot be seen.
"IS THIS IT!?" She howls, sagging from the experiment table, even as the scientists cluster in to try and drag her off of their Newtype doctor. "THE POWER TO CHANGE THE WORLD?"
Two of them grasp her wrist; a third injects something else, there.
Her consciousness fades.
She's locked in her block, when she wakes up.
...---...
When someone comes to get her, in the small room she sleeps in -- her block, a thing with one-way viewing windows and a door which locks from the outside -- she thinks it's been some time, since she woke. She's hungry. She hasn't eaten.
Her wrists were bound when she woke up -- in front of her, at least -- but there's no real chance of her getting aggressive, anyway, when the door opens. "You have an appointment," the doctor says, without inflection. "Come along." And she does, though there's a horrific pit in her stomach which only grows, after she's handed pills to take.
She doesn't want to go downstairs. There's a crematorium, down there, and they'll all be forgotten.
But the scientist delivers her to a much larger and nicer room -- the office of Dr. Divya Devi, head of the project. She's a severe woman in her sixties, with piercing hazel eyes, seated behind her desk. "Sit down," she tells her subject, and she does.
"You've put me in a difficult position," Dr. Devi says, without smiling. "You're a failure, too... but our tests are quite certain we got some measure of result, with you. Some in my team would rather neutralise you and start over with a fresh batch... but as it's been pointed out to me, you do appear to still be alive. It's less than I can say, for your comrades."
She can't quite meet the doctor's eyes. "What am I?" She asks, and she finds her voice small.
"As far as I can tell, you're a void unto yourself. An empathic black hole... it's hardly what we hoped to accomplish, achieving this legend. I'm not sure I should even call you a Cyber-Newtype... I suspect you'd hate the comparison, frankly." Dr. Devi's reference to Dr. Chen's condition is a heartless thing, and entirely deliberate.
She can't sense the intent behind it; she scowls, instead. "Mm," she agrees, with a hum, fingers tightening around each other, as well as she can reach. She takes a breath, and looks to Dr. Devi, steeling her shoulders. "Don't... don't get rid of me," she says, with halting insistence. "Even if I failed to be something like that... I'm something new, aren't I?! You should take an opportunity like this. You can still use me!" She pauses, frightened by the way her emotions grow so sharp and jagged so quickly, even under the medications; she takes a breath, and notes the way it shudders. "I can still..." she starts, and can't quite finish her sentence, even now she's pleading for her life.
But Dr. Devi, perhaps, is merciful, because she picks up the end of her sentence. "... you can still be of use to us, is that it?" She prompts, and her subject nods. "Yes," she agrees, after a moment's pause, "you do seem to disrupt psychic connections..." Dr. Devi doesn't speak of her own ambitions, the way she could go down in history for discovering such a thing; she hardly needs to discuss her hopes and dreams with an experiment. "But of course, your loyalty will be paramount," she says, instead, folding her hands on her desk. "Even now... are you able to devote yourself to the Republic, I wonder?"
"Yes," she replies, fingers tightening a little more. "I love my country. I wanted to help... I really thought I could make a difference," her voice wobbles, at the injustice of that. "I..."
"Good," Dr. Devi silences her, and she falls silent. "You know the cost of failure, of course. No one person is worth more than the whole... you understand, of course." She nods; she does. Dr. Devi presses her: "Even so, are you prepared to survive, for the Republic's sake?"
"I don't want to die," she says, honestly. "Whatever it takes... I can do it. I survived this long already!" The pain in that insistence is raw and it is real, but she couldn't turn it onto Dr. Devi, anyway.
"Very good." Dr. Devi nods, sharply. "All right. We'll call you Yuliana Dispersal... and lay the blame on Minovsky's curtain. Consider it a symbol of your allegiance."
And Yuliana Dispersal nods, in turn, taking it into herself as easily as she breathes. "... thank you, Doctor."
"My pleasure."
...---...
Yuliana pauses, at the grand black dressing table, with its opulent mirror and its fine green detailing. Her brush pauses, too, on its trail through her sharp hair, and she meets her own jealous green eyes.
"It's Kafim," she tells herself, a shade nervous.
She takes a breath to steady herself, and lets relief flood into her heart, a fool's smile, as she thinks of what that means. "I'm Yuliana Kafim," she tells herself, a second time, and it feels like freedom from a weight she'd forgotten she was carrying.
Her brush pulls through her hair a final time, and then she turns, to find Elisa again.
The memories might be troubling Yuliana, but if anyone were to blame Mrs. Kafim for finding solace in marriage... Dr. Kafim wouldn't let them, would she?