Chapter 4

The Future Brings

His eyelids fluttered apart, like the wings of a butterfly, and bright light momentarily blinded him as memories flooded into his mind. He felt the side of his face, and winced as his fingertips skimmed over the mottled flesh covering his face in a canvas of blues and purples. He sighed, and cried out at the jabbing feeling in his stomach, aware of the rib poking against parts of his insides. Memories he had pushed from his mind with the pain stirred in his mind, providing him with inescapable nightmares of the past.
"So that's how I came here," he whispered to himself. The searing white sunspots in his vision cleared and he could see where he had been placed, though his replenished sense did little to cause him comfort. He tore his eyes away from the mold-flecked walls and stared at his hands dotted with dried blood. He searched his mind for the reason the blood disgusted him so, and when he understood why, he retched on the floor beside him. The blood is your own, your symbol of madness. He leaned his head back and loosed a scream that seemed to shake the four unbroken stonewalls around him as it rocketed towards the heavens through the barred ceiling. The sun seemed to swallow all of his anger and frustration, leaving him feeling calmer, as though nothing really mattered anymore, as though his life was someone else's and he was a spectator of a game.
He scrambled against the wall by his back, pressing himself against it, measuring the space the room allotted for him, frowning as his mind calculated to space. It was not the fact that he had less than 10 feet to each side of the square of the room; but that he knew without a doubt a tiny amount of room he had been provided without having to think about it; without having to calculate it. He had always been smart, especially in math, but he could never have estimated with his eyes, or been so confident that his answer was right. There was no other answer. His cell was 10 feet long, and 10 feet wide with 562 cobblestones on the floor, twice that on each wall, and 525 on his ceiling. The humidity in the air was 87%; combined with the warm air temperature provided him with sweet pouring down his face. And he was sure.
His eyes began to fill with tears as his mind skimmed across the events proceeding his awakening upon the damp, molding cell. His heart began to break as he relived his actions, but not because of what he had done; because he had almost committed murder-against his own flesh and blood-so erringly, so precisely, so confidently. He could feel the shards of his heart slice against the flesh inside of his body as they slid down from where his heart had been. He would have done everything he had done last night again, if the circumstances arose, and he would have finished the job as he intended.
He could feel his stomach begin to toss and he began to grow nauseous, disgust filling his body. He turned his head to his right, trying to swallow the foul saliva pouring into his mouth, preceding the contents of his stomach. What had he last eaten? Cookies with...his mother. His stomach muscles clenched, and his body jolted as his stomach expelled the contents residing inside. He closed his eyes, allowing his thoughts to carry him away, though they kept drifting to before he had been captured. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, wincing as the disgusting smell reached his nose, threatening to cause the same result once more. He unconsciously cast his gaze upon the pile, and felt his body grow cold with fear. Tiny flecks of dark black, like a swirling void in the depths of night dotted the mush-colored slop. Blood.
He scrambled across the floor to the spot exactly diagonal-he knew-to the vomit, and felt sweet fear course through his body. He closed his eyes, reveling in the forbidden sweetness of a twisted form of pain, disgusted and delighted at himself. His eyes were rolling madly in his head like a frightened stallion, though he was less afraid of a tangible foe than his own insanity. He coughed, prepared for the blood which sprayed forth out of his opened mouth and layered upon his lips. He traced a trembling finger through the mortal pain and placed the finger in his mouth, laughing gently as he actions began to register in his mind.
Then it hit him, hit him like a hammer, a crushing wall of mortar, slamming down on him, crushing him, forming him into a mangled half-human thing. He understood why he had been bound, how he had escaped, how he so unerringly nearly murdered family, why he had been followed and thrown into this cell. He understood why Layen had been taken from him. Without anger, without fear, without embarrassment, without disgust, without uncertainty, he uttered the four words that had changed his life without knowing him realizing it.
"I am a Maverick."
He was surprised, or as surprised as he could possibly be in his emotionless state, that he knew without a doubt he was a Maverick, an unholy demon of machine and man. He could not be machine yet, that was the reason he had been captured so late at night; he would have to be implemented with a special computer program, overriding the madness that came with transforming into a Maverick, converting them to mindless androids. Reploids, they called them. The soulless, lifeless, emotionless half-humans controlled by men other than themselves through the device of computer software, all because they had been born with special abilities. The Madness, he had heard was the awakening of the Maverick's powers; the time after their powers and gifts had been unleashed, but before they could be controlled was a time of perpetual darkness for all those directly in contact with a Maverick.
"I am a Maverick." The words repeated themselves over and over in his head, as though each time he uttered them was a new experience, a new electrifying jolt of enlightenment. His pulse began to quicken to an untimely speed, the thumping more like the rhythm of a primal drum than a heart. He could almost detect chanting in his mind; he could almost hear the words of a primitive people singing along with the music of the drums, of his heart. His perked ears snatched at words, and the chanting began to take a solid form. His body grew cold with fear before seeming alight with an emotion he could not begin to fathom, and his head rolled back and his lips parted as he began to scream, singing the same lyrics he could hear in his mind. His words gushed forth softly and slowly at first, but as the chanting in his mind grew, so did his own imitation. His words gathered speed and volume and soon he was screaming the four maddening words.
"I am a Maverick."