Kat stopped trudging down the corridor and turned back to where Escher stood, uncertainly, outside cell 709. "Ohyeah, I'd better just check." She snorted, mirthlessly. "Wouldn't want to lose my job"
Inside, Chet Karos stood waiting for them, leaning slightly against the wall in his characteristic relaxed-tension manner. He cocked his head at Kat as she entered, and for once he looked deadly serious.
"Katarinait's started?"
"What?" Kat really wasn't in the mood for Chet's mind games. "What's started?"
"Hmm" The man closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them, their vivid green staring into space in the direction of the door. He stayed like that for a moment, lips moving ever so slightly, and Kat had the distinct impression that he was counting under his breath. Then he shifted his focus back onto her, and when he spoke his tone was unexpectedly sincere, fast, and full of urgency.
"You'd better go, Katarina, better run, very, very soon. Else you'll be caught, you'll be sent to a place you wouldn't like. Go to him, Kat, and go quickly."
"What are you talking about?" asked Escher behind Kat.
Karos set his creepy stare on her. Since entering the cell she had stayed mostly hidden behind the other girl to try and stay away from it, but it still felt like those malicious green orbs were staring straight at her.
"Why, you'll get caught, of course." he replied with his usual certainty. "And you'll be sent to a place you don't want to go."
Kat watched him intently, her face betraying deep thought.
"Run, Katarina. Run, and run fast."
And he smiled his smile at her, and she knew right then, whatever it was, it was important.
So she ran.
"Kat, what are you—-"
Hsss.
Escher was interrupted by the closing of the thrice-reinforced, heavy door as Kat slipped out, her figure disappearing from the observation window.
"What do you know." echoed the voice of the insane from behind her, and chills ran up Escher's spine. "We're all alone."
Escher turned, as slowly as she dared. Suddenly, the cell seemed far too small a space for two people. She was quite sure that she and Karos could have been at opposite ends of a concert hall and she would still have felt uncomfortable, but here and now the feeling was suffocating. It intensified as she faced the man and noted that, yes, he was still grinning that arachnid grin.
"Mr. Karos-" she began, carefully.
"Please. Call me Chet." And there it was again, that odd courtesy which somehow seemed far more threatening than impoliteness, a sort of pleasant demeanour that had quite obviously never been used in a genuine context. It was charm by numbers, perfect but chilling.
"Uh. Chet. Look, about what I said" As she spoke, Escher was acutely aware of the closed door a few paces behind her. There was an alarm button set into the soft wall by the frame, as in all of the cells, but right now it seemed a very long way away indeed. And also, assuming she could reach it, there was the problem of the trouble she would land Kat in if Mereii found out that she had left her alone and locked into a cell with a patient-
"-And you wouldn't want to get Miss Morrigan fired, now, would you?" said Chet mildly, his words cutting into her chain of thought with laser precision. "That would make things very difficult indeed."
She started, disbelief sleeting into her expression "Whoah, whoah, wait just a second. Thatsaying thatthat wasn't the future. That was mind-reading. Where did that come from?"
The tall man quirked his eyebrows at her, amused. "I have a gift for reading people, Miss Griffin. It's not magic, and it's nowhere near as inexplicable as my other gift, which issomething else." The amusement drained from his voice as he continued;
"In any case, it doesn't take any kind of gift to see that you're scared of me."
"I'm not scared of you." said Escher, automatically.
"No, you're absolutely terrified." Chet agreed, head on one side. "I just happen to dislike hyperbole. Yes, of course you're scared. Why shouldn't you be? It's human nature to fear what can't be understood. But then, you'd know all about thatwouldn't you, Miss Griffin?"
Escher continued to stand very still. She knew for a definite fact that there was a 0.5 mechanical pencil in her left sweater pocket. If Chet did attack her, she could at leastgive him a severe poking.
"I'm sorry if what I said sounded rude." she said. "But I can't help being sceptical. I just don't believe inall that stuff."
"Fair enoughbut consider that all that stuff' is my life's'gift' and the reason I'm incarcerated in this wretched place. I think I'm entitled to be less than impressed at someone belittling it." He made a tiny advancing movement, which was immediately matched by a large retreating one on Escher's part as she backed straight up against the sealed door. The straitjacketed man shook his head calmly.
"You should really try to be a little less predictable, Miss Griffin. You're transparent enough as it isit's not going to help you when it all starts."
"Whatare you talking about?"
"You're already the weak link in this chain." continued Chet, matter-of-factly. "You know it, too- it's in your face, your voiceyour every movement. And, as Kat has just so obligingly proved, you can't always rely on everyone else to keep you out of trouble. What have you done this time, I wonder?"
The girl's eyes narrowed. "You talked Kat into leaving me in here." she said. "I didn't do anything."
Chet smirked. Escher got the impression that, had he been a normal (or at least less medicated) person, he would have laughed at this. As it was, he was Chet, so he smirked. "You didn't? You haven'tbroken something important, or anything of that nature? I'm sorry, I must have been mistaken."
Escher turned her head slightly, apparently to examine the wall at her side. For Chet's sharp eyes, it was as big an admission as if she'd spoken.
"As for Kat, I merely told her that she'd regret failing to act as I advised her. I merely saw that she was needed elsewhere, and I told her so. I had no idea she'd be so distracted as to leave you behind."
"Well, okay." said Escher, a challenge in her tone. "What did you see? Where did she go?"
"As you may have noticed, Miss Griffin, I don't generally deal in particulars." Chet's eyes were suddenly close to becoming those worrying, snake-green slits once again. "She's gone where she thought she was needed. And if you keep trying to test me like that." he added, "I'm afraid you'll find my patience isn't up to regulation standards."
"Look, I already said that I'm not purposefully trying to annoy you." snapped the girl. "I just want to know that you haven't put Kat in any danger. My friends are important to me, Chet. That's why I'm trying to help Kat with Doctor Octaviusbecause unlike you, I care about people!" Possibly to alleviate the vagueness of this last statement, she stabbed her index finger in Chet's general direction with as much force as she dared, and fought the urge to add "So there!"
"Because, unlike me, you're perfectly sane?"
"Yes!"
"Yes, I can see that." said Chet, tranquilly. "That's why you live absolutely alonewith a cat. It could also have something to do with all those annoying little OCD symptoms you carry around with you like so many lucky charms."
Escher looked up fast, straight into Chet's overbright eyes. He gave her his biggest, most disquieting smile to date.
"We can spot our own." he said.
There was a crammed sort of silence. Escher opened her mouth, then realized that there was nothing she could think of to say with it.
Kat slid inside the door as it closed, then turned to Otto. He didn't look up, but then she hadn't really expected him to. An absurd guilt prickled at her as she realised that she was actually getting used to him being in this condition.
Her thoughts flew back to what Chet had said; that she'd better run, and run fast. Now that she had a second to think, she realized that she hadn't known where she was supposed to run to or to whom, or anything. But her gut had told her here. Something was about to happen. And it was not going to be a good thing, she decided with a frown.
She glanced out the door, trying to figure out what it was that would happen. Was a nuke coming to explode upon this very spot?
Her eyes flickered up to the tentacle and the actuator collar that Escher had broken earlier-
Wait
-and any further thought was suddenly wiped from her mind, replaced by the basic, frantic need to keep breathing.
It had taken less then a second for the tentacle with the clearly unfixed collar to open and lash out at her like a striking viper, wrapping its claws around her neck and squeezing. Squeezing just a little too hard for comfort, rendering breathing difficult, very, but just about possible.
Very strange, really, because she knew the personality of the actuators: if they wanted to kill her, they would have snapped her neck. That thought was painful in the way that a tooth is when pulled under Novocain, a sort of dulled aching.
"Tent" she croaked, feeling her feet leave the ground. Fear was beginning to twist her stomach. The few thoughts she managed to have circled, scattered with panic. They can't kill me, because they know me. They wouldn't. "It'sIt's me. Kat." The claw around her neck was constricting, slowly but surely.
The actuator clicked and whirred. "Kat! Remember! I saved you!" She wrapped her hands around the two claw fingers that were around the front of her neck, giving a futile pull to try and get it away. "From the..saw."
She felt her strength ebbing, and the tentacle sensed it too. It squeezed a little harder, and she found that it was much too hard to keep her hands around the claws. Even holding them up became a chore that she simply was too sapped to do.
Her stomach churned even more at this. They COULDN'T. They know me, they couldn't never, ever do this to me.
"Te."
It was difficult to know what happened next. Perhaps Otto responded in some way, because the actuator screeched and chattered loudly enough for it to hurt Kat's ears at such close range, and dropped her.
Katarina lay on the floor, gasping for breath. She rubbed her neck and watched the ground, her face wrinkled with the closeness of the encounter. A few more seconds and she could have died from asphyxiation. And from a tentacle, a tentacle that she had been so horrified to see so placid, the tentacle that she had saved time and time again from the police forces and the press and everything.
A friend, interesting to say, had almost killed her.
She looked up at it, her breathing finally settling to quasi-normal. The claw watched her carefully, silently. Reaching down to her, it opened and chattered. The screeching she'd heard before was toned down, cautious. Maybe even apologetic?
"I'm fine" she said, still rubbing her neck, which she guessed was now bruising beautiful black and blue. "And youyou're alive."
The actuator most certainly nodded this time, then nudged Otto with a closed claw. It clicked urgently at him, but he only looked at it with a dazed and foreign expression, blinking slowly. He opened his mouth to speak, but then immediately turned away from the apparently-worried piece of machinery attached to him.
Kat looked down at the tentacle, which matched its flickering red light with her violet contacts. "I don't know what's wrong with him." she said, finally. "There's things in his mind that are making him confused as to what you are."
She could have sworn the actuator frowned.
Moving with increasing fluidity and grace as it geared itself up, the arm went back to nudging Otto carefully, chittering and scritching rapidly to him. He just watched it, his face confused. With a final nudge, the tentacle gave up, rose and looked at the three other mechanical actuators, their inhibitor collars still in place. It turned momentarily to Kat, then arched upwards to the collars fixed to the walls. Extending the familiar long and serrated spike, it methodically punctured each happy blue light, the three of them sparking before dying completely. As the blue died, red light began to shine through the cloth-bound claws above the collars, changing the very atmosphere of the room. Shadows shivered across the walls, now, the combined scarlet illumination strong enough to cast and dispel them as they moved. Kat shaded her eyes from the textile-diffused glare, and noted that it seemed as if a missing dimension had been sketched back into the cell by the light and shade that the arms brought.
The three newly-awakened tentacles rose, opening their claws to the fullest extent to free them of the cloth shrouds. For a minute, the air was filled with teeth-jarring shredding sounds, bits of canvas and thread drifting to the floor as the makeshift restraints were methodically destroyed. Eventually, apparently cued by a sharp chitter from the first arm, all of them dipped and focused on Otto, claws gaping slightly as they shone their bright and bloody lights into his bewildered eyes.
"Actuators."
The four arms looked sharply back to Kat as she spoke, swinging nearer to her.
"Can you..tell me what happened?" She pointed to the back of her neck, trying not to touch the brusing.
The first tentacle nodded as Kat moved closer, the verdigrised manipulators extending to reveal a sharp, steely wire in its depths.
She eyed it dubiously. "That's larger then the one you used last time."
The other three tentacles nodded to her. With a frown, she shrugged. "Nothing to lose, I suppose."
The tentacle wrapped around her and slid the wire into her neck. This one, most definitely, hurt.
"OW!"
We apologize. In simplified terms, a larger connection requires a longer wire, which in turn requires more pain.
"It's fine" She looked at the three others within her frame of vision. "What happened?"
We shall do it this way instead
"What?"
A larger connection was needed to directly transfer information.
"You mean you're actually showing me what happened?"
You will be an observer, a ghost of sorts.
"What's wrong with him?"
He does not know what we are. There was an infinite amount of worry in that voice.
"He doesn't know anything."
What is wrong with him?
"I told you already."
Medication. We see. We believe the saying is fasten your seatbelts'.
Kat would have needed a hell of a lot then a seatbelt to prepare for what happened next.
Katarina had long mused about the exact nature of the link between Otto and the tentacles. The deep connection between the two, sight and sound and hearing and everything, had always struck her as the most fascinating thing around, so naturally she'd wondered what it was like. How did someone see two things at once, both what your eyes were seeing and the information from another being directly translated into your brain? Wasn't that, well, confusing? Hard to understand, at least?
She would later compare the experience to watching a baseball game on TV; you could see it, you knew exactly what was going on, perhaps even more but couldn't do anything or say anything and no one saw you.
The next several neurones that fired in her brain were all for eyes. She blinked and opened them, looking around blurrily. She wasn't quite sure where or when she was, but she began to recognize the place as Otto's house. She was in the kitchen, sitting on the table. She looked down at her body, which seemed solid enough to her, at least, but Otto paid her no heed and was wandering the kitchen aimlessly, the tentacles looking around for him; watching, like they always did.
"I could have swornI didn't leave that window open. I wonderno, couldn't be" He looked up, his quiet tone failing to disguise the uncomfortable worry in his expression. "I better go down to the lab."
Kat watched him continue to scrutinize the kitchen, looking for anything odd or out of place and completely failing to notice the young woman sitting about three feet away from him on the table. It would have been funny if it wasn't so weird.
"No more blasted orange juice" Otto grumbled, turning from the fridge. Kat had the sudden hope that this really was where she, well, was, and the entire asylum didn't exist.
Those hopes were dashed as he looked right through her and set one hand down on the table, on top of her own. His fingers went right through hers and tapped on the granite countertop absent-mindedly, prompting a squeak of shock from the girl, which he evidently couldn't hear. "Can we risk it?"
One tentacle rose and chittered. Otto nodded, collected his coat and wrapped it around himself, grabbing his fedora and placing it on, before he was out the door.
Kat followed, although it was more that she felt herself being pulled. She was being dragged through his memory by the tentacles, and this made her distinctly uncomfortable as she watched Otto pulled out a jug of orange juice from the nearest A&P and step up to the express counter, placing just that.
"Will that be all?" asked the bimbo-esque cashier at the desk, with a plastic smile.
"Yes," replied Otto gruffly, sticking his hand in his pocket for something to pay with. After a short search, he revealed several bills and handed them to the girl. That paid, he picked up his OJ and left with a sigh.
Watch the woman who our Father paid for his refreshment.
It wasn't till after she watched the woman notice the silver gleam and glowing red eye of a single actuator, then reach for her telephone, that Kat noticed the voice. Shocked, she looked around. She had just managed to grasp the notion that no-one saw her here- that she was a phantom, a ghost of sorts that didn't belong here- and as a result she first thought the voice might be from her own mind. Then she realized her thoughts did not generally include phrases like our father', or have such a harsh, level quality. She looked around again, and this time she saw the red glow of an actuator's eyes surrounded by the three deathly claws. It floated near her, and it was talking.
You are watching a direct feed from Otto's mind, to our memory banks, to you.
"Fascinating." she said quietly, as the tentacles walked her out.
Wait a moment
She looked around, and saw that three other tentacles were there. Strangely enough, they lead back and then swung around her back almost as if.
As if they were attachedto me.
She looked down, sliding up her shirt a bit. Yes, there was the spinal brace, around her stomach.
A symbolic representation.
This calmed her a bit, and she allowed them to continue walking, following the man. Otto quietly strode, blending in. If she didn't know him, she would have sworn he was just another hassled businessman on a late-night shopping run.
With his head bowed and tentacles hidden, the doctor's view was severely limited. He did not see the police officers begin to trail him silently, nor did he notice the one who was shining a flashlight on the exposed actuator from the bottom of his coat until he was alerted. Kat, on the other hand, did, and she would have yelled herself hoarse at him if she had thought that there was a fraction of a chance that he could hear.
Her point of view switched again, causing her head to spin. This time she was staring at the ground, and her hands were in her pockets, and the actuators were hidden under the four-year old trench coat that Kat had bought for—-
Wait
I'min Otto's head.
Correct.
Instinctively, she tried to move his head to look around, but found it impossible. Before she could experiment further, she was distracted by a new astonishment- the echo of Otto's thoughts and the voice of the tentacles, just as clear as if they werewell, as if they were in her own head, which wasn't far from the truth.
The tentacles she could hear now, she realised, belonged to this period. Not the ones who had brought her back here.
Otto.
What is it?
There is a large light shining down on us.
This isn't the time for jokes.
We do not joke.
His head lifted, and his body turned around. It took a second for his eyes to focus on the bright lights of the police officers. And there were a lot of them.
"You're under arrest!" shouted one of them.
"Yes, I can see that." he replied quietly. Only Kat could sense the scramble of assessment that was taking place behind the calm mask, both intelligences searching the scene around them for a chance, an escape. "Though it would be possible for us to kill you all," he continued after a moment, as if making a remark about the weather, "I'd rather this didn't get any more unpleasant than necessary."
"How kind," remarked another officer, dryly.
Two more men in uniform stepped forward, setting down a strange looking machine. The one on the left pressed a button, and suddenly, she felt a weight bear down on his back. A good sixty to eighty pounds.
Father!
She had been aware of two presences in his mind before this moment, but at the next moment, the second was gone.
Kat felt suddenly sick, and it took her a moment to realize that it was Otto's fear that was gripping her, making her vision blur with the sheer intensity of it as her- his- awareness started to drain away. Whatever the thing was, it was making both the tentacles and their host black out, forcing them to the ground. And then, in the final moment before the scene faded, Kat saw something that made her non-existent stomach lurch. Behind the machine, behind the glare, another police car had pulled up, its two officers getting out to join the throng. But it was the third man that slid from the back seat that riveted Kat's attention as Otto's vision faded away.
It was becoming distinctly difficult to focus, but she could see he was tall and smartly-attired in a dark coat and tie. A set of small-rimmed glasses perched on a long, slightly pointed nose were the only thing that decorated his face. He stepped forward to stand behind the protection of the police who had obviously authorized his presence. She vaguely wondered who it was, most certainly not a policeman. Maybe a psychologist or something
By sheer coincidence, the last thing that the eyes that Kat was currently trapped behind could see with any clarity was the face of the man in the suit. She saw that the familiar stare behind those familiar glasses was bright with a very familiar bitter triumph
and then the world fell away.
This time, the voice of the tentacles, the tentacles that had brought her here, cut in sharply, bringing Kat back to her own world, We knew nothing more until we awoke later, strapped with electric cuffs.
Couldn't Otto tell you?
Their voices were layered with betrayal: He would not tell us what went on.
This most certainly amused Kat, but she said nothing. Instead, she tapped her lip curiously, What happens next?
This time, however, she was prepared for the out-of-body experience. As she felt her mind virtually fly out of her body, she blinked her non-eyes and opened them.
She looked around a bit, and for a moment she thought she had simply been returned to the present. The location was the same- a particular rubber room, bearing a certain multi-armed occupant. But now there was also another man in the room, a certain doctor, who she now wanted to castrate many times over.
What's going on now?
Watch.
She noticed Otto was not yet in any sort of straitjacket, but a set of smaller, more makeshift-looking cuffs still fit nicely around the four tentacles, which were looking rather submissive. Handcuffs linked his own wrists together. John Mereii, now attired in a white coat and looking, Kat thought, decidedly worn out, was occupied with unlocking a case, talking as he did so.
"apologise for the delay, but I've been working extensively on these since your capture. I'm sure that when you see the effect, you'll agree that the results are more than satisfactory. From my point of view, at least."
"I don't even know you." Otto said, lifting an eyebrow. "You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. What can you possibly hope to gain from me now?"
"You ruined my life, Octopus."
"My name is Otto Octavius, Dr. Mereii. I'd prefer you call me by my real name instead of some pseudonym created by a rather interesting newspaper," He was as polite as could be imagined, given the current situation. Kat was actually surprised she was expecting Otto to shred John to little pieces.
"I'll call you whatever I want," John spat, clearly needing a lot of self-control. "Because you didn't have a care in the world for me, did you!"
"Dr. Mereii, calm down." Otto sighed. "I think you can tell that I'm sane, and even if I wasn't, I doubt whatever insanity you see in me is bad enough to merit this." He looked around at the rubber walls. "And you're clearly a little bit out of it yourself."
Oh, well done, tentacle-boy. If Kat's face had been in the same virtual reality as her mind, she would have winced. Piss him off, that'll work.
"I'm fine, it's you that's not." Mereii's face showed unconcealed hatred. He pulled four more tentacle-sized collars out of the industrial-looking case at his side. Kat recognised them instantly as the things which, in the present, had kept the actuators dead to the world and their host.
"This won't hurt." said the psychologist, advancing a step. "Unfortunately."
"Whatare you doing?" This wasn't really a question. Kat understood that this was a time when Otto was still one-hundred-percent himself, easily able to pick up on the malice in Mereii's tone and expression. He watched the psychologist warily, the cuffed tentacles twitching sporadically. But each time they twitched, the collars sparked and the actuators lowered.
Kat blinked, and suddenly she was staring straight up at John instead of watching from behind him.
Otto, what is this man's intention?
I don't know.
Once more thrown by this quick and strange transition, it took her a second to realize she was inside Otto's head again, hearing his thoughts, feeling his fear. She decided that when Otto was scared, bad things always happened. This seemed to be the trend.
His eyes her eyes followed John as he pressed a switch on one of the collars, a small blue light flickering on. She almost saw the neurones click together in the mind she was sharing, feeling a surge of anger and panic. Her inward eye was dragged suddenly back to the open window that Otto had remarked upon earlier - and, with a lurch, she understood.
"That's an inhibitor!" Otto hissed. "So someone was in my house! It was YOU!"
"I can see how you acquired all the doctorates you got, Octopus," John replied with a smug smirk.
Otto's eyes widened. "MereiiYou're insane. What did you take? What have you done?"
With infuriating fake deafness, John snapped the collar onto the bottom left actuator, then deactivated and pulled off the electric cuff. "Brilliant, aren't they? I call them inhibitor collars."
It took Kat several seconds to figure what she was hearing now. A new emotion from the actuators, something that hadn't even almost-touched the girl as a possibility. Crying. They were crying, like a set of three five-year-olds, wailing to their father as she felt their brother leave. She had a distinct mental image of three small boys, only five, latching onto Otto's leg as a dark force tore a fourth boy away.
Father!
Father, please!
Let us stop him!
Kat could hear the new weakness in the voice of the actuators. One of them was gone, the ever-present quartet becoming a frantic trio. Otto's eyes looked down to the collared tentacle, which lay where it had fallen on the sterile floor. The heartlight had gone out. She felt, rather then saw, his eyes widen, his fright adding to that of the actuator's mechanical fear.
Yes! I agree! Do something! Anything you have to! Just get us out of here!
The tentacles which were still responsive acted immediately to their host's panicked order, snapping forwards just as Mereii picked up the next collar. The psychologist stepped back, warily, but he needn't have worried- the next second, the most vicious burst of electricity yet surged from the temporary cuffs. Blinding white exploded around Kat as Otto screamed, the tentacles screeching and jerking in the grip of the current.
As soon as he had reassured himself that the tentacles were unable to reach him, John stepped over a twitching, sparking actuator and snapped the collar around it, chuckling. "And they work excellently, as well."
Otto's voice was choked, furious, frightened. "I swear, Mereii, if I ever get out of here, I'll kill you." The deadly hiss that was hidden under the choked fear told Kat that he meant it. And it made her doubt her idea of freeing him if he killed John, even if he deserved it, she wouldn't be able to deal with the fact she had indirectly killed a man.
John smiled predatorily at Otto as he locked the collar around the top left actuator. Said actuator's heartlight blinked, fighting, before falling out of its hovering position and onto the floor with a soft clunk. "That's a big if, wouldn't you say, Otto?"
Father!
The voice was weak and scratchy, so far from the hypnotic and swirling standard chatter of the tentacles that Kat
was familiar with. Almost as if a famous singer had tried to sing with laryngitis. The actuator singular was
high pitched and panicked, the last boy that held on for dear life. And now the father was holding onto the boy just
as tightly as the boy was holding onto the father. One voice seemed so.so insignificant. This wasn't what
actuators were. A wave of nausea rolled into her again, but she resisted it. Only now did it occur to her that she didn't know
if that was Otto's fear and worry and everything else, or her own, or a combination of both.
The previous doubts about saving him were gone. He would be free. She knew it.
Fath—
The end of the word was cut off by the snapping to the collar around the last tentacle. The last boy ripped away from his father. If she tried, she could almost imagine that snap to be the end of the word, for the sense of incompleteness that resounded from the last of the last syllable was enough to drive her mad.
Actuators! Tentacles! Are you there!
There was no answer.
John stood up and dusted his hands. "Good night, Doctor Octavius."
Now there was something alien in Otto's mind, something inexpressibly foreign and wrong. Kat strained to hear this new sound, and several futile moments passed before she realised that it wasn't a sound at all. The complete opposite, in fact.
Silence.
No voices.
Kat guessed that the only reason that she was still in this memory at all was that maybe a few of the residual traces of the smart arm A.I had not yet been forced into oblivion. Still, she could sense the immense, crushing void that was building in the absence of the voices, and she guessed that if she could sense it, then for Otto it was probably ten times worse. It was like the difference between watching a TV that was receiving ordinary channel signals and one that displayed only constant white noise. The silence was maddening, like an unscratchable itch, and it was only getting more intense as the seconds passed.
As she felt the strength of the memory that held her start to fade, Kat was returned to herself once again, a ghost that watched the fraying scene from behind Dr. Mereii as he took out a notepad and pen. Otto was pale, but otherwise still outwardly showing no sign of anything but rage. He yanked violently at the handcuffs, trying to rise- a futile action, as the immobilized arms were now nothing more than four massively heavy weights at his back.
"If you want any kind of information, Mereii, take these things off." Otto was evidently struggling to stay calm, to sound reasonable. It is very difficult to do either when one is speaking through gritted teeth, but he was trying. "Justtake them off. I can ensure your safetyjust-"
Uncapping his pen with a loud click that stopped Otto midsentence, Mereii gave him a level, terribly interested stare, then smiled, cadaverously. "Intriguing." he murmured, and turned for the door, starting to write as he did so.
Kat wondered vaguely whether he would feel anything if her discorporeal body kicked him through the stomach. Before she could try, however, the room and its occupants faded completely and left her in the dark, with the quiet, metallic voice of the tentacles in her mind.
And for us, that was the end.
