JMJ

Chapter Twelve

An Overgrown Embryo in a Metallic Egg

The figure just barely leapt out of the way with quite a normal cry of surprise from the heated swing of Matthias' punch. I would have been a tidy left hook had Matthias managed it.

" Matthias!" cried the man.

Matthias' hands slammed back behind him on the slab by which he was barely propped up enough to call a seated position with his legs stretched out in front of him. Panting blistering breaths Matthias glared at the man and studied him a moment.

Where had he seen him before? He looked familiar.

Matthias squinted and blinked, but he could not quite place him. His mind suddenly felt disoriented— downright discombobulated— so that he had to rub his forehead as those heavy breaths slowed.

It was then that he was distracted by taking note in a high-pitched tweaking in place of a heart beat. Beneath the collar of his jumpsuit was a wire leading straight to his chest where an unidentified lump beneath the slivery synthetic cloth was monitoring.

He looked around him at this circular chamber. It was a very dense room; metallic and almost spherical save for the floor. A round door stuck out in the wall on his left. Most of the rest of the sphere was covered in virtual screens displayed from laser-lights in the walls. They were mostly medical monitors including several layers of his heart beat alone on one screen. On others were plain rotating male figures alongside numbers, waves, and charts changing subtly and constantly. His breath, his various systems and pressures were all there, but mostly the monitors were focused on his brain. There were at least two dozen diagrams of brain activity, functionality, and other forms tracking that he did not know the meaning of at all if they indeed were meant to be anything except impressive to look at.

He did not bother studying them long as he noticed something pressed against his temple. Slowly he touched it. This device was not attached to a wire and seemed to be only hanging on like a bandage strip. He could not tell whether it was plastic or metal.

Dizziness waved through him a moment. He closed his eyes with a cringe, but it passed and he turned once more to the man that looked familiar and yet he did not know him.

"Are you feeling alright?" asked the man.

Slowly Matthias opened his eyes. He raised a brow and curled a lip. The man only blinked quite honestly back in his concern, and Matthias grinned vilely. Then he chuckled.

"You have me systematized to within a micrometer of my life," Matthias found his words garbled. "I'd think you'd know better than me!"

The man seemed to be in some sort of official capacity. He had an unknown badge on his very administrative-looking coat of a very ostentatious design like most of his attire. His boots were bright blue and yet impressively built as though they might hide some sort of rocket for flight or magnetic soles for metal clinging. His face was trimmed with a beard that was almost perfectly square along his jaw; though the fact that his hair was purple only matched the vibrancy. Had he looked too official Matthias might have thought him dubious, but as he looked so dubious already, his position was beyond a doubt.

"Well, your emotional state is legitimate despite the scientific data and will be confirmed if necessary," replied the man.

Matthias took in a slow breath and sat up to lean over his knees with his legs thrown over the side of the medical table.

"Well," Matthias said with care. "For starters, I do feel that a bit of explanation would be nice."

"Be careful," said the man suddenly. "You may want to lie back down for a bit longer. Your brain did suffer trauma."

Matthias sniffed. "I don't know, I feel the need to speak like a civilized human to a civilized human, you understand. Just be plain, are you the doctor around here?"

"I am," said the man.

"Then please just speak like one. I'm not in the mood for nonsense."

"Yes, I am Dr. Ladle," said the doctor with some irritation. "Now, please, if you wish to continue speaking with me, I insist that you lie down, and I will do a couple more tests to make sure everything is normal now."

Matthias' eyes narrowed. Then he shrugged loosely, "Alright."

He flopped back down and threw his arms behind his head before returning to the doctor quite expectantly. First the doctor pressed a few touch-screen buttons not exactly physically touchable, except maybe the feeling of a slight buzz of static as the screen did very slightly seem to fizz each time the Ladle touched the screen. It was much as though he was pouring invisible hot soup onto anything he touched. With liquid grace he moved some of the diagrams about, zoomed into one or two with his long, dexterous fingers almost too long and dexterous to be natural, but not quite enough to call them impossible or freakish. It was just simply that they looked perfect for his job as though he chose the job simply because of his fingers… unless of course, he chose his fingers because of his job.

Then Matthias sighed to display his emotional state as the doctor requested.

"Yes," said Ladle. "Excuse me."

He reached over with the same dexterity with the softest, deftest touch as he adjusted the mechanism on Matthias' brow by bringing up a mini screen from it, which temporarily blocked Matthias' vision of anything else but out-of-focus information displayed in reverse. After a moment, Ladle closed the screen.

"It would be easier if you simply had all your implants, but you were captured by Pantheon before everyone was in safety, and I do not have spare implants at the moment onboard. We'll have to wait until we get more supplies at the matrix-ship," explained Ladle.

"So you're an alien?" shrugged Matthias.

Ladle jumped and stared as though Matthias had been quite serious in his question. Truthfully after he said it, Matthias was not sure he did not mean his question.

Ladle's fingers remained perfectly smooth as they reached under the table platform and placed another scanning device onto the back of Matthias' neck where the amygdule was located; though for what purpose Matthias had not the slightest idea, and Ladle did it so quickly and deftly that he had no time to protest much less ask.

Matthias glowered as Ladle went back to his screens. Just as Matthias was about to open his mouth again, Ladle spun around like a mechanical piece of a great old clock in a historic German city.

"You were being facetious!" exclaimed Ladle. "Excuse me. Sorry. You were raving about just about anything not too long ago."

Matthias nodded gravely but with suspicion.

"You still don't remember anything," said Ladle.

"Remember what now?" asked Matthias. "I do recall a great many things, though I'm not sure I recall anything about you."

"Do you recall being captured by the Pantheon?"

"The people from the ball?"

"Yes, you did go to the last ball before you were captured, if I recall your data correctly," said Ladle nodding.

"I'm still in Wonderland…" muttered Matthias under his breath.

Ladle frowned but then smiled kindly— patronizingly as though Matthias was a little lost puppy.

"I understand you're upset," said Ladle. "And I know these are not the times one wishes to wake to, but the crimes against humanity of the company known as Pantheon has reached its zenith now. As if kidnapping millions of people for their heinous experiments was not bad enough, to try to control people's dreams, to read them, to actually bring dreams to life…? You were working at your store across the street from—"

"Where are the other patients?" Matthias cut in.

Ladle blinked almost stupidly but nodded readily. "Ah, you do recall something of it. Yes, you… you are the only survivor."

Again Matthias leapt up, and he cared nothing for doctors' orders. He grabbed the doctor by the scruff of his coat with panic, dread, and rage boiling together too hot for the doctor to ladle anything out of him. "Where's Esther!"

"Who?" whimpered the man. "Get a hold of yourself or I'll call security to hold you down."

Matthias exhaled heatedly through his nose as he glared deadly into the man's quivering jade eyes. Then he released him and sat back down on the table with a bout of dizziness and nausea.

"There was no one named Esther listed among those kidnapped."

"Among millions?" growled Matthias.

"Well, not from your city," the doctor pressed.

"Then where is she?" asked Matthias darkly.

"Either she made it on one of the ships after the ball, or she was only a figment of your imagination as Pantheon wreaked havoc with your brain."

Matthias' heart trembled despite himself, and he was sure the doctor could easily see the distress his words caused him even if he was too scientifically inclined to know by Matthias' face. Nonetheless Matthias tried not to show it as much as he could. Besides, he still was fairly certain he was in Wonderland still. This was no real life. It couldn't be. It was like a nightmare of waking after a dream and he was unable to wake up yet however conscious he felt.

"You nearly had a heart attack when we removed you from your escape pod. Somehow even as you were, you were able to activate it and jettison yourself from the rest of the ship out into space before the explosion."

Matthias rolled his eyes. "Is there anyone named Nick that has to do with any of this?"

"Yes, he claims to be a friend of yours. He's waiting for you."

"As a friend, has he contacted my family?" asked Matthias watching the doctor's every move with the deepest scrutiny now.

Ladle seemed nervous about this fact but he answered without any amount of pause that might have proved he was making this up. It still proved nothing to Matthias.

"It's difficult. There's no phone service, after all."

"Because… we're in space?" asked Matthias wrinkling his nose.

"The technological advancements of earth were under wraps because of the unrest we were all in, and the fear of it being used in warfare by the tech companies who designed and built such things. We are only grateful for such secret ingenuity of our leaders now used for the rescue of so many people from the disasters caused by Pantheon."

" Mmm."

Despite himself, his dizziness overcame him and he had to lie down again. He had to admit that none of this felt like a dream physically even if logically none of what was passing through Ladle's mouth made a lick of sense.

"What is causing the dizziness?" demanded Matthias.

Glancing briefly at the screens to make sure before he answered, Ladle nodded as in silent communion with the machinery and then returned. His head was of very bushy movie-star styled curly hair that bounced in a way that made Matthias think vaguely of Shirley Temple. He was almost beginning to see images from Wonderland pass over his glazing eyes, and he moaned as they spiraled round making him feel dizzier like the aftershock of a carnival ride he had been unprepared for.

The doctor looked at the screen and quickly dove beneath the table as though to hide from an oncoming explosion right here and now, but he popped up like a squirrel and held up a very ordinary bucket. There was nothing in Matthias' stomach apparently, but Matthias could not withhold the dry heave. Very little came out however painful, but it did not make much sense to him in the medical environment nonetheless.

"What—!?" demanded Matthias between gasps.

"You're in a very grave state."

"You're not going to tell me this is the afterlife," snorted Matthias.

"Some of the nausea may be exemplified by the equipment," Ladle explained, "especially the one I just attached to you, but it is meant to prevent you from further states of hallucination. The hallucinations caused by Pantheon's work are dangerous enough to kill a person instantly. Surely at the end before you just woke up you must have felt the more physically violent aspects of them! You've only just been broken free of it. You've only been here a few hours, but if we had not figured out what to do for you for much longer it's very likely that your brain would have simply imploded in on itself. It's a miracle that you're conscious and able to function at all.'

"The miracle of science fiction," muttered Matthias.

"Advancements are amazing of late for me as well," admitted Ladle, "but it was all hidden because of the anti-logical movements that had taken root in the west. Some of the best technology in medical advancement was preserved in countries like China."

"I think your thing is making it worse," Matthias could not help but garble. "All I'm seeing is images of things spinning."

"It's only keeping it at bay. If it was not on you, you would already be swallowed up by hallucination," Ladle insisted. "It's the key to your mind being as stable as it is."

"I don't believe you!" Matthias choked.

"I'm sorry, Matthias."

Matthias groaned loudly and waited it out until finally the images passed, and he felt himself disappear into a dreamless, wonderless sleep of nothing but exhaustion plunged into nothingness.

Then nothingness, except that repetitive sound of a mechanical heart reader— the scientific, technological reduction of a heart beat. A modern tick-tocking reduced to merely tweaking. What was it tweaking was what he wanted to know or if it was all his fancy. It was not even the type of alert-beeping of a common hospital. The sound was tinny, metallic, lifeless, and sanitized in a way that was meant to sound soothing but only sounded empty. There was a point in which even this empty tweak…tweak…tweak disappeared again to a relief of silence in the deepest slumber, but it was not for long.

As Matthias regained thought, he wondered if it was the devices attached to him forcing his brain into a standby mode that did not allow much for images to take shape in dreams, and yet if that was the case, it did not block out his thoughts from wandering. Maybe it had nothing to do with anything but what Ladle said. Maybe… maybe what Ladle had said was based on truth after all, but he still could not allow himself to believe him entirely.

At least his dizziness had dissipated again. He was feeling normal enough other than dried-out and cold from the air filtration meant to keep the machinery from overheating no matter how advanced it was. Details seemed to fit together so nicely despite the ridiculousness of the whole. It was all hard to fight in his weakened condition, but then again, he was suddenly conscious enough to open his eyes with a thought finally fermented enough to take the forefront.

What if the things attached to him were making him hallucinate!?

Every tweak could be keeping him from making proper judgment of his surroundings!

He stared up at the dome ceiling and found himself flat on his back in the jumpsuit on the medical table in the very center of the spherical room like an embryo in a round egg or a pupil in a bloodshot eye. Whoever he was, wherever he was, whatever was happening he let it sit for a few seconds as he stared. All alone with the humming, the tweaking, and the sweeping of air playing just a little with the hair upon his sweaty head.

He held his breath with a glare. When he released his breath, he lifted an arm with smoothness that surprised him like a sticky control stick that moved better than anticipated. He slipped his fingers which were not nearly as long or deft as Ladle's, but reached easily behind his neck. He felt the mechanism that Ladle had attached there and investigated it like the feelers of an insect. He tested its hold. It did not feel too strong. He pulled.

Though he braced himself, it did not pull one hair on his neck. He blinked in surprised and sighed. There was no alarm or any difference in the sounds about him as he took the tiny device and held to his face. It was finely designed, whatever it was, at least aesthetically like a tiny little spaceship from a very sleek science fiction movie. After he tossed it aside, he felt at the band on his temple now. With care he removed that too.

He paused. The room was the same as before.

Now he knew, of course, that the gadget on his chest would most-likely change the room a bit. It would at least get rid of the tweaking. Hopefully it was not tweaking anything in his heart, mind, or body. Or did he hope that it was?

Swallowing hard, he decided that it would be better if it was changing things despite himself as that would mean that he probably was not where he thought he was, yet if he was where it looked like, someone would come in to investigate if his life-readings were cut short. He guessed it would be more than Ladle full of concern.

He shrugged unconcerned himself in the end after weighing it about.

A thought about Esther being in the same predicament passed through his mind with a feeling of sickness that was more the heart than anything physically around him. He knew he would rather she be here to be freed than some unknown place unless it was truly safe at home. It was only Esther he thought of as he reached beneath his slippery, silvery jumpsuit and yanked the thing like a metal leech over his heart.

It was a bit more painful to remove, but it was far more a load off once the pain subsided. He was more interested in the sudden silence. The tweaking had vanished in the instant he pulled it, and all the lights had gone dim as if they had been running on his heart like a battery. Most of the lighting had been from the screens, which no longer had anything to show. Although there was no alarm, there was after near blackness a suddenly glow from the sides of the table itself.

He held his breath almost fearing from the way those green lights pulsed that something would burst out of the table to strap him into place.

Nothing of the sort happened, and he sat up in a jolt of motion. He looked over the sides of the slab as over the sides of a boat, and to his surprise there was no flat floor as there had been when Ladle had been here. He was actually suspended in the center of a sphere just like that imaginary embryo or pupil. He had suddenly the strangest sensation of being like a student in a nightmarish detention room, but it passed quickly like nausea.

Lumpy protrusions covered the sphere like a rash of mutated growth from which the screens had once protruded. The door was where it had been before, and it looked like there was a hatch below him, presumably for the medical table to withdraw into when not in use. There was also a hatch above that seemed to have something to do with the vents.

It felt silly to crawl around in vents like in some preteen adventure, but with no one around, and the door not exactly inviting and would prove difficult to get to from the table, he decided to at least test the upper hatch.

Besides, Ladle knew Nick. There was no way he wanted a conversation with Nick in this little pod. If they were to talk it would be on his own terms.

Maybe he would be arrested for this action he was about to take, but he was sure he would only be accused of needing more therapy of the sort Ladle had been dishing out and not convicted of a felony. So he opened the hatch. It was quite smooth and new and stuck only a little. It gave in with a tiny extra tug.

He heard something outside the door. Footsteps? It was hard to tell the way his bubble made everything echo. But it passed by and gave him the notion of the orb had had a passing bout of nausea.

After a shake of his head he pulled himself up with little difficulty. Then once he was safely above the orb, he closed the hatch behind him. The way was lit for him in wires glowing softly like robotic veins into the narrow tunnels beyond where the dry cold air blew into his face.

However, when he had only gone a little ways he felt himself fading, fainting.

He tried to remain conscious, but the more he tried, the less control he had. The more he felt himself lying down the more he felt he was upside down. The more he tried to focus on moving, the more he realized he could not. Then he opened his eyes.

He was lying on the medical table again as though he had never left it.

A mask was on his face. What he was breathing he was not sure, but it tasted sickly sweet. He heard the tweaking. He heard the suction of breathing. He heard the suction of… something far more disturbing that he did not dare to place. He heard— no, he felt someone hovering over his head. Hovering there, something was pressed against his skull.

Pain!

He was staring up at masked people hovering there like they were not people at all staring back with faces covered in shadow.

He felt himself shake. He felt himself quiver. He almost bit his tongue.

The tweaking grew more frantic. Frantic. Frantic. Louder, louder. Steam.

Then…

Consciousness left him.

It felt like only a second.

He woke up again.

Ladle was there removing something from his temple.

"He should be stable now," he was saying to someone. "Only rest will help him further. Had it been much longer, and I know his heart would have given out. I can't believe that the shock from Pantheon's work on his brain had been so strong that he actually burst into consciousness during the procedure."

What procedure?

Matthias felt fear tear through him like a scalpel to his brain as though he feared he had had a lobotomy, but if he had had a lobotomy he certainly could think clearly even through the shaky grog still consuming him.

But he kept his eyes closed.

He did not want to look at Ladle or anyone right now. He was not sure what was real or what was not, but he could not speak right now. He wouldn't. He simply laid there pretending he was not conscious, but they probably knew. The screens would tell them, after all.

"Matthias?"

Matthias did not open his eyes.

"I apologize for disturbing you, but—"

"You already disturbed me," Matthias gulped at the sound of his own scraping voice, but as he cleared his throat he mustered, "you disturbed me enough already."

"Do you wish to remain in here then?"

Matthias paused. Then he looked Ladle straight in the face with as much courage as he could muster. Whoever the other personnel were, had just left through the door, so he had not had the chance to see them clearly. One, however, seemed to have a tail coming out from under a long coat that was sleekly neon, snaky, scaly, and changed color like a lava lamp.

Matthias blinked and looked again, but the door was already closed.

"No. Let's go. Now. Tell me what's going on. Tell me everything." Matthias spoke sternly, but at last his eyes faltered. "Please."

"Of course," said Ladle kindly, or rather patronizingly as to a lost puppy.