[HOLO] [Sanctuary] What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stranger
Of course Sam Axe had woken up before with no idea where he was or how the hell he got there. He’d gotten married once in Vegas. And there’d been this one Staatssicherheit guy who’d pistol-whipped him to every rendezvous no matter how much Sam said he’d love a blindfold -- but that’d been ‘89, and nowadays he tended to wake up wherever he’d put his head the night before. And nowadays he’d hit the hay by eleven o’clock and there’d be no head next to him on the pillow in the morning. Say it ain’t so, Sam.
But waking up standing, and ‘waking up’ when you’d been mid-sentence with a lady (who had three condos in Boca and was also really cute) was a new thing. He’d ‘woken up’ in a stainless-steel can of a room, wobbling on a raised dais in the middle and completely alone. His hand was still cupped around a beer that wasn’t even there any more, and he was left blinking foolishly at nothing at all.
Downside: when you woke up in an unfamiliar place you could keep your eyes shut and feign unconsciousness. Worst came to worst, when you had to stop feigning you could do the amnesia trick instead, though he’d never found who are you? Wait! My God! Who am I! to be effective yet. Horse had already left the barn on this one.
“Hi,” he said. Nothing. “Hello? ¿Hola?” Nothing. The room was so sterile and empty he could’ve been inside a microwave. Just him and his pedestal and thinking that if this was Heaven, God, You could have made it look less like a space alien lounge, and if this is Hell you got me beat. Everything was matte gunmetal colours and circular, which made it difficult to estimate how round about the room was: big enough, decided Sam.
Some drugs made you feel as though no time had passed, or took a chainsaw to your memory bank. Get disoriented enough and it’d have the same effect. Stress test. Psychological conditioning or torture could do hell to you too, but nobody was that good. Nobody could be that good. He was still wearing the lime-green shirt Fi winced at whenever she saw it, which was a kick in the pants if you looked at what Mike wore most of the time, and it still smelled like his aftershave. No time could have passed. Nobody could be that good, not the Management, no spook who hated any of them.
Big burning hole in his pocket where his cellphone had been, though. No surprise.
“Don’t mind if I do,” said Sam, and made the first real test, which was moving.
Walking around on the raised dais raised no alarm bell, but it let him know that the rest of the room looked like the rest of the room -- and that out of the corner of his eye, right above him was some kind of device fixed to the ceiling. Sam tried to compare it to other devices in his brain and gave up. He wasn’t the device guy. No laser beams, no gunshots; no telltale fatigue or dizziness when he moved. Whoever had put him here didn’t really care about him moving around. It was power, to not care.
“This is a nice place you have here,” he said amiably, for the benefit of any unseen cameras or rows of Martians watching him on Martian Pay-Per-View. When his foot tested the first step and worked at the metal it was solid. This place hadn’t been mocked up out of beer cans. “Real cute. Is this before or after the probe, fellas? I’m the type of guy who needs romancing, you know?”
The room was deadly silent, and when Sam went to the wall and put his ear to it there were no sounds from outside. Nothing to indicate that this was some cheap, crappy construction made in some warehouse in order to give him one hell of a scare. No door. Nobody.
Fear? He was fifteen years past spooking at bumps in the night. But disquiet -- well, you could have buckets of that, and all for free.
But waking up standing, and ‘waking up’ when you’d been mid-sentence with a lady (who had three condos in Boca and was also really cute) was a new thing. He’d ‘woken up’ in a stainless-steel can of a room, wobbling on a raised dais in the middle and completely alone. His hand was still cupped around a beer that wasn’t even there any more, and he was left blinking foolishly at nothing at all.
Downside: when you woke up in an unfamiliar place you could keep your eyes shut and feign unconsciousness. Worst came to worst, when you had to stop feigning you could do the amnesia trick instead, though he’d never found who are you? Wait! My God! Who am I! to be effective yet. Horse had already left the barn on this one.
“Hi,” he said. Nothing. “Hello? ¿Hola?” Nothing. The room was so sterile and empty he could’ve been inside a microwave. Just him and his pedestal and thinking that if this was Heaven, God, You could have made it look less like a space alien lounge, and if this is Hell you got me beat. Everything was matte gunmetal colours and circular, which made it difficult to estimate how round about the room was: big enough, decided Sam.
Some drugs made you feel as though no time had passed, or took a chainsaw to your memory bank. Get disoriented enough and it’d have the same effect. Stress test. Psychological conditioning or torture could do hell to you too, but nobody was that good. Nobody could be that good. He was still wearing the lime-green shirt Fi winced at whenever she saw it, which was a kick in the pants if you looked at what Mike wore most of the time, and it still smelled like his aftershave. No time could have passed. Nobody could be that good, not the Management, no spook who hated any of them.
Big burning hole in his pocket where his cellphone had been, though. No surprise.
“Don’t mind if I do,” said Sam, and made the first real test, which was moving.
Walking around on the raised dais raised no alarm bell, but it let him know that the rest of the room looked like the rest of the room -- and that out of the corner of his eye, right above him was some kind of device fixed to the ceiling. Sam tried to compare it to other devices in his brain and gave up. He wasn’t the device guy. No laser beams, no gunshots; no telltale fatigue or dizziness when he moved. Whoever had put him here didn’t really care about him moving around. It was power, to not care.
“This is a nice place you have here,” he said amiably, for the benefit of any unseen cameras or rows of Martians watching him on Martian Pay-Per-View. When his foot tested the first step and worked at the metal it was solid. This place hadn’t been mocked up out of beer cans. “Real cute. Is this before or after the probe, fellas? I’m the type of guy who needs romancing, you know?”
The room was deadly silent, and when Sam went to the wall and put his ear to it there were no sounds from outside. Nothing to indicate that this was some cheap, crappy construction made in some warehouse in order to give him one hell of a scare. No door. Nobody.
Fear? He was fifteen years past spooking at bumps in the night. But disquiet -- well, you could have buckets of that, and all for free.