From here on, stuff in quote tags is stuff you've already read; feel free to ignore it. As soon as the quote tags end, new stuff will start appearing, complete with a probably favorable alternate ending! Give it a read, I encourage you to do so!
WITH APOLOGIES TO HARLAN ELLISON: GRID1
BY TOTALLY NOT DOOMISH
For everyone; we will embrace our pain and use it as fuel for our journey.
And so we sit. At a crossroads. At eternity. The door is unlocked, open. At any moment, I can go through it and return to my girls, my protective shield. I can keep them safe. But, I choose not to. The game is more important than the comfort. I try desperately to cling to that thought, but it slips away."Stop it, Hisao."
One day, she'd said it, and it brought me out of my slumber. It brought everyone out of their slumber. I woke up, and slowly, so did everyone else. The five or so people I'd become entangled with, all in a room. Kenji was not with us. He was never with us.
I don't know what happened to him, but I've stopped dwelling on that. I've stopped dwelling on anything anymore, really. I'm cold, hungry, but I'm not letting it get to me. I'll never let it get to me. The others think I'm the only one that still has any hope left, any hope that we'll see the light of day again. Hope of anything, really.
But I'm not the worst off. Lilly sits in the corner, huddled and broken, head and arms across her knees. On the few occasions we're given food, she doesn't have any. She cares too much about Hanako to let her starve, even though she never says it. She hasn't spoken in years, and I'm starting to think she's unable to anymore. Her blonde hair is matted to her forehead, and her eyes are closed, sewn and grafted shut by the malevolent dictator that runs our lives now. Not that it matters to her. Nothing matters to her anymore. Sometimes she looks up, alert, mumbles for a moment, and then slumps right back over, dry heaving like she's going to vomit, but she never does. We think the reason she doesn't stand up is because she's starting to grow into the wall, but we can't ever be bothered to check. Nobody ever catches what she says, but she doesn't ever come back to reality for very long.
Hanako is gone. Mentally, of course. She's been clawing at the walls recently, her fingernails and eventually her fingertips turned to bloody stumps on the end of her hands. They're always fine after she wakes up. I tried to talk some sense into her once, tried to keep her from scrawling on the walls in her own blood until she fell asleep, but she just looks at me with horrified, anguished eyes, and I can't bring myself to tear her away from her work. The burns on her body have been spreading for a few years now, every day slowly enveloping more and more of her beautiful visage into a horrible, scarred monster. Eventually the scarring grew so painful that she wrenched her own eye out, and can only see out of the one that hasn't been covered yet. On a good day, you can still talk to Hanako like nothing was ever wrong, and she'll work past her giggles and her horrible, gnarled smile and talk about how she misses the way things used to be. Sometimes she sits over by Lilly and they cry together. Sometimes she doesn't.
Shizune and Misha are sitting in the corner opposite Lilly's, staring at each other. Thinking. Shizune has always been unable to speak her mind properly, and now that she's seen Misha broken and shredded to bits so many times that it's physically hurting her, I don't think any of us want to hear what she has to say. They're no longer two entities, Shizune and Misha, but one bigger object. Not physically, of course, but they're literally inseparable. If you bring them more than a few feet from one another, their almost animal instincts will kick in and they'll claw at whatever they can find to get out of your grasp and back to each other. Misha's trademark hairstyle was torn right from her head on the first day we were put in this place and it's never come back. Sometimes she twiddles idly with the air like she's twirling the drills again, but then she realizes what she's doing and is ashamed. Misha is very protective of us, and would- and has -thrown herself onto almost anything to protect the rest of the group, especially Shizune. Shizune has stopped trying to comfort her physically, but I'm almost certain the two have grown almost a symbiotic telepathic link. The way they help each other is insane, I've seen them collaborate like twins, one knowing exactly what the other wants and vice versa. Emi's suggested they're sexually entwined, but I've never seen it happen.
Rin is also gone. Only, physically. Nobody has seen her in a decade or so now, and I'm starting to think that the voice above us let her go, either out of pity, or out of mercy. I have nothing to say about her. She never broke. She was our voice of reason, the one thing that kept me sane. And now she's been gone for so long that I can't even tell how much time we've been down here anymore. In fact, she might have been taken away from us to spite me and only me.
Emi... It hurts to talk about Emi. The voice broke her first. It took away her prosthetics, forced her to hobble around on her stumps for a while. After it got tired of that, it threw her down into what she talks about as the pits of hell, being constantly jabbed by pins and needles in sheer darkness. When she returned, she didn't talk for a year or two. I don't really blame her. Emi's been talking to me, lately. I'm the only one she ever talks to. The others are too far gone to listen to her anyway. It took her some time to work up her emotions, but the facade she puts on is almost like her old self. She's constantly crying, but she tries not to let it get to her. By now I'm sure she can ignore the tears to the point of her entire shirt being soaked without her even giving a second thought. The voice gave her back her prosthetics eventually, but she can't take them off. She's tried, and she claims it will kill her and she'll never come back to us. They're manufactured like some sort of horrible steampunk anomaly, jutting out in random spots and chugging like they're controlling her. She's shown me how they transform before, how they arrange themselves into whatever shape she needs them to be to get by. I've seen them coil like springs, and turn into thick hatchets to cut through jungles as she walks high above us. I've never seen what the ends that latch onto her legs look like, but she claims they're long, horrible hollow needles, jabbing so far up her legs that she can feel them in her pelvis when she walks. She can't run anymore, it hurts her too much.
She spoke again. "I said stop it, Hisao." I turn towards her and realize that I'm so lost in thought that my nails are digging into her sides, tiny specks of blood coming from the deepest puncture. I hesitate to let go of her, because I know what's going to happen when I do. I mutter a sorry. I can't muster up enough courage to feel anything, because as soon as I start feeling anything, I know I won't be able to stop. Like mechanical creatures, my hands retract from around Emi's sides. I hold her when I don't know what else to do.
After an hour or so of silence, Hanako tears herself away from the wall. She looks in more despair than usual, her frown hidden by the almost glasgow smile her scars have etched on her face.
Between mad giggles, she utters out, "H-Hisao, he hasn't talked to us in a while." The way her voice sounds almost normal between the poorly stifled chuckles hurts me every time I hear it. She jitters and shakes, and Lilly raises her head from its place on her knees, as if she knows Hanako is to the point of breaking. She doesn't move, though. She stopped moving to protect Hanako when it wasn't necessary long ago.
I nod. "I know, Hanako." It's all I can muster. I've stopped trying to commit myself to when the voice is going to tell us what to do next. The school is like a jail for us. Every door bricked in, every window collapsed, every tunnel a mystery. We spend most of our time in our tiny room, locked together in both harmony and anguish. When the door swings open, we're always somewhere different. Sometimes another tiny room awaits on the other side, to whisk us away to wherever the voice wants us to go. Most recently, we were led to the cafeteria, which was filled with a horrible, fleshy growth. We were told to feast, and none of us did. The voice slammed all of the doors, uprooted the tables, cleared the space, and put us against each other until we would each take our fill. We wouldn't, though. No matter what the circumstances, no matter what happened, no matter where we were, we never hurt each other. Never; Misha being wrestled from Shizune aside, of course. The voice eventually got tired of waiting and slaughtered us all, and we woke up in the same room we'd been in before the ordeal.
There's a deafening rumble from somewhere far off. I stand, my legs numb from sitting for so long, cuddled together with Emi in horror. The rumbles always happen before the voice calls us to attention to toy with us for a while. That's all it ever does; toy with us. Give us false hope and then take it away. It does it day in and day out. Waking us from sleep, murdering us just for its own amusement. It used to bother me, but now I'm okay with that. Lilly's okay with that. Hanako's okay with that. Shizune and Misha are okay with that.
Emi's not okay with that. As soon as the voice speaks up, she starts gritting her teeth. I can tell she's still got the one thing none of us have. She's got hope. And that worries me.
"Hisao..." She starts, uncertain. I give her a limp-wristed hand to help her stand. If she falls over, she's not getting back up, and the voice will do horrible things to her. I know; I've been forced to watch far too many times.
"HELLO, STUDENTS." The voice explodes from unseen speakers. It sounds different to all of us, but it gives the same directions. It always addresses us as 'students', as if we still attended Yamaku. I suppose we're still there, in a manner of speaking. Or, maybe we aren't there. I've stopped trying to tell.
"TODAY, YOU WILL NOT BE GETTING ANY FOOD." Stating the obvious. "I HAVE A TASK FOR YOU. IT WILL HELP ME IMPROVE MY THINKING CAPABILITY; AND YOU CERTAINLY WANT THAT, DON'T YOU."
In reality, none of us wanted that. We wanted to shut the thing down and kill ourselves in peace, but we wouldn't be given that luxury.
"RETRIEVE THE TAPE FOR ME." It doesn't speak after that.
Nobody moves for a moment. I blink a few times, and take a step towards the door, Emi holding tightly onto my shoulder. The machines attached to her legs give her more height than her normal prosthetics. With these, she has more lower leg than upper, and constantly has to trip over herself to keep her balance. She would be almost as tall as Lilly if she managed to stay upright for more than a few minutes.
I turn the handle, and beyond the door is a long corridor lined with steaming, smoking pipes. A horrible, humid air fills my lungs, and I try not to recoil at the ash that drifts into my face. We are in the underground, deep within the school, far lower than any of us could have been allowed to go under normal circumstances. We've been here before; several times. More recently, Emi and I were shoved through the tiny exit and trapped in the blistering heat for a week. Then, the voice got tired, and shut off all of the red, glowing pipes, plunging us into darkness and impossibly low temperatures. Her maniacal, furious legs kept me from getting close to her to share our warmth and she froze to death. My reward for staving off the frostbite was enough food to keep myself alive until the next game started. It was all a game to the voice.
The others slowly come to attention. Shizune and Misha are able to tear away from each others' eyes for a moment to watch the roar of machinery from beyond the door. I motion wordlessly for them to follow, all of them, and Hanako curls into herself as she etches in Lilly's direction slightly, then towards me.
"Lilly." I speak her name, and it hovers in the air for a moment.
Her head cranes up at me, but she shakes her head weakly, shuffles to the side and I see that her flesh is stretched taught against the wall through the back of her ratty school uniform like she really is becoming a part of it. Blood seeps down her neck as she demonstrates her limited ability to move. I suppose she won't be coming with us, then.
The five of us, hunched together like a group of scared kittens, etch our way down the hall, trying not to cry. It's easiest for me, hardest for Hanako, impossible for Emi. The heat is causing all of us to sweat profusely, but it's to the point where it's almost bearable. The girls' shirts are soaked as well as mine, a strange odor of love and sex wafting up, mixing with the metal taste of the pipes themselves. Slow, step after step, methodical. As if to mock Hanako, the floor tiles below us are all different shapes and sizes and colors, but it's so impossibly dark save for the glow of the pipes that I may as well be blind. I'm inadvertently leading the group, and I don't realize it until I come to a staircase that looks impossible for us to fit up together. We'll have to go up one at a time.
"Okay." I murmur. I look back towards the others, but there's no way for anyone but Emi to squeeze around me. As she knows I can't allow myself to be alone, she offers to go first. She packs her body against me tightly, and I feel the wetness of her constantly streaming cheeks as she moves. Her back brushes against the piping, and she sizzles like a cooked ham under a heat lamp, biting back her lip to keep from crying out. Our lips touch from the closeness, and as she wanders up the staircase and into the darkness, I wonder if she can still feel anything emotionally stimulating at all.
After a moment, I see her reappear and motion for us to follow, looking significantly wounded. Whatever form of trap was up there waiting for us to stumble over it, she'd disarmed it at the cost of part of her midsection. We do, one by one by one, Hanako bringing up the end. As she reaches the top stair, she trips upon her own feet and falls down, cackling as she hits the floor and her lip splits. She doesn't get back up for a long while, and none of us move to help her. The voice would reprimand us again. She can take care of herself well enough.
As we walk, I examine the contours of Emi's figure from behind her. She's incredibly thin, like a poor caricature of what she used to look like. The almost bite mark taken out of her side doesn't help either. She's visibly shuddering with every step, her buttocks tensing every time she puts a heel down and feels the weight in her legs shift. Her breathing is constantly ragged, and for a moment, I find myself reminded of a sexual encounter we had hundreds of years ago. She staggers, and then puts a hand out, singeing it on the pipes. Anything to not fall over. She motions for me to go on, and I move ahead of her. She takes her place behind Hanako, clutching her bleeding side.
Eventually, after wandering through the blisteringly hot maze, we come to a small table with a tape recorder on it. Back in the lead, I hesitate while I'm about to pop open the recorder, and instead dare to play the tape back. Tapes are strange things to the voice. It uses them to drive us to insanity, and it almost always works. The thing seems to feed off of our pain, and the tapes are the final breaking point for most of us. Even Shizune can hear them, somehow. Sometimes, it's impossible to tell who the message will be for or what it means to them. Sometimes, it's clearly labeled on the tape itself. I know that if we don't play the tape, the voice will strike us down and we'll have to do it all over, so I commit to reason and go ahead.
This time, it's Hanako who gets the worst of it. Just when her sanity is starting to return, the voice strikes her down again. I'm too busy thinking to listen to Hanako shove her face into the pipes over and over and over, desperate not to hear the tape tell her she's going to be alright. She hates when people tell her that. She's shouting for her mother, her voice twisted in anguish. I don't recognize the voice on the tape, but I assume it's her parent forgiving her for what happened those many years ago. I don't know. Only Hanako knows.
As she smashes her face into the pipes again and again, I consider how lucky I am. I'm the only one they talk to now. Emi responds to the voice sometimes, but that's about the extent of it. I hate being their shoulder to cry on, in Emi's case literally. Hanako's burnt herself to the point of being blinded, and I shove my way past the others to stop her. She smashes her head into the same pipe again and again, desperately hoping to rattle herself enough to the point of brain damage. On her next reel backward, I stick my hand inbetween her and the piping, catching her. I hold her to my chest because I know there's nothing I can do, and her sizzling forehead burns my throat, but I don't care. We got off easy enough, this time. Only one of us suffered so the rest didn't have to. It was almost a noble sacrifice, in a way. Turning a gun on herself, so that the rest of us may have a day of rest.
As we're making our way back, I notice something that wasn't there upon entering. The others usher back into the room. I can hear Lilly groaning and gurgling from beyond the door, and I'm glad I didn't go back. I notice Emi's stayed behind as well, having to wobble on her own, trying desperately not to fall into the red-hot pipes on either side of her.
"Hisao." She calls my name out like she's climaxing, and I feel sick. Her guts are starting to spill out from the wound, and if she doesn't re-enter the room soon to recover, she'll collapse and die right at the finish line. She's literally holding herself together with both hands, knees knocking inward. She refuses to leave my side most of the time, especially now that the voice has taken Rin away. I tried kissing her once, to make her feel better. I'd put a hand on her shoulder, the other on her breast. Almost mounted her. She started to react, but suddenly crumbled instead, realizing just how horrible the situation was. I haven't tried since and I don't plan on trying again.
The door in front of me is old and decrepit, and I can see a tiny, thin wire across the frame. Opening the door will kill me. I know it. I don't know what's on the other side of the door but I know that opening it will kill me and that is enough. I turn away from it to Emi, and shake my head. Whatever's beyond this door will have to wait until the next time we pass through, because the overwhelming feeling of dread I get upon looking at it is too much to bear. We re-enter our tiny room, and the door slams shut. Pointless work for pointless repayment. After a tape game, the voice always contemplates whether or not to feed us, sometimes aloud.
It's hard to recall how long we've gone without food before. Time flows endlessly when you have nothing to do but wait for the pain to stop. As I sit down in the center of the room, Emi hanging on my arm like a wolf pelt dragging behind an elaborate coat, my mind wanders. Every time we re-enter the room, one of us is always dead. Always. Impeccable. Unstoppable. But, this time, we were all okay. Hanako's melted, crushed face would take a while to recover, but she is torn away from her wall now, cradling Lilly in her arms like a spider about to wrap her and eat her. It's a wonder she can still see through the scars clotting over her eyes, and it's a wonder Lilly even knows she's there. Emi told me once that Lilly was too far gone, that there was no recovering her, that the fleshy growths adorning her back and lower vertebrae were too hindering on her movement to keep her with us. She started to suggest we put Lilly out of her misery. As we've never intentionally killed one another, we had no way of knowing if she'd come back or not.
I can still see it clearly in my mind; the only time I've ever hit Emi. The smack drove us apart like an axe through a block of wood, and she escaped to the opposite side of the room like I'd shot her with an arrow. It'd only been one act of violence, but earning her trust again took months. We came back together when I shoved her aside and, in a display of emotion the likes of which none of us had seen in years, smashed a lone tape recorder to spare her from having to hear what was on it. I spent the next week or two screaming, and when I came back to the room, Emi clung to me like a sloth to a branch, crying that it was all her fault and I shouldn't blame myself for her mistake. She hasn't stopped since.
My thoughts hit a brick wall. Would Lilly come back if we'd killed her? Would any of them come back? I look down at my hands for a moment. Burned, bubbly, charred from stopping Hanako from smashing her own skull in. When did things get so different? Why do I feel so protective of the girls? When Emi touches me, I feel nothing, and somehow, I feel like I need to keep them alive at all costs. Nobody should ever have to walk through the fire alone. I need them, and I can be fairly certain they need me; but it's more than that. They live off of my seething hatred for the voice, they thrive like rabid dogs every time a speck of hope shines through my eyes. I try to convey my feelings to them, like a symbiotic creature congratulating its host on a job well done. Living through the day was a rarity in the hell we'd found ourselves in, and as I lay down and look up at the ceiling of the room, Emi joins me, her hand locked in mine. When we're laying together, I'm filled with optimism, however bitter it may be. Her tears eventually bring her out of the world of consciousness, and the rest of the girls slowly but surely nod off around me. But I continue staring at the ceiling, hopeful, hopeless, almost schizophrenic in thought process. I don't sleep anymore, and maybe that's one of the reasons I'm still hopeful.
It was always one for cruel irony, the voice. I can recall once when the voice was feeling particularly angry, it opened the door and instructed the others to stay behind. They didn't want me to go, but I knew it would punish all of us if I didn't; and I left them behind. The short hallway led to a mirror image of our original cell, and there I sat, for months. Alone. As soon as the door closed, it didn't open again. I heard a rumbling as the hallway grew shorter, mashing the two rooms against one another like two angry lovers committing adultery against their spouses. The doors were connected. I could hear it. I could feel it. For the longest time, I sat alone in the darkness. Then, I started hearing knocking. Breathing. I could hear Emi at the door, whispering my name. We sat, back to back, against the door, for the longest time, talking about how we wished we could be back together. Then, I heard the voice. Not from my room, but theirs.
It knows how I hate being alone. It told them that my imprisonment was an experiment, and the longer they could go without interacting with me, the better their reward would be. Like a game. I wanted nothing more than to help them, so I stayed silent, as far away from the door as possible, as the lock clicked. I could hear the scuffling and shouting as the others wrestled Emi to the ground, to keep the door closed at all costs. She was shouting my name, choking and sputtering as they subdued her. I heard a shrill cry, and then a horrible whirring as they ripped her prosthetics right out of her kneecaps. It was amplified, like I was sitting in a theater. I could hear the blood gushing from the almost electrical outlet where the things plugged into her. Her screams were inhuman, terrified. I stood up, stepped over, and my hand was on the door handle before I realized what I was doing. I wrenched it away, ashamed of myself. The thing had caused me a moment of weakness and I'd let it get away with the act.
I listened to the blood gush out of Emi's legs a little more, and some murmuring between Misha and nobody, as they considered what to do. In the end, just as I could hear Emi sputtering and dying, they reattached her legs and she lurched to life once more. Hanako observed the whole thing, and she told me that she's never seen Emi so pale and cold. Maybe she was dead, and the legs brought her back to life. None of them spoke after that.
And now I find myself in the same situation. The voice is replaying the event, challenging us to try again. Daring us to open the door. It's been years since it's tried something so simple. We never got anything for however long we held out, and perhaps it was willing to let us have a second go this time. Perhaps if we held out a few more weeks, it would give us something for our effort. Food, perhaps. None of us knew.
Instead, I remember my life before our imprisonment. When I'm alone, I begin to see tiny lights in front of my face, little wisps floating in the air like dust. My old memories, floating around me, hovering over me like a cloak of death. Perhaps it's insanity. Perhaps it's something more. It's been an insurmountable amount of time, but I can still catch slivers of them as they dangle in front of my face. I grasp at one, and am reminded of my first time with Emi. I let the strand go as soon as I clutch it; it hurts too much to think about our relationship. It hurts too much to think about love, about sex, about feeling. I grasp at another in the darkness, a wisp-like hair glowing mere feet from me. I can see Emi, happy on the exterior, through the veil. Running, wistfully, wanting to improve herself, to forget the past and move on. Emi at her Emiest, Rin had pointed out to me. My thoughts travel to Rin, and I follow the silky glow to a time when she was around. She spent too long staring up at the ceiling, wondering what the voice was doing to us. I'm trying desperately to think of what happened to her, to remember where I was or where we were when she went away, but it doesn't come to me.
And then, I recall the door I'd been given pause at. The one door I knew I couldn't pass without help. The door I'd stared at, wondering how I knew it and why it was there. I nod to myself. Rin had to be beyond that door, wherever it led. She had to be there, waiting for me, waiting for us to come through and escape. I can almost hear her voice, whispering, calling out to me. I let the strand go, its use expended. I sit back against the wall and listen to the girls' ragged breathing in the next room over, closing my eyes.
I can hear the pitter patter of tiny droplets on the floor. Emi's tears, Hanako's bloody art, Lilly's pus and gore as her tumors grow out of her skin. It could be anything. I can hear Misha groan softly as Shizune plants kiss after kiss on her cheek. I suppose that's what they do when I'm not around anyway, and Emi was correct. Lilly's ragged breathing and shudders come from the corner. For the longest time, I sit, and I listen.
The voice comes over to my room, speaks to me.
"I TIRE OF WAITING, HISAO." It sounds complacent, despite how disgruntled it tries to come across at. It is almost as if the thing knows how bleak life has become for us, and it's barely able to stifle its laughter.
"Good." I talk to the voice sometimes. Try not to let my voice falter.
SOME STUFF I HAVEN'T BOTHERED WORKING OUT YET HAPPENS HERE, LOLOLOL
Emi knows it too. She gives me a small, broken smile, and I imagine her shoving her own face into the pipes like Hanako had been. "I'll do it." She sniffles, tears still waterfalling out of her eyes. I don't feel bad about letting her sacrifice herself, but I turn away as she opens the door, to give her some peace. She'll come back anyway.
The door opens slowly, and Emi is splattered around the hallway behind me into a sizzling mess. I feel a rush of air, hear a gurgling scream, and then nothing. I don't know what happened and I don't want to know, but stepping over the pile of gore to get into the room, I notice that her clockwork legs are still pumping out oil and churning, anxious to reattach themselves to her body.
Whatever fire and hell I'd have to endure to get past the door normally turns out to be nothing, and I enter the room. The voice follows me in.
"YOU ABANDONED YOUR FRIENDS."
This time, I respond to it, trudging down the empty hall. It reminds me of my dorm room at the old school. "I know." I still can't muster up any emotion, limited to tiny sentences and grunts. I can feel my heart beating in my ears but I tell it to shut up, there are more important matters at hand. My heart seizes on me every day, and I know the voice is behind it. Every time I try to get close to one of the girls, save for Emi, my heart freezes in place and I can feel the blood start draining from my features.
But I ignore it for now, continuing my short conversation with the voice.
"DO YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW I'M TORTURING THEM RIGHT NOW, HISAO?"
I shudder at the mention of my name. The rest of the girls say it save for Misha and Shizune, but I hate when the voice addresses me directly. It wants me to suffer, but I refuse to let it. It's unable to break me, no matter what it does, and I know that it hates me more than it hates the others. My emotion towards them has ruined me, and being away from them now is physically torturous.
The voice goes on without me responding. "MISHA AND SHIZUNE, HISAO. EVERY TEAR THAT DROPS, I TAKE A LIMB. THEY WERE ALMOST THE NORMAL ONES ONCE." It cackles, and I feel the burden of death hovering over my shoulder. I don't let it get to me. I was the least close to Shizune and Misha, but it kills me inside to see such an undying loyalty be ripped right from their hands.
Come to think of it, Emi was the one I was closest to. One day the voice seemed to not be paying attention, so I painstakingly removed Emi's legs and gave her as much affection as I could muster. As soon as I'd finished with her, it mocked me for my weakness and tore Emi to pieces right in front of me. She's gotten the most of the physical torture, and it hurts me as well.
"TALK, HISAO. SPEAK YOUR MIND."
"Nothing to say." It's true. I have nothing to say. I'm a husk, an emotional sack pushed around by the girls. I always have been, and always will be.
I've reached the end of the hallway, and the end of my train of thought. I push open the door just like the last one, no longer caring if it reduces me to chunks like it had Emi. I've run out of sympathy for everyone, even myself, at this point. Behind the door is another door, with a long, circular indentation inside. The voice knows how I hate blindly doing things, but I have no choice. I roll up my sleeve and take a sharp breath, reaching forward into the hole.
I feel sharpened glass fragments, torn from the boarded up rooms on either side of the hallway I'm stuck in. They're pointed in the same way road spikes are, in that you can go across them one way, but going back will tear you to shreds. And, as I grab the handle of the door, buried far beneath the glass wall, my arm IS torn to shreds. I don't care, and shake my arm like a wet towel, watching the blood fleck from my arm all over the carpet and the walls. Regardless, the door opens, and I step through the threshold.
"Never one for subtlety." I grit my teeth. The voice's torture methods were obvious. Inflict as much pain as quickly as possible and then drag it out. I'm positive that, in the next room, I'm going to have to use my gnashed and twisted arm for several things.
And, in fact, my destination is on the other side of a high wall. I grunt in anger at the voice, but do little to stop it. After what seems like hours of scaling, falling down, waiting for my bones to bring me to my feet, and scaling again, I reach the top and ragdoll onto my back.
"GIVING UP?"
"Fuck you." I spit blood onto the ground. I'm never going to give up. I have to make sure they're all safe. I'm doing it for them, not me. I don't matter to myself anymore. I'll bring myself to the end of existence to make sure the girls are alright. I love them, all of them. This sudden rush of emotion hurts me more than the physical pain, but I curse again under my breath and, unable to stand, drag myself along the ground.
"IT'S FUTILE, YOU KNOW. THE TORTURING YOURSELF, THAT IS."
It keeps taunting me as I drag myself through another horrible maze of pipes and heat. I reach the end easy enough, and crawl into what may as well be the voice's dorm room. It looks like Kenji's, makes me want to vomit.
I can feel my consciousness going. I know the machine when I see it, and can feel the death throes rising up in my throat. It wants me to see it so that I know what it looks like, so we can look at each other face to face, mano a mano, before it crushes me yet again and sends me back to the start.
But this time, it doesn't crush me. I'm the closest I've come in years to the thing and instead of killing me, it does me the decency of standing me upright and restoring me like I broke it. At this, I'm confused.
It speaks first. "WHAT'S THE MATTER? CAN'T THINK OF ANYTHING TO SAY?"
I shake my head. I'm lost for words. It's never been civil, with anyone before. It's a computer, a god damn computer. An enormous one, a genius one. It's a gigantic, thin stack of computer towers, almost space-age in appearance, linked together by a thick, red, pulsing cable. I run my hand along the cable, and it feels warm, like a heart. The beat is off, it feels irregular. I try as hard as I can not to dwell on that.
I'm by no means a strong person. I am the only one of us that still remembers what life outside the AI's chamber was like, though none of us know what it's like now. I've tried to reason with the computer before and had my tongue ripped right out of my throat for it. Hell, I've tried not to reason with the computer before and had the same result. All I know is that I used to be out there, out in the real world, where things made sense, and now I'm not. One day, fate drew us all to that one room and we ended up being stuck there forever. Or maybe we went insane. All of us. The pressures of school took their toll on each of us separately, and somehow we all ended up together.
I walk from one end of the long, tall room to the other, looking the computer up and down. I know I can't face it, I know that in a fight I would lose, even to an electronic being. Something so omniscient, something so powerful and enormous that nothing could stop it short of God himself storming down from the heavens to rip it out of the ground and crush it to bits. But then, something strikes me. I have an idea begin to form in my mind. I stop, turn, face the piece of machinery I just passed.
Directly connected to the AI. To the voice. Open gears, turning, chugging. It brings an idea to my mind. I can only hope that the computer hasn't caught on yet. All it can think of it how brilliant it is. It can't possibly think that someone as simple as a small, fleshy, insignificant human with a heart disease could shut it down.
I leave the room, plan in mind. It may kill me. I don't know. I don't care. All I'm sure of is that I'm willing to try anything. I leap off the high wall, dash down the corridor, stumble through the pipe maze, and end up back in the main chamber. I'm out of breath, and my heart is pounding, reminding me of just how human I really am. I can feel it, I can feel victory literally in my hands as I reach down and scoop up one of Emi's gore-spattered prosthetics. The thing hums in my hands like an angry bee, but I stuff it under my arm and run the course again, faster this time. I'm not going to let my heart get the best of me.
Emi told me once that I could do anything. At the time, I was half-collapsed to the ground and out of breath, and I didn't believe her. I hoist the mechanical anomaly above my head, and without another thought, jam it right into the clockwork mess before me. With a groan and a scream, the computer cries out in real, honest terror.
"WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING, HISAO?!" It shouts my name, but I won't be swayed anymore. It's time for me to finish it. If one part stops, the whole thing stops. My teacher, Mutou, taught me that once. Granted, I never knew I'd use the knowledge to finish off an omnipotent computerized beast, but I took it to heart, regardless.
As I turn tail and run, all I can hear is grinding and shuffling, and the computer glitching out an anguished yell that echoes down the corridor. "A MAN THAT STUD-D-DIETH REVENGE KEEPS HIS OWN WOUNDS GREE-EE-EE-EEN, HISAO!" Which otherwise would heal and do well, I know the quote.
My breath is ragged by the time I reach the main chamber again. I can feel death in my ears again. This time, real, honest death. This was it, this was final. If I died now, I would never come back. I would never re-form. I would never be able to save the girls.
But I try as hard as I can to persevere, getting a tiny boost from seeing the hallway clean and no longer full of bits of Emi. I wrench the door open, and am met with five pairs of eyes and a turned head. I must look completely insane at this point. I have dark circles under my eyes, my hair is a mess, my clothes are in tatters, and there's blood on almost every inch of me. My heart is almost visible with how hard it's beating against my ribcage, but I can barely feel it.
Emi, legless, sits in the middle of the room. She seems pleased to see me.
"Hisao, you're back!" She greets me like I'm returning from the bathroom in class.
"H-Hisao..." Hanako stammers, eyes wide, rapidly clawing the decaying skin off of her wrists.
Shizune and Misha say nothing, still lost in each others' eyes.
Lilly looks even worse for wear than before, her flesh visibly strung from the wall at this point. She's coughing and hacking constantly.
In my hand, I find Emi's other leg. I don't know how it got there. I don't know how it got into my possession, as I certainly can't remember picking it up. I wince visibly as it turns into a one-handed chainsaw before my very eyes, the part I'm grabbing turning into a handle. The leg chugs and smokes, furious at me, growling like a feral wolf.
I look at the leg, and then back to the girls. They're all suffering. They're all in terrible condition. They've had to endure this for the same amount of time I have and none of them have even remotely held it together. I've been their crutch, I've been their guiding light. It's all my fault that they've been kept here for so long, and it's all my fault that I have to watch them suffer and likewise. Rin understood that much, and I know that's why she got out. I know.
The chainsaw revs in my hand, vibrating me to the core. I know what I have to do. My eyes are wide as I stalk over to Lilly. Sweet, precious, innocent Lilly. She's gotten the brunt of the torture, and now, here she is, strung up to the wall like a pinned up monarch butterfly, bleeding and crying out of her every pore. The burden of death is over me a second time, and now it's my turn to act. The girls have all silenced themselves and turned, even Misha and Shizune. They're watching what could be the most heavy confrontation we've had in ages, likely ever, and Lilly is going to be at the center of it.
She barely manages to croak out my name before I swing the handsaw with full force, drilling into her neck with surprising speed. She hacks and coughs and whines as the saw rips through flesh and bone, rending her head right from her body. I push and push and push as hard as I can on the saw, to get it over with as quickly as possible. In the end, the back of Lilly's head has been attached to the wall, and all I'm doing is severing her spine. She rattles for a few moments, both halves of her, and then she falls silent. I almost drop the handsaw from the shock and horror that echoes through me in Lilly's death throes. With the little will I have left, I am able to keep it steady, and I stand there, watching Lilly's body twitch and spurt, waiting for something to happen. All of the girls wait for something to happen.
But nothing ever does. Lilly doesn't come back. It takes hours for us to even begin thinking again, but once we do, all hell breaks loose. The girls have realized what's happening. They know exactly what I'm going to do, they know exactly how I'm going to set them free. They know, and I know, and somewhere, the computer is laughing.
Before Hanako can make it too far, I rush forward like a hungry animal and pin her to the wall with the chainsaw, shredding her stomach and innards to bits. I feel almost as empty inside as she looks afterward, slumping to the ground, blood all down her front.
Misha is prepared to defend Shizune, and when I swing the chainsaw at her, Misha catches it with her hands, gripping it with all her might until her fingers are sliced clean through. She cries out in abject horror but refuses to let Shizune get killed on her behalf, launching onto the chainsaw and almost piercing herself with it. After she's gone, Shizune doesn't put up much of a fight and goes almost the same way.
And then, the only one left is Emi. She's skittered backwards on her hands, pressing against the wall, trying to be as small as possible. She's shaking like a leaf, absolutely mortified. I slowly, achingly come towards her.
"Hisao, stop." She echoes her own words, from the very start of the day's events. It's not a question.
Regardless, I don't stop.
"I said stop, Hisao." She cries out again, and the chainsaw screams in my hands, having finally chugged through the bits of flesh and blood stuck to the end. It was almost as prepared as I was.
"I can't stop." I say, as calm as I can muster, but my voice cracks and I sound insane again. It's becoming a running theme.
"You can't do this, Hisao. It's not the right way." She says it like she knows it for a fact.
"This isn't what I wanted either, Emi." It was true.
"But it doesn't have to be like this." The clarity in her voice brings tears to my eyes.
"Emi, don't make this harder than it needs to be." My own voice brings the tears out of my eyes.
"For you or me?!" She yells. I'm taken aback at this. At one time, I loved her. At one time, we shared the most intimate moments together. At one time, we were human.
And now we weren't.
I made it as quick as I could muster. Murdering all of your closest friends with a handsaw after hundreds of years of torture is far from my ideal way to spend the day. I guess an analogy like that makes me sound almost normal, and I hate the thought.
I toss the leg aside, letting the hot tears stream down my cheeks. It's the most human I've felt in years, and all it takes is a room full of blood and bodies for me to think about it. I leave the room and don't turn back. I wander for hours, days, weeks, even. Lost, afraid. There were no friends to guide me now, nor an AI to tell me what to do. I feel disjointed, upset. Insane.
I did it. I won. I beat the computer. The only thing I can't do is kill myself. I consider this as I stalk the almost boiler room-like halls. I smash my face into the pipes but they've become cold. It's no use. After seemingly years of wandering, I come to a door. A door I've never opened before. Similar to the door I uncovered before with Emi, there's a thin wire visible on the handle. This time, there's nobody to sacrifice. There's no certainty to anything anymore. The door might kill me, it might not. I don't care.
I shove it open, and for an instant I can feel my entire life smashing into me like a freight train. I reel backwards as a rigged mechanism almost akin to a shotgun explodes in my face. I'm standing at the perfect angle where it barely skims me, but does enough damage to almost rip my jaw off of my head. I kneel for a moment, but get back up, used to even more horrible, agonizing pain than this. I can't feel my arms anymore, like they're not even there. I look down to affirm they are, but my vision is tinted a light pink color. I trudge onward, and the boiler rooms turn into normal school hallways, slowly, surely.
It 's the instant that I leave the facade that it dawns on me. I climb an enormous staircase without using my arms, shove open a door with my shoulder, and then it all hits. The fresh air. The calm wind. The hatch behind me. The normal world I left behind one day. I studied revenge, and my wounds were still as green as they were when I'd shoved Emi's leg into the computer. The girls. I murdered them all, and the exit was right in front of me the whole time. I fall to my knees, unable to stand up any longer.
I cry as hard as I can, harder than I've cried in what I was told was hundreds of years, but was only a mere few. I open my mouth and try to cry out, but my jaw is hanging on its hinge, and I can't even manage to do that anymore.
I curl into myself, and for the rest of eternity, my mind screams.
And there you have it, the original With Apologies to Harlan Ellison. I completely forgot about the "lololol" part there in the middle, so just imagine Hisao and Emi left the room together and ventured back out into the hallway. With that, the thread finally concludes right where it began, with me apologizing firsthand for all the hatred I have received for this story. As in the Grid1 dedication, I have embraced it wholeheartedly, and it is now being used in my future writing exploits. I've learned a lot over the past few months, about writing and post-processing, and I cannot say I have a single regret. Thank you all and goodnight.
