Dead Space: Catalyst (11 page)

“Your colleague?”

“The man you strangled,” he said. “Or rather, started to strangle and then cracked his skull.” He shook his finger at Istvan. “That wasn’t very nice of you.”

“But he told me to do it,” said Istvan, and then noticed the gray man was staring at him with delicately poised attention.

“
Who
told you?” he asked.

Istvan raised a hand and let it fall helplessly. Who had told him? At the time it seemed so clear, but now it seemed so confused. A man that was not a man, a figure made of smoke, a voice that perhaps was there, perhaps not. How was he to explain that? Particularly to a man whose skin looked wrong?

“I didn’t mean to,” he finally said.

“You didn’t answer my question,” said the gray man.

“I didn’t?”

The gray man smiled, shook his head. “No,” he said. “You didn’t.” He sighed and rose from his chair, pushing up with his hands on his knees. “No matter,” he said. “We’ll have you for a long time. I don’t need the answer today.”

The gray man started to move toward the door, then turned back. “You asked what would happen to you,” he said. “Next step, since you sped things up by murdering a man who was just trying to do his job, is for you to be taken off planet to a secure location, a place not subject to the laws in place here. That’ll make it easier to work on you.” He smiled. “
Work on you
is obviously a euphemism,” he said. “By the time we’re done with you, I don’t know how much of your mind will be left.”

He struck the door twice with the flat of his hand. “Then again,” he said, “it’s an open question how much of your mind is there now.” The door groaned and slid open. “Be seeing you,” the gray man said, and slipped out.

11

But it was months, or what felt like months anyway, before he saw the gray man again. First they left him alone in his cell for a while without food or water, and then, once he was very weak, finally gave him water. Then they beat the bottoms of his feet with a steel rod until he couldn’t walk or even stand. They they put a bag over his head and poured water over it, so that it felt like he was drowning. They stripped him and left him shivering in a cold bare room and then yelled at him and insisted that he talk until he felt he had no choice but to retreat deeper and deeper into his body and watch it all from a distance.

Most of it he watched with horror, but their growing frustration at being unable to crack him he watched with a certain delight. How many days that went on, he couldn’t say for certain. But then abruptly it came to an end: they again put a sack over his head and bound his hands and hustled him careening down a corridor, laughing at him when he fell before yanking him back to his feet.
Is it the same sack?
he couldn’t help wondering. They put him in a vehicle again, but he didn’t think it was the same vehicle they had put him in before—it felt different somehow. The tone of the space, even through the sack, was different. There was someone next to him holding him firmly by one arm and someone on the other side of him holding him firmly by the other arm. They drove somewhere for a long time—
maybe not all that long,
suggested a voice somewhere inside of him and when he heard it he grunted with satisfaction into the hood.
Welcome, voice,
he thought. He felt one of the hands tighten on one of his arms. However long it was, eventually the vehicle stopped and he was rushed out of it and brought quickly into another place. At first he thought he was going into a building, but when they finally had him inside and seated and had removed the sack from around his head, he saw that he wasn’t in a building at all, but in some kind of aircraft. He was alone except for two guards.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

But the guards with him would not answer the question. They would not even look at him. There was a grating sound above them and he saw light begin to flood in and realized they were in the spaceport, and then the ship’s engines began to rise and they were lifting straight up and into the air. That, of everything he had experienced so far, turned out to be the thing most akin to a carnival ride. He could feel his stomach pushing down, threatening to leave his body, and his whole body felt heavy and he had a hard time breathing, and the voices in him drifted tingling down from his head before getting tangled within his legs. And then they were through the upper lock of the dome and the pressure began to diminish, to become less and less until it was almost nonexistent. Soon they were circling a space station, synchronizing speed with it and slowly coming closer until with a gentle
thunk
they had docked.

“Is this where we’re going?” he asked. But neither of the guards answered. It felt strange to be weightless, to feel like you hardly even had a body. It was like how sometimes the inside voices didn’t have a body, he thought, and then thought,
Maybe I am becoming an inside voice.
Or maybe the inside voices weren’t inside at all, he told himself, but in space, where they could exist without a body. He was webbed into his chair, but floating now, jostling gently back and forth against the webbing. But the two guards seemed to be sticking to the floor, something about their boots holding them in place. He didn’t have boots. Why not?

They unwebbed him and, grabbing him by his elbows, propelled him gently through the air, but as they got closer to the hatch, he started to feel his body come back to him and by the time they had gone through and into the station, he weighed nearly as much as he always had. Having a body again was something of a disappointment.

They dragged him down around the wheel of the space station and to a bigger bay where a larger ship was waiting, not a planet hopper but an interstellar vessel. Near it was the gray man, holding a rubberized sack.

“Ah, Istvan,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Why?” asked Istvan, astonished.

“Now that these fine gentlemen have tried their best,” he said, gesturing to the two guards, “it’s my turn.” He gestured to the guards. “Take him in.”

The guards dragged him up the ramp and into the ship. They passed a series of crew members, many of whom regarded him nervously.

“No need to be alarmed,” said the gray man to one of them. “You never saw this.”

The gray man directed them down a flight of stairs and through a thick metal door marked
RESTRICTED AREA
on the outside. Inside was a chamber lined with metal cabinets, a grate cut into the floor. The room was freshly washed, water still puddled on the floor, but there was nevertheless an odd smell to it, something that Istvan couldn’t quite place. In the room’s center were three reclining rubber and metal chairs, all of them bolted securely to the floor, each equipped with a series of restraints.

“Strap him in, boys,” said the gray man.

Eventually they did. First, though, they removed his restraints, and then removed his clothing, making a neat pile of it to one side. For a moment Istvan thought of trying to break free but he was too weak to do much of anything. They led him to the chair and strapped down his arms and his legs, and then affixed a head strap as well, something to keep him from turning either left or right. Then they saluted the small gray man and left the room.

“They can see you. You’re real,” said Istvan.

“I thought we’d already agreed that I was real,” said the gray man. “Can’t you accept anything as meaning something once and for all?”

No,
thought Istvan.
No, I can’t
. He had been hurt too many times, burnt too often by a world that seemed to be constantly changing, constantly shifting out of his grasp.

The small gray man came forward and stroked Istvan’s hair. “Now we’re alone,” he said, and then he reached into his sack and took out a razor and began to shave the hair roughly away, sometimes nicking and gouging Istvan’s scalp.

“We have lots of things to play with,” said the man, gesturing to the cabinets. “We’ve got a lot of time before we arrive where we’re going and where the fun will really start.” He reached into the rubberized sack, bringing out a hypodermic and a needle in a plastic casing. He affixed the second to the first and broke the casing away. “No reason we should wait until we arrive to get things started,” he said, and smiled.

He primed the needle, and then brought it slowly down until it was no longer within Istvan’s field of vision. Istvan felt a sharp prick in his arm, followed by a burning sensation, and he winced. The burning pushed its way down toward his fingertips and began to climb up his arm.

“How does that feel?” asked the small gray man, almost in a whisper. He was holding the hypodermic up again and Istvan could see that it was empty, the needle slick with blood.

Istvan felt the burning push its way past his shoulder and then insinuate itself into his chest and neck, and then suddenly it felt like the top of his skull had been torn off and the skull filled with liquid fire. He gasped, could see in his wavering vision the smiling face of the gray man.

And the worst part was that—even as he struggled to catch his breath, even as he tried and failed to stay focused and keep a grip on his mind, even as pain rapidly transformed into the worst thing he had ever felt—he experienced a brief moment of lucidity, and couldn’t help but realize that this was only the beginning, and that before it was over it was sure to get much, much worse.

PART THREE

12

In a dream Jensi found himself in an unfamiliar room, strapped into something that resembled a dentist’s chair but wasn’t quite that exactly. Besides, why would a dentist have to strap someone down? Still, it moved like a dentist’s chair, rising slowly up and falling slowly down according to how a technician next to him applied pressure with his foot to the controls. The technician was wearing a white coat, like a dentist’s coat, but he wasn’t a dentist: Jensi could tell because of his teeth. Some were crooked and thrust every which way and others were simply missing and all of them were stained a yellowish-brown. His breath was bad, too, almost unbearable. And his coat was spattered with what looked like old blood.

“What am I doing here?” asked Jensi in the dream.

The technician laughed. “What are you doing here?” he asked. He lifted both hands and Jensi caught a flash of metal in one. “You’ve always been here,” the technician said.

There was, hanging from the ceiling, a strange rubbery contraption, like an inverted dentist’s chair, and once the technician had lifted and lowered Jensi’s chair to his satisfaction he reached up and pulled it down. It was some sort of pliable plasticene substance and it closed around Jensi, molding itself firmly against his body. Mostly it was soft, but here and there it pushed at him, hard little points touching his arms, his legs, in a way that made it difficult to move. What was hidden within it? And then he felt a little pricking as one of the hard points pushed its way farther into him, a needle of some sort, then another, then another, until it was hard for him to breathe since it made the needles, if they were needles, sink in even deeper. The technician slid his hand underneath the plasticene covering and when he slid it back out again it was slick with blood. It was hard for Jensi not to feel alarm, but the harder he breathed the more his chest hurt, the needles jabbing deeper and making him burn, so he tried to breathe in short, sharp breaths and raise his chest not at all. But he was, he suddenly realized, beginning to hyperventilate, his head getting exceptionally dizzy and black spots beginning to appear before his vision—unless the needles were injecting something into him and it was the drug he was feeling.

“I’m going to ask you a few questions,” said the technician, his voice extremely flat.

“No,” said Jensi, and felt a stab of pain.

The technician ignored him. “Let’s start with an easy one,” he said. “What is your name?”

Jensi shook his head.

“Wrong answer,” said the technician. “I’ll ask again. What is your name?”

“I—” said Jensi. “Please—”

“These answers are also incorrect,” said the technician. “Please try again.” He leaned forward, and for a moment his voice wasn’t flat but friendly. “I’m surprised at you!” he said. “This is the easiest question. If you struggle to answer this one, how are you possibly going to manage the rest?”

Before Jensi could respond, the technician leaned back, his face becoming neutral again. “I will repeat the question. What is your name?”

The black spots had nearly overwhelmed his vision. He could barely see the technician now, and what he could see of him was covered in overlapping circles of darkness, as if the man was either just coming into or just fading out of existence. “I—” he tried again, and then screamed as the needles jabbed, and then managed in a half-strangled voice, “Jensi.”

“Closer,” said the technician. “But still wrong. Would you care to try again?”

But no,
thought Jensi, trying to plead to the technician with his eyes,
that’s my name, that’s really it. I’ve answered correctly, let me go.

The technician waited there patiently, his face expressionless, while Jensi kept taking quick, shallow breaths. Finally he said, “Would you like me to give you a hint?”

Very slowly and deliberately the technician raised his hand, and Jensi saw that the flash he had seen before was not metal after all, but a mirror. For a moment the technician misdirected it and Jensi only saw in it bits and pieces of the walls, and then it caught the light and flashed hard at him, momentarily blinding him.

And then he caught a wavering glimpse of his reflection, and realized that the face he was seeing was not his own, but that of his brother Istvan.

*   *   *

His body was tingling when he woke up. He rubbed his arms, almost expecting to see marks from the needles, but there was nothing there. He had to get up and go look at his face in the mirror, just to make sure that it was really him and not Istvan. For once, he was reassured to see his own haggard face and red-rimmed eyes, the proof of another night of uneasy dreams and little sleep.