Spring Upon the Solstice

VI - Human in the Shell

{ 001 }

"Do you know what truth means?"

A void expands beneath me, encompassing the horizons of the room, and the distant walls, and finally the skies, existing as nothing beyond the reaches of nothingness. Is that even possible? To lack nothing, and yet to lack everything?

"Truth is belief," I force through my parched lips.

A flare of pain strikes me like lightning, racing through my nerve endings and eating away at whatever silence may have filled the air before. I cry out—not that I want to, but because I can't do anything else. My limbs are petrified, locked to the chair I'm strapped in. My blood flows, but not because my heart pumps it. Even my thoughts, ordinarily sharp and fluid, feel clogged up. Right now, I could be considered an outlier standing on the bridge between life and death.

"Wrong. Wrong again."

"Truth has never been perpetual!" I shout into the bitter emptiness, as my voice gradually fades away. "Does it not exist somewhere in the world, everywhere and nowhere simultaneously?"

"The truth does not exist like you think it does," the voice booms. "Truth is only a twisted version of reality, that we design and fashion to whatever seems reasonable to our minds. Man may scrape the surface of the true truth, but to say that he can understand it is heresy. Now, repeat."

"Truth is a lie," I mutter begrudgingly, receiving another blade of agony for my troubles. "I said it, didn't I?"

"Continue rehabilitation."

The entire room evaporates instantly from darkness to light, as the walls burn with flames of blinding white. My retinas sting horribly, but my eyelids refuse to close. One at a time, my arms unlock from the chair's plastic armrests, and oxygen flows unrestricted back into my lungs. However, it's not that I can move again. Rather, the pain overpowers the anesthesia.

"Injecting secondary dosage," the voice rattles off. "Standby."

My neck cracks as I crane my head to watch a viscous orange liquid guzzle through the four IVs pricked into my shoulder and thighs. The suffering continues a while longer, until my facial muscles can no longer spasm, and I fall limp.

"Dosage complete. Loading environment and recalling access memory."

The blank white world orbiting aimlessly around me unfolds into color, expanding from basic geometric shapes into more complex structures. Steel beams assemble themselves; lights spark to life; the sky grows dark and ominous with shadows of gunmetal.

"Environment fully loaded. Begin."

The line between pain and pleasure blurs as the drugs take effect, and my body ceases its struggling. I hate revisiting this memory the most.

-+-

The sour taste of gunpowder fills my mouth, prompting me to open my eyes. A metallic scent wafts through my nostrils, and the slight drop in fresh air causes my eyebrows to furrow ever slightly.

"What's wrong, One?"

I blink twice, absorbing the raucous grey of the Osaka background and blending it with the neon signs as the rain falls around us. The tinge of gunpowder disappears into the mist.

"Well?"

A man dressed in a slick grey trenchcoat—tall, but not too tall—young, but not young enough to be in his prime—adjusts the sailor's cap adorning his head. Wild curls of black hair slip out from underneath the cap, dusting his neck every slightly. A thin band of gold peeks out from his left hand, and embraces his ring finger snugly, engraved with some obscure date from before the war. He has a mechanical implant in his right knee—an injury he got before the war—and an imperceptible scar traces over his cheek.