User:G'orzak/Echoes that dwell

Echoes that Dwell

“Yoko,” called the professor just as Yoko was about to walk out the door, “could you stay for a few minutes? I need you for something.”

Yoko hesitated for a moment before walking up to the professor’s desk. She had always found his overly friendly attitude toward her a bit unsettling, but she was already not doing well in his class, and didn’t want to give him any more of an excuse to fail her. “What is it, professor?” she asked.

“Would you step into my office? I need to borrow you for a few minutes for a little project I’ve been working on.” Yoko made no attempt to hide her unease at the suggestion, prompting the professor to add “It’s perfectly harmless, I assure you.”

Walking into his office, Yoko saw that his desk had been pushed to the side of the room, and in its place was a chair not unlike that one might find in a dentist’s office, except it was covered in all manner of biomonitoring equipment, the most prominent of which was an egg-shaped hemisphere studded with electrodes, attached to an articulated arm that looked like it had been taken from a desk lamp. Looking at his desk, Yoko observed that his lamp was in fact missing. The wires from all the instruments converged into a bundle about 4 centimeters thick underneath the chair, and lead to a rack of servers in the corner of the room.

“Go ahead, sit down,” said the professor, evidently unaware of what a horrifying request he was making, or at least hiding any awareness he may have had. After about ten seconds of Yoko standing there awkwardly, the professor said, “You’ll get quite a bit of extra credit for this, and it will only take a few minutes. You’ll also be helping science.”

Yoko wasn’t one to refuse either easy extra credit or advancing the causes of science, and a few minutes didn’t seem that bad. She sat down, and the professor lowered the electrode array onto her head. An LCD monitor a meter wide began displaying a large number of histograms, probably of the data feeds from the biomonitors. He then sat down at his desktop and began typing commands. As the array began chittering and stimulating different sections of her brain, Yoko was immediately inundated with smells, sights, sounds, sensations, some of which she had experienced, and others she could never have imagined. After an indeterminable amount of time, the array shut down, and having regained her vision from the myriad hallucinations, she looked at the clock and saw that indeed, only about three minutes had passed. “Alright, we’re done,” said the professor, smiling. “Thanks for your help, Yoko.”

Yoko awoke in complete darkness, not remembering having fallen asleep in the first place. She tried to get up, and found that not only was she still in the chair from before, but strapped down somehow. She looked up at the corner of her field of vision at the clock built into her contact lenses. 1:28 AM, May 14, 2031. She had been out for nearly twelve hours.

The fluorescent lights turned on abruptly, flooding the room with harsh, flickering light. Once her eyes adjusted, she saw her professor standing before her, holding a metal pole with two prongs at the end. In a few seconds, she recognized the object – a cattle prod.

She panicked, trying to plead with him to let her go, but though her mouth was moving, no sound came out. Looking down, she saw that there were no straps holding her to the chair. Yet still, she could not move. She immediately reached the conclusion that the electrode array on her head was somehow interfering with her motor functions. For some reason, her facial muscles seemed unaffected. Mouthing out the words as clearly as she could, she explained to the professor that her father was an ambassador, and that there was no possible way he could get away with kidnapping an ambassador’s daughter.

The professor smiled sadistically, and touched the prod to Yoko’s stomach. Her body moved of its own accord as pain flooded her nervous system. The only thought she managed to have with her mind so concentrated on the agony was a single word: “Why?”

The professor withdrew the cattle prod, her silent screams bringing him no enjoyment. Yoko saw a blurred image of him walking back to his desk and typing a command into his computer. Her tongue went numb for a split second. He walked back over to her still-quivering frame. Pressing the prod to her skin once more, it now drew a piercing scream, followed by a string of pleas for mercy. He smiled, and Yoko blacked out.

Yoko awoke for a second time, in the same room, but she had been stripped of all her clothes.