Part Six
By Soshika

The room was the same as the one he had first been brought to when he came to this section of the place. Green walls, and the shapes in front of him yellow. Through their eyes, he saw a room with a desk and books, a room with him curled up in a chair in a corner, gazing to the side without acknowledging the world outside.

One of the shapes lifted its arm and muttered into something nearby. "Interviewing Special Project 01, day one. Project has not eaten in several days, as was reported from an orderly. Project was found sitting on the floor looking towards the north-westerly corner of his ward, the orderly informed us he had not moved from that spot in seventy eight hours. Orderly also reported the Project did not sleep. Interview comencing."

Something in the room clicked, and he used the eyes of one of the shapes to identify it as a metal pen. The shape scrabbled down notes before he spoke. "Hi there. I'm professor Schubert, but you can call me Michel. I'm going to ask you a few questions, is that okay?"

He did nothing. He refused to even move a muscle. He could stop his breathing for quite a long time, if need be. He kept his images focused around the pen, the pen which was tapping softly on the note paper. The shape made a strange utterance and wrote something down before continueing.

"Do you have a name?"

He was the Demon...everyone knew that. All his kind were demons...

The shape cleared its throat again. "Some time ago, you killed some men. Do you know how you did that?"

He would never do it again, that was all he needed to know. Never again, he would never let that light lose to kill. He could still recall the floor being so slick with the blood, where he would slip and fall as he ran...

"They told us...They told us that you can't feel pain. Now, we know this isn't true, but why do you ignore it? Do you feel weak if you hurt, do you feel inferior..."

The voice trailed on, but Grey's attention was fixed on something else. The tapping pen glinted in his vision as a bright blue shaft, cool and blue and red where the shape's fingertips touched it. Blinking, he raised his head to look at it.

The shapes around him milled a moment, surprised at his reaction. The pen moved quickly, and he followed it with his own eyes. It was a fixation in his mind, the pen. It was a solution, an answer to their questions. A thought was begining to form in Grey's mind, unbeknownst to any of the others.

"Can you hear me?" The shape turned red in exhiliration, elated with the progress. It started firing off questions faster, which Grey ignored. "Is that it, you're inferior? I can hardly tell you otherwise...What..?"

On his feet now, moving again, Grey stepped towards the shape with the pen, extending his hand. Some of the shapes shied back and away, nervous of his hidden power. The one in the chair tried to scramble up into it, but did not succeed.

"What are you doing? Are you going to speak with me?"

Twitching his fingers, Grey continued to make demanding motions. When the shape did not understand, he glared. This only caused a dozen images of demons, monsters and deaths into his head. He wasn't used to them anymore, and cringed visably because of them.

"Do you want something from me? What are you doing? Tell me if you can hear me."

Breaking his silence, Grey spoke in a simple quick and harsh sentance. "I want the pen." His voice was scratchy and disused, sounding very much like a growl.

"...The.." The shape drew up suddenly and leapt to its feet, sending images of Grey as an insect, something which had easily been made and could easily be broken. "What for?"

Blinking his dark eyes, Grey continued to hold out his hand and speak without emotion. "I want to show you something."

Hand shaking, the shape was glowing a deep orange as it slowly dropped the silver pen in Grey's almost healed left hand. Closing his palm around the glowing blue object, Grey placed his other hand down on the desk. Giving the remaining shapes a quick glance, he drove the pen down onto his hand, the metal tube snapping through the flesh with little protest. There was a grinding sound, and the hard room was suddenly filled with the echo of Grey's slowly spattering blood on the floor.

Holding up his hand, the pen wedged entirely through the center of his palm and streaming a glowing crimsion river in his vision, Grey looked directly at the shapes. "This is what I feel. I am not anything similar to you, I am not even alive. And I hear you...I always hear you."

As he spoke, the shapes were blurring brighter and brighter again, swirling together in a rainbow of milling, panicked creatures. In the midst of it, he felt no emotion. Only calm as the spat-spat-spat of blood on tile rang out above their frightened voices. When the bright shapes flashed into darkness, he had felt nothing at all.

"By the Ruler, how much did you administer?"

"Three times the prescribed amount. Any lower and it wouldn't have done a thing. The pen tube snapped on the way in, we still haven't gotten all the bits of metal out."

"Are you sure he needed it?"

"A painkiller-seditive combination. The only way we could operate to remove the peices of the Proffessor's pen. We tried lower amounts, but the computers show it did nothing."

Wha...what? Wh..where am I...? What... Grey found that he could not move, open his eyes, or even recieve images. The only thing he knew was that the room was warm against his skin and that there were voices. Voices talking about him. That, and that he could not seem to focus.

"Doses that big have caused mental retardation in Humans-"

"He isn't a human, doctor. You forget this."

I'm no...not human...Not Human? What...what am I?

"How old is this one? He looks nearly sixteen."

"About ten. Damn those animal genetics speeding the againg process, they skew almost everything."

"Any idea why he reacted so violently to simple questions?"

"We aren't even sure if the reaction was to the question. Computers tell us his mother had to take heavy doses of painkillers during the birthing process...it might have caused some brain deformation."

Mother? ...I have a Mother?

"Well, we couldn't really check up on the condition of her now, could we? A damn waste, if you ask me, to kill all the surrogate females."

My..mother. My mother is...dead. I am dead. I am ....

"The past is the past. Computers tell us he has a natural immunity to almost anything we could throw at him. It takes nearly poisonous amounts to gain any kind of reaction."

"Computers also seem to tell us his brain activity's abnormal..."

I...how...what is in me? How much...?

"Ah, yes, there's that of course. So near as we can tell, that was all they had on him upstairs. But they seemed to think he was some sort of telepath. It's much more simplex than that."

Get them out of me...Get them out of my head..

"So the various waves shown here are all his own?"

"More or less. The dominant two appear to be the Human and Animal sides of his mind. The others, they may be underdeveloped personalities. Our job is to keep the animal from gaining control."

"Which line's the animal?"

Gaining...gaining control? What is IN me? Why ..why can't I think..?

"The brighter silver one. The blue one is the Human."

"...The Animal is already in control."

"Yes, but we think we can correct that. We suspect his recent behavior is just simple depression, which is easily treatable."

No more, no more! Stay out of my head!

"Do you really think that anti-depressants made for a Human will work on him?"

"Well....We have to chance it. The dosage would be considerably more, though. But it should repress the Animal and encourage the Human to surface."

NO! I AM NOT HUMAN!

"Making him not only easier to control, but easier to communicate with?"

"Certainly. There would naturally be some animal left there, but it would be a marked improvement."

"Fabulous. You believe he would stop these senseless acts of self destruction if we were to do this?"

"It seems our only option."

For all of his fogged past and confused thoughts, Grey wished he could move. He wished, and whimpered, but could not cry. The tears were gone. They would not return.