S017: Start
Normally the weight of his insulated sleeping bag made it hard to wake up. It was warm, cozy, and kept the screaming of nearby circuitry at bay. It even had a little hood that he could seal himself in with. It made it easy to dream.
As soon as the knockout gas wore off, something began to hum next to his head, rousing him from his dreamless sleep. The killers that stuck them here just tossed him inside a regular sleeping bag. It felt like it was strangling him in the heat of the sun.
Immediately he shot up, throwing the bag off of himself as he did so.
The onrush of pain at the sides of his head nearly threw him back down to the ground. It was mostly the gas -
is this what a hangover is like?
- but there was something else, too. A telltale hum.
Memories returned with the pain. Good ones, of friends and a silly trip out to a potato farm. Noah and Kaine were excited to to go to the potato farm, too. Someone nearby asked an unwelcome question, and another person told an unexpected joke, a potato pun.
Then blood, and shrieking, and fear. Darkness. Watching people die. The introduction to this game.
He opened his eyes again. Keeping them shut made it too easy to visualize it all.
A familiar opalescent border formed around his vision, visual artifacts formed from his Gift’s adaptation. August’s eyes quickly adjusted to the bright light, deepening in hue and muting the colors of the world around him. The only thing that could set it off, besides arc flashes, was direct sunlight. Scrambling, he shoved the sleeping bag aside and took cover underneath some brush, just out of the sun. Turning his head towards the ground, he blinked a few times and the fractals gradually receded.
It was difficult to think, to piece together what was happening.
Danger. I'm in danger.
Some guy followed him home once, in a pickup truck. It was too dark to tell, but he didn’t think the man had good intentions. August had reached for his battery then, the one he carried with him at school. As soon as he did, the truck sped off, probably thinking he was reaching for a gun.
He might as well have been.
Yet the battery wasn’t there; they’d taken it from his pocket while he was knocked out. There was something else powered nearby, though. Maybe more than one thing, it was still hard to tell given how much his head was swimming. There was no way to know how long it had been since he’d taken his medication last. A day, maybe? Withdrawal felt like a migraine, plus some paranoia and anxiety mixed in there. Usually it was easy enough to tell when he missed a dose, Gift-suppressants being the blunt instruments that they were.
Right then it was pretty hard to distinguish one pain from another. Paranoia and anxiety seemed to be the right emotions to be feeling right now.
There was one thing that he knew might make him feel a little bit better. He just had to shut it up.
Those people had left him outside, so the source couldn’t have been built into anything. It didn’t thrum loud enough to be a power outlet. More like a cellphone, but it didn’t feel like an integrated circuit. Something much simpler.
A grey bag sat a few feet away. August reached out and pulled it towards him. Whatever it was, it was inside. Unzipping the satchel, he rummaged through the assortment of supplies. As he did so, details came back to him. More than just blood and terror, the words the woman in the Owl suit had spoken.
“I did read Battle Royale.” August muttered as he rummaged through the bag.
They even did the thing where they stencilled the student numbers on the outside of the bags.
“Fucking stellar example to follow.”
In the book, the game was institutionalized state terror. Fascism in practice, where cruelty was the point. It was probably the same, here. The killers in the animal masks weren’t really trying to learn anything; that didn’t add up, as there were far easier ways to find out who was the strongest. The truth of their intent was in their actions - the poison the Owl spewed from her mouth was just their excuse.
August shoved aside the first aid kit, reaching for the yellow flashlight sitting at the bottom of the bag - the source of the current. Popping the cover off of the flashlight, he dropped the battery out onto his palm. Setting the flashlight back into the bag, he sat back and turned the small battery over in his hands.
The label read 4.5V. A name brand battery, though he didn’t see these too often. Underneath the brand, it indicated five amp-hours. They were almost never exactly what was on the label, but it was probably enough.
He focused on the battery, thinking of drawing the current from it like a loose string from a sweater. In an instant, the thrumming stopped. A pleasant sensation ran through August’s arms, dissipating throughout his body and driving most of the dull ache from his skull. He still didn’t feel great, but he could at least think clearly.
August tossed the dead battery aside, and cleared the ground next to him. Using a small stick, he scrawled some numbers in the dust. There were some things he needed to know to live the life he did, though he never expected to use them in a situation like this.
The messy equations led him to a number - the battery would bring him to just under fifty-thousand joules. More than enough to get him started, to keep him safe. To do more, if he didn’t have to use it right away.
The relative silence drew his attention to something else. His hands crept up towards his neck, resting on the cool metal of the collar. They ran along the length of the device, stopping at one point. He tapped it once with his index finger. It replied.
“Okay then.”
What he felt, he’d keep to himself. While he’d never forget that it was there, the collar was quiet enough to ignore. For now.
August sighed, looking back out at the desert around him. It was quiet enough. If anyone took those murderers at their word, it wouldn’t be for long.
If.
Taking a sharp breath in, he saw something drip towards the dirt, in the middle of his ad hoc equation. Tears were running down his face. He wasn’t sure when he started crying - he didn’t want to. He didn't want them to think it had -
Gotten to you? Why wouldn't it? Look at where you are, what's happening!
He wanted to be angry, but it wasn't coming to him. Not right away. Everything he’d dealt with, every inconvenience and adaptation he had to make, it was all on account of his power. All a debt he incurred to be able to, at least in theory, do incredible things.
A few milliamps straight to the heart is enough to kill someone on the spot. That kind of current is nothing to me.
It was what guidance counselors and his parents and therapists and feel-good lessons in school tried to tell him: that he was special, unique, and beautiful and there was a place in the world just for August Hanlon and Conduit.
People can’t scream when they’re being electrocuted, because their diaphragm seizes up. They can’t control their bodies anymore. They just fall down and die.
The people that kidnapped them had another understanding of how special they all were.
They know. They know what I can do.
Guns aren’t fast enough to save them.
Could I have stopped this?
It hurt to ask himself that.
August hung his head, his gaze falling to the half-open duffel bag. A small orange pill bottle stared back up at him. His name was written across the side, followed by an arcane chemical name he couldn’t pronounce. Whatever it was, it was just the latest in a long line of medications he’d taken.
They always made him feel terrible. Some had been better than others, but at the end of the day they were all substances designed to stop his body from doing what it wanted to. To slow it down, and slow him down in turn.
But it let him participate. Let him go on trips like these. It kept him safe. Kept people safe from him. It was the cost of not being alone.
August fished the bottle out of the bag, and twisted it open. His tear-streaked face stared down at the pills, as if they’d offer him a way out.
No one knew how the Emergence happened, or why. There were theories, but nothing falsifiable, nothing anyone could really prove. August had some ideas, but nothing concrete. Not an explanation, just an inkling.
They were extensions of souls, he thought. Something that reached out from the depths of a person and twisted reality, altered it somehow. They rebelled against natural laws, and fought with people the way people often fought with themselves. It was the immaterial breaking into the material. It meant there was more to this than just what they could see or touch. Gifts were the surest sign that people were actually real, that they were more than just animals.
For the most part, they were beautiful. People, even more so.
What the terrorists were doing was worse than just giving them guns or knives and asking them to kill one another. These monsters were forcing their victims to violate themselves on a profound level, making them use their Gifts like this. It was hard to imagine a more disgusting way to corrupt someone.
Conduit fucked with everything around him, it challenged any idea of a conventional life. Forced him to consider alternatives, and drew him to the margins. It pushed him away from most people, and the world of most people.
Occasionally, it pulled him towards others.
August thought of Mercy. Of her parasol, and the way she lit up when he’d shown her the metal bird sculpture he’d been working on. It felt so exciting to see her smile because of something he'd done.
Then he thought of that dead crow at the side of the road; the way it was bent all wrong, shredded by splinters and smoldering; how the air smelled of burning wood and ozone and rain and how he cried himself to sleep that night, and then the next one, and a few more after that.
More than anything else, Conduit hated control. It resisted. So August hated control. He would resist, too.
August tossed the pill bottle aside, next to the dead battery, small white tablets scattering all over the ground.
There were good people with him on the trip. Some of the others had powerful Gifts, things they could use to fight back. If they stuck together, and thought this through, there’d be reason to hope. There had to be a way out of here, some way that didn’t involve killing one another.
He needed to be himself if they were going to see this through. Slinging the duffel bag tightly over his shoulder, August stood up and stretched, both mind and body.
In between his hands he played with an arc, letting it dance between each finger for a moment before ceasing. The meds were still wearing off, and he didn’t have as much control as he wanted, but it would have to be enough to scare off anyone who had designs on playing a part in this nightmare. It was enough to stop things from getting out of hand.
No one has to fight. We can fix this.
…
And the people who took us?
The crow was an accident. He didn’t mean to kill it. It just happened to be there. Near him, when something went wrong. It hurt him to know that he was the reason it died, even if he didn’t mean to do it.
It was just a little bird.
He wasn’t sure how bad he’d feel if he killed any of those people in the animal masks. The part of him that hated wanted to fight back, wanted to think he’d be okay with it.
The part of him that cried when he accepted what was happening wasn’t totally sure.
August thought of the shattered pine tree, and the smell of molten asphalt. The long shadows cast in every direction, flickering as solid matter vaporized around him.
He thought about what it would take to erase a person like that,
to annihilate them
in a way so violent, people could hear it from miles away.
I don’t want to find out, but I won’t let them kill more of my friends. I can’t.
The dead-looking concrete building beckoned in the distance, the only real shelter from the desert sun. It was hard to tell where his other friends would go, but he knew where Mercy would be headed.
August set out towards the Compound. Hopefully someone else was coming up with a better plan than his.
((August Hanlon continued in Induction))