THE TRIP -- a science fiction short story to knock the dust off.

Original artwork by Thao Le Designs (@thaothao)

The Trip

The Mangled Forest leaned and twisted and in some places had grown together, as incapable of movement as the prisoners who stood watching from the distance of the labor camp. Those trees had a way of working into a man, of occupying his thoughts. It was a hard thing to put to words, and maybe that’s why almost no one did. But they watched. Sometimes in glances; and on occasion, with the neurotic fixity of the bald man watching them now.

“Don’t look too long, Oak,” Chandrey said. He was a lanky scarecrow of sinuous muscle, missing all but four front teeth. “If Black Dog sees, he’ll think you’re up to something.”

“And what if I am?” Frederick Oakhart, Oak to his friends, said from the corner of his mouth. It was raining hard, the smell of them as ripe as a line of pack mules in monsoon season. “He don’t scare me.”

Chandrey looked down at the wrapped stump of his foot, where, two summers ago, Black Dog had used a field saw to amputate it below the ankle. “All that hooch’s turned your brain soft.”

“My brain is fine.” Oak looked at the others, these colleagues of necessity. “This place ain’t.”

Grum spoke up then, a big man whose pot-belly refused to wane despite their forced starvation. “We’re stuck, plain as nails in a stump, Oak. We got Black Dog on this side of the fence.” He tilted his tired eyes toward the trees. “And whatever lives in them woods on the other.”

“What is it that lives in them woods, though?” Oak refused to let it go. “I ain’t never seen ‘em. No one has.”

“Heard ‘em plenty,” Chandrey said. “All night. Especially when the moon is new.”

Grum shivered then—whether from the icy rain or his thoughts, Oak would never know, because the whistle blew.

They all turned to see the sloping, mangled bodies of other prisoners fall in toward the mine mouths buttressed into the hillside. Between the hillside and where they stood, Black Dog stepped onto the porch of the officer’s shack and crossed his blacksmith’s forearms across his chest. He was watching Oak the way a hawk will watch a flagging rabbit.

Oak watched back longer than any sane man should.

Then he fell into step with the others, wondering all the while about those trees.

***

The day’s work was soul-crushing, as it always was. Picking, chipping, flooding, prying, and doing all of it while somehow managing to not make a mountain fall in on him. Sometimes Oak prayed while he toiled, thinking maybe there were Gods here, old things, same ones that had incanted the mangled forest beyond camp. It was a strange way to think of trees—objects drawn up from abysses for some dark and unknown purpose—but a little strangeness didn’t stop him. There were stories that circulated when the tub hooch was passed. Stories of massive shapes on foggy nights—all of them second-hand, of course—and sometimes even magic. It was believed The Kennel was different than most other places in which men paid for their sins.

On Oak’s first day Black Dog had hosed them down with mule piss from a pressurized hand pump. He’d ordered them to stand naked, while he insulted the size of their sex. He’d struck some, and pulled raw sheaves of hair clean from the scalps of others. And smiling with a row of silver teeth, had said, “Welcome to The Kennel. Any dog who bites the hand that feeds him’ll find himself sleeping in yonder trees. Where there are bigger dogs with bigger teeth.”

Then Black Dog had pointed to the twisted ganglia of hulking branches and stumps beyond camp. Like a bolus of snakes frozen in some temporary suspension. Oak had, had the real suspicion that walking there might throw a kind of scent to the things encased within the bark, things only pretending to be asleep. They didn’t look like trees, so much as orphans banished from a world that knew no light.

The steam whistle blew beyond the mine, scattering his reverie like crows.

Oak looked up toward the light and palmed the soot from his face and tried hard not to breathe the dust, which was known to make a man cough up vital pieces of himself. He dropped his pick off in the barrel beyond the cave mouth, and made his way across the tracked mud to camp. Prisoners didn’t get baths. But when it rained like it was raining now, Black Dog had the charity to allow them ice-cold showers, so long as they did it in the mule pen…

Standing in ankle-deep shit.

Grum was already sudding his globe of a belly, when Oak arrived.

“Didn’t die?” Grum called.  

“Didn’t die,” Oak said, completing the ritual greeting. He stripped his shirt and pants, began to sud himself with a scentless block of tallow, and—

Felt the spray, warm, everywhere. It spiraled and danced between white tiled walls, between lines of naked tattooed men, covered in soap and washing themselves under their own pressurized cones of water, not seeming to mind the uniformed guards watching over them, not seeming to do anything but stare straight ahead with a kind of paralytic terror. And a voice right next to him whispered, “They always wash you before The Trip. All the pain you survive in there makes your body sweat and sometimes even shit itself. Can you believe it?”

Oak collapsed into the mule shit, seizing, the muscles in his arms and legs knotting and releasing like eels attempting to break his bones. A cluster of other showerers turned to study him without much interest. Grum raced over and lifted him by his armpit, stepping clear before Oak could stumble and cover him in shit.

“Is it your lungs?” Grum was asking, his voice distant, throwing echoes. “Is it the dust, Oak?”

Oak didn’t feel the rain. Didn’t smell the shit. Unbidden, his eyes were drawn up to the Mangled Forest like a slack rope yanked suddenly taut. Those big twists of barkless wood held for him a kind of prophecy, though it spoke in the low buzz of cable wires, in a language of rudimentary sparks. A cold weight settled in his stomach, and with it: a certainty that what he’d just seen and the Mangled Forest were somehow the same thing.

“What’s this?” The voice that barked behind him was built to drown out cheers from the floors of fighting pits. “I reckon men only touch that close when the devil’s work is on their mind.”

Oak turned in a shivering heap and saw Black Dog leaning against the mule pen. He was bigger than any man Oak had ever seen—the kind of size made for myths. Looking up at all that ugly muscle, he had a mind to keep his mouth shut.

“What happened here?” Black Dog barked at the others.

A man with ratty blonde hair and a patch of leather across one eye spoke immediately. “He fell down. That big’un there helped him up.”

“Is that what happened?”

There was not a head that didn’t nod.

Black Dog trained his eyes on Oak. They were the color lightning. “Playing in mule shit’s against the rules.”

Oak said nothing.

“Atonement will be required.”

Oak, unable to keep from glancing at the Mangled Forest, nodded.

“You got a voice?”

“Yes, sir,” Oak said.

“Not much of one, but a voice, indeed, by God. Answer me something, and do it quick. Why d’you keep looking yonder, when I’m standing right here?”

“No reason, sir.”

“Prevarication’s an equally punishable infraction. Jesus, son. Looks like a double dose.”

Oak shook his head, feeling that cold stone roll over in his gut, hearing the voice whisper, all the pain you survive in there makes your body sweat and sometimes even shit itself.

“I ain’t lying.” Oak stood straight up, tried to recall what courage looked like, and found a hole where the memory should be. “I’m being honest, Mr. Black Dog”

“Mister Black Dog,” he chuckled, delighted by the sound of it. “You know what prevarication means? So you’re smarter than you look.” Black Dog let his bull whip unfurl like a lazy serpent.

It appeared being well-versed in the King’s English was also against the rules.  

***

The hell in the mud field came and went in a hurricane of pain. 

Oak shivered on his pallet, trying with two greased palms to keep hold of consciousness. Grum and Chandrey stood a piece back, studying him as if to commit his human form to memory. Strips of exposed fat—and in two places: a rib wall—gleamed in the caged gas lamp fixed into the ceiling of the barrows. Pink and yellow sinew flexed with each desperate pull for air.

“You’ll be okay.” Grum smiled like he meant it, or at least wanted to. “He went hard on you, is all.”

Chandrey looked at Grum like they should ball a wet cloth over Oak’s nose and mouth and be done with it. Such acts of neighborly mercy were not unusual in The Kennel. “You lay on your side, or the rat piss’ll rot right through you.”

“How bad is it?” Oak whispered, having watched their exchange in the reflection of the filmy window. “I can see your faces. Don't lie.”

“It’s bad.” Grum looked at his feet. “Real bad.”

“You’d be dead, if you weren’t so damn stubborn,” Chandrey said. “Black Dog was trying to kill you.”

“He didn’t, though,” Oak began, “He…” but the sudden rack of coughing replaced the words with fire.

“Go slower,” Chandrey said.

“He unlocked me!” Oak screamed it, felt the words throw a light.   

Grum settled himself into an uncomfortable silence, until Chandrey said what both of them were thinking. “You done lost your mind.”

“Maybe.” Oak shivered. “But maybe that’s what I needed. A reboot. To have my hard drive restored.”

“Reboot?” Grum shot Chandrey a worried look. “The hell’s a hard drive, Oak? Chandrey’s right. You’re talking nonsense.”

“You can’t remember yet. This is all some grand mirage.” Oak reached one trembling hand to the bent tin cup they’d filled with rain water. He brought it to his lips, and coughed half of it out. “I think that’s the point.”

“What you need is sleep,” Chandrey said. “Sleep and—”

“Shut the hell up and listen, will you?”

           

And something in the calm authority of Oak’s voice made Chandrey slowly take a seat on an overturned crate. “Guess there ain’t no harm in listening to the ravings of a mad man.”  

Oak tried to see the clearness of the vision, closed his eyes and reached into the light. “This ain’t what you think it is. That mine, those trees, Black Dog—it’s all a goddamn…” But the word vanished from his mind.

Grum looked disappointed. “It’s late Oak. Chandrey’s right. You need—”

Just then the first howl unfolded like a chain across the night. It was followed by a second, and a third. Chandrey and Grum perked up, staring out the window toward the trees.

“And what about that?” Chandrey asked. “Another grand mirage?”

Oak nodded slowly. “All of it. I’m telling you I saw it. When he strapped me up. When that big ugly son of a bitch strapped me up.”

Grum said what he said next out of pity. “Go on and tell us what you saw.”

***

The rain had made it nearly impossible to walk.

Oak stumbled behind the mule cart naked, blood caked on his elbows and knees. Black Dog stood in the bucket seat like some cannibal God, calling for the prisoners to watch, his cannon of a voice shattering even the most casual of whispers.

Oak saw the rows of filthy faces turn to them, half-expecting the men to take up stones. In the end, their indifference was somehow worse. Not that he was guiltless. He’d watched dozens paraded behind the mule cart; had even watched Chandrey lose his foot. It was their eyes that bothered him, the equal parts pity and relief; eyes so familiar, so much like—

           

Eyes watching him behind a glass barricade, the room clean-smelling in the way sterile places often smell, and there was a charge here, a scent of ozone, that made his nostrils burn as they wheeled him on his medical gurney, wheeled him past those eyes filled with too many emotions to place, too many emotions to comprehend in these last pounding seconds of his life as a—

           

Oak slammed into the mud, alarmed to find it there, the coldness of it. For a moment he forgot his pain. He snapped his face up like an animal and looked for the clean, metallic room with its table and its machines. He quested for the doctor pulling his gurney, and saw only Black Dog with his grin of silver teeth.

“His spirit is not broken,” Black Dog roared, “And so we shall break it afresh! We shall break it until his eyes contain perfect emptiness! An emptiness so total it cleanses the man who once occupied its void.”

The flick of his muscled wrist unfolded with the slowness of distance, the whip curling up and toward Oak’s face the way a strand of spider silk will lift in a gentle breeze. He was not precisely here, but in two places at once. And that struck something integral in him, the mental image a kind of talisman, becoming both the mud fields of the prison and the Mangled Forest beyond, becoming both this cold reality and that one of lucid distance in his mind. There was a barrier here, and the prison fence was only one of them. The fence and the glass, he thought. The fence and the glass. The fence IS the glass. And the glass … what? Keeps things out? Keeps things IN?

The whip wrapped his neck, a burning piano wire. Blood hit his back in hot streams, and he had time enough to notice the small hooks and burs and glassy tines fishboned into the leather, enough time to understand that all those pieces were in the meat around his neck, before Black Dog pulled and—

           

The strap was fastened, a big leather buckle that made Oak think of the industrial restraints used in ancient sanitariums, and the face looking down at him was beautiful, a woman, her hair oiled and shortened to help her blend into this hard environment composed of even harder men, and he could see in her eyes she was not driven to perform this task from any place of vengeance or malformed justice, but one in which she believed what she was doing to be right.

“Is that too tight, Mr. Oakheart?”

Oak tried to speak but the belt around his neck made it impossible.

“Blink once for yes, and twice for no.”

Oak blinked once.

She smiled. “You know what this is, don’t you? What you’ve done? Why we’re here?”

           

—And Oak was on his belly now, dragging trenches through the mud, trying to scream and choking for his effort. He could hear his own skin, sounds like something impossibly muscular tearing solid sheaves of leather. Black Dog pulled him so hard he came up onto his feet, staggered, and was flipped belly-down onto a leaning platform built on the X of two barkless trees.

The whip ripped free, taking splinters of the glowing unformed power that was his life. He could see them leave his mouth in small bursts of light, could see them scatter to ribbons with the force of his screams. They left his mouth on drifts of fog, the rain still falling, washing into the warmth of him, drawing it out to fall in bloody traceries of rain water down his back.

“Three lashes!” Spittle flew from Black Dog’s mouth. “For each crime!”

And that last phrase timed perfectly with his downfallen eyes, with the creeping realization that he was not staring at just any barkless trees, but that the X used for this table of torture and those in the Mangled Forest were the very same. He could hear the heavy jangle of Black Dog’s buckles and chains, as he marched into the open space behind him. There should have been more fear, but what he saw made fear impossible.

Oak was staring at the saw grooves on each branch, the saw grooves that in a normal tree would have revealed the pale white heart wood at its center; the saw grooves that in a normal tree would not have been fused with twists of circuitry and wire.

The sound of the whip cutting the rain was like some alien sawblade that—

           

—warbled and clicked in a way that was almost biological—almost, but for the methodical timing of its revs, its cycles, which betrayed the human origin of the machine. The light in the medical room glowed in faint yellow streaks, pulses that made Oak feel as if he was imprisoned in a Jack-o-lantern. The woman doctor was above him, bracing his temples with cold gel; affixing small screws into the flesh there, turning him into some Frankenstein’s monster.

The image of that, and of the Jack-o-lantern, made him smile.

 “Is this amusing to you, Mr. Oakheart?”

He blinked twice.

Because this was not amusing so much as it was terrifying to the point of forced absurdity. To smile was the only way to not go mad. He could smell the soap on his skin. The soap from his group shower before they wheeled him here, before they paraded him before the wall of faces behind the glass, whose purpose was to … what?

In the sound of the machine it was impossible to remember, impossible to think.

“I’ll see you again shortly,” she said to the pulsing darkness of his closed eyes. “You never should have done it, Mr. Oakheart. You never should have—”

           

—He went through the motions of screaming—opening his mouth, expelling what was left of his air—but heard no sound, felt no vibration. The last of his light escaped, and he fell onto the table; fell into it the way a corpse will fall into an open grave.

Black Dog’s voice cascaded against his consciousness in a crushing wave. “Take him to the barrows. Let him die out of my sight.”  

But Oak was too mystified to die.

***

Grum and Chandrey looked at each other. Oak could tell from their expressions they were not convinced. And why would they be? Who was to say what he’d seen had not been sublimation of the paranoid suspicions he had secreted for years?

Years?

Oak thought about that before continuing, his breath coming in shallow gusts. “How long have you been here, Chandrey?”

Chandrey answered immediately. “Six years, four months, and thirteen days.”

“And you?”

Grum had to think longer. “Six years and change.”

“And what about before?”

“Before what?” Chandrey asked.

“Before The Kennel,” Oak said. “What did you do? How did you get here?”

The room was silent for a very long time, while the howls held their witch’s congress with the night.

“Well, ain’t that strange,” Grum whispered. “I can’t rightly recall.”

Chandrey sidled his eyes. “Ain’t no surprise there.”

“What about you, then?” Oak asked. “Because I can’t remember either. Not fully. Not yet. I was supposed to do something. Something important.”

“You and every other sad son of a bitch starving in all this mud,” Chandrey said.

Grum looked at Chandrey. “You’re awful cagey for no damn reason.”

“I’m cagey because our asshole of the hour’s gotten hisself killed for nothing, and now we’re sitting here talking about magical mule shit.” Chandrey stood and limped out of the room.

When the howls died down, Oak whispered, “Did you notice that?”

“Notice what?”

“Chandrey never answered the question.”

***

The shivers became fever, and in the fever Oak could see. His visions turned like the pages of a book, small pieces that made no sense—a meeting in a restaurant, a man who smoked a cigarette in a cone of darkness that hid his face, an errand of life and death—but in the end created a type of moth-eaten tapestry. He saw a woman he believed to be his mother, only her face was an orb of light.

Don’t run with those boys, Freddie.

They’re not bad, mom. They have a bad wrap, is all.

Bad things get bad wrapping.

They don’t call me Freddie, mom. They call me Oak.

Like the tree?

A strong tree, he’d said, before the pages shifted and he was in classroom, full of pupils who wrote their notes directly onto the clear surface of their desk, the back of their necks pulsing with a blue diode, a kind of chip that committed the notes to some internal file, and he the only boy without one, insisting on pencils, on paper, a strong Oak to resist the winds of change.

The pages shifted again, and he was in a cubicle amid a cubicle sea, the incessant buzz of voices taking stories, reporting news, sniffing leads, all of them speaking directly into the blinking light behind their necks, and he into the rotary telephone on his desk, the sight of it a kind of comfort, his desk stacked with paper, which was getting more expensive by the month in these days of endless war, endless fires, endless—

The pages shifted, and shifted again, and here was the President General broadcasting via ionic hologram in mid-air, the grains shivery, but the likeness unmistakable. The President General announcing his prison reform initiative in the riotous wake of over-population, and the concomitant need for peaceful denizens. “Violence can be erased,” said the president, into the chip that broadcast his shivery doppelganger to the world. “And it can be done peacefully.”

The pages, the pages, so many pages, and now the man with the cigarette, the mantle of darkness covering his face in a restaurant booth and keeping it covered because there was no diode in the back of his neck. He was like Oak. By his manicured nails and health-monitor watch, Oak could tell he worked in Government. This was one of the untouchables.

“Do you know much about the President General’s peace reform?”

Oak began scribbling onto the palimpsest his small notebook had become, when the hand closed over his, a bit too firmly—possibly biomechanical.

“Don’t write this down. There can be no record.”

“No record,” Oak agreed, pocketing his notebook.

“You don’t have a chip,” the man said.

“Neither do you.”

And from the Darkness, Oak sensed a smile.

“There are people as high as the Cabinet who want this leaked. They need it leaked. Their families are in danger. That is the power of this reform. Your life, your personality—all of it can be snatched away.”

And it was first real moment in life Oak sensed his doom.

***

When Oak awoke, he remembered little; even less by the time he began to heal. But tucked under the pallet on which Black Dog had assumed he would die, carefully scripted on old shipping manifests misplaced by a simpleminded but surprisingly beguiling Grum, were the notes from his fevered memories. He understood that’s what they were now. Every night he reviewed them, making sure he was alone, and when the howls came in their cycle from the Mangled forest, he felt a deep desire to forget again. Felt that contained within those animal snarls were a type of code.

Soon, even Oak’s southern accent fell away.

Chandrey was the hardest to call to heel. It had been three weeks since he’d stormed from the room, and the left side of his face twitched, as he limped into the afternoon light.

“Something ain’t right,” he’d said, in such a way that Oak could tell it had been weighing on his mind. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. I’ve been thinking a lot.”

Oak turned on his pallet. “And?”

“What happened to your voice?”

“This is my voice,” Oak said. “The old one wasn’t.”

“You sound weaker.” Chandrey paused. “You sound … gentle.”

Oak shrugged. “I know who I am now.”

“What do you mean by that?””

“Don’t you get it yet?” Oak pointed at Chandrey’s stump. “That foot isn’t gone.”

The twitch in the left side of Chandrey’s face intensified, and Oak understood he would need to be gentle, that the suddenness of the shift could be enough to break a man.

“What I mean,” Oak said, “Is that this isn’t as real as you think it is.”

There were tears in Chandrey’s eyes. He sleeved them away, looking up and past Oak, out into the endless mud that was their life. “How can you say a thing like that?”

“When’s the last time it snowed?”

“What?”

“Winter. Those are mountains around us. There are trees other than the Mangled Forest. When’s the last time you’ve seen one shed its leaves?”

Chandrey scratched his head, sucking his four front teeth. “Well, shit.”

“This is some kind of, I don’t know, suspension. I don’t think you can die.”

“What?”

“I don’t think death is allowed here.”

“Tell that to Thompson! Or Cudahy! Or that poor bastard Jackson! Black Dog ripped his spine out in front of all of us.” The twitch infected both sides of his face, tried to pull it apart. “I don’t even know why I came. Jesus…”

“They died to you. But they didn’t die to them.” That didn’t make sense, so Oak tried again. “I think when they die, they go back.”

“Back?”

“The Mangled Forest isn’t full of trees, Chandrey.”

He backed up, shaking his head slowly, a man warding off a thing he knows can no longer be forestalled. He didn’t seem to notice that he’d used his stump without the slightest limp, used his stump as if the foot had been there. “What’re you fixing to do?”

“Convert you,” Oak said. “Grum’s already in. I need a third. Someone I can trust.”

Chandrey licked his lips. “And what’ll I get, if I do?”

“How about your life back? I have a plan.”       

***

In the dream the female doctor was above him again, and he opened his eyes into the yawning chasm of yellow light, the machine so loud, and its clicks so constant, it became a type of warhorn. He felt the alchemy of that noise traverse the screws in his temples, deconstruct his sense of time. Neural pathways became a scorching fire, and in their flames reshaped his very nature, told the story of Oak the prisoner, the story of The Kennel and its endless torture.

“The sequence is nearly complete,” the doctor called, turning back to the wall of glass, where a man with Black Dog’s face stood in a military uniform, the President General’s red and blue insignia stitched above his heart, the clockface infused into the glass reading 9:34AM, “This one’s still resisting the alignment. I may need help.”

A voice chattered from the loud speaker, timing perfectly with Black Dog’s lips. “And the other two?”

“Fully aligned,” she said.

Oak turned then to see Grum and Chandrey in the gurneys next to his, these men who had helped him, these men who had—

And then Black Dog was somehow above him, crushing his face with a calloused palm, crushing his skull into the table. “You’ll think twice now about blowing your whistle, won’t you, Justice Boy?” And then, closer, right in Oak’s ear, with breath like a summer grave. “They always wash you before The Trip. All the pain you survive in there makes your body sweat and sometimes even shit itself.”

           

Oak awoke in a cold sweat.

He heard shuffling in the darkness before Grum emerged in silhouette. “You okay? You were screaming.”

“Tonight.”

“What?”

“Get Chandrey. It happens tonight.”

***

Black Dog was sleeping when Grum stove his head in with a pick—and even then, it wasn’t enough to kill him. They all looked at each other while he shook on the floor of the officer’s shack, spitting blood up through those hellish silver teeth. That’s when they noticed the rest of it.

“What the hell?” Chandrey whispered. He was by the door of Black Dog’s quarters, a rock axe cocked above his shoulder. But there was no one coming. Through the black socket of the doorway they could see the other beds, where Black Dog’s men shivered and jerked atop their mattresses. Some of them were bleeding from their mouths. Others snapped their eyes open intermittently, the pulses of light there making the room flicker.

“Their eyes,” Grum said. “What’s that in their eyes?”

“They’re mirrors.” Oak leaned against the wall, grimacing at the tightness in his back, the healing skin there like a brace two sizes too small. “Black Dog is their queen bee. It’s the way insect networks work. A swarm intelligence. So long as he’s unconscious, or at least damaged, I think we’re safe. He’s the driving force here.”

Chandrey lowered his axe. “What now?”

“You got the mule cart?” Oak asked.

Grum nodded. “Just like you asked.”

“Wrap him in the sheets,” Oak said. “We’re going for a little stroll.”

***

Three silent shapes cut across the muddy darkness, two sickly mules drawing a cart that creaked and wobbled as it rolled. The ground fog was thick this morning, and in the distant east dark purples were aglow with icy blues. No one hesitated at the fence’s barrier. Oak lifted the latch and then they were trudging toward the trees which were not trees. The trees so much like a Gorgon’s nested scalp.

The first howl to cut the silence made Chandrey jump and stumble back. He raised his axe, lowering himself in a crouch, searching the fog for mevement.

“Don’t worry.” Oak pointed to a steel box fixed into the nearest tree trunk. It was disguised to look like lumpen bark. “They’re speakers. Some kind of transmission.”

“For what?” Chandrey asked.

“To keep us out.” Oak slapped the mule’s haunch and drew them on toward the center, where a arthritic giant of a tree stood taller and paler than all the rest. It was there they tied Black Dog, his wrists encircling the gnarled bole; it was there they stripped his night clothes to expose his hulking nakedness; and it was there Oak unfurled the whip that had savaged all of them, pulling answers from the tyrant of their lives.

When it was done, Oak made sure the giant was still breathing. He flexed his hands and felt Black Dog’s blood crackle in its wrinkles. Then he pulled the spade from the mule cart and walked out into the trees.

“You think he’s lying?” Grum asked behind him, as Oak walked. “It sounded like a lie.”

“No one’s ever done that to him before.” Oak shook his head. “He wasn’t lying.”

“But us?” Chandrey cast his eyes to the clearing just now coming into view. “In there?”

“We’re not really there, Chandrey. None of this is. The mind works in abstractions. It’s how we dream. These trees are some kind of warning. Like a wall that won’t let you look at your ugliest truth. Like a well that swallows secrets.” His voice flowing in a kind of poetry, a cadence buffeted by strengthening memory. “I came here to uncover this. I came here to prove that what they were doing to prisoners and enemies of the state was more monstrous than anything previously imagined. The Geneva conventions can’t touch this, because to anyone watching, we appear as sleeping patients. We appear docile and harmless. How can any news network understand what’s going on in the dreams of these people? How can anyone comprehend the horror?”

Oak stopped at a clearing marked with stones, the stones etched with names, the names glowing with yellow digital light. He found the one he was looking for and began to dig. “Find yours,” he told them.

The earth voided beneath his toil, piling at the edges, until the shovel struck wood.

Oak used the mules to pull it up.

Then he used the mules to pull up Chandrey’s and Grum’s.

“It’s probably going to hurt when you see it,” Oak said, trying to encourage them with his eyes. “Ignore that. There’s a diode, a kind of light, implanted into the back of the neck, right below the hairline. You need to yank it out on my count. Are you ready?”

They placed their hands on the coffin lids as one.

           

“Now!”

Grum and Chandrey both cried out. Oak wanted to, but fought the terror, the bisection, the growing pressure at the center of his mind screaming this is impossible, I’m here, that can’t be me, that CAN’T!

Oak reached around his own head down there in the black plush interior of the coffin, and felt a strange doubling sensation, the ghost of fingers against his neck.

“One…”

He gripped the diode, felt its cold light, its thrumming engine.

“Two…”

He plunged his fingers into the cold meat, and felt a lightning bolt punch into his skull, making the trees flicker, making the world flicker.

“Three!”

They pulled and—

***

The pages flickered and Oak was in the diner again. One of the only places in town that still served real meat. Real meat had not been outlawed, but replaced with such cheap synthetic alternatives the role of the American Farmer had crumbled to dust. He liked the smell of bacon, of eggs, eked from them the same comfort garnered from pencils and paper and his old rotary telephone back at work.

His contact was in the farthest possible corner, tucked into a belt of shadow. He clasped and unclasped his hands nervously, as Oak approached.

“Sit.” The hand inclined with a cigarette pinched in its fingers.

Oak sat, and after judging the man’s motives to be loosely legitimate, tucked his notebook back into his pocket.

“So where do I come in?” Oak asked. “You risk nothing. I risk everything.”

“I risk my life and family.” The man stubbed the cigarette with such ferocity Oak could see each knuckle going white. “You’re a journalist. Your reward is the truth.”

“If this is even real…” Oak lowered his voice. “And that’s a big if, how can I expose it without endangering myself?”

“You’ve already endangered yourself by being here.”

The chatter of surrounding voices sunk beneath a buffer.

Oak swallowed. Cleared his throat. “How does it work?”

The man pulled out an envelope. “There are 85 billion neurons in the human brain. Their combined connections number over 100 trillion. Each one of those relationships, those patches, govern who we are, what we like, how we remember. Artificial Intelligence isn’t legal in any consumerist capacity, but the government has been using it for at least ten years. Imagine a plow horse you never have to feed or pet or wash, a plow horse that just sits in the dark and does your work while you sleep. It would take all the world’s neurologists twenty years to chart the width and breadth of one human mind.”

“But not a computer,” Oak said.

“A very smart computer.”

“So it did what no team of neurologists could do?”

“It did more than that. It created an algorithm, and from that algorithm, The Trip was born.”

“The Trip?”

The man pulled pictures from his envelope and spread them on the table. The first showed a headpiece with screws aligned to a diagram of a human skull, colored arcs representing inflowing currents to the nervous system. The second showed a table fixed with a dome of yellow lights, the human model in this picture represented with a vacuous wide-eyed expression, as he stared into the light. The third showed virtual landscapes stocked with characters, like movie stills. One of them appeared to be a frontier era mining operation.

Oak tapped his finger on the picture of the mine. “What’s this?”

“Interactive Reality, or IR. This is how they want prisoners to do their time. Ten years of IR in ten minutes of real world time. This is how violent criminals will be reformed. But that’s just the start. Dissenters will be next. Then those with minority political and religious views. In short, enemies of the President General’s Mantle.”

“How do you stop it?”

“This is where things will get strange. You can walk away, and I won’t begrudge you for it. But as I said, the mere fact we’ve met endangers you. This computer has more than one function. It can deduce the likelihood of betrayal, and can deduce yet further the likelihood of how and when and with whom that betrayal will take place.”

“So you’ve entrapped me.”

“You’re not the first.”

“What happened to the others?”

The man stayed silent.

“What happened to them?”

The man collected the photos and slid them back into the envelope. “The only way to expose it is to break free of it. The resurgence process erases all memory of the event. When subjects wake up, they’re molded in accordance to the algorithmic imperatives, but cannot remember the events which shaped them.”

“Amnesia?”

“Not fully. They might weep suddenly or smash a dish without knowing why. They sometimes kill themselves. But that’s of no concern to the President General. One less body to feed is a boon to overpopulation.”

“How would I get inside? If I agreed.”

“You would have to get caught. Then, after going under, you would have to trick the system. You’d have to remember who you are.”

“How?”

“I’d show you.” The man slipped the envelope inside his jacket. “Think about this carefully. It’s dangerous and terrible and no one should be asked to do it. And yet I ask. I’ll meet you here in one week. If you accept, you’ll need help. Do you have anyone you can trust? Anyone who believes in justice deeply enough to gore themselves upon its horns?”

Oak thought of Tom Chandrey and Hector Grum. “Yes. I think I do.”

“One week,” the man said.

“Wait.”

The man hesitated in his veil of darkness.

“How do you know so much about this computer?”

The man pushed his face into the light. It was old and tired and had eyes of a blue that looked as if the color had been hammered out of them. It was, Oak realized, the face of a grandfather who fears the world that will be left for his children’s children. “I know because I designed it.”

***

“I don’t know what’s happening…” The words came in icy waves, a kind of thunder cradling them, drawing itself into a tunnel that floated down into Oak’s mind. His stomach was cramping, his muscles filled with lactic acid, his body sheathed in sweat.

And the voice.

“We need help!”

A woman’s voice.

The doctor’s voice.

And that’s when he opened his eyes to see her huddled over Black Dog. The big man was strapped to a table in the far corner of the room. He seized and bled from his mouth, his massive body jerking as a dead thing will jerk in contact with a current. Chandrey and Grum were to his right, both men slowly blinking, flexing their jaws.

Oak tried to sit up and felt the screws keep him there. He gritted his teeth and worked them quickly, one after the other, the sound of it like a fork scraping his skull. When he sat up, his stomach flexed and tried to empty everything it held. He swallowed the bile as silently as he could, slipping off the table and working at the head screws of Grum and Chandrey.

“Did you hear me?” The doctor screamed, still turned away from them. “I said I need help! I think … I think he’s dying!”

Grum and Chandrey opened their mouths but Oak pressed a finger to his lips. He knew what he had to do now, why he’d felt a small bracing pity in the center of him, while noticing that this woman doctor believed what she was doing to be right.

The three of them stalked across the room like lurking pirates, and when Oak was close enough to smell the medicinal scent of her hair oil, they grabbed her and hauled her to the table.

Grum fastened a hand across her mouth, looking up at the glass, the window empty, the clockface reading 9:53PM.

This outpost was tucked away somewhere so secret Oak doubted it was heavily staffed. The military man known only to him as Black Dog had come here as a type of treat, had probably seen it as a masochistic pleasure cruise, because they couldn’t die, because no one was really getting tortured.

Chandrey worked the screws into her temples, hissing as the current bit his fingers.

She was looking at them now with horror, shaking her head, trying to beg them with her eyes. Beg them to not experience a reality she had doled out to each of them with medical detachment. But her eyes kept going to the light, being drawn there, magnetized.

“I was in there for seven years,” Chandrey whispered to her. “Seven years. And that one over there? He cut off my foot with a hand saw.”

Oak was barely listening. He had eyes only for Black Dog, thought of how he’d ridden high in his cart, the almost romantic glee that composed his face with each snap of the whip, each punishment. And now the world would know. As soon as he typed the command his contact had given him into the machine’s interface, the data would be rerouted to a public server, to news networks, to foreign governments. They would know what was happening here. And somehow that still wasn’t enough. He could feel the phantom pains suckling at his back like hungry leeches, could feel the phantom mud sucking at his feet. And this man had extracted his hope from him, piece by glistening piece. And he’d done it while smiling.

Oak rushed across the room and grabbed the screws and heard the doctor’s muffled voice behind him, breaking through Grum’s fingers.

“Nooooooooooo!”

Oak pulled the screws free in a constellation of sparks that bloomed across the air like wildflowers. A bell of pressure expanded and flung him back. Soon the big man stopped shaking. But that’s all he did.

Black Dog’s eyes gaped up into the light. Black Dog’s eyes no longer blinked or even flexed. Oak approached on shaky legs and stared down into the gray-blue that had in another world reminded him of lightning. What he saw there filled him with a poisoned sense of justice.

Perfect emptiness.

(Leave a comment below, follow the blog, and say hey on Facebook *Author Carson Standifer* or IG @novelistcarsonstandifer)