Chapter 18 - Jericho

  Psychosomatic Output: 300 Bio-Units

  Synaptic Rank: unbound

  “He’s still lying there.”

  Jericho’s eyes fluttered open at the sound of the feminine voice. Bright lights shone down on him.

  “Dead probably.” A smack could be heard, followed by a muttered curse.

  Where was he? His fingertips twitched, and he felt the rubbery surface of the arena. The arena! What happened to the crown? He tried to reach for it, but his arms didn’t want to respond.

  Randrea’s face appeared above him, lips pursed. “Are you dead?”

  He blinked repeatedly, his vision was bleary. “No, but I think I might be dying.”

  She brought her face even closer to his. Is she kneeling beside me? His cheeks started to burn and he tried to turn his face away.”

  “Why do you say that?” She murmured.

  “I can’t move.”

  Randrea let out an incredibly girlish giggle. “Probably normal, you were like, this close to dying.” She made a tiny space between her fingers.

  “Probably normal?”

  She suddenly leapt to her feet and crossed her arms. She stood over top of him, his view from the floor accentuated the hard lines of muscle running up her legs, to her torso and arms. His eyes lingered on the skin tight uniform, where it was and where it wasn’t.

  If only she wasn’t twice your size… or I don’t know, had hundreds of weird spines all over her body.

  With some effort he ripped his eyes up to her face, she was staring back at him with an unimpressed, knowing look. His cheeks reddened and he squeezed his eyes shut, willing his body to melt into the floor.

  “I have a stim in my bag,” A nasally voice said from somewhere out of his vision. “I’m not sure what it will do to a human though.”

  Randrea stretched her arms behind her head and he tried not to notice her toned stomach and the bare skin that krept up her torso a little too far.

  “What do we have to lose? He might be dead in a few minutes anyways.” Randrea said with a ugh.

  “I can hear you.” Jericho muttered, “I’m not going to die, give me the stim.”

  “You heard him, Graits.” She shrugged.

  His eyes bugged when he saw the size of the needle, but kept his mouth shut as the Myrd popped the cap off and removed any air bubbles. Without a word the needle was jabbed into the meat of his thigh, and he felt it bite into his femur.

  They stood over him and waited for the reaction. A look of morbid curiosity on Graito’s face made his skin crawl.

  A pressure started to build at the point of injection, the muscle started to swell and his skin tightened. The pressure lessened just before the bursting point and heat flooded his body.

  Red hot molten iron heat.

  He screamed and thrashed on the floor as every nerve ending lit up like a starship’s control panel. Thankfully, the pain sted for a only a few seconds and it faded almost as quickly as it had come.

  “How do you feel?” Randrea asked with a twinge of concern.

  His skin itched something furious and he leapt to his feet. It felt like a swarm of insects taking microscopic bites out of his flesh and he scratched like a madman. His brain was screaming at him to move as if the only way to relieve the itch was to work his muscles to exhaustion.

  “I feel incredible, but so-“ He scratched at his scalp, “ugh I’m so itchy.”

  Graito’s cocked his head, “interesting side effect.

  “Is that not normal?” He started to jog in pce while simultaneously scratching at the skin behind his knees, “I think my skin is going to catch on fire.”

  “Nothing about this situation is normal,” Randrea said, snatching the crown from the floor. “Everything here was not designed for human consumption or interaction. You might think Arthros knows what he’s doing, but he’s just as lost as the rest of us.”

  “That's a comforting thought,” He mumbled, staring at the twisted wire crown with a new sense of dread. “So Arthros doesn’t even know if I’m capable of surviving this thing.”

  The Myrd’s bulbous lips pulled back over his needle-like teeth in a contemptuous sneer, “That’s why he ripped it from your head. He’s afraid you were going to die.”

  If that was true, then it would mean Arthros sacrificed the integrity of the training to make sure he lived. It didn’t make sense, he didn’t care that much about him… did he?

  “Why would Arthros do that.” He said through gritted teeth, scratching his elbows.

  “How am I supposed to know?” Graito snarled, “Something is going on or he’s going soft.”

  “Graito,” Randrea snapped, “watch how you’re talking! He was just giving him a second chance.”

  The Myrd whirled on her and rose to a bipedal stance. He lifted a ft, stubby finger towards her face, “Exactly! Where was Scyth’s second chance? We watched her writhe in her own filth, do you know how embarrassing that kind of death is? Do you know what that would do to her reputation back home if word got out?”

  The itchiness faded.

  There was a look of pained understanding on Randrea’s face as she pced a comforting hand on the alien’s shoulder, “we need to trust him, he has a reason.”

  The tension in the arena was palpable. Graito dropped to his centaur stance and let his two upper arms go limp. For a moment he gred at the floor as a storm of emotions wrought his face into a mask of torment.

  “Graito…” Randrea knelt down so she could look him in his six eyes.

  “You take over, I’m not doing this.” He turned and walked out of the arena, leaving Randrea helplessly watching him go.

  Jericho watched him go, a pit forming in his stomach. Arthros might have saved his life, but it hadn’t done him any favors. Was it even possible to make the Myrd like him at this point?

  “Who’s Scyth?” He managed.

  The wire crown was passed to him as Randrea sighed. “His sister.”

  His heart sank even further, and he accepted the crown without a word. He’s going to hate me forever. Damn it Arthros, what have you done?

  “Try not to think about it, you need to focus. I don’t want Arthros to come back to your corpse.”

  “Easier said than done, I think Arthros set me up for failure. In more ways than one.”

  Randrea didn’t say anything but the grim look on her face said enough. He took a deep breath and pced the crown on his head. He still had no idea how to deal with the pressure. The crown’s effect was so severe and immediate that any coherent thought vanished the moment it was activated. It was one thing to fail at something you knew was possible, but what if it wasn’t possible?

  Arthros had thrown him into this arena without any solid evidence that a human was even capable of withstanding the neurological pressure.

  “Are you ready?”

  Jericho gnced up, surprised she was giving him a chance to prepare himself. “What? No sudden activations?”

  She shrugged, “You had a taste of that just like the rest of us. But now you need to be given a chance to do it properly, or I’ll be sending your body to the morgue.”

  Jericho pressed his lips together, and only nodded to let her know he understood. I can do this, I’ll prove to everyone that I deserve to be here. Are you watching mother.

  “Remember, it’s a neurological device. It’s all happening up here.” She tapped the side of her head with a slender finger.

  “Got it.”

  Her fingers twitched and the device was activated. The pressure hit him harder than Graito’s punch, and he dropped like a sack of stones to the ground. Just like st time, every human thought was repced by a raw, animalistic instinct to escape.

  Use your head!

  He rolled to his stomach and thrashed, cwing uselessly at the hard rubber floor. His instincts told him to burrow, maybe survival could be found underground.

  Think! All you have to do is think!

  He gnashed his teeth, and a guttural howl was torn from his lips. The crown was stripping him of everything that made him human. If his legs could work, he knew they would have carried him out that building.

  Yet, he was aware of this. He could hear his thoughts, faint as they were. Yes! Use your head, you can do this!

  He wasn’t an animal, but a man. A human. He was Jericho Hound.

  He squirmed like a bisected worm, his hips bucked and his feet kicked senselessly in the air. Get it off, Get it off, Get it off! “GeeetItoff!” The words spilled from his lips like water dribbling down his chin, but they were words.

  Somewhere in the back of his conscious he was aware of a Randrea speaking to him. You are Jericho Hound, you’ve survived far worse. Those thoughts drifted through his consciousness like a sloop amidst a storm of towering waves. But he heard them, and they were enough for his eyes to catch a glimpse of the glowing thread, coiled on the floor in his front of his face.

  The sight of the thread was enough to lessen the pressure by a minuscule amount, but in his mind it was like entering the eye of the Storm.

  Peace for one blissful, fraction of a second. It was all he needed.

  Randrea said it all happens in my mind, she wouldn’t say that if it didn’t mean anything. Think, you stupid idiot think or you’re going to die.

  He was vaguely aware of Randrea’s encouraging voice, and the puddle of drool his face was currently sitting in. It all happens in my mind, why- the computer. The answer was so ridiculously easy he felt like a fool for not figuring it out sooner, except he had no idea how to access the AI.

  The pressure returned, and his time of refuge was over. With a monumental surge of energy and the feeling of the thread coiling around his wrist, he ripped the crown from his head. As if it never happened, the pressure in his head vanished and he was left panting in puddle of his own sweat and drool.

  “You pulled it off, intentionally.” The Hokkonian spoke quietly, almost to herself.

  “Yeah, I needed to speak to you.”

  She blinked at a him, bewilderment filled her features. “You talked, I heard you.”

  “Is that not normal?

  Randrea shook her head, “You talked yourself through it, I’ve never seen anything like that. Speech comes far down the road, long after you manage basic motor function. It’s almost as if you… forced the words out through sheer will.”

  She gave him a strange look, and Jericho thought he caught a hint of apprehension in her gaze. It was as if she was seeing him for the first time. No it was more like she seeing a feral animal, snapping at the air and frothing at the mouth.

  “How do I access my AI?”

  She seemed to snap out of whatever was occupying her thoughts. Her smirk returned, albeit a little shaky. “You figured that part out did you. The crown has been designed to simute the neurological pressure of a HWND, but it’s more than that. No matter how strong or weak your mind is, the crown will always exert more pressure than your mind can handle. It forces you to access your AI from the very second it’s activated.”

  “That would have been nice to know.”

  The female shrugged, “Like I said, we all had to figure it out on our own. If it killed you, then it killed you.”

  “Like Scyth.”

  Randrea pursed her lips and gnced at the doorway where Graito had left, “Exactly like Scyth. On your first try there is no intervention, no matter what, that’s the rule.”

  “So then why did Arthros save me.”

  The Hokkonian ran hand through the Mohawk of spines on her head and sighed, “Because he’s worried about something, and when Arthros is worried, we should all be worried. He doesn’t just do things for no reason, there is a process to every decision he makes. Graito understands this but… well it’s going to take some time for him to get over it.”

  “I get it, I would be the same way.”

  Randrea nodded, “Me too, alright, put that crown back on your head, we have some work to do.”

  She expined briefly how to activate the AI. A confusing expnation and consisted of phrases like ‘you just know it when you feel it’ and ‘you just need to try and touch it’. It wasn’t helpful at all, but it was better than nothing.

  For the next couple hours Jericho tried and failed to access the computer in his head. For hours he would don the crown, only to drop to the floor in a writhing mess of limbs and drool. Every time he managed pull the crown off at the st second, and though he was getting quicker at captivating his own thoughts, the pressure wasn’t lessening. He was just ‘getting used to it’.

  It was impressive sure, and Randrea made sure to tell him, but it wouldn’t be good enough to pilot a HWND. It wasn’t even good enough to get up off the ground.

  “Picture it in your head, and just touch it.” Randrea said, poking an imaginary something in the air.

  “Don’t you think I’m trying,” Jericho snapped.

  His uniform was completely soaked, and it clung to him uncomfortably. His head was a tangled sweaty mess. His limbs were sore from the thrashing, and bruises he received from dropping to the floor were getting worse.

  Until one time, he finally saw the ‘thing’ Randrea was talking about. Guided by the thread wrapped around his wrist, he stumbled upon a light.

  A small glowing ball of energy, so faint he could barely see it, but it was there. The more he envisioned it, the easier it was to see. Until the only thing that filled is vision was the thread wrapping itself around the glowing sphere. He reached out a tentative hand, and touched it.

  Hello Jericho.

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