Chapter 2
The first thing you miss is your privacy. You can put up with the beatings, the broken bones, the starvation, and the sleep deprivation. Living in a transparisteel box means that they are always watching you. You can’t sleep, you can’t eat the little bit of food you get, and you can’t relieve yourself anywhere but in a corner. That’s what they do, they force you to live in your own filth and it makes you angry. You revert to your baser instincts. Then when you have broken the bones in your hand and reduced them to bloody lumps after hours of beating your hands against a transparisteel wall the depression sets in. When they turn on the lights outside of the cage you can see it in the eyes of the one across from you, that vacant look as if nobody resides there anymore. Then it hits you, you’re never going to get out of here even if you knew where here was. That is how it begins a creature broken and bleeding, half starved, up to his ankles in his own filth, without dignity, without hope, and who has begun to accept the fact that the rest of his life will consist of four transparisteel walls that creature is ready to be molded into whatever you choose.
* * *
I awake with a start. In the first few moments of consciousness I realize I’m no longer in my cage. The sheer joy from realizing I’m no longer in there threatens to over take me, but before it does I realize that I am strapped to a table. The precise words of a droid intone, “Do not move sir, I am currently setting one of the bones in your hand. If you move it will be more painful.” It must be a Two-OneBee medical droid. What could this mean? What did they have planned for me?
“Sedate him, I don’t want the subject to injure himself,” a male voice calls from out of my sight line. I sniff the air to try and catch his sent but all I smell is the strong scent of cleaners and antiseptic.
“Yes, sir,” the droid replies as he quickly and expertly sticks a syringe into the side of my neck, with my body restrained I cannot stop him.
Floating. Weightlessness. I feel like I am lying on my back in a sea and staring into a pink dawn morning back home. As the sun bursts over the horizon brining with it a wonderful new day, but I can’t remember ever doing this. Am I awake or am I still asleep. The last thing I time I was at home I was……”You don’t understand”…..yelling, but at who? “You’re too old and set in your ways…….If Anaranjado was still here things would be different!” Am I’m still drifting; I have no idea how long I have been like this. I was hearing my own voice, and it was saying the words I said to my father the day I left home. With the mention of my brother my father had struck me for the first time of my life, a casual open handed slap that broke my nose. I can remember the look in his eyes as he saw blood streaming down my face and I could feel the smug grin that my face held as I said, “Violence is the recourse of the untrained mind father, or at least that is what you told me”. Oh how proud I was of myself, I had made my father look the fool and proven my point sometimes violence is the only answer. Still I had no idea how I ended up here in this world of nothingness.
I felt a shock and my eyes opened wide into a world of pink. I was floating in a large cylindrical tube, filled with pinkish liquid. That’s when it all came back to me, the cage, the medical droid, and now here I was floating in a tank of bacta. As I stared out of the tube I could see a short human female that smiled at me in a way that her species must think of as perky and she waved to me and motioned up. I looked up and saw the top of the tube open and a hand reach in. I grabbed the hand and used it to help me out of the tube. Soaking wet I stood on a grate drying my fur with a large towel. “We are a little short on bacta here, so we need to get as much back from you as possible,” the female said. There was another man in the room he was tall and trim with a gaunt face, he wore a gray uniform and it appeared that his fingernails were made of some metal that had been sharpened to a point.
“Glad to see that you are finally awake, my name is General Melvar you have already met Sara one of our med techs. I’m sure you would like to get some sleep in a real bed, so Sara here will show you to your room.”
“Where am I……….” As I began talking another voiced chimed and began repeating my words in basic and what’s worse it appeared to come from me.
“Oh, that what you are hearing is a vacuolar implant that we placed inside your trachea. So now whenever you talk it will immediately translate what you are saying into basic.
“Yes, so now you can speak a civilized language,” Melvar chimed in.
“Why did you do this to me? Why am I here? Where is here?”
“Is here” I could see that this implant was already going to be a problem.
“All in good time, first you need to go and lie down. So follow Sara and after you have had some rest and something to eat we will talk some more…about your situation.
Continue on to Chapter 3
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