Mindshard (ON HOLD)

Chapter 8: Praetor

     That death Finn knew well, having suffered through it fifteen times.  And, as he felt the collar warm against his flesh, he knew he was about to suffer it again.  Silently he howled in the depths of his mind, knowing this time the pain would be enough to send him finally over the edge into insanity, an edge he had walked precariously close to the last two times.  Would he then wake again, this time mad from the torture, his broken spirit captured by the Praetors’ strange technology to be poured once again into his body, cloned from the cell sample the Viseith agent took onboard the Indurin before killing him originally?

     It was a shock that first time, waking with his neck still aching in memory of the twist that snapped it, severing his spinal cord and sending a neural shock into his brain with sufficient force to kill him almost instantly.  But he didn’t wake in a bed that time, opening his eyes to find himself suspended instead in a great, encased tube, surrounded by a thick, green gel.  A mask covered his nostrils and mouth, a steady stream of air flowing from it to fill his lungs with clean, if somewhat antiseptic-tasting oxygen.

     He had been naked that first time, the neutral buoyancy of the gel cradling him against gravity like amniotic fluid, tubes into his body his umbilicus, providing nutrients to his rapidly regrowing body.  Gone were the scars gathered from a lifetime of living; the long purple line along his left forearm from falling out of a tree when he was a boy, the moon-shaped scar from the emergency appendectomy he suffered in his second year of university to remove a burst appendix, and the slightly crooked cant of the small finger on his right hand, dislocated and never properly repaired when he was a teenager.

     They were all gone, erased when his body was remade from the sample of DNA the Viseith drew from the cells stolen out of the tissue of his neck.  Remade into perfection, his DNA cleaned and re-engineered to create a better Finn, faster and stronger than nature originally gifted him.  His nervous system too benefited from the re-engineering, his brain hardwired to be more efficient, retain more information and function faster.  His reflexes were improved to razor-edge and he found himself with infinite control over his body.

     As beneficial as he thought it was when he first discovered the improvements, Finn quickly realized the downside to the heightened sensation and nervous control when they pulled him from the tank and put the dominance collar on him.  Because it rapidly became apparent that they hadn’t improved his nervous system in order to make him think faster, but to feel the collar’s fiery grip that much more strongly.

     A perfect half circle of some unidentifiable metal alloy a finger-width wide, the collar fit easily around his neck, lying against his collarbone to send metallic fibrils deep into his body in their search for his nerve centers.  At the same time the collar bonded itself at the molecular level to his skin, effectively becoming part of his body and quite irremovable.  Completed by a remotely operated control device, the unit became a tool of horrible torture, morbidly effective in its task of breaking one’s spirit.

     Finn had tasted its fire the first time vev’Norantus demanded he tell them where the humans were hiding the Crown of Oberon, the questions coming hard and fast as a knot of healers dried Finn off from his time in the tank.  Burned into his synapses via gel electro-transfer, Finn was stunned to find the Sidhe language at his fingertips, his comprehension and usage of it flawless.

     Unfortunately that also had the secondary effect of making him available for uncompromising interrogation.  When the human didn’t give him the answers he wanted, vev’Norantus sent a wash of fire through Finn’s body and the gasping human dropped to his knees, pain stealing his strength in an instant, the first of many that would follow with devastating effect.