Ember

The pain. Ember was quite sure they had never mentioned the pain.

Aching, searing pain that started in her lungs, and moved its way to her chest. It expanded like an inverse bubble in her modified body, wrapping itself around her ribs and trying to choke them. The other teens were several yards away, also hanging from the bars while trying to hold their breaths.

It felt quite suddenly to Ember as though she had cracked a rib. She could hear it, too, coming through her bones and sounding like a dull clunk. Just like the sound her commander’s head should make, happening in her ribs. It was probably just Cothis, the statistics of hallucination.

Ember’s thoughts wandered when she was in pain. It was her brain’s way of coping, a government program inside redistributing the feeling to other aspects of her consciousness. And, like a government program, it probably would have worked better if it wasn’t in charge of everything.

The program decided it wanted her to drop to the ground, so she did. Ember breathed a long, panging breath. A guard-bot clicked warily, but Ember cared not.

“Give me one more reason, and I’ll quit,” she said.

It did.

The pain of sudden electrocution made Ember want to tear her arm off and cut herself in half with it. She decided to rip apart the robot instead, embracing her primal lust for war. It didn’t make her feel any better, but she stopped feeling worse. With the purpose that came with immediate elimination of extreme pain, she strode toward the door and keyed herself out with the tattooed lines on her wrist.

As the door buzzed its surrender, Ember heard the alarms going off. The frantic crowd around her appeared calm under their projections, and they would want to cling to each other as the klaff chased her down. They wouldn’t be able to, though; the “no-touch” rule was enforced by electric fields.

“I wish you could see me,” she said out loud. The figures appeared not to notice. “I wish I could see me,” her breath muttered under her. She slapped it for being so insubordinate, and it retreated back to her presumably broken lungs.

She kicked her heels forward and zipped forward at speeds near the sound barrier. The halls, though pristine and neat, seemed uneven as she leaned further toward freedom. But she knew, as she had been told hundreds of times, that no one really wants freedom. They simply want change. Right then, change was better than the hell of military training.

Leaning back, Ember looked over her shoulder. A thick body with tentacular appendages ran behind her, easily keeping pace and gaining. In a fluent movement she drew her gun, spun around and aimed at the perforations at what should have been the creature’s face. The appendages were too fast, however, and took the weapon from her grasp and tangled her in what she only hoped wasn’t a loving embrace.

“Why attempt just, frailty?” it cracked, breath hissing from its arms as it did so. “Catch, tear the inside.”

Ember closed her eyes. Her hair wasn’t functioning, not performing its basic task of translating the words. It meant that she was being erased.

“Akram has found his race, I see,” she said. And those were her last words as a hand was waved over the lines on her wrist.

*

Ember lay on the table, her mind inactive for the reason that it was removed. It was her third one, and yet her body still desired trouble; her soul, change. Her purpose was in her very depths, the part of her that operators could neither erase nor find. The air hummed with the silent freedoms that could have been. Her mind would never know it, but she was destined - eventually, in some lifetime - to find one of them.

Somewhere within the recesses of remaining sanity and wakefulness, Ember found energy. No twisted, manufactured consciousness would override her own.

She twitched.