This was my first trip to The Consortium building, which I had not even visited as a boy on a class trip. Few children of Earth in the space era had not been. But, I had always refused: repulsed by a strong, nonspecific sense that within the walls of that place lay my deepest fears. Even passing it by on the street engendered a sort of tingling along my spine. There was no particular reason for this eerie feeling, and I could give you no specific explanation for its origin. Yet, intense disquiet always accompanied the mental picture of The Consortium’s multicolored walls and shimmering, iridescent security dome.
Schoolyard gossip swirled around the most secretive elements of The Consortium, and imbued it with something approaching a legendary status.
“They’ve got animals locked up in cages in the basement. A friend of my dad’s seen them pulling out eye gunk with a syringe to do tests on it and shit!” a self-appointed, sixth grade expert told me once, years ago.
“No, no, you’ve got it all wrong,” an intellectual challenger imperiously corrected. “They do radio testing, and try to find ways of getting people’s heads to explode. I saw it myself a few years ago. I slipped off from a tour and caught a glimpse through a door in a restricted area. They popped a rabbit’s head like a balloon.” Several days of rabbit-head nightmares followed that exchange. I was not, in the end, a particularly brave boy.
A moment of premonition and, strangely, of distant memory accompanied the first rays of light hitting my cornea as I rounded the corner and caught my first glimpse of The Consortium in 30 years. It had not changed. The city around it had twisted and changed shape, but The Consortium was like an oak: solid, timeless, forever. How many people had lived and died in its austere shadow?
When I arrived at the edge of the dome, a small group of uniformed men ushered me through: the force field parting around me as they held up small, round devices to facilitate my entrance. I raised my hands, at their direction, as I was subjected to a thorough patdown. Even the quarter in my breast pocket which I had all but forgotten about did not escape their notice. After what felt like an absurd length of time, I was finally deemed not a threat, and allowed to pass. I held my identification card up to the fat man at the reception desk, who waved me through without much interest.
He seemed totally dull to the outside world: as if his body had become a kind of sensory deprivation tank for the mind. I shuddered at the not-so-impossible future which momentarily flashed before my eyes in which I shared his fate.
We moved from the lobby to the elevator, which became incredibly claustrophobic with the accompanying uniformed men. I made a few weak attempts at casual conversation which they returned with only stony silence. It was just as well. I imagine small talk with them would have been more intense than any conversation I had previously experienced.
As we descended into the lower levels of the building, my claustrophobia intensified. I pulled the small, yellowed slip of paper which I had been mindlessly rubbing between my thumb and forefinger in my pocket out to look at once again. It was a vaguely frightening summons which induced dread not so much because of what it said but because of the implicit blankness of its brevity:
“June 3, 2 pm, don’t be late.” It was printed on a piece of Consortium stationery. The blues and golds of its elaborate crest were dazzling under the right light. There were few good things I had to say about that place as an institution, but its graphic design was beyond reproach.
The light “ding” of the elevator reaching its destination startled my somewhat frayed nerves. This was not how I had intended to spend my weekend. As the doors opened, I braced myself for what I might see. Were the stories of torture and brutality true? Would I be scarred for life by images of medical malpractice and cruelty?
The room the elevator doors revealed was... actually pretty disappointing. Rows of labcoated people were bent over microscopes, schematics and paperwork. It would have been indistinguishable from a series of office cubicles save for the distinctive garb of its occupants.
“This way,” the suit to my left informed me, pointing. I jumped a little at the sound of his voice which I had not heard since we had met. He was a tall, black man with short hair and an expressionless face. The intensity of his concentration was offset somewhat by his general demeanor of disinterested nonchalance. But, I could tell that underneath all that, he was ready to tear me to shreds if I made any movement to jeopardize the peace.
As we approached our destination - a small room off to the side - our passing did not interfere with any of the scientists’ work. They did not seem to notice us. Upon arriving in the office we had been walking towards, the security guards motioned me through, but did not enter with me.
A man with bushy eyebrows and a rather wild mane of hair greeted me with a smile.
“Good to see you Mr. Shepard. My name is Doctor Richardson,” he said.
“I wish I could say the same.”
He was not surprised by the response, but an almost imperceptible note of annoyance tinged his voice as he said,
“I’m sorry for all the cloak and dagger stuff, but you know how important and classified our work is here.”
I did know. Everyone on Earth knew of The Consortium and its strange, quasi-governmental status. It was never clear to the general population which held power over which: the World Government or The Consortium. Politics had never much interested me, and so I had not devoted much mental power to trying to answer that particular question.
“Yes, I do. How can I help you?” I asked, somewhat presumptuously. It was entirely possible that I was not here to help at all.
“I’ve got a few questions for you, if you don’t mind.”
I nodded, even though I did mind. He wasn’t really asking anyway.
“Did you travel to Dorsious on March 3rd of last year?”
I cocked an eyebrow. I had indeed gone to Dorsious, a commercial hub a few parsecs away.
“Yes.”
He scribbled down a note.
“What was your business there?”
I began feeling extremely uncomfortable at that point. “Look, I don’t think I want to be interrogated like this. I’d like to leave now,” I stood up and
turned to the door. The two large men outside stepped into my path.
“We’re not finished yet. Sit down, please.” That hint of frustration in the older man’s voice grew to a commanding rebuke. I obeyed, the beginnings of a nervous sweat breaking out across my face.
“You can’t keep me here. I want to go!” I tried pushing back, but my vocal chords betrayed me with a sudden pitch change partway through.
“Please sit and answer my questions. Let’s not make this any more uncomfortable than necessary.” I began to pick up on small details of the room that had escaped my conscious notice earlier on. There was no ventilation. In fact, I couldn’t detect signs of the tiniest crack in the walls’ surfaces.
“Is this room soundproof?” I asked.
“I’m the one asking the questions here.” The note of command in his voice hardened into steel. “But, yes. You are quite literally in a place where no one can hear you scream,” he chuckled at his own joke. It would have been nothing more than an annoying habit, and a rather obscure reference, if it didn’t have the air of a threat right on the heels of his previous words. “Now, please. Answer my question. What was your business at Dorsious on March 3rd of last year?”
“I was meeting with some traders who wanted to work out a business deal in person. Long-distance communication, even through the wormhole was just too slow.”
My captor jotted this down as well, along with God knows what else.
“I think you’re lying.” As he said this, he stood and pushed a button which pulled down a curtain in the corner of the room. I saw a previously obscured corner of the workroom. I was confused. It was a dimly-lit artist’s studio. Rows of people with brushes poised at the edge of canvases looked up at the room I was in. The old man picked up a canvas of his own and began laying careful brushstrokes on it.
“A little bit on the side...” he murmured to himself. I was somewhat taken aback by the contents of the canvas. It showed a man with a terrible grimace on his face surrounded by fire. Whips made of flame assailed him from all sides as he was roasted slowly over a volcanic lake of lava.
“Inspired by Dante’s Inferno, this one is.”
I shook my head. “What in the hell does that have to do with anything?”
Doctor Richardson looked up for a moment, reluctantly tearing his gaze form the canvas. “There’s a beauty to this, Daniel. Don’t you see it? Can’t you just taste this man’s suffering?”
If I was being honest, the painting made me slightly ill. There was something decidedly unnatural about it. It felt like a dissonant note in a symphony. It was just wrong.
“What is it that you want from me?” I began to lose my composure.
“We’ll get to that. First, tell me what you think of the painting.”
I had some minimal training in painting and art history, but certainly not enough to be an astute critic of Doctor Richardson’s work. It was frankly a miracle that my brain was still functional enough to put semi-coherent thoughts together.
“It’s a touch on the extreme side,” I managed after a moment of intense contemplation.
“No, no. Don’t you see? That’s the point! It’s about finding the most extreme torment for our subject. ‘A touch on the extreme side,’ just doesn’t cut it. Even intense agony is unacceptably lenient for him. Dante had this vision of divine justice, of sinners burning in exquisite agony for all eternity.
Of course, it was all nonsense, predicated on those foolish Christian doctrines the World Government squashed years ago. But, you see, he got the aim right. The pursuit of the most intense suffering... you see. That’s art.”
A moment of desperate panic seized my throat. I tasted bile. My mouth went dry. The whole world collapsed into that room and all goodness and light drained out of it.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I asked.
Doctor Richardson threw his brush to the floor.
“I want you to admit that you’re an agent of the Alpha Centauri People. The government has suspected it for a long time but they’re bound by their snivelling ‘human rights’ protections. All they can do is lock you up: I can do whatever the fuck I feel like to you.” He motioned to the two guards once more. “Bring Subject 507 in please.” They nodded and left.
They returned shortly thereafter, wheeling in a long, metal cylinder. There were dials, wires and levers that I did not understand, but through the glass in front I saw a man’s face. The two men turned a dial, and the front half of the device swung open. They carefully removed the wires, IVs and restraints which held him in place. Doctor Richardson placed another painting on his easel. It depicted a man in the middle of a tundra: surrounded by wolves tearing his clothes apart.
The man collapsed to his knees, his teeth chattering and a wild look in his eye.
“Please don’t send me back there!” he sobbed.
“SILENCE!” Doctor Richardson roared. “You speak when spoken to, Inmate!” he emphasized this point with a vicious kick to the man’s ribcage. He crumbled to the ground.
“Do you see now, Mr. Shepard? Confession or no confession, all are punished. But, we always get a confession in the end. And then we can create any torment we want for our prisoners. The only limit is imagination. Bring in the artist.” One of the men outside the room walked through the door and looked at Doctor Richardson,
“Yes?”
“Would you mind explaining to our guest what gave you the inspiration for this piece?”
“Of course,” the man said, taking his glasses off and polishing them absent-mindedly. “My environmental controls had just broken and I was stuck in the dead of winter with pretty much nothing to stop the cold. It was just awful. At the same time, I was having these nightmares which have plagued me on and off since childhood about being attacked by dogs. So, when it came time to think up a new piece, I just put two and two together.”
I felt like I was going to be sick. What the fuck were these people talking about? “Pieces?” These were fucking human beings!
“You-you’re all insane!” I told them. “This is insane! This can’t be real. It must be a dream.” I actually closed my eyes and expected to wake up. But no such luck. This was as real as real gets.
“Van Gough was called ‘insane,’ too.” Doctor Richardson mused, almost to himself. “And look how much people value his work.”
The guards had picked up the pitiful wreck off the ground and were holding him between them. His chattering and wheezing had calmed a bit, and his eyes were slightly more focused.
“I can’t take another second of that shit!” he yelled. “Every nerve on my body in the worst agony you can imagine...” he broke off, a sob choking him up.
“Not the worst; not yet,” Doctor Richardson said, in that same wistful tone. “But we’ll get there. Maybe this one,” he pointed to me, “will finally be it.”
I realized what was going to happen to me. My throat closed up, and then opened suddenly to allow for the contents of my stomach to be projected onto the ground.
“For fuck’s sake. Cleaning crew, we’ve got some work for you in Office 14,” he said this last part into a microphone on his desk. “I’d just gotten the floor cleaned too. Alright, put him in there,” he motioned to the two suits, who began dragging me into the hallway... to my fate. As I screamed, and fought viciously against the two hopelessly stronger men, I heard Doctor Richardson put the final touches on my personal hell.
“A little more on the right there... Maybe the whips should be cat’o’nine’tails...” he murmured. I passed easel after easel, painting after painting. They were packed together with not a millimeter wasted in the massive building. Each one reaching and drawing ever closer to the archetypal suffering. Oh, what limitless genius the human mind has for suffering, and what little mercy.
They locked me in one of those things: and ever since every nerve ending in my body felt the fires of lava and the bite of the whip. But, they got their wires crossed somehow. I can connect with their time-travel experiments. That’s how I’m sending this signal. That’s my only hope. Please, for the love of God, do something to change the future. This is not how the world is supposed to be.
Until then, I suffer: alone. Sending my ships in a bottle down the rivers of time with no way of knowing whether they’re reaching anyone. Just one voice, that’s all I would need to keep from going insane.
Just one voice.