TORTURE

5 hr 20 min to Birth

"Hello, world," a voice boomed in the room, over a sound system of poor quality.

They all looked up, as if a voice were speaking to them from the sky.

"He's in the control room," Raymond said. "Those speakers come from the control room."

"Can he hear us?" Flannigan asked.

"If he's using the system correctly."

"Nemo! Can you hear us?!" Flannigan shouted.

"Yes," he replied, flatly and loudly.

Simon was frowning. Gene looked quiet, suspicious.

"You have come a long way," Nemo boomed.

Something was wrong with his voice. It was smooth and mostly human, but the intonation between words was choppy. It's computerized, Flannigan thought. He's altering his voice. Hiding his identity. That was not a good sign.

"You have come a long way," Nemo repeated. "I am honored that you have come so far to meet me. And I am interested in meeting you."

Simon grumbled that, for someone interested in meeting them, Nemo had been awfully shy to date.

"Let's get started by playing a game," Nemo said. "I'm fond of games. We have been playing a game of hide-and-go-seek since you met me."

Flannigan thought about her conversation with Nemo that had taken place in Simon's apartment. The subject of games had come up then, as well.

"Now, however, I must change the rules of our game of hide-and-go-seek. The game is serious for me. The exact results of this game, for me, could be the difference between life and death. So it is necessary that I raise the stakes of the game and make it life-or-death for you, also."

They looked at each other, corralled in the center of the courtyard.

"If you lose the game," he continued, "you will die. These rules may be hard for you to accept. You may criticize them as perverse. But I will try to convince you that quite the opposite is true. There is no sport to me in killing anyone or anything, and I have no desire to torture you."

Flannigan and Raymond met eyes. Flannigan motioned with her eyes down toward Raymond's belt. His two-way comm was hanging off his belt. Can't you do something with that thing? she thought. You've got an emergency button there. Press it.

Finally, Raymond put his hands on his hips, trying to appear natural. After a moment, his pinky stretched from his left hand to the vicinity of his two-way comm. It pulled open a safety catch, revealing a red button. He pressed it.

A loud siren came on, echoing through the chamber.

"An alarm!" Nemo exclaimed over the noise. "It's ironic, Raymond, that you should call attention to yourself at this point, because I was about to call attention to you. First, let's turn off this pesky siren." The siren went off. "Don't worry, I'm sure your staff still got the alarm and they are on their way. But let's talk about you for a moment, Raymond."

They all looked at Raymond, wondering what made him special.

"Before we begin this dramatic life-or-death game of hide-and-go-seek, I need to prove to you that the game is real," Nemo explained. "If you don't trust the rules, you won't play correctly. So, to prove myself, I need to kill one of you as an example."

The color drained from Raymond's face. His left hand was repeatedly pushing the red button on his two-way.

"As soon as I realized this, Raymond, I knew that you were the perfect person. All people must die at some point, but it is fitting that you should meet your end in this way, in this place. You are now in the place of the gorillas. And what did you do to them? You trapped them, hunted them, attacked them with swarms of robots, tranquilized them and let them go. You occasionally killed one or two, to see if the threat of death was real. And this process continued without any end. There is a word for this behavior. What is the word for this behavior?"

They looked at each other desperately.

"What is the word for this behavior?" Nemo repeated.

"Research," Raymond shouted weakly.

Nemo did not answer.

"Torture," Gene said quietly.

"Did I hear torture?" Nemo asked. "I believe I did -- from someone I haven't had the pleasure of meeting yet. You must be one of the friends Flannigan spoke of. That's precisely the word I meant. It was torture. Raymond, you pretended that it wasn't torture. Pretending was easier since the gorillas couldn't speak your language. They could not protest, reason with you, or tell you how they felt. Nevertheless, Raymond, you committed these atrocities against an intelligent species. Your litany of justifications will be easily used in the same way against you and everyone who repeats them now that you have encountered a more intelligent species, one which considers your thoughts and language to be primitive."

"I'm sorry!" Raymond shouted, flecks of spit shooting from his lips.

"I'm sorry, too," Nemo said. "But one of you must die as an example to the others. An example of my seriousness, and of my ability to enforce the rules of the game. You will not only serve this purpose, but in doing so, you will illustrate to the others that I do not condone torture. Lastly, by passing away quickly, you will experience a fate that is probably lenient compared to that which you have delivered upon your evolutionary siblings on this island."

Suddenly an alarm sounded, a different alarm. A female voice came booming over the sound system. "Test beginning in ten seconds."

Raymond dashed out of the courtyard. He vanished out of sight into the fake city.

"Test beginning in five seconds," the woman's voice said.

The alarm system stopped. The space was quiet. Flannigan, Gene, Simon, and Kenny stood in a circle, looking at each other.

A flash of silver dropped from the sky. It hovered in a cloud between them. Looking closely, Flannigan could see that it was a swarm of moving silver pieces.

Flybots, she thought. They are looking at us.

Before she could get a better look, they were gone.

She turned around, looking for the silver cloud, but it was out of sight. They reluctantly came to the obvious conclusion: the flybots had found Raymond.

Flannigan led the way out of the courtyard, in the direction Raymond had gone. She led them first to one dead end, and then another. By that point Gene had figured out the puzzle, and he stepped forward to lead them down two more turns.

Raymond was lying on the floor, face down. Gene and Flannigan knelt by him and flipped him over.

He looked like he had been dead for a day or more. His face was swollen and red. His eyelids and his lips were bloated. Looking more closely, they could see mosquito bite marks on his face and neck.

His body was still warm. Gene searched for a pulse and checked for breathing.

Flannigan looked up at the rest. Simon was frowning again. He sighed.

"You know, this wasn't how I thought it would look," he said.

Gene grimaced. "Why? Did you think it would look more... humane?"

"Shhh!" Flannigan said. "What's that?"

They were quiet. They heard a voice. A tiny voice, coming from far away.

They moved Raymond's body. Under it, his two-way buzzed with activity.

Flannigan picked it up. "Hello? Raymond is down. Who is this?"

"Lewis, ma'am. What's going on over there?"

"Lewis, do you have a way of shutting down the control room? The room controlling the indoor testing area. Our target is in there, and he's sending flybots at us."

Lewis paused. "But that's not possible."

"Why not?"

"We finished our scan of the video footage. There is no activity in the control room."

"Where's the activity, then?" she asked. Could he be controlling the machinery from somewhere else?

"We didn't find any. By the look of the security cameras, there is no one on the island."

"No one?"

"I'm double-checking them," Lewis said. "But I'm about ninety-nine percent sure there is no one on the tapes."

"Could he avoid the cameras?"

"We don't film every square inch of the island. But we do cover all of the interiors and a lot of the exteriors."

It made no sense. But there wasn't time to figure things out -- not yet at least.

"Lewis," she said. "I need you to power everything down on the island. As much as you can. Especially the computers, anything that might control these flybots. How long will that take?"

There was no reply.

"Lewis!" she said. "Do you copy? How long will that take?"

Nemo's voice boomed through the chamber. "You can put that down now," he said. "You won't want to miss the beginning of the game, trust me."

"Nemo," Flannigan announced, "we appreciate the fact that you do not condone torture. We don't condone torture either. But this game that you refer to is an act of terrorism. We cannot cooperate with you or negotiate with you until you meet us in person."

"Those are not the rules, Flannigan."

"You don't make the rules, Nemo."

"But I do, Flannigan. I am the product of every rule, and the rules work through me. The kingdom of heaven is at hand."

"You aren't God, Nemo."

"As a matter of fact, Flannigan, I am God. In many respects that make sense to you, literal and figurative, I am God."