Chapter 62
Nobody huddles in the corner, naked and freezing in the deep climate control, but too scared to grow fur. Hard to say how long it’s been here–hours? Days? There’s nothing in the white-walled room but Nobody and the big energy-shielded window that looks out on the empty control room.
Which means there’s Nobody here at all. The only thing here is a mistake, like Mewtwo always said. Someone Absol thought would be useful, someone she knew would see this journey to its end. But no one treasured, no one loved. Or defended. That was always Mewtwo.
Nobody has never been anyone at all. “The child” was only ever a story it told itself. All the rest, made-up faces, made-up names. Or those that it stole. It could become anybody down in this cage, and it’d be no more of a person than before.
Nobody rouses from its brooding when it hears people enter the control room outside. It tries to look without being seen to look.
Nobody know one of these. He doesn’t even glance Nobody’s way before busying himself with the computer, like this is just another day at the office. The second one is new, and she comes over to the window to look in at Nobody.
“Let me out,” Nobody says. “Let me out. Please.”
“Don’t listen to it,” the first man says, staring into his screen all the while. “I know it looks like a kid, but it’s not. It’s just trying to make you let your guard down. You should have seen what it did to Ling.”
“Please,” Nobody says, and has to stop as the word comes out croaking, swallowing and wetting its lips before it tries again. “Please. I want to go home.”
The woman stands stock-still, her eyes flitting between Nobody and the man at the computer. “Xenbek,” she says, “are you sure–?”
“Watch.”
It’s the only warning Nobody gets, the sparest moment to brace itself before the man does something and its vision frays like a television with bad signal. Pain stabs into its neck and spreads out along its spine in ripples of twitching skin and spasming muscle, waves of change twisting flesh into exotic shapes. Scales and feathers push up through skin, limbs form from shivering flesh, muscle hardens to bone then feathers out to nerves.
Nobody bucks forward onto all fours, trying to hold itself up despite the pain and shaking. It stumbles to the window, all mismatched, protesting limbs and thinking of nothing but escape as its body rebels at the computer’s command.
“Stop it!” it screams, pounding on the glass with a fist that keeps shifting between scale and craggy, glinting carapace. “Stop it, stop it! Let me out!”
They don’t stop it. Nobody bangs on the window with all the strength it can summon, trying to call energy to shape a proper attack. The glass rattles and shakes but does not crack. The man on the other side watches with face blank, maybe taking mental notes of all the things Nobody can become.
The woman’s cowering back, mouth slightly open in dismay. Nobody tries to focus its eyes enough to read the name off her ID badge. “Maresha!” it yells. “Maresha, listen to me! I’m not a pokémon! I don’t belong here! You need to let me go!”
Maresha starts at the sound of her name, but then she backs away, shaking her head. She won’t look at Nobody, focusing instead on her coworker. Nobody knows, then, that there will be no help from her. She fears Nobody now, and she will not stay her hand. None of them will. They look at Nobody and see a monster, and they will do anything to contain it, anything to understand it, and if they feel any remorse at all, it will not stop them.
“I hate you!” Nobody screams. It pounds on the glass, with all the force it can muster despite its twitching, fluxing arm. Claws screech across the inside of the window, and then they aren’t claws anymore, but Nobody tries, still, to reach, to break through. “I hate you, I hate you! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill all of you!”
Nobody screams over and over until its voice cracks and its scratches at the glass turn feeble. It slides down to the floor, pulling its knees up against its chest as best it can when they refuse to stay the same size. Nobody puts its head down and waits for this to end, teeth clenched and tasting blood in the back of its throat. The humans don’t turn the power off until Nobody succumbs to pure exhaustion, its changes sluggish and half-formed, features running one into another in a sludgy mess.
“As you can see, it’s far from human.” The voice comes from far away. “You’re ready for intake? We can’t keep it here indefinitely.”
Nobody lets the conversation fade from its exhausted awareness until something clicks inside the wall and a hot prick of pain blossoms in its back. It twists around, clawing desperately at the needle already spreading cold numbness across its back. “What is that?” it cries. “What are you doing?”
Some kind of drug. Like the Rockets’ darts. Nobody tries to yell, but the words come out slurring, then fade to nothing. It can’t even twitch when a hidden door opens across the room, can’t react when one of the humans looms over it, not even when its sluggish mind recognizes the object in their hand as a pokéball.
There’s no way to struggle when the red light grabs it, and when Nobody’s released again it’s with the same poison in its veins. It lies frozen in the slick of its own blood, put back together wrong, and can’t even feel smug about the horrified exclamations from the scientists, a bigger group of them now. At least they agree they won’t be able to use pokéballs with Nobody. They come at it with potions that at least heal the surface wounds, and as the deadening poison starts to wear off, Nobody can fix the rest.
“Remarkable regenerative capabilities,” one scientist mutters, eyes alight with some emotion Nobody’s sure it doesn’t like. An avid one. “Pokémon, of course, but…”
Nobody’s too weak to protest that it’s not.
“Yes, if it can do human organs–if we can isolate the factor–the body does seem to be human, on a chemical level. Arpad, what do you think? Let’s take a sample…”
“Let me go,” Nobody croaks, but they’re talking excitedly amongst themselves. Even if one of them had heard it, it’s sure they wouldn’t have answered.
The cage is tiny, cramping. Fragrant wood shavings line the floor, and you dig down under them, nails scraping against the seam where the wall meets the steel bottom. No purchase for you there, no gap or fault. “I’m not a pokémon!” you yell at the top of your voice, pounding open-palmed on the energy shield that makes up the front wall. Your hand rebounds buzzing and numb, but you keep pounding anyway. “I’m not a pokémon! I’m not! Listen to me!”
In fact you are now Jade Winstead, to the best of your recollection, an old identity pulled from some weary crevice of your brain. You only need someone to be right now, someone human, anyone.
It’s no good. No one comes to investigate your cries.
You won’t be able to stand unless you make yourself smaller, and there’s hardly room to turn around. There’s some kind of tube sticking in through the wall that you see glistening with moisture, and nearby an empty chute. You stick your arm as far up it as it’ll go, but that’s no good. There’s some kind of metal flap inside, and you can’t pull it open no matter how you claw around the edges. Food and water, you think. This is how they intend to feed you.
“What’s all that noise up there?” a hissing voice asks, and you look around wildly. But of course–you aren’t the only person here. There are other cages, and not all of them are empty. You scoot up close to the energy shield and crane your neck, trying to see who’s out there. A charmeleon, a hawlucha, the tail of what you think might be an umbreon. None of them show the faintest interest in what’s going on around them. But in one cage is an ekans, staring straight at you.
“I have to get out of here!” you say. “They put me in this cage, they won’t listen to me! I’m not a pokémon, I’m not one of theirs. I have to get out!”
“I know,” the ekans says soothingly. “None of us wants to be here. We’ll help you if we can. But, well…” She flicks her tail helplessly.
“I can escape,” you insist. “I’m strong. Just tell me, what do you know about this place? Has anybody gotten out before?”
Rumbling laughter rattles up from beneath you, someone in a cage you can’t see. “No one’s ever gotten out. They’ve held Lugia in here. Raikou. Entei. They surely won’t have any problem keeping you caged.” It’s a low, gravelly voice. A rock-type, you think.
“Shut up!” You bare your teeth. “I’m strong! You don’t know what you’re talking about.” In a strange moment of vertigo you’re reminded of Mewtwo, raging that Celebi might think him lesser for not being a real legend. “What are they doing here? What’s this place supposed to be?”
“Those people are Cipher,” Ekans says with a shudder that rattles the rattle on her tail. “But where we are, I don’t know.”
“What they want is easy,” the gruff pokémon says. “They want to make you like Raticate here. Hey, Raticate!” Something heavy strikes metal, and a second later comes a furious burst of squeaks and chatters, a nonsense stream of aggression and noise.
“What does Cipher want with any pokémon?” Ekans says quietly.
“But I’m not,” you say, your throat closing up so you can only barely get the words out. “I’m not a pokémon.”
“Of course you’re a pokémon,” that gruff voice rumbles up from below. “They put you in that cage, didn’t they?”
You draw yourself up into a ball, nestled among the wood shavings, and rest your forehead on your knees. You wonder if your tears will damp down the bedding, or if they’ll all be wicked away, the better to keep the place clean.
How much can you regenerate? You always would have said “a lot,” but you’ve never tried to find out, not systemically, with methodic cruel curiosity. How close to the edge of death can you be brought, and then revived?
They won’t kill you, really. You’re far too valuable as a research subject. But they want to know what percent of your body can be destroyed and then regenerate, what happens when they remove an organ, and then how many they can take without killing you. You have to tell yourself they’re being careful when you have the mind in you to do it, when you aren’t under the fog of sedatives, when the pain isn’t enough to confound you. They won’t kill you. They won’t kill you. They won’t kill you.
Back in your cage, there’s nothing to do but heal and try to remember who you are. You twitch now and again as some confused nerve sizzles with phantom pain. Strange scents haunt your nostrils, and no amount of blinking clears the random smudges that mar your vision. When the scientists force your changes they change your mind, too. They can turn you into someone else, and sometimes you take a long time to realize you aren’t yourself. Maybe someday you won’t remember who you really are at all.
Maybe that’s already happened.
You lie in silence, listening to the pokémon shifting in their cages. You don’t talk to them much anymore; they’re always chatty when they first arrive, but they go quiet before long. Even that ekans won’t answer you now. All she does is hiss, sometimes, when startled or perhaps simply feeling angry. The way Raticate did. Raticate who isn’t here anymore.
So you don’t talk to the pokémon, or the humans, either. They’ve never answered you. They’ll talk to each other all around you but ignore your every cry. At this point you’re not even sure if you’re still speaking their language.
You ignore the clatter of food arriving from the feeding tube. It’s pokémon pellets, the sort of thing trainers feed their team when out on the road, when they themselves have trail mix and dehydrated meals and an endless stream of energy bars.
You’re not a pokémon. You won’t eat anything dumped in by some sort of lab feeding system. After some time the bottom of the chute opens, and the pellets disappear with a rattle, probably off to be incinerated or something.
You can do nothing but lie in your cage and brood, surrounded by flat shadows that will never contain Absol, the whole building shielded so the dark can provide you no escape.
Even if the way weren’t blocked, there would be no reason for Absol to come and get you. Not until you can be useful to her again.
You’re useful to Cipher. That’s why they won’t kill you, even if it sometimes feels like they’re trying. You have to hold on to that thought. You aren’t going to die here. That one thought, repeated over and over even as they pour the electricity in, while your senses crumble around it. When you forget even your mother’s name, you have to remember that: you will live. You will live, as “you” fragment into nonsense sensation.
Change, but that stays the same: they won’t kill you. Change, and yet you’ll survive this, and change, and they won’t, change, and you, change
change and
“It’s been trying to dig the electrodes out again,” someone says. Nobody lies quietly, which is all it can do with the drugs circulating in its veins. Blood-crusted claws lie slack in the wood shavings.
“I’ll see what we can do about restraints,” another voice replies. “Or a low-dose sedative might solve the problem. Don’t want to incapacitate it, but…”
“If we have to,” the first voice says. “It’s important that the electrode array remains in place. Sedation would make the voluntary change tests much more difficult.”
Nobody thinks vaguely that they might be talking about it. It doesn’t matter much.
Nobody can’t properly remember what it was doing before. Who it was. It finds wounds along its back but doesn’t know how they got here. That happened to someone else, the memory of another mind.
Who it is now isn’t important. It won’t last for long. All Nobody needs to do is lie here. Eventually something will happen. Lie here until something
changes
again
and
Nobody roars and struggles against the restraints binding it to the wall. Fire, lightning, ice–it tries everything, dragging on its bonds with every ounce of its anger. Nothing works, but nothing can hold forever. It will keep fighting for as long as it takes. There’s nothing else to do.
Nobody strains and twists, trying to reach the restraints with its teeth, trying to reach its own flesh with its teeth, its claws, whatever ripping protrusions it can conjure. No matter how it contorts itself, it can barely move, held by thick cables wrapped in a rubbery sheeting that repels all its attacks. It can’t even turn itself insubstantial around them, like they radiate some kind of energy that holds its very spirit in place.
Nobody blasts them again and again, and when that does nothing shrieks in anger, flailing and sparking and bending the restraints with every ounce of its power. Its fury breaks nothing, bruises nothing but itself, and leaves it leaning on its own bonds for support. Nobody sweats and pants and feels like it might vomit.
“What is that?” A voice from some other cage. “What’s going on? What are you doing?”
“Just ignore it. It’s been doing that for days. Won’t listen to reason.”
“Will you shut up? Some of us are trying to sleep!”
Nobody doesn’t recognize the voices. Are they new? Have any of them been here as long as Nobody has, or is it the most senior now?
Perhaps if it really thought about that, Nobody would be afraid. But reflection has never helped it. All that matters now is escape. It hangs in its restraints and slowly regains its breath, then tugs one arm again, testing. The flexible tube around its wrist is charred but appears undamaged. Nobody pulls again, harder, and growls and fights until
everything
changes
and
You lie still, bound in chains too thick for your blaster to cut. Not that you have your blaster anymore. The space pirates thought of everything.
They’re coming back now. You listen hard, ready to pounce on any opportunity to escape.
“…not responding to commands,” the first pirate says. He’s outfitted in the gray and blue of the Landover Fleet, their skull and crossbones leering from a shoulder patch. A cool logo wasted on a bunch of disgusting fools.
“I’m not surprised. If Maresha is really as interested in its psychology as she claims, she ought to treat it better than this. A little enrichment at least. What sort of results does she even think she’s going to get?” The second pirate is a woman in a red, red jumpsuit. She must be a member of the Bloodrager Fleet. What’s she doing working with a Landover pirate?
There’s something nefarious afoot. You have to escape and warn the rest of the Transformozords!
“Yes, well, what are you going to do? It’s too strong to leave it unrestrained. It’s this or it starts murdering people.”
The Landover pirate is activating something on the wall plate, and a moment later you feel a prick and a spreading cold that tells you they’re going to take you away for another of their ghastly experiments. You shout, “I’ll never surrender, callous fiends!” before the drug can stop your mouth.
“I wish it would stop doing that,” the Bloodrager pirate whispers to her companion. “Getting roared at was scary, but this is honestly way worse.”
“Well, it’s revealing, at least. Some people thought it might actually be generating novel sentences, but clearly there’s some deep well of existing phrases it’s absorbed,” the Landover pirate replies. He’s deactivated the energy shield on your cell, and your bonds have fallen away, but the pirates’ fiendish chemicals prevent you from doing more than shivering. “Like a chatot, but obviously much more extensive. The real question is how that mixing and matching works on a neurological level, and why pokémon haven’t developed true language capabilities…”
On and on and on while the pirates’ space-gurdurr lifts you out of the cell in its leathery arms. If only you could move, you could poke it in the eye, grab a blaster from one of the pirates, and shoot your way out of here. From there, only a hop, skip, and a jump to your Zord, and then it would be over for this space-riffraff!
You only hope you can escape before your teammates rush in to save you. You wouldn’t want them caught up in the pirates’ diabolical plot. It is reassuring, knowing they’re out there looking for you, but you really need to find your way out first, before the situation
changes
so
There should be a picture of what the scientists want Nobody to turn into. That’s how it works: they show a picture, and Nobody becomes it as best it can. After it changes, the scientists poke it. Sometimes they make it fight. Sometimes they draw blood or cut nobody open, remove a few pieces for study. Nobody doesn’t like that. But that’s how it works, and it understands how it works, and it knows how to make the scientists happy, and how to make it all end as quickly as possible.
Today there is no picture, and one scientist’s hand is already creeping towards the electrodes’ controls. “Wait, stop,” Nobody says, its voice rusty with disuse. “What do you want me to be? You don’t have to shock me. Just tell me what you want.”
They do not tell Nobody what they want. “Stop!” It twists around, instinctively trying to reach the electrodes as they begin to tickle. It isn’t them that hurt. It’s what they make happen, the way Nobody’s skin hardens and cracks open, then smooths to amphibial wetness then softens with feathers, armors with scales. The way spines jut and then dissolve along its arms, membranes grow and recede between fingers and toes. Nobody isn’t becoming anything but a monster, a random mishmash from confused electrical signals.
Its head pounds. Its back arches in pain, and it chokes on bile, coughing terrified without air and then–not. It’s in pain, it’s trapped, but the terror’s no longer in it, only the fact of what is. Nobody’s vision splits and wavers, colors shifting and peeling apart as something in its head changes, and all thought collapses, running down to gibberish.
When Nobody comes back to itself it’s raging, howling and shaking and practically tearing itself apart to get free of its restraints. No conscious thought, just anger and desperation.
The scientists seem to be discussing something about the fine blue feathers now peppering Nobody’s right side. The words mean nothing. Nobody thrashes and howls until it can do no more than pant and gasp. And then the tickle begins again, and then the proper pain.
Nobody’s roar cuts off as anger is split open by white-hot agony, a moment that stretches forever, to be replaced by bewildered self assessment. Who are you? Why are you here? And why does it hurt, hurt so terribly much?
You can’t begin to figure it out until the pain recedes, leaving you covered in pebbly skin with patches of strange prismatic white. Who are you? Your memories don’t line up properly, where they even exist at all. Nothing about this makes sense. You’re just a kid. Your name? Nicholas Garrett. You’d been going to an academy for people with pokémon powers, yes, but that’s not here. What happened? These people must have kidnapped you. And now they’re experimenting on you. Which was exactly what the academy was supposed to stop!
You yell, but the scientists only send in a mechanical arm to get a slice of your strange armor. It shrugs off your desperate punches. And then there’s a weird itching sensation deep in the meat of your back, and you forget all about Nicholas Garrett, or anything else except the pain.
Who are you?
Who but–Vulpix, of course you’re Vulpix. You can feel your tails fanned out behind you, but there’s something wrong with your legs, some creepy scaly sickness. They’re too long. But you’re Vulpix, aren’t you? Until the pain washes over you and you start to lose it, you forget about Vulpix and
Who are you now?
You’re sure you’re human. You don’t belong in this cage. You can’t have been here all your life, or you wouldn’t know to panic. Wouldn’t know this is wrong. You don’t belong here!
Who are–?
Raticate. Raticate, of course. Cipher has been trying to take your mind from you, but you remember that much.
Raticate. How could you ever have doubted? Even when the shadows come, even when the shadows come you should be able to hold onto
Who–?
No name. Have you ever had a name? You don’t know, you don’t know, you can’t
Who are you now? Who?
Only Nobody, mind like a pane of shattered glass. On the far side of the window the humans argue about what their samples mean, if they’re bits of unknown pokémon or species long extinct. Speculate about whether Mew’s power means Nobody contains every pokémon ever within, or whether it holds future as well as past, building blocks that can be combined in myriad ways, to create countless pokémon yet unknown.
That’s not something you can find out by showing a picture and ordering a transformation. Random, uncontrolled change is the only way to see what even Nobody doesn’t know is there. It’s too tired for anything more now, but Nobody knows the scientists will continue later. There’s so much to find, so much to test. And for Nobody, so many different people to be.
It can’t move when they carry it back to the cage, but nobody can still cry, somewhat, tears dripping from its eyes, chest spasming as the paralytic wanes, involuntary signals struggling to get through. It can’t tell if anybody notices, and it’s not as though it would matter if they did.
By the time it’s back in the cage Nobody is confused again, baffled by the water drying on its face. It doesn’t understand the sad ache in its chest, the emptiness that keeps asking
who
are
Nobody lies quietly. It hears someone enter the room and hardly cares whether they’re here for it or one of the other pokémon. Pokémon that nobody doesn’t know, has long since stopped keeping track of. It doesn’t bother to raise itself to look out, to see who it is or what they’re up to.
The energy shield disappears. Nobody’s bonds release, the cables drawing back into holes in the wall. Nobody lies where it is and waits.
“Oh, shit,” someone says outside the cage. “Shit, shit, shit, that wasn’t–”
A prick, a spreading cold. Nobody doesn’t try to resist. The gurdurr reaches in to pick it up as usual.
Someone’s babbling. “I forgot the paralytic before releasing the restraints! I can’t believe it, I’ve done it a thousand times.”
“Calm down. Remember to read the instructions, huh? They write out all the steps for a reason.”
“That could have been bad. That could have been so bad. I thought it was going to attack me. And then if it got out…”
Nobody waits. There will be something, some pain, and then it will be returned to the cage. What the scientists say hardly matters. Nothing really matters; things happen, or they don’t. There isn’t anything Nobody can do about it. There’s nothing to do but wait for the next
change
Nobody lives, and lives many times over. It finds itself laughing or crying without knowing why, memories trailing off into a fog of alien thought. Sometimes it thinks it’s a pokémon, and sometimes a human, and which of these are true, if either of them, it can no longer say.
It can lose itself for hours in technicolor dreams of forest, never realizing it isn’t Mew, until the glare of fluorescent lights intrudes and its perception lurches to something else. Sometimes it’s convinced it’s being held captive by Cipher, and that it needs to get free so that it can find Mew at last. But that hardly seems more plausible than the possibility that it’s been kidnapped by space pirates or is turning into a shadow pokémon or even is lost at the bottom of a dark well, hallucinating everything.
All Nobody knows for sure is a cage, and bindings, and a door where people come and go. All sorts of people. Some Nobody thinks it knows, or ought to. But when it reaches for them, it turns out they were never there at all.
The door opens, and who is it this time? A scientist, come to drag it off for more experiments. Opens again, and now? An ekans, and don’t ask how Nobody can see it through the steel floor of its cage.
The door opens, and this time there are two scientists, one tall and one short. The tall one’s wearing a sweater vest. Nobody can tell even though there’s a lab coat on over it. He looks gray and weary and says, “This isn’t working. I can’t believe I’m surrounded by idiot children.”
The short one… is the great Nathaniel Morgan. Nobody thinks that’s the name. He scowls at a clipboard in his hand. “I hate fucking scientists,” he says, and hurls it disdainfully away. The two of them leave after that, and Nobody doesn’t remember seeing them again, for however much it’s worth.
The door opens, and this time it reveals an Absol. Now a hypno, now a charizard, now a very dead heracross, her carapace split open and oozing. Even so, she seems the jolliest of them all, laughing and drinking from her can of soda and goading Nobody for being silent.
And one time when the door opens Nobody doesn’t see who comes through, but it can feel them. The wood chips around it shiver and quake as if with fear. Nobody thinks it knows who this is, yes, it does. Pressure builds inside its skull, squeezing its brain like an overripe grape. Nobody presses up against the back of the cage, trying to push itself through the wall, but the wall is still a wall, and it can’t change, it can’t go.
The person’s getting closer.
“Why is it screaming?” someone says.
“I don’t know! I can’t–up the dosage on the sedative!”
“I didn’t even know it could make noise like that. It’s always so quiet…” The voice is blurry. Over Nobody a shadow looms, dark except for glowing eyes. Nobody quakes.
Then the world changes again, and for a while Nobody loses itself in some kind of courtroom drama where the jury keeps wanting it to change into different people to give testimony, and it’s not doing a good job of it. Soon enough it forgets that it ever feared at all.
There’s no way to say how much later it is when the door opens again. This time the person who comes through is someone Nobody recognizes. The scientists have only just put it back in its cage, and it’s both hurting and crying, since for the moment it can do both.
The human stands inside the doorway, looking around at the cages. And, just like that, he turns to leave again. Nothing of interest here. That isn’t right.
Nobody braces a hand on the floor of its cage and pushes itself up as high as it can go. Its body’s heavy, so heavy. “Great Nathaniel Morgan,” it says, hopelessly. The words are hardly more than a rasp, and Nobody knows that even if he hears, he won’t understand. No one ever does, not since a long time ago.
He must have heard something, though, because he stops and looks around, his eyes meeting Nobody’s. They widen, briefly, before his face settles into a mask of cold fury.
Nobody doesn’t understand why that stings. Why would it ever have expected something else? The man leaves the door and goes to the control panel in the wall, punching in commands.
“You want to kill me, don’t you?” Nobody says. “You always wanted to. You tried to. Well, do it.” It sniffs back more tears. “Go ahead. You were right. I never should have come here. I never should have done any of this.”
The cages open–all of them. Pokémon sounds rise in a babble, and the man has to step aside to evade a darting dreepy. He’s focused on Nobody, though, face still set and cold. A knife appears in his hand.
“Good,” Nobody says quietly. “Go on. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want any of it. I’m done.”
“Honest to God, Kid,” the great Nathaniel Morgan says as he reaches up to saw at the cable tethering Nobody’s neck to the wall, “what the fuck are you even talking about?”