The Test Subject
Part 9
A different assistant took Duncan’s hat and showed him in to see VP Roberts.
“Ah, Duncan! Good to see you. I do so enjoy our little chats. Perhaps this one will be more productive?”
“Uh… maybe. Where’s Mateo?”
“Who?” Roberts asked.
“Your assistant. The one that you took from me.”
“Oh, the pretty boy? Why do you ask?”
“Well, I noticed that he’s not in your office today,” Duncan clarified.
“Yes. He’s recovering in the infirmary.”
“Recovering?” Duncan asked, concerned. “Recovering from what? Is he sick?”
“Oh, nothing like that,” Roberts said with a wave of his hand. “I just had to send him to the slave police for an obedience reinforcement procedure.”
Duncan’s blood ran cold. An obedience reinforcement procedure was the bland euphemism for the worst punishments that a slave could receive. The kind of torment that only an experienced professional could deliver. The slave police had special facilities, outfitted to deliver the most painful experiences imaginable.
“You had the boy tortured?” Duncan asked, hoping that he’d misunderstood.
“Of course not,” VP Roberts said. “I had him punished. A little discipline is good for a slave. I wanted to have him whipped, but he’s a valuable piece of livestock, and all those scars would considerably reduce his value. So I settled on several hours of extreme electroshock. I’m sure that will do the trick.”
Duncan was having trouble controlling himself. The normally calm intellectual found himself staring at a marble paperweight on Roberts' desk, and imagined himself beating the Vice President to death with it.
“May I ask why you had Mateo punished?” Duncan asked, trying to keep his voice calm.
“Does it matter?” V.P. Roberts asked
“It matters.”
“Well, if you must know, I didn’t feel that he was properly enthusiastic about servicing my manly needs over the weekend. So I decided that he needed an attitude adjustment.”
“A lack of enthusiasm?” Duncan said, incredulous. “You had him sent for an obedience reinforcement procedure over a lack of enthusiasm?”
Duncan hadn’t meant to raise his voice. But V.P. Roberts didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he smiled, like this meant that he was the one in control.
“Oh, come now, Duncan. You did the same thing when you first met the boy. Wasn’t there some dispute in your office, and then you had him assigned as a test subject for discipline devices?”
“That was totally different,” Duncan said, red-faced. “The boy was… green. He didn’t know proper behavior. He had to be…”
Duncan found himself struggling to defend his actions. It had all seemed so reasonable at the time. A slave had misbehaved, and Duncan had ordered him to be disciplined.
But now that he knew Mateo, that situation looked different.
The truth was that Mateo had been inexperienced. And Duncan had not been patient with him. He’d felt hurt when the boy rejected him so loudly. And he’d ordered a punishment that was completely out of proportion to the boy’s offense.
It was a hard realization for a man who prided himself on being fair.
“It looks like we’ve both had cause to punish that boy,” the VP said, chuckling. “Although I suspect that my discipline will prove more effective. Electroshock at that intensity is brutally efficient. It puts the slave in so much pain that he dissociates for a while. He spends the rest of the day trying to understand what happened to him, and how anything could have hurt that much.”
Duncan didn’t know what to say. He just stared at the marble paperweight, fighting the urge to grab the thing and smash it into Roberts' smug face.
“But on the bright side, there’s no permanent damage,” the VP continued. “So I can have the boy punished like that as often as I like.”
Roberts flashed an evil grin.
“In fact, if I wanted to, I could have him tortured every fucking day for the rest of his miserable life. Until there is nothing left of him but a screaming husk that can’t remember anything but a world of pain.”
Duncan felt his face flushing red with rage.
“I doubt the corporation would let you abuse its property that way.”
“Oh, I can always make a good case why the boy deserved it. And who’s going to argue with me over a mere slave? Who even cares what happens to that boy?”
VP Roberts let that question hang in the air for a moment.
“By the way, do you have the Tycho report on you?” he finally asked.
“No,” Duncan said.
“I thought not,” the VP said. “I know how careful you are about carrying around sensitive work product.”
He glanced at his Rolex.
“Well, I’m afraid that’s all the time that I have for today, Duncan. Perhaps we can discuss that report tomorrow?”
Duncan didn’t say anything. He just got up and left as quickly as he could. He knew that if he stayed, he would probably say something he’d regret. Or do something that he’d regret.
He ran across the Dominus Systems campus to the company’s infirmary. There was a nurse in the front office. And of course, Duncan’s precise brain remembered her name.
“Hi, Cathy. I heard that Mateo is in the infirmary today. Is he okay?”
The look on her face spoke volumes.
“Oh… uh, I’m not sure that you want to see him like this, Director Wyatt.”
“Trust me,” Duncan said quickly. “I’m sure.”
“Okay, sir. But he’s… well, not in any shape to communicate.”
Cathy led him back to a room with four beds. Mateo was lying in one of them, strapped down with restraints so that he could barely move.
Duncan knelt next to him. He reached out to stroke Mateo’s face, but the boy suddenly started screaming and thrashing against the straps holding him down.
“Mateo! It’s okay! It’s me, Duncan!”
But it was like the boy's eyes couldn’t recognize Duncan’s face, and his ears couldn’t recognize the sound of Duncan’s voice. Like pain was the only thing that the boy remembered now.
“I’m sorry,” the nurse said. “I tried to warn you. They’re always like this after an obedience reinforcement procedure. It takes a few hours for the worst of it to wear off. But he’ll be back at work tomorrow.”
“Will he be… him, tomorrow?” Duncan asked.
“Well, he’ll be a little more docile, obviously, after punishment like that. But there’s no permanent brain damage, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“How often do we punish slaves like this?” the stunned executive asked.
“Maybe once or twice a year? There was an escape attempt last spring. And a couple months ago, a kitchen worker punched his overseer.”
Duncan’s emotions were boiling over. He wanted to run back to VP Roberts' office and rip the man’s heart out with his bare hands. But Duncan was too smart and too methodical to make a mistake like that. His bloodlust would have to wait. Right now, he had to focus on protecting Mateo.
Duncan forced himself to take a minute and think the situation through. And then he turned to Cathy.
“VP Roberts ordered you to report back to him after I’d been here. Right?“
The nurse looked uncomfortable.
“Yeah,” she admitted sheepishly. “I don’t enjoy spying on you, sir. But it was a direct order.”
“It’s okay. You’re doing your job. What did he ask you to do?”
“Just to keep my ears open. Let him know if you said anything to Matteo.”
Yeah, that made sense. Roberts would want to be sure that Duncan had been to see the boy. And he’d want to know how Duncan had reacted.
“Look, I’m not a fan of all this,” Cathy said. “Mateo is a good kid. Everybody knows that. I can’t imagine what he could’ve done to deserve this.”
“He didn’t do anything,” Duncan confided to her. “Roberts is hurting Mateo to put pressure on me.”
The nurse looked shocked.
“That is seriously fucked up,” she mumbled.
“Yeah,” Duncan agreed. “It is.”
He realized that it was time to make his decision: Either the quant would surrender his integrity and become VP Roberts' stooge. Or he would have to let Roberts torture Mateo until the boy went mad.
Deep down, Duncan knew that he didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t let Mateo go through another obedience reinforcement procedure. But then Duncan tried to imagine doing what VP Roberts wanted: going into meetings and fudging his analysis. Spinning stories with statistics. Lying with numbers.
The thought of it hit Duncan like a knife to the gut. As long as he could remember, his honesty had been the key to his identity. Maybe he wasn’t the smoothest guy, but you always knew where you stood with him. He was the one person that everyone went to for an honest opinion. And when he told you what the numbers meant, you believed him.
Without that, Duncan wouldn’t be… well, Duncan. And Mateo? He was never gonna be that playful, carefree young man again. Not while he was living in fear, wondering what else VP Roberts might do to him to keep Duncan in line.
So things were never gonna go back to the way they were.
That was the hard truth of it:. For a few months, Duncan had actually been happy. Really fucking happy. And now he knew that he was never going to have that again.
But with that knowledge came a kind of freedom. Because the most dangerous man of all is the one with nothing to lose.
Duncan was going to protect Mateo. By making sure that no one could ever use the boy against him again. Not Roberts. Not anybody. Not ever.
He turned to Cathy.
“Roberts asked you to tell him what I said to Mateo, right? Those were his exact words?”
“Uh… pretty much. Just that I should listen and let him know what you said.”
“He didn’t say anything about notes?”
“No. I guess he didn’t.”
“Good. Can I borrow a pen and paper?”
“Sure.”
She brought him a notepad, and Duncan wrote out a short message. He folded the paper carefully.
“Can I trust you?” he asked the nurse.
“Sure,” Cathy said.
“No. I mean, can I really trust you? With something important?”
“What do you need me to do?”
“Give this note to Mateo when he’s back in his right mind. And don’t tell anybody else about it. Especially Roberts.”
“Is this going to get me in trouble?”
Duncan wasn’t sure how to answer that. But then Cathy looked at the shaking young man strapped down on the bed.
“Fuck it. Give me the note. I’ll make sure that he gets it.”
Duncan hesitated. He knew that he was bad at this. At reading people. At knowing who to trust.
But then Cathy smiled at him. And Duncan decided that for once in his life, he was gonna have to go with his gut.
He gave her the note and went back to his office. He sat at his desk, a grim smile forming on his face.
“Okay,” he thought. “Time to burn it all down.”
