[memory] What: Memory Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing Warning, this memory contains: Dread and apathy
You've lost track of the days. You never paid special attention to begin with, especially living the way you have for the last couple of years. One bleeds into the next and a Tuesday looks like a Thursday looks like a Sunday, for the most part, though there are more people out on the weekends, typically. You were always more focused on seasons: when it would be hot, when it would be cold, when it was more likely to rain or snow. Now, you've really lost track, but you think it's been about three months, and the important things you count don't happen every day.
You call it a cell, but really it's just a room: six by eight, gray-painted cinder block walls and a metal door. Metal toilet and sink in one corner, bed bolted to the wall opposite this. White sheets, white pillows, gray blanket. The only window is set with wired glass in the metal door. Light is mostly provided by a fluorescent tube mounted higher on the ceiling than you can reach even standing on the bed. It ticks off at 9 p.m. every evening, and then the only light is the faint white glow from the wired window square until that ticks off an hour later. You know the routine by now, and it hasn't changed.
At the moment, you're in the bed, looking up at the light on the ceiling. You're holding you're hand up over your head, looking at your fingers, wondering if somehow they look different today. Because what else can you do? They aren't giving you anything aside from supervised meals; no books or TV time or even a walk outside to stretch your legs. After years of uncertainty, it's weirdly comforting, in a way, to know that no matter what happens, you'll wake up in this bed tomorrow morning. It comes with a price, of course. This could be the next several years of your life, after all. Maybe the remainder of it. There's a part of you that's inured to this; it's stability. You're not cold or going hungry. But, if you're being honest, the times when it's not terrifying are kinda boring.
There's no clock in the room/cell, but you know the footsteps you hear are not approaching your door at a proscribed mealtime. Which means today isn't going to be a boring day. Your body tenses and you try to tamp down the fear, but it's hard, even though you know what's coming, and you've already been through it thirty-some-odd times. You drop your hand and sit up as the locks on the door are undone from the outside and it swings open. Two men in some tactical paramilitary black with holstered sidearms are flanking one of the men in lab coats. You know this one: Dr. Woodrow. He says your name and asks you to follow like you can just say "oh, gee, just don't feel up to it, I think I'll just stay in bed today," like it's the fifth grade and you didn't do all your work for a book report due that day.
You swing your legs over the side of the bed, white-socked feet on the cold tile floor. Nobody offers you shoes or slippers, and that's not any different. There are little grippers on the soles of your socks to keep you from sliding around. Your one piece jumpsuit is gray, his coat is white and his slacks are gray, the guards are wearing black, you kind of wish, not for the first time, that there was a little color to the place. It's like you're trapped in the worst black and white film ever.
You silently take your place between the two guards as you're ushered out of the room. The fight has gone out of you by now; there's nothing more they can do to you that won't hurt as much as they've already hurt you. That's what you tell yourself, though sometimes you wonder if that's strictly true. Pain has degrees, right? Isn't that a thing? Well at some point, it becomes so great that you can't really compare it anymore, it just hurts a lot and that's all the description necessary. But, you follow anyway. The corridors are the same cinder block, painted the same off-white shade of gray. The doors are all metal; everything in this part of the wherever-you-are looks pretty much the same.
Things change as you're moved through to another wing of the building. Everything here is white paint and stainless steel and glass walls. Laboratories and offices. They take you into The Chamber - an octagonal glass room in the center of a large, high-ceilinged room ringed by offices and work stations. High-polish, black-tiled floors. There's a chair in the center of The Chamber, ringed by cameras and medical monitors, an array of straps and electrodes and velcro cuffs. You let them strap you in and hook up the monitors, and the techs all seem so pleased by how complacent you've become.
You're finally in place and you've lost some of your peripheral vision thanks to the circle of metal than fixes your head to the padded headrest. Dr. Woodrow slides into view, holding his clipboard, checking it as if he doesn't already know what he's doing to you today. "Today," he says, and even though he's kind of got a bland eighties-sitcom-dad look to him, generic brown hair and fashionable (you guess) glasses (the kind of dad incidental to the story, not the leading man by any means), he's got very intense, dark eyes. You know, because they're always the ones watching you, the ones you know are trying so hard to hold on to what they see. "Looks like electrocution is on the list for today," he informs you. You can't nod, your head is locked in place. Machines beep, indicating the rise in your pulse, but you lie to yourself and say you feel nothing. You're just readying your body for the pain, and maybe for the hope that there won't be a next time.
Woodrow's talking to the assistants now; somewhere there's the clacking of a keyboard. A couple people are moving around, adjusting monitors. Then you hear him say "let's begin," and he turns to you before it starts, and says the one thing he's said thirty-two other times: