Persistence of Memory

Part 1-3

By the time the sun rises high enough above the trees to blind me, I’m too tired to keep walking. The wound in my hip flares with fresh pain at each step, sending slivers stabbing up my side and into my shoulder until every movement pinches my neck and makes my vision swim. I last ate…when? Last night, evening meal, gruel I devoured because I knew I’d need my strength, but it didn’t help much. I’m barely trotting anymore. The run in me is gone. If the guards found me now, there wouldn’t be much of a fight. I might even go back with them willingly if they promised the anesthetic touch of a suture laser for my wound. Anything to end this pain.

But you’re free.

It’s a small whisper, barely audible above the whine of the voice inside my head, the endless screaming that will drive me mad if I let it. It’s like a headache almost, only it’s deeper than that, deep in my brain and rattling my teeth until I want to sob. I want to squeeze out my eyes and cram my ears but I know I’ll still hear it because it’s inside me, in the chip they put in my mind during the culling. We studied it in class, row upon row of perfect human soldiers, learning about the cullings with a disinterested glaze in our eyes because it happened to us but we don’t remember anything before so it’s not personal anymore. We were culled, taken from our homes, our families, our lives.

Culled, stripped of our memories and our beings, leaving only an empty shell waiting to be filled with war. Culled, trained to be the best at what we did, and what they wanted us to do was kill and cull and grow like a cancer, spread through the land until we were all that remained, not men and women, but a superior race of soldiers, a weapon of the government, a weapon for the gods.

We learned all about the voice, the chip inserted right behind our left ear, where a faint scar is all that marks the spot on my neck. The voice was our god, our commander, our conscience. It was who we were now, who we were to become after the culling. It kept us alive in the battlefield, sane in the trenches, and safe within the prison of their camps. No one ever escaped before because no one survived the endless, mindless screech of the voice when one ventured too far past the boundaries. I knew what to expect—outside the compound, the voice commands you to stay and wait for the guards. I survived that because I didn’t listen.

Four hundred meters into the forest, the screeching had begun. A sound like tires squealing over ice, and I tried to ignore it. In the darkness last night it was all I heard, a steady sound that I managed to block out until now. Every few meters it goes up an octave, and I know the stories, I saw the films. Too far out and the pitch gets so high, your blood vessels begin to pop. Your nose bleeds, your ears, your eyes, and then finally your soul shatters, you fall to the ground in a heap, crash and bleed out as they say, dying because you wanted to be free and they wouldn’t let you go.

But that’s not going to happen to me. I’ve got a plan.

I’ll only go as far as I can stand it. When the voice gets too intrusive, I’ll stop. I’ll find a town and get my wound cauterized, and I’ll see if anyone there remembers me. If they don’t, I’ll wait until I get used to the voice and then I’ll move on. I’ll stop again when I can’t stand it anymore.

Eventually I should be able to live with the constant screech. I can get used to anything if I have to deal with it long enough, I’m sure.

First I have to find a physician, a healer, someone to seal up this wound. When I stop for a breath I take a look at my leg, but all I see is black blood and angry red flesh and I close my eyes as dizziness washes over me. It’s going to get infected. It’s going to rot, I just know it, it already looks bad and I’m sure it’s going to get worse if I don’t get it tended soon.

The guards haven’t caught up with me yet, which makes me think they’ve left me for dead. They know the voice will shriek my life away. But they don’t know I don’t plan to let it.