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GSA Carpark, 4 AM
He moves like his own clothes hurt him, sits heavily down on the concrete steps leading down the hillside, and immediately rues the fact that he'll be finding bruises tomorrow, and blood if he's not careful. He doesn't feel like being careful this morning, in the hours between the departure of those stressed out agents working late for fear of not completing projects on time, and those bleary-eyed kids turning up at five, hoping to make an impression before they burn themselves out. At 4 am, even God isn't watching, as the moon clouds over, leaving only orange sodium street lamps to burn into his eyes. The world hurts, and it would kill him to cry.
What happened to you today? His girlfriend might ask, if he had had anything more than a civil conversation with the opposite sex for the last sixteen years. Sixteen years seems too long to be an unfeeling being, wrapped in plastic and deadened to the world, but sixteen years must seem like yesterday, and the end of it all tomorrow, otherwise he'd go mad. The psychological reports agree that he's sane now, maybe saner than the violently intelligent young man who first turned up for work, yawning like the rest of them before the sun came up, but he compares his state of mind to those of the occasional psychopaths whose files cross his desk, and he comes off wanting. They say that you're not insane if you can ask the question "Am I insane?". He gave up asking a while back. He prefers to be something less than the ideal profile, something less than the people out there in the, what do you call it? The real world.
What happened, he would tell this fictional construct of a woman, was the same as any day. Ritual embarrassment at the hands of Adam's people, more agents in stasis, more hours spent stripping himself of his own skin. It would be cleansing if it wasn't so painful. Real pain from Adam, real violence would be easier to handle than self-hating, cringing incompetence and repetition. It's the boredom that gets him. They tested his pain limits before he joined up, and the interrogator cracked before he did, at the sight of this boy who could barely grow a beard keeping stonily silent under the blood and sweat of his own body. His fingernails had never quite recovered, but at least the torture had kept him entertained. They never found those limits, but those of enduring boredom were rather closer to hand. Stick him in a factory production line and he'll break like a matchstick. Adam knows how to beat him, and the dead man is afraid, not of pain, or of failure, but of not caring enough to stand in his way. If he could, he'd go home now, unlock his front door, switch on the fire and make up breakfast in bed for the waiting woman who loves him. But he can't, not only because his house is a place he never visits, and the woman, if she ever existed at all, is now only a fleeting fantasy, but because, as he laughs hollowly at his own self, he can't let Adam win. Not until there is blood underneath his fingernails and the breath of the world kills him.
Mason Eckhart levers himself up and walks disconsolately back into the building, head bowed and shoes scuffing the gravely floor. No one sees him, and no one remarks on his strangely human behaviour. They've all gone home.
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