Fragment 14 - The Prisoner

It didn’t work. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but instead of escaping whoever it was pursuing me, I am now a prisoner. I’ve finally been given access to my laptop computer again, and everything seems normal, but my jailers... Let’s just say I know they’ve put something into the machine to monitor what I type. At the moment, I don’t care. As long as they believe I’m at least half insane, they don’t seem to have any interest in harming me. Still, were it not for the calendar in my computer, I wouldn’t know what date this is. I can’t believe it’s been almost two months since I last wrote.

I thought by escaping into Switzerland I’d avoid the notice of whomever was trying to kill or incarcerate me. I was wrong. Tracker sensed something as Henri’s parents guided me along what looked like a game trail crossing the border from France. His hearing, far more sensitive in range and frequency than human, seemed to pick up on a sound just off the trail. Because he was using my own limited facilities at the time, he couldn’t verify what he heard, so remained silent. He wasn’t so quiet when he heard the approach of a border patrol. I grabbed the bike and tried to ride away as fast as I could pump the pedals, but a bicycle is no match for an army patrol in an off road capable vehicle. If I’d turned back down the trail and ridden like an idiot, I might have escaped... for a while. I didn’t. Mountain biking isn’t one of my more favorite sports. As a result, the only way I could try to escape was to either ride through fairly thick undergrowth to force the truck to go around, or ride along the edge of the trees, diving into the woods along any game trail I could find whenever the truck got too close. They herded me straight into a foot patrol. When they wrestled me to the ground--not difficult since I was still somewhat out of shape and already winded from the panicked ride--they gave me some sort of injection. When I woke up, I found myself here.

Where is here? I don’t know. The place is stark and clinical, with bars across the doors and the walls covered with some kind of quilted padding. I would guess some sort of insane asylum. The room has no windows and the door is made of a very solid wood; knocking on it sounds like trying to knock on the trunk of a tree, no sense of hollowness, as though the wood itself were several inches thick. It is also the only unpadded surface in the room that I can reach.

The room itself seems quite large. I have to guess that it measures roughly twelve feet by nearly twenty, occupied by a sofa-like extrusion, two chairs, a table and the bed. It’s almost arranged like an apartment or a studio, minus the kitchen. The furniture is much softer than the walls, but there doesn’t seem to be any solid structure under it, except for the table itself, probably covered with about a hand’s width of padding while the rest seem made of nothing but fabric-covered foam rubber of different densities. In all four corners of the room, mounted at the ceiling, quarter-hemispheres of mirrored glass or plastic cover what I assume to be video cameras, watching me from every angle in such a way that even my computer display and typing are visible no matter where I sit. Well, my typing, anyway. Even so, I expect they’ve managed to monitor my display as well, so why even try to hide it?

Still, I want to know why I’m being held. What do they think they can learn from me? What is there about me that they would first try to kill me and later imprison me? I admit that I healed from that crash remarkably quickly--I’ve even fully regrown the teeth I lost--but that’s come after the crash. I think that was the tiger’s doing, but I haven’t heard from her or any of the others since I woke up in this cell. Are they somehow being blocked from me?

I don't know if you have heard of something called Seasonal Affective Disorder or not (seems like everything's a disease these days--even when it's not) but I've been in somewhat of an emotional low lately due to a number of factors, only some of which relates to my writing. Hopefully I'm going to break out of my slump and get back into writing more regularly, though I think I'll try to limit myself to once a week.

Now, is he realy schizo and some kind of drug is suppressing the other personalities, or are his creations hiding from his jailers?