damned_institute | Day 52: Game Room

Lunch had taken his mind from his worries, if only for a few minutes. But after the intercom sounded and the nurses began leading patients onto the next activity, one look at the bulletin board brought everything back in full force. No replies from Ashton, Dias or Dad. By now Claude felt like he was practically counting down until the end of the day, when he was going to have to finally grapple with the real possibility that most of his friends from before Landel's, as well as his own father, had fallen victim to the institute.

And now he was going to have to deal with his mother being here on top of that. It didn't seem like a coincidence that she'd show up right when his father's whereabouts were so up in the air. But what did it mean? Why couldn't Landel leave his family out of this?

Normally, the announcement about new video games would have made him perk up, but his eyebrows only knit together with concern as his nurse led him into the game room. That didn't seem to stop her from trying to get him to unwind, though.

"Oh, come now, Thomas, you've worn that expression for most of the day!" she told him with a frown. "Why don't you have a bit of fun now that your eyes are all better? I'm sure you could use it."

The last thing he wanted was to be reminded of his "sleep studies", he darkly thought to himself. But before he could protest, his nurse had sat him down in front of one of the television screens. There was an old gaming console, one Claude had never seen before, and he glanced at her with a confused expression. "Go on," she encouraged as she placed one of the controllers in his hands. "I know how much you enjoy these kinds of things. Someone will come play with you soon, too, I'm sure. Doesn't that sound nice?"

He didn't have time to answer her, because she'd soon bustled off to tend to some of the other patients. Claude watched her leave with a sigh. He realized the daytime staff meant well, which made knowing what they turned into at night even worse to think about. But now he was just being negative for the sake of it, wasn't he?

Taking in a small breath, he reached over to the console and turned it on. As long as he was waiting for some kind of answer from the bulletin, there probably wasn't much he could do except pass the time. Claude watched the title screen appear on the television, his expression growing more curious in spite of himself. Super Mario Bros....

[For Prussia!]

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"Still not sure they're not going to." Pull the curtain back, that was. "Depends on who's running this circus. Ever heard of the Fernald School?" There were dozens of stories like that one, most of them not involving Nazis, whatever people liked to tell themselves.

"Two Cambridge," he paused, and clarified -- Mello's accent was radio-perfect, but that arsehole had given away at least a few years across the Atlantic. "M.A. institutions of higher learning, one breakfast cereal company, and a shitload of secret goverment funds? Eat your Wheaties, kids, and we'll take you to see the Sox lose. Just don't get too close to any Geiger counters." That one hadn't triggered a class-action lawsuit, but no-one had asked the kids if they wanted to be irradiated.

Or explained why they wouldn't want to. Superpowers only happened in comic books. Which was an argument against anyone ever showing up with starry-eyed memories of the Toxic Spiderman. Whatever.

"Overconfidence will get them in the end. We've just got to survive long enough to watch it catch up with them." Easier said than done.

There it was, the line that should have been Mello's. He should have believed that all of it--the static of the monsters and brainwash victims, the radio drama playing out, even the obstacles thrown at them upstairs--was the thrashing of a cornered animal. He didn't. He wasn't sure S.T. did.

"They didn't get what they had coming to them, then?" he couldn't help but ask. The name rang a bell, faintly, occupying the same mental space as Tuskegee and Milgram, remembered at all because even twelve-year-old Mello had seen the relevance of social psychology. He'd never expected to have its point aimed at him, though. The shit people would do to other people, and allow, because it happened in clean laboratories or with the assumed blessing of some controlling agency.

He could have pointed to his world as a prime example, actually. It was only the bad guys being killed, right? Thinking that, even sarcastically, left a nasty taste in his mouth, and he thought of how one of his two bullets might as well have been engraved with a name.

"We have to make sure Landel does. Not by watching. By making it happen." He still clung to the hope that proof that emphatic would silence the bugs.

Do they ever? was practically spelled out in the semaphore of S.T.'s eyebrows. This was a self-effacing incredulity, given what had happened to Laughlin. Dolmacher, too. He'd gotten more direct karmic fallout, but it was his own fucking fault.

Still, S.T. didn't think he had it in him to kill in cold blood. A pile of cinders still visible from the Childrens' Museum (Kelvin had had some seriously kid-unfriendly words on his choice of places not to die) made claiming total non-violence a bit dodgy, but it had been him or them.

"He's all yours. Murder's mediapathic. Nobody'd believe me when I said we weren't proponents of a direct-action campaign." GEE would lose their sense of humor, and either he'd have to get a real job or go running off to Boone with his tail between his legs. Europe was nice for a visit, or so he'd heard, but he didn't want to live there.

"I'd just sic a horde of wet-behind-the-ears Harvard law grads looking for their chance to be a hero." No-one would ever make a Hollywood blockbuster about the twists and turns of a class-action pollution lawsuit, but it was the only way to hit them where counted. In the pocketbook. Tie one vice-president to a disaster and they cut him off and grew two more -- regular self-regulating corporate hydras.

Hm, figures, was the gist of Mello's answering eyeroll. "Send lawyers, guns, and money," he murmured. "But, as we don't have any of those, I'm more than prepared to get my own hands dirty." He was somewhat surprised S.T. didn't seem to be. "I'm sure as hell not holding my breath for help from outside." He left the perfectly obvious And neither should you unsaid; impatient though he was to get a mental list of people who'd be on board for his plan, one that didn't have any 'maybe's on it, he wasn't sure if a bigger push in that direction would do the trick or not.

No, stop that, he told himself. You're not ever supposed to be unsure. "If anyone from outside could get here, this place would've been shut down a long time ago." They didn't even know whose outside it was, past Doyleton and the rest. It was well-established Landel could drag people from anyplace he liked, and not at all certain to where he'd dragged them. If--when--Mello did make good his escape, what would he find out there?

He'd worry about that when he saw what it was.

Substitute helicopters for the guns and that was S.T.'s perfect care package.

"Yeah. Debbie would have opened this place up like a yuppie at a lobster bake within a week. Even if she thought I was avoiding her, it'd be hard to hide not showing up at work."

Unless everyone thought he was dead. Again. Naah. That trick only worked once, and only with massive media cooperation on all sides.

The kind the Head Bastard can summon with a smile and a checkbook? Right. First the cover-up, then the exposé.

"If there is an outside at all. That town puts on a good show during the day, but it's part of the package. Ever look up at night?" Of course he had. Everyone had. Not even the Vulcans or Jedi or whatever the hell they'd dragged in last recognized the constellations. Though that wasn't, as it happened, what Sangamon was getting at. "More stars than out on the rez. No way in hell is NYC within a hundred miles of here."

Mello hadn't exactly gone stargazing, finding plenty to occupy his attention on the ground every time he went outside at night; but he had noticed the lack of the expected light pollution, mostly because it made it difficult to pretend he could see perfectly well out of his left eye.

"There can't be nothing out there," he said, annoyed, at himself for the most part. He could think of a hefty handful of arguments off the top of his head for there being functionally nothing, and none at all for there being something they'd be allowed to reach. He still intended to go see for himself. Stubborn as usual, and especially pointlessly, lately. Even more infuriating than the unwanted running commentary was how its intonation mimicked the same person as the one who'd put it there had done.

"Murder may be bad PR, but do you think Landel would give up our actual location under the threat of anything less?" Besides, it only counted as bad publicity if you got caught, and gave a damn what the public thought in the first place.

He ignored the part about nothing. Sangamon didn't want to believe it himself. There were detergents and toilet paper and computers with fancy flat displays. Orange juice and chocolate and probably coffee for the staff somewhere. Bananas. All sorts of industrial food and electronics and plastic-wrapped crap lining the shelves, which had to be trucked in from somewhere. Doyleton certainly didn't have citrus groves. It might have a paper mill and a power plant, but that was about as far up the technology ladder as it went.

That aside, the guy had a point. "I didn't say I was going to stop you." He shrugged. "I'm just not getting caught with my finger on the trigger. Besides, I'm not sure I could do it." He liked saving lives. It was no less a power trip sometimes, just a different one.

Day 52: Game Room

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