Sangamon Taylor (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
toxicspiderman) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
damned_institute2010-12-18 10:35 pm
toxicspiderman) wrote in damned_institute2010-12-18 10:35 pm
Night 53: Disciplinary Therapy Corridor
[from here]
"Of the times I've been up here voluntarily, a couple have gotten out before we got up here. Usually we have to cool our heels for a while." He shrugged, and then started unearthing unpleasant memories. The investigation pulled up nothing except the sneaking suspicion he could still smell SLUD-induced vomit in the cracks in the floor. "The other time, fuck if I know how long. Spider raided the drugs and the janitor's closet before passing out here."
"Don't try to kick these doors open. You'll break your leg. They're less normal than the rest of this place. The Frankensteins don't ever show on this side." A lot of people forgot that Frankenstein was the mad scientist, not the monster he created. Igor had achieved a cross-media cultural blitzkrieg that no one confused him with Abby Normal's. Just the top brass and their monster. Middle-level management strictly not liable. "Transporter doors, staff only. Have to be." He didn't have to add not to open them. Mello wasn't an idiot, even if he was getting way too into this for an impartial observer.
"Of the times I've been up here voluntarily, a couple have gotten out before we got up here. Usually we have to cool our heels for a while." He shrugged, and then started unearthing unpleasant memories. The investigation pulled up nothing except the sneaking suspicion he could still smell SLUD-induced vomit in the cracks in the floor. "The other time, fuck if I know how long. Spider raided the drugs and the janitor's closet before passing out here."
"Don't try to kick these doors open. You'll break your leg. They're less normal than the rest of this place. The Frankensteins don't ever show on this side." A lot of people forgot that Frankenstein was the mad scientist, not the monster he created. Igor had achieved a cross-media cultural blitzkrieg that no one confused him with Abby Normal's. Just the top brass and their monster. Middle-level management strictly not liable. "Transporter doors, staff only. Have to be." He didn't have to add not to open them. Mello wasn't an idiot, even if he was getting way too into this for an impartial observer.
no subject
He noted S.T.'s run-down of his portable pharmacy with a nod. If Mello had known he'd be coming up here, and why, he might have swung by Matt's room to grab a pack of smokes for him. Might have. More likely, he still would've made a pointless dash.
"Do I look like I brought entertainment?" he snapped. He clicked the torch on, played it over each door. Nothing. Clicked it back off.
"Who's your roommate?" Someone with an intelligence background, assuming Mello hadn't already met him, would be very useful to know. If nothing else, it was a distraction from the silence that sat heavier in this hallway than anywhere else in the Institute, from the images he was trying to keep his mind from conjuring up of what that silence masked.
no subject
"Was. Jason Bourne, but that was a different room and three roommates ago. More if I slept through any one-hit wonders." Two and a half weeks was pocket change in S.T.'s world. Ecological disasters could happen overnight if an oil tanker ran aground, but most of them were slow (and usually deliberate, or at a conservative estimate, clueless) poisonings. "Nice guy." Not the description most people would have given him. Doughy cheeks like a well-fed stockbrokers son who hadn't seen anything tougher than a Harvard debate team, fought like a Southie punk.
"Wonder what happened to him?" All of the answers were depressing and unprovable, but talking was better than sulking. Better than watching Mello sulk, too.
no subject
Mello clicked the flashlight on and did another sweep across the doors. If S.T. was going to be annoyed by it, he'd just have to deal. The second any of the doors opened, Mello was going to be there. He knew he wasn't doing a great job accepting that all he could do was wait until that moment, but he couldn't have cared less. He was saving the pacing until standing still became unbearable, though. He gave that about five more minutes.
"I'm on my third roommate now." In slightly more than a week, but that appeared to be relatively normal. "Roommate number two had Javert's notes about this bullshit." He gestured in the direction of the doors with the flashlight. "Have you seen them?"
no subject
One more educated guess.
"Was there something you were looking for?" Mello had to have the damn things memorized, though S.T. wasn't going to ask him for a recital. Kid was too good not to have them cold even if he'd only had a short shot at them while his roommate dozed off or something.
no subject
"I don't have them on me. I was going to offer you a look if you hadn't seen them." To solidify their not-exactly-alliance, for one thing, but also because S.T. was coming at the problem from a different angle, and while Mello preferred working alone, he'd also learnt to tell when cooperating would get him what he wanted faster.
"What do you think about the guy who got taken twice?" Either that case didn't belong in the list at all, or it was an anomaly worth knowing more about.
no subject
"Not a fucking thing. Poor bastard." S.T. hadn't heard of anyone being taken twice before. Not that it should have been a surprise. Anyone who'd passed middle school math and wasn't sitting in front of a slot machine knew that it wasn't unlikely. If Landel was picking names out of a hat.
There was a cute party trick S.T. had done a few times as a combination ice-breaker and statistics lesson. It took a room of about thirty people to have a decent chance of working. Fifty and it was almost too easy. All it took was a group of people who didn't know each other well enough to have each other's birthdays in their Rolodexes. S.T. would pull out a crisp five dollar bill and see who'd bet against him that there weren't two people in the room with the same birthday.
The trick worked because people were egotists. Birthdays were supposed to be unique. Never mind that there were only three hundred and sixty five days in the year, and each was equally likely to spit out babies. (This was the part in the explanation where some nerd in the back row stuck his hand up, and then when S.T. ignored him, started bitching about leap years or the baby boom after the Blizzard of '78 or June weddings until the entire room shushed him.) People thought about the odds that someone else had their birthday, which in a small crowd wasn't that likely. Say it was thirty people. That gave 30 * (1/365) chances. Call it one in twelve, keep the change. Easy to bet against.
The problem was that they'd skipped all the other people's odds. Actually doing the math out would turn him into a social pariah, but he could start walking around the room, pointing out that Roger and Rachel had one chance, and then Roger and Mick, and Kenny and John, and before long he had everyone nodding. Then the big reveal, and ten bucks in his pocket.
Sometimes people even learned something. It was a dangerous gamble, not because of the probabilities, but because he couldn't help wondering when some flack was going to figure it out, too. They were collectively a bunch of crap-flinging monkeys, but they'd learned what stuck. Clever metaphors for mathematical concepts were high on the list. Boxcars and banana peel bullshit. Two dozen cases of rare brain cancers weren't a statistical likelihood, they were a fucking smoking gun. Especially when the statistics were being dredged up by the people who'd been pouring vinylidene chloride in the local swimming hole.
"Think I'll take you up on those notes." He shrugged. "Whenever." He was still trying not to decide if it would be better or worse the second time. Getting dragged up here. "I could use the short version now, though."
no subject
"The effects fall into two or three different categories. Either they amount to ongoing torture, or they have some kind of side benefit. In at least one instance, they're nonexistent, or they wore off. Presumably, in those cases, the original trauma was considered sufficient." Only S.T. could have said which category his experience fell into. Mello thought it was probably the first, like his own. All this was leaving out the one patient who was an exception to much of the usual MO, the one Javert had considered an unreliable source, but whose second trip up here sounded more typical. It was something to look into, later.
The information Javert had gathered wasn't where Mello would have focused his efforts. He cared very little about how varied the constellation of tortures the Institute was capable of inflicting was; they were so tailored to the individual victim as to be almost useless in helping him undo his own. Another information trawl through the victims who were still here would be worthwhile, if he could get past that damn reluctance to talk about it. Understandable, but annoying. Past annoying and into infuriating was how he'd have to give up a little about what had happened to him, if only by drawing a pretty clear path for inference, to find out more about the areas that did interest him.
"When you were in there," he said, low, "did you get a look at the doctor?"
no subject
Little bit from column A, little bit from column B. Either Javert's notes as copied were an earlier vintage or the guy took privacy seriously.
"Yeah. Up close and personal. Walking advertisement for the fluoridation program." S.T. flashed a smile, in case Mello's universe had better dentist's unions than Pennsylvania industrialists with fluorine to burn. Not literally, though the stuff was pretty fucking flammable. "One of those guys who don't have a problem looking someone right in the eye and lying their ass off. No soul in there." Between that and the grin the guy was a makeup team and some seed money away from political success.
He was about two syllables into asking I take it you didn't? when Frankenstein's burned-in smile fuzzed out and the memory of Mello's expression when they'd dragged him out turned in. Shit. Keep it general.
"A lot of the effects are sensory. Or E.S.P., which puts it in the ballpark." Or over the wall and headed for eastbound on the Mass Pike, but the same game. "Ironic, too. The effects. Not all of them, but they know us. Used my real name, not this Paul Quincy bullshit, and knew what scares me."
no subject
That meant they were... finishing up. Mello had been trying not to think about it, mostly successfully distracted, but now it felt as if the wall he'd sealed all those thoughts up behind were starting to crack at the foundation. Would he even be able to do anything for Matt? It meant going back into one of those rooms, which was going to be swept clean of evidence, somehow, by the time door opened, but was still the site, or its copy, of the worst night of his life.
In defiance of that uncertainty and reluctance, he walked along to the far end of the hall and worked his way back, trying each of the remaining doors in turn, rapping each with the flashlight. Nothing. He had to pace, now, a circuit of a few feet back and forth in front of S.T. For anyone who came through here at this point, eavesdropping would be the last thing on their mind.
So the doctor for S.T. hadn't been anyone he knew, unless he wasn't saying, but that seemed unlikely. Generic representation of what he hated the most? Maybe they hadn't had a specific one handy, Mello thought, and almost let a dry laugh escape at that.
"Exactly. The bastards in there aren't pretending they don't have our real info. They want us to know they do." He would've bet, though, that they made less of a point of it for people who weren't in the habit of hiding all their personal data. "And they want to dress up the torture as something else. Be a better person, whether you like it or not, only they twist 'better' as far as they fucking can. Every benefit they end up giving has a price."
no subject
Mello wasn't the only one trying to keep up the conversation just as a distraction.
"Fuck, you got a nice one." The sneer on his face was echoed in his voice, going beyond his usual asshole act into bitter old man territory. "Mine didn't bother with the foreplay. Just the next rat with the right genes. Squirt a little of this in, hope it survives, if not, grab the next tail. Hell, I'm surprised they don't pack us in in breeding pairs just to save themselves the trouble of firing up the transuniversal transporter."
no subject
He wasn't going to explain that, for him, the lead-up had been just as bad as the actual 'treatment,' which had certainly been part of the point of doing it that way: let him stew in his helplessness, give him ample time to turn over in his mind what he could have done to prevent it. Let him conclude that there wasn't anything he could have done. Mello was sure they'd played S.T. the same way. Lab rats, the assembly-line impersonality of it all, the bland face of someone playing god not for ego's sake, but all in a day's work. Yeah, he could understand how that would get to the guy.
He took another look at the row of doors. Fuck's sake.
"What they do in there? It's the real point of this place, or part of it." But a piece only, to a picture the prisoners hadn't even been allowed to glimpse. Mello still had to wonder, resenting it all the while, if his certainty that they never would were the product of the bugs or the sane reaction to an impossible situation. Has to be the bugs, he told himself. You're the one who, when you're blocked into a corner, brings the goddamn walls down, remember?