Chapter 11 - Man In A Box

The cell they had put him in was more of a box than a room. 

He barely had enough space to fully stretch out and all he could do was sit on the bed that was bolted into the wall. He could not even walk two steps in the cell. X2 sat on the bed and put his forehead on the wall in front of him. He could lie down in the bed, but there was no way he was going to be able to stretch his legs. It was good thing that the cell was dark and he could not see the confined space. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine himself floating out there in the dark, cold space. Drifting like a body without a tether. X2 kept his forehead pressed to the cold wall and meditated on what he had done. 

He wished he had stabbed that guy harder and longer. He wanted that man to suffer. An easy death was not what he had in mind, but the drink had fucked up his judgment and he had done the deed in the most messy and quick way possible. The punishment would have been the same, but he had wanted to put some suffering in the body of the man. He did not. That was his only regret. The man's surprised face swam in his mind's eye as his screwdriver entered his neck and then the side of his face. X2 could feel the guy's hot blood spray on his face as he tried to stem the brutal puncture that X2 had inflicted on his neck. There were people screaming, but it was all far away. He had pushed the man to the ground and then kicked his body a few times, but it was not fun, because the man was already losing consciousness by then. Somewhere near him, a girl screamed even louder as X2 put the screwdriver back in his kit and simply walked away. No one had tried to stop him. Who would have dared?

The scene played in his head again and again. And he wondered about all the ways he could have prolonged the man's suffering, stretched out his moment of death and relished it a little more. Futile, now. All of it. Soon, they will come to tell him of the judgment that was pure and simple murder. 

They will space him soon. 

X2 realised that he did not give a fuck about that. 

He only wished he could see her face one more time. 

--

The room they had put him in was bigger than the halls of his village. 

Skiz opened his eyes and everything around him felt wrong. 

The air had a stale smell to it as he breathed it in. The light around him felt fake and when he moved his hand, it waved through the air too easily. There was something wrong with the earth's pull in the small room he had woken up in. He was lying on a small table, the surface of which felt cold to touch on his bare skin. The clothes on his body were not like the clothes they used to wear in the village. Someone had dressed him in strange clothes that felt constricting on his body. He moved his hand to tear off the clothes from his body and took his first look at the stump that remained of his hand. There was a small globe of a shiny material where his hand used to be. He swallowed. How was he supposed to live the life of a warrior without one hand. He could not wield a spear with his non-dominant hand. He lay back on the cold steel of his bed and closed his eyes. There was something in his blood that made thinking difficult for him right now. He sighed, cursed his luck and tried unsuccessfully to sleep, wishing that all this was just a bad dream. There were footsteps nearby and a door opened. A woman dressed in strange white and blue clothes entered the room and started to fiddle around with different surfaces around his bed. She tapped some with her fingers and moved the others to take a look at the lights and flickers on the surfaces that made no sense to Skiz. 

Then she took a look at Skiz. "Oh, you are awake. Funny, the drugs were supposed to keep you under for longer."

The words that she spoke were garbled when they came out of her mouth, but once they reached Skiz's ears, they made sense to him in a way that he could not explain. 

"Lie down and relax. The dictation module will take some time to calibrate your language input and output sensors. You might feel a little woozy till then. Just relax." She pressed a button on one of the screens and Skiz felt a tiny pinch on his shoulder. He turned his head and saw a machine swiveling away from him. The woman was looking at him with a strange expression on her face. 

"You are one beautiful motherfucker, aren't you?"

Skiz said nothing.