Punish the System - 3

Connor realised he’d not been listening to the enthusiastically wittering voice for quite some time.

Not out of rudeness, though that was a tempting option at this stage of proceedings, but rather because he’d been trying to determine quite how much trouble he was actually in.

He’d read about things like this happening. One minute, you were finishing a job, then you were getting shot in the head, and then the next moment you woke up and you were… wrong. And not just injured either, but fundamentally altered.

The story of Finneas Gage came immediately to mind. He’d been a railway worker from the nineteenth century who’d got a bit of iron through his skull at forty miles an hour. Amazingly, though, he didn’t instantly die. He didn’t even pass out, by all accounts. He just went ‘ouch’, and then he was up and about, walking and talking and was even able to give his name and the date to the horrified onlookers staring at his impaled head. 

Everyone goes on and on about how lucky he was. How he’d survived an impossible injury. But over time, it was clear that Gage hadn’t survived. Not really. The man who walked away from that traumatic brain injury wasn’t anything close to the same man who’d stepped onto the site that fateful morning. 

That version of Gage had been diligent and friendly. The man who came back from his enforced spiking was impulsive and angry. The doctor who treated him had noted, in the understatement of the century, that “Gage was no longer Gage.”

And that was what bothered Connor the most.

The idea of dying never really scared him. Not that he was a fatalist or anything like that. It was just that the possibility of sudden, violent death had always been part of the job. Baked into the margins, as it were. You didn’t do the sort of things he did for a living without having a pretty realistic understanding of his life expectancy. His dad had always been very clear about that with him.

If it wasn’t going to be a knife in the back, or a chemical smeared on his door knob, then it would be an explosion at a rock concert that would see him off. 

Dying? Pfft. Losing his sense of self, though? Losing control of his internal landscape, his shortcuts, his reflexes, his gut-checks and guiding personality? Well, that was something else entirely. Such a profound change truly was terror wearing a mask that looked like his own face.

And Connor feared he had become another Gage story for the history books. 

He was lying, disembodied, and adrift in the dark, listening to a talking Sprite that sounded like Siri had been possessed by a children’s television presenter. 

Sure, he seemed to still have enough ‘Connor’ floating about to be answering questions, processing words, and making jokes. That all sounded like his mind was still firing away. But, unless he was being monologued by a nutter in the bed next to him, which was beginning to no longer feel entirely credible, then a whole host of his screws must have come loose. Right?

And that really sucked.

In his early days in the taskforce, there’d been a guy in Surveillance named Maxie Archer. Ex-military, ex-Signals. He’d been everyone’s go to guy for anything they wanted covertly observed. But then Maxie had taken a massive chunk of shrapnel through the temporal lobe in Derry, and, although he technically recovered, he could never taste strawberries again. Couldn’t read fiction either. Said his brain had decided there was no utility in made-up stories. 

Oh, and this version of Maxie Archer had absolutely no empathy either. 

He’d been quietly moved on after a couple of incidents.

As he’d been packing up his things, he’d told Connor something that would stick with him forever.

“Take care of your noggin, mate. You get your brain rewired, even just a little, and you’ll never know what you’ve lost. It could be a memory, a habit, or a preference. It could be how you felt about your mum. But it could also be what made you you. And you won’t even know you’re supposed to be missing it. Your brain’s the best friend you have, Connor. Don’t let anyone mess with it.”

Connor had laughed at the time. Maxie hadn’t.

And now, floating around in all this darkness, he thought he finally got it. Because he didn’t actually know if he was still him. He didn’t even know if he felt like himself. He wasn’t sure what baseline he was meant to be measuring against, because there wasn’t a checklist for identity loss, was there? 

There was no early warning system he knew for ego drift.

He quickly ran through some names. Important places. Core memories, if you will. The shibboleths he'd always relied on to get him through dark times. Regents Park. A few months at Langley. Camden on a wet Tuesday. That time in Cardiff with the nun. The red folder with the stamp he was never supposed to see. The first time he’d held a loaded weapon. The taste of coffee and the smell of wet concrete from that underground car park in Salford.

Well, all of them still seemed to be present and correct. All those memories were still his.

But, now he was looking at them properly, there was a space between those thoughts, wasn’t there? A sense that something was missing. Or had been added to, maybe? 

Somehow, thinking about the key events of life was like walking through his childhood home and spotting a single picture frame replaced with its mirrored version. He couldn’t absolutely name it as off, but he noticed it was weird.

“Okay,” he said aloud, mostly to himself. “So, despite everything, I reckon I can assume I’m still me. Mostly. At least for now.”

The Sprite which, perhaps sensing Connor’s darkening mood, had politely paused its chatter, piped back up with a sunny sort of concern. 

“Is now a good time to resume discussion of the status of your Integration journey, Mr Connor? Or would you rather lie in existential despair for a few minutes longer? I am perfectly happy either way!”

"You know, all things considered, I reckon this is some sort of dream. And I think I’d like to wake up from it now. Is that something you’d be able to help me with?"

“Certainly, Mr Connor. I can do that for you. As I’ve been explaining, although you may not have been listening at the time, you’re not actually ‘here’ in any meaningful way. Think of this more as a staging area for your Integration. A vestibule of frozen time, if you like. 

Normally, this is where you’d begin your onboarding process. There would be glossaries. Stat previews. And a short guided tour. However, as there’s currently nothing for me to actually onboard you into, I must say that I’m afraid I’m at a bit of a loss as to the next steps. I am uncertain what that next step even is.”

“Okay, well, I’d be very comfortable with waking up and returning to my body, thank you very much.”

“Then that is what I shall do, Mr Connor! Please be aware that you will experience a brief moment of transient dislocation, a kind of conceptual lurch as your sensory thread is rewoven into real time. Please do not be tempted to resist this process, as uncomfortable as it may prove to be. Resisting will result in nausea, teeth-grinding, and in most cases, spontaneous, agonising death.”

“There will be no resistance from my end, mate. Just get on with it if you will.”

“Of course. Please hold.”

The dark void around Connor rippled. Not like fabric, and not like water. It was more like the punchline to a joke he hadn’t realised was building. There was a skip, a flicker, and then a hard, sudden lurch forward. 

It was as if a thousand micro-sensations collapsed inward around him. Like he was being yanked through the very centre of his brain and spat out to the other side. 

There was a snap, not of bone or nerve, but of time. One moment, Connor felt he was utterly untethered in the universe and the next, he was back inside himself.

This was momentarily reassuring, but that was before he realised his newly reinhabited body was very much inside something else, too.

Plastic was pressed against his nose and mouth, and a coarse zip edge was brushing his brow. He couldn’t actually see anything, it was almost as complete darkness as there had been in the ‘staging area’, but at least this time he could hear the sound of his own breath echoing within the tightly confined space. 

His chest, which really hurt, rose and fell. His cheek hurt too.

But at least there was air in this… bag. It was stale, for sure, but it was real, and it had more than a little whiff of disinfectant about it. Like a newly cleaned hospital floor, which made sense, he supposed. 

Connor experimented with his breath for a moment, making it come in quick, shallow bursts. Each exhale bounced off the interior of the plastic and curled back at him, warm and vaguely human-smelling. He felt it fog against his face, then disappear.

Not wanting to make too many assumptions, Connor carefully flexed his fingers as if he were testing for booby traps. Thumb to fingertips. Then knuckle bends. His left hand moved, then his right. He jiggled his legs too. He had epic pins and needles, but they were definitely there. Which, considering he’d been fearing the worst, was a net win. 

He noticed a sluggish ache throbbing down one thigh, as if his circulation was still trying to reboot itself. He shifted his weight down onto one shoulder, and felt the rasp of a zip seam rub against his collarbone. 

His body complained as he experimented with his full available range of movement. He was tightly wrapped for sure, but all of his extremities seemed to be present and correct.

But that didn’t change the fact he was in a body bag, right? And probably, by the smell and all the cold, in a mortuary, too. 

Locked away in a drawer.

Which was a vibe.

It was quite a testament to his general level-headedness that Connor didn’t panic at that point. Nevertheless, waves of adrenaline came knocking all the same, making his heart thud at a million miles an hour. 

It was not actually the first time he’d awoken in similar circumstances. There’d been that time he’d been buried alive in a shallow grave in the Cotswolds, for example, but the sheer wrongness of the situation was very unwelcome.

On the plus side, though, while his skin was undoubtedly cold, it was most definitely alive, and not in the abstract shell kind of way that it had been before. 

He also could absolutely feel the bullet wound in his chest which was giving off a deep, fibrous ache as well as the one to his cheek which really stung. It felt like someone had driven an ice-pick through the bones of his skull and into the root of his molars, then heated the pick for good measure and swirled it around.

But at least it was his pain. There was no more floating. No more conceptual holding rooms. He was back in the thick, wet, ugly intimacy of his own body.

“Mr Connor, is there anything I can do to make this a more comfortable experience for you? Perhaps a mild dopamine rush? Or would you like the illusion of a beach? I’ve read that warm sand and crashing waves are quite helpful in similarly stressful situations.”

"Not yet, thanks." While I have you, can I just do a quick sense check, though? I'm in a body bag, right?"

“Yes, indeed you are.”

"Which means everyone obviously thinks I died, right?"

“Indeed. Just to reiterate in case you still haven’t quite understood what occurred, had I not begun your integration process when I did, the injuries you received would absolutely have led to your terminal demise.”

Horror suddenly lurched in Connor’s chest. 

"You’ve not turned me into a zombie or anything like that, have you?"

There was a long pause. Not from Izzy, but from inside Connor himself. His mind was instinctively checking every horror film he’d ever pretended not to watch. Because Connor absolutely hated zombies. 

To be strictly fair, he didn’t actually mind the really fast ones. Not even the climbing-over-themselves types. No. It was the slow ones that really creeped him out. The old-school Romero shufflers. Blank-eyed, skin like overcooked chicken and nails that were always black. The ones that just kept coming. 

The inevitability. 

The unreasoning persistence. 

It wasn't actually all the gore that bothered him. It was their emptiness. The idea that a person could still be walking around, still moving and still doing, but with no version of themselves at home. No thought. No self. Just a rotting marionette wired to appetite.

Connor’d once been trapped for twelve hours on a surveillance op where the only available entertainment was The Sadness. He’d watched it in fifteen-minute chunks on a muted screen, between tracking a Taiwanese diplomat and eating dry pistachios. By the end, he couldn’t close his eyes without picturing teeth tearing through his throat. 

“Because if I am a zombie,” Connor said, “I need you to tell me. Now. Don’t sugar-coat it. Don’t ease me in with sparkly little metaphors. I want to know if I’m about to develop a taste for brains and lose my vowels.”

“Oh no, Mr Connor! You are most definitely not a zombie. You retain full cognitive function, with no necrotic tissue, and your appetite matrix is currently reading as ‘peckish for toast.’ You have no cravings for human flesh at all, I am pleased to say! 

Indeed, I flatter myself that, following my intervention, you are potentially the most alive you have actually ever been.”

For a moment, Connor felt very much better about everything. There was air in his lungs, pain in his chest, thoughts in his skull, and apparently no immediate craving for grey matter. Those all counted as a win. 

But then again, he was being reassured about all this by a voice which was obviously some form of hallucination. A side effect of being shot. A stress response to nearly dying. A horrified brain weaving comfort out of trauma. 

But he could only deal with so many problems at once.

"Okay," he said. "Well, I don’t think there’s much point hanging around in here any longer, is there?"

Connor shifted his weight, trying to gather himself for an escape attempt. This wasn’t as easy as he might’ve hoped. Seeking to move around in a body bag wasn’t just unpleasant, it was biologically challenging. Every breath was a negotiation between air and plastic and his limbs dragging against the slick lining. 

He knew from rather extensive training that the key to getting out of confined spaces wasn’t to use brute force. It was about implementing a controlled sequence of activity. You didn’t want to be flailing about, that could make things worse, you needed to treat your escape like a puzzle box.

First came a bit of proper orientation. Connor gently pushed against the ceiling of the bag until he met firm resistance. It wasn’t metal, he thought. No, it was some sort of plastic. Maybe fibreglass? That would make contextual sense. Although hospital mortuary drawers were usually stainless steel, newer models would use composite insulation panels for easier sanitation. About 50–60cm high, he reckoned. Refrigerated. And with a magnetic lock outside. They shouldn’t be sealed from the inside. They didn’t usually need to be.

Connor twisted, and the bag groaned in response. Sweat broke across his ribs, and there was a fresh sting where the chest wound pulled against the gauze that had been stuck over it. He paused for a moment, waited out the wave of nausea, and then tried again. 

Elbow. Shoulder. Shift of weight. Then he turned onto his side and winced as the bag pressed against his face in a horribly claustrophobic moment. There’d be all sorts of irony if he ended up suffocating himself to death trying to escape from a body bag, wouldn’t there? It’d be the talk of his taskforce for years.

"Stop it," he snapped. “Focus!”

Then, Connor brought both his knees up, slowly and awkwardly, curling himself up like a dying beetle. He took a few settling breaths, and then he kicked out. Not especially hard, but more than hard enough. Whatever was above him gave way with a plastic creak.

He kicked again, and then again, this time adding a bit of rotational twist power from his hips. The panel popped. It didn’t quite open, but it certainly shifted enough to disrupt the seal and to allow a draft of cold air to slide in. 

Connor pressed his head upward into the space, causing pain to shoot through his cheek wound. But that pain was his and it meant his nerves and muscles were still working. It meant, despite everything else, he was still in control. 

Another push and, this time, a much harder twist kick.

He was rewarded with a sudden clunk of something snapping, followed by a rattle of a sliding tray engaging. And then, very slowly, the drawer rolled open a few inches. Just enough to reveal the fluorescent flicker of a mortuary’s ceiling lights. 

“Oh! Well done, Mr Connor! That was positively resourceful of you! Shall I initiate an alarm to alert the attending staff that you are now, as it were, un-dead?”

“No,” Connor said, panting. “Let’s not ruin their surprise.”