Chapter 2

THE COLLAR

The routine Alexander had been forced into over the past several days was nothing short of torture. He couldn’t say how many days had passed. The only clues came from the cell itself: the pipe embedded in the rear wall, and the toilet tucked into its shallow cubicle. Both activated on what he estimated to be an hourly schedule.

He’d started counting the subtle vibrations that preceded each cycle. A few seconds later, a thin stream of watery slop would spit from the pipe. The toilet flushed at the same moment. He’d managed to count past a hundred of those intervals before losing track somewhere along the way.

The constant pressure to be ready, awake or not, was grinding him down. Sleep came in snatches. Never deep enough, never long enough. He’d started dreaming strange things: fractured images of streets he didn’t recognize, faces that spoke in static, machines that bled. Each time he surfaced from sleep, his heart was already pounding, unsure if he’d missed the slop.

That had to be intentional. Not just to keep him fed, but to drain him. Break his spirit. Disrupt any sense of control or reason. Strip away his sanity until all that remained was a starving, desperate animal.

Maybe I’m already crazy.

The thought came uninvited, but it wasn’t unfamiliar. Easier, in some ways, than believing he’d died and awakened in some alternate timeline. Same body, just younger. And in a world where aliens and superhumans existed.

Alexander laughed under his breath. The sound echoed off the cell walls, sharp and lonely.

But the memories feel real.

Too real. The events were too detailed, too nuanced, almost like warped reflections of the ones he thought were his.

Assuming they’re even mine.

“Enough,” he snapped, driving a fist into the wall. Pain jolted up his arm. “I’m not losing my mind. It’s the isolation. That’s all this is. I’ll figure it out.”

A soft buzz scratched at the base of his skull, almost tickling his ears. It had started a few days earlier. At first, he’d blamed the flickering light above, but he soon realized it wasn’t an electrical malfunction. It was in his head.

The buzzing faded slowly, replaced by a pressure that pulsed through his skull. He clutched his ears on instinct, even though it made no difference.

Maybe he’d suffered a traumatic brain injury. That would explain the buzzing. The confusion. The feeling that reality was stretched thin at the edges.

He reached for the collar again. Fingers slid under the smooth, metallic band around his neck. He tugged and twisted. Nothing. Frustrated, he used both hands, pulling until the muscles in his arms shook and his neck screamed in protest.

The buzzing surged in response. Sharper and more aggressive. Pain spiked behind his eyes and coiled into the base of his skull. He let go with a gasp, vision swimming.

Alexander’s eyes snapped open upon hearing vibrations. He stepped toward the pipe out of reflex, then stopped.

No, I am in control. It is my choice.

He stepped away and lay down on the slab instead, curling his legs to fit the space designed to be just a little too short. The slop spilled and drained away without him.

It was a pointless act of rebellion. But it was his, and that mattered.

He startled awake to the next vibration. His body moved before his mind caught up. Another hour gone. The constant disruptions kept him from proper rest, but missing the regular slop delivery would slowly lead to worse malnutrition and dehydration.

There was no good choice.

He stood with a groan and shuffled over to the pipe, just in time to cup his hands and catch the thin stream of chalky liquid. He drank it without thinking.

Still a choice. Still mine to make.

Sitting back on the slab, he rubbed sleep from his eyes and forced himself to breathe. A slow, intentional inhale through the nose. A measured exhale through the mouth.

He tried to thread the two lives together. The one he remembered, and the one this body had supposedly lived. They didn’t match, but the dissonance no longer surprised him.

This is real. Whether I understand it or not.

He looked down at his hands. Wrong. Younger, and with fewer scars and calluses than he remembered. They’d been proof of the years he’d spent working with machines.

It couldn’t be madness. It had to be something else. But if it wasn’t madness, then what was left?

Something impossible.

He maintained his controlled breathing. Gradually, and for the first time since he’d awoken on the tray heading for cremation, he felt clarity return.

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Santiago Systems A-1 Brain-Computer Interface

Status: Sleep Mode

The words weren’t spoken, but he heard them. They formed within his thoughts like a notification appearing on a mental screen.

ALERT: Host Cognitive Stability Detected

Reinitializing Core Functions…

Alexander swallowed, throat dry.

I didn’t imagine it. It’s some sort of brain implant.

He felt pressure bloom at the base of his skull. Reaching back, he found a soft bit of fake flesh that gave way, revealing something hard and artificial beneath.

Memories surfaced. The waiver. Anaesthesia. An implant. They’d said it would help him master his powers, that they were standard for everyone receiving the serum.

They lied.

It was to control me if I got powers they didn’t like.

Scratching gently, the skin gave way to reveal a metallic port, some kind of physical interface for the implant to be seated in. The skin closed back around it easily as a wave of discomfort washed over him.

External Device Detected

Designation: Santiago Systems X-3 CTE Collar

Status: Active

ERROR 0525: Connection Request Denied.

BCI Operating in Isolated Mode.

Authorize Command and Control Link to Collar?

Alexander clenched his jaw, closed his eyes, and tried one last time to wake up in a less crazy reality. Nothing changed when he opened them.

CTE. Containment? Termination? Enforcement?

It could be a bomb collar. He’d considered it from the moment he found the damn thing around his neck, likening it to some of his favorite movies. But if superpowers really existed, maybe the collar suppressed those instead.

Maybe it does both.

He hesitated to answer. Was it voice activated? Did he need to subvocalize? What if establishing a connection was enough to set off the bomb collar? If it were a bomb collar.

It’s totally a bomb collar. I’m calling it right now.

“Authorized,” he rasped, wincing at the potential explosion.

Authorized Received

Connection Established

Collar Slaved to Host Implant

Operations:

1. Diagnostics

2. Interface

3. Deactivate

Alexander swallowed, considering each line carefully. He stifled the urge to select option three.

It’s possible that deactivating it will raise an alarm somewhere.

“Diagnostics.”

Status Report: Santiago Systems X-3 CTE Collar

Mode: Active Containment

Containment Field: Enabled

Power Suppression: Maximum

Locator Beacon: Online

Biometric Telemetry: Streaming

Failsafe: Armed

Remote Override: Enabled

Recommendation:

Disable Failsafe and Remote Override

It’s giving me advice now? Some sort of onboard intelligence?

Alexander exhaled, not realizing he’d been holding his breath. The device was everything he’d feared. ‘Failsafe’ obviously meant ‘necktie explosive’.

And leaving anyone with a remote trigger? No thanks.

That meant he needed to shut down the remote override first, just in case anything else tripped an alarm. Then he could disable the failsafe, and finally the suppression. Assuming everything went to plan, he could leave the tracking and data feeds to make it look like things were operating normally.

And if they do detect something is wrong, someone’s going to have to come down and fix it. That’d be an opportunity too.

“Interface,” Alexander commanded with a whisper. “Then disable the remote override, the failsafe, and the suppression. In that order.”

Warning: Disabling power suppression will trigger an automatic alert.

Authorize Alert Suppression?

It hadn’t escaped his notice that the implant was growing more coherent over time.

“Yes, do it. And keep everything else reporting normally.”

For a few heartbeats, Alexander wondered if he’d just made a fatal mistake.

Remote Override: Disabled

Failsafe: Disabled

Power Suppression: Disabled

188 Alerts Suppressed

Alexander barely had time to process the final line of the implant’s report before the sensation struck.

He was being watched. The certainty that washed over him was like nothing he’d ever felt before. It was the type of knowledge people just had. Like knowing the sun would rise. Or that he had to inhale and exhale to survive another minute.

His eyes lifted instinctively to the ceiling fixture. It was a squat, reinforced light encased in mesh. He’d looked at it a hundred times before without thinking, but this time he felt it.

I’m not paranoid. And I’m definitely not crazy.

He snorted.

Okay, so I might be a little crazy. I am talking to myself, after all.

Alexander forced himself to breathe and slowly looked away from the device. He might have already given himself away, but it couldn’t hurt to pretend. Closing his eyes, he willed himself to relax and waited to see if the sensations would fade.

It did not. If anything, the absence of his eyesight sharpened his new awareness. It was almost as if he could reach out and touch the device, tracing its form behind the armored mesh. Above it, and running up into the ceiling, he felt a pulse… almost like a heartbeat, occurring in intervals too precise to be random.

He kept his eyes closed and stood, carefully stepping from one side of the cell to the other. As he did, he felt the device tracking his motion. It wasn’t the device moving physically, but something inside of it. Deeper. Like an algorithm adjusting its focus as he moved about.

It’s a camera… and I can feel it watching me, sense the data packets it’s sending out, and maybe the current feeding into it.

Alexander took another breath, this one almost ragged. No matter how much he’d hoped this was a temporary delusion, that perhaps he was having some coma dream and would wake up in a hospital any moment, he couldn’t deny the truth any longer.

With the power suppression disabled, some part of his mind that had been shackled burst to life. And with it came a sense of familiarity.

And a name.

Technopathy.