Paralyzed

***

I saw my end.

Dom lay on the ground with a gaping hole in his chest.

Alba was missing an arm, her face frozen in disbelief, an expression of defeat etched across it.

And amid all this, more and more soldiers kept arriving, surrounding us.

“Inertia, I’m sorry. This wasn’t the safest place for you,” Alba said as she fell to her knees, unable to believe what had just happened.

I was devastated, unwilling to accept that everything had gone so wrong.

Where was Chefe? Luna? Was there no one to help me?

I took a step back. I couldn’t accept this... I hadn’t come to 6025 to live like a lab rat.

Suddenly, the phone in my right pocket started heating up and quickly began burning my thigh.

“Ouch!” I screamed in desperation. My leg! At this rate, I’m going to lose it!

I reflexively tried to pull the phone away from my leg, but the armor I was wearing was resistant and unaffected by the heat. So I pulled my right arm, still inside the armor they had built for me, and desperately tried to tear the phone off with my hand, but it had already fused to my body.

It seemed that by then I was already anesthetized; I couldn’t feel anything, even with a flaming object lodged in my right thigh. My nerve endings had already been completely destroyed.

“Inertia, are you okay?” Alba asked, looking at me with concern.

“I think I—”

Before I could finish, a piece of the phone detached and began moving inside my body. It burned me from within; I could barely breathe. I felt it rising, using my bones as a path until it reached my spine. Every inch it traveled left me trembling, as if it were ripping me apart from the inside.

My vision went white, and I felt my consciousness slipping away.

Am I dying—?

Then everything went black, and I finally lost consciousness.

It didn’t last more than a few seconds, and I regained consciousness. When I woke up, I was lying on the ground, staring up at the night sky. I felt the sand against my skin and the sea breeze brushing over me. That’s when I realized I was without my armor.

But just like when we wake up from a nap, memories of a recent dream — no... a nightmare — came back to me: my hair consumed by fire, my arm turning into a weapon while I screamed and cried in pain. I didn’t know if it had only been my imagination, so I propped myself up and looked at my arm.

My right arm had turned into a weapon. That wasn’t human; I wasn’t human anymore. As I looked at my arm, I saw the orange strands of my hair falling over my shoulder. What have I become?

I stood up unsteadily, and then I was struck by paralysis. I don’t know how to describe it, but the sensation was like being in a trance. I was conscious, yet I couldn’t control my own body.

Before I could understand or even try to stop it, my right arm lifted on its own and aimed at a soldier in front of me. Four shots fired into his chest, and he dropped. But before his body even hit the ground, all the soldiers around us had their guns trained on me.

Alba’s father screamed desperately for them not to shoot me. I couldn’t understand why he wanted to keep me alive... I wasn’t human anymore, at least I didn’t feel like one.

My body turned to the left, and my right arm lifted, aiming at the soldier beside Alba. He reflexively raised his weapon at me, but before he could fire, I felt another seven shots tear out of my arm.

Everything went silent, and no one dared to move. At that moment, my sense of reason returned, and I tried to regain control of my body, but I couldn’t. I was nothing more than a bystander.

Someone, please help!

I tried to speak, but once again it was like being trapped in a nightmare where you scream and no one hears you.

My arm rose again, but this time the weapons switched places. In that instant, I felt a tactile sensation I had never imagined experiencing in my life. It was as if, in the middle of my arm, there were four joints, each rotating around the other. The weapon wasn’t fused to my arm — it was my arm.

“What is this?! Inertia, what happened to you?!” Alba said, her voice trembling as she looked at me in fear.

I don’t know, Alba! Please help me! I screamed, hoping she could hear me.

But someone answered in my place — it was Rei.

“Inertia, what do you mean?! Alba, what is going on here?”

But where was his voice coming from? My mouth was closed while he spoke.

“Inertia, lower the weapon. We didn’t come to hurt you; that’s not our intention!” Alba’s father insisted.

Don’t lie. You may not have come here to hurt me, but that doesn’t say anything about the future.

“Alba, I don’t know how to explain, but I think I can fight back. Let me help you—”

While Rei spoke, a kind of gravitational net immobilized me and pinned me to the ground. Lying there, I saw soldiers restraining Alba, who no longer put up any resistance.

“Alba, you’re coming with us,” her father said.

I felt the trance fade, and I came back to myself. The sensation was like finally being able to breathe again after holding my breath for two minutes straight.

To be sure, I tried to move my body, but I could only wiggle the fingers of my left hand because the rest was still trapped by the net.

“Andrea, look at her neck. She’s one of us.”

One of the soldiers pointed his weapon at me and pressed on with his questioning.

“Was it all a trap?”

“No. I saw everything Pedro was doing behind our backs. She’s human,” Andrea, Alba’s father, confirmed.

“But Andrea, we can’t take her in this condition. I see it here, and our laws apply to her now.”

“Don’t be fooled by appearances. She is human; we’re taking her,” Andrea insisted.

“No, you can’t, Father! Not without her permission! Inertia, you’re one of us now, deny everything he—”

One of the soldiers silenced Alba by shoving her face into the sand. But why?

“Andrea, that’s enough. We have plenty of witnesses here,” said a familiar voice.

Chefe! He, Luna, and a huge group of people surrounded us, each one holding a special weapon.

Andrea completely ignored Chefe. He didn’t take his eyes off me for a single moment. Then he removed the net that had been immobilizing me and extended his hand to help me up.

“Inertia, I don’t know what kind of lies they told you about us, but we’re not bad people. We won’t exploit you in laboratories or kill you. Nowy holds the greatest technological and financial power. Our proposition is simple: you help us, and we’ll help you with whatever you wish. I promise.”

Oh, but of course. They would never harm me... they just tried to take me by force because of the situation, right? Does he think I’m an idiot or what?

“I’ve already said it once, and I’ll say it as many times as necessary. I won’t go with you. I want to stay in Kera,” I said as I stood up on my own.

“It seems you already have an idea about us without even knowing us... but know this, we’ll accept you when you decide to change your mind, and you will change,” he said.

Andrea seemed obsessive and manipulative... having someone with a narcissistic profile like his leading a country felt like too much to me. But I won’t deny that, as a skilled manipulator, he managed to get into my head. I wanted to uncover the reason behind his certainty that I would change my mind. What was it that I didn’t know? Or was that certainty just another carefully crafted lie?

“You already have your answer. Get out of here!”

Chefe said as he approached, then lifted Alba, who was still immobilized, her face covered in sand.

“Fall back.”

That was the only command Andrea gave, and it was enough for all the soldiers to retreat from the shore. They withdrew, passing through Chefe’s people, who glared at them as they went.

Andrea finally broke his gaze from me and left with the two soldiers waiting at his side.

I looked at Alba, almost crying with relief.

In all the simulations I had created for possible outcomes of this conflict, I had never imagined one like this. My mind eased, and the same relief washed over my body as I lost my strength and slipped into unconsciousness the very next second.

End of Report 17