The dream was always the same: I woke up, and I was in a world gone white. White walls, white floor, white ceiling, white bulbs in the naked light fixtures. One wall had been replaced by a mirror, and when I sat up and looked at myself, I was wearing a white hospital gown. The only color left in the world was my hair—brown—my eyes—brown—and the blue ID band around my left wrist. I raised my arm to look at it.
SUBJECT 7C—DESIGNATE GEORGIA MASON
The intercom clicked to life, and Dr. Thomas’s voice filled the room, cool, distant, and artificially compassionate. “Good morning, Georgia. Did you sleep well?”
“I had a dream,” I said, still looking at the ID band. “I dreamt Shaun came and found me.” I dreamt we’d toppled the CDC. I dreamt we’d saved the President, and lost Becks, and saved the country, if not the world. I dreamt of Canada, and the wild green fields of freedom. All those things seemed so far away now, like they had never been possible.
“That’s good.” Dr. Thomas sounded pleased. I tensed. It was never good when the doctors responsible for my care sounded that happy. It usually meant pain to come, and more restrictions on my already limited privileges. “We designed that dream for you, Georgia, to make you feel better about your ongoing confinement. Did he break you out of here? Did he take you away from all this? To Canada, perhaps?”
I went cold. “Yes,” I admitted, having long since learned that lying to the men who kept me captive did me no good at all. The fact that I could even consider lying was a testament to what they’d done to me. The woman I’d never been but remembered being would have died before she lied, no matter what the circumstances were. The most she’d ever been willing to do was withhold information, not sharing the things she didn’t consider important. That vicious dedication to honesty had been enough to get her killed, and get me created, with my greater talent for saying one thing when I meant another.
That didn’t make it a fair trade. I liked being alive—it was a fun way to spend my time—but I would have given it up in an instant if it could have meant being the original Georgia Mason again, not a cheap knockoff. Shaun would have torn down the walls of the world to get back to the original. He didn’t even know that I existed.
And now even my dreams weren’t safe from the men who’d made me.
“That’s very good,” said Dr. Thomas. “We’re going to be making some adjustments to your programming over the next few weeks, Georgia. It’s important that you know what we’re planning to do, because we need to see if awareness allows you to fight the changes. We need you to struggle. Not that it’s going to do any good. You were born in this room. You’re going to die here. But you knew that, didn’t you? Even in your sweetest dreams, you knew that seeing the sun—seeing Shaun—was too good to be true.”
I threw back the covers, intending to leap out of bed and hammer my hands against the mirror. They were probably standing right on the other side, watching me, judging me, measuring my reactions. Well, I’d give them a reaction. I’d give them an explosion. I’d hit that glass until it shattered, and then we’d see who was trapped here. I wasn’t trapped here with them. They were trapped here with me.
But when I pulled the blankets off my legs, my legs weren’t there. My body ended in a pair of carefully bandaged stumps. Dr. Thomas was laughing, his voice drifting through the intercom like the judgment of an angry god.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “You must have been so deep in the dream that you forgot. We removed those the last time you tried to run, Georgia. You can’t run anymore. You’re never going to get away from here. You’re never going to leave us. We’ll keep you until we’re done with you, and then we’ll keep you in jars, sliced and sectioned for study, until you give up all your secrets—so give up, give up, give up—”
The dream always ended the same way, too: I woke screaming, clawing at the air, with the winter chill heavy on my skin and Shaun’s hands pinning my shoulders to the bed, Shaun’s voice cutting through my cries as he pleaded with me to—
“Breathe, George, breathe, they can’t hurt you anymore, they’re not here, and if they were here, I’d throw a fucking party, right after I shot them into Swiss cheese, so come on, Georgia, breathe.”
My vision cleared and there he was, bending over me, his knees planted in the mattress and his hands holding me down, keeping me from hurting myself. I stopped flailing, giving one final kick for the sake of feeling the blankets against my heels. My body was still my own. My mind belonged to me. My life belonged to me—to me, and to the man who was looking down on me with such terrified concern. My best friend. My adoptive brother, weird as that past relationship was in the light of our present one. The only person I’d ever loved enough to die for.
“Better now?” asked Shaun.
“Better,” I said, and forced a smile.
He watched me for a moment longer before he took his hands off my shoulders and collapsed, all but boneless, to the mattress beside me. “That dream again, huh?”
I nodded wordlessly. He didn’t need me to describe the dream: He’d heard it all before, over and over again, on the nights when I woke up screaming. It wasn’t as bad as it had been when the dream was new. Back then, I’d managed to claw off strips of my own skin trying to remove the tracking devices my subconscious mind believed were planted there, the ones that would inevitably lead the CDC to our position and put me back in that featureless white room. It didn’t matter that the CDC as I remembered it no longer existed, subsumed as they’d been by the EIS and by the sweeping policy changes put in place by the Ryman administration. The CDC had created me, growing me from a few scraps of DNA and programming my oldest memories from a combination of the electrical patterns of the original Georgia Mason’s brain and their own ideas about what sort of person I should be. I was their daughter and their masterwork, and one day, they were going to come for me.
When they did, though, Shaun was going to be ready. I could see that simple, sincere truth in his eyes, and so I allowed my own eyes to close as I nestled up against him, breathing deeply, and waited for sleep to come back and claim me again.
It was going to be a long wait. As Shaun rubbed my back, and the sound of the owls going about their business outside drifted in through the windows, I found that I was okay with that.