Guards came, and guards went from their station. Two changes of shift so far. That's how I kept time.
Twice the automated voice told us to step away from the forcefield only signalled the start and end of meal time now, where the guards will drop a few tasteless nutrition tubes and bottles of water, and collect the containers later.
While I counted time with the shift and food rotations, Trey's talkative nature helped pass time away in this cell without nothing to look at except guards and prisoners.
Occasionally, he would talk himself to sleep after munching on the tube and spitting out the contents, since his biological body needed rest to heal in its own way.
In his sleepy state, he would use the open sonic washing toilet to piss in. I counted five times. Fortunately, the engineers of the battle fortress equipped the cells with state-of-the-art sterilising cleaners, so no foul smells lingered.
I don't miss the time when I used to feel the intermittent urges to toilet.
With the atomites in my system recycling every nutrient, I could control my intake to limit the frequency of pissing and shitting.
I could see every prisoner using the sonic washing toilets, exposing themselves under the guards' voyeuristic eyes. The lack of privacy irked me.
I remained silent amidst his snoring from below me, deliberating the advantages of explaining the true reality of our situation, which Trey thought of as a virtual experience.
Would his mental state break down?
The rustling of the bed below and a loud yawn alerted me to his awakening.
"Hey you there?" He asked.
"Yup."
"I've been thinking… what do you call my game masters?"
His sudden question made me aware of a seed of doubt planted in his head. Not by me, but probably others.
"Heard of Iktomins?"
I gambled on the question to observe his reaction. If the Iktomins are as smart and cunning as rumoured, they would cover their tracks.
Trey stood up and faced me while I laid on my side. His now badly bruised face drained of color at the mention of the Iktomin.
He had heard their name before.
Guess they didn't cover their tracks so well.
"S-s-say again?" He stammered.
"Iktomins."
He stared at me blankly and asked, "Why do some alien NPCs mention their names?!"
His persistent reference to us as aliens or NPCs deluded him from the fact that he is the actual alien, not us. To him, any 'alien' was some non playing character in his 'game'.
Some? How much interaction did he have with the other spacefaring species, I wondered.
"What do they say?" I asked, pretending to be stupid.
Yes, the seed of doubt had sprouted in his head.
"They told me I was an experimental subject…"
Whoever revealed the truth to him didn't realize the extent and depth of his brainwashing, but at least made him suspicious of his situation.
"What do you think?" He wore a wary look on his face with the question as he folded his arms across his chest.
Trey's defensive body language hinted at his unwillingness to accept any view other than he was in this 'game'.
Death would spare him the psychological trauma and pain of finding out what they had done to him. The foreseeable eventuality determined Trey may never return and integrate with his pre-spacefaring society.
He told me about Earth and its people. The level of primitive technology they held may detect those implants in him from what he said.
"Well, it doesn't matter what I think, it is whether you want to see what you want to see, or accept what's in front of you," I replied.
"What do you mean by see only what I want to see?"
"Either this is virtual reality or this is reality." I shrugged as I pushed myself up and jumped off the bed.
Trey sat back down on his bunk bed, clutching his head with his hands.
"I don't know, I may go crazy, but I feel everything, like throbbing pain and even my heart pumping faster than it should."
"Do you feel unwell?"
"I don't know how I feel. Is it real or am I wasting away in some chair which links me to this virtual world? What do you say?"
The latter situation may be preferable, even as distasteful as it sounded, because the truth will be too hard for his sanity to handle.
Behind the forcefield, I turned away and watched the guards standing around their workstations, while thinking of a way to answer Trey's question. One guard, a Haolean, looked up at our cell momentarily and said something to his Perunian counterpart.
If only they didn't use a sound barrier forcefield, I could easily learn of what they were saying. My optical implants narrowed the focus on their moving lips.
'When are those cyberneticists coming?' That's what I could lip-read from the Haolean moving lips.
The Perunian threw me a quick glance and shrugged.
'Two rotations Eden time' was what I got from his reply.
Time was running out for Trey and I. Well, Trey would probably be in a greater danger if those cyberneticists expressed an interest in his implants.
Maybe I should really look at Trey's implant. It may be my only opportunity to learn about the Iktomin progress in cybernetics.
"Hey, you listening?"
So engrossed was I in observing the conversation between the guards, I ignored Trey's rambling about the same old virtual reality nonsense in the background.
I faced Trey again and smiled. "I have no opinion. Even if I told you what I think of as real, you will take me as a block of code programmed to convince you otherwise. Reality is subjective."
"Like the reality of these lines?" He showed me a sunken line in his skin of the wrist where the Iktomins operated on.
"To me, they are real," I replied truthfully.
With a sigh, he laid back on his bed and turned away with a loud sigh.
"I never asked to play these stupid games. I just want to go home."
It reminded me of the first time the Kamui cyberneticists surgically inserted those cybernetic implants into me as a child.
Like Trey, no one asked me what I wanted.
Then again, what do I want now?
Unlike Trey, I have no more home system to return, except for wandering in a beaten up and antiquated war cruiser through space. My current mercenary life only involved mundane jobs to pay for parts, food and supplies, letting the droid swarm scavenge or mine on planets what they could.
Only meaning in this dreary, long drawn existence is to find out what caused the destruction of both Kamuy and Inti planetary systems.
I don't understand my obsession with an extinction-level space anomaly, which took away everything I knew.
My motivation isn't logical or directed at revenge. Or even helping others.
How can I take revenge on a cosmic phenomenon, if it is one?
Everything about me started from a laboratory dish used to modify genes and eliminate defective mutations and slowly rose to weaponising me.
Maybe they forgot to take out the defective cognitive genes governing curiosity and obsession.
The central Kamuy military hospital personnel only cajoled me back then about how special I was as a military-class Kamuy, whose destiny was to protect our species in this quadrant against all threats.
I scoffed at my once ambitious thoughts of a high flying future with the Kamuy Military.
Maybe my people brainwashed me too.
All of us, military class Kamuy, acted our part as offensive and defensive weapons. Nothing more than cheap lives to sacrifice for the greater good.
Yet here I am, the sole survivor, living on as a mercenary, eking barely enough to survive.
I doubt Trey wanted to be here. All his nostalgic talk about his home world, Earth, only made me realise that both of us played a game we never wanted.