Hurricane Heart

Hurricane

I had been raiding the Vaults beneath Berlin the night I was captured. It was me and two other Dreamers, and evidently the authorities had sensed our appearance. They cornered me; four men with guns pointed in my face, and there was nothing I could do.

Well, apart from help the others. I always said I would not go down without a fight, so I cried aloud for the other two to run. They heard me, and they turned to see the men moving towards them, realising I was already trapped, and they took flight. Both of them escaped, but they were pursued for a while by the security guards.

One of the men came closer, and I could scarcely even resist him for the guns pointing in my face. He handcuffed my hands tightly behind my back, wrenching my gun from my pocket and passing it to his colleague.

He and another gripped one of my arms each, smiling at me in a way that would have made me punch them had I been free to do so, and began to march me down the corridor. Eventually, we ascended from the Vaults into a government building, and they walked me outside, now the middle of the night, and threw me into the back of a black van, locking the door as I screamed for help.

‘Shut up,’ one of them hissed. ‘Or I will shut you up.’

I knew what they could do to me, and as the doors slammed in my face I began to realise the utter hopelessness of my situation. I was driven for what felt like about an hour through the city, and when we stopped and the doors opened, we were outside a large, long, two-storey building with almost no windows, built of grey concrete, like a hospital, but even more soulless and hopeless. Even from outside, I could sense all the dreams that this place killed.

They marched me inside, going to the reception area where they spoke to a woman and had me led down another short corridor. The floors were metal and the walls were grey and the lights were down low for the night, but of course the Institution operated for twenty-four hours a day. It was the most dream-shattering place I had ever been in, and knowing what was about to happen was already beginning to destroy me.

They led me into a small, dimly lit room with three chairs positioned around a table. They unshackled my hands, but kept a firm grip on me as they practically threw me into one of the chairs, strapping my wrists and ankles in so that I could not move before I knew what was going on.

The details were all strange and confusing, but I was being hooked up to a lie detector; that much was obvious. It was a small black box on the table, which had lots of wires coming from it, which were in turn strapped to my left index finger and my chest. I couldn’t even struggle anymore; I was long since defeated.

A man and a woman walked in, both wearing navy blue uniforms, and both with the same cold, emotionless expressions on their faces, as though their lives were completely devoid of anything to enrich them. They sat at the table and began to ask me questions.

The first was straightforward.

‘Are you a member of the organisation which calls itself ‘the Dreamers?’’ the woman asked, her tone abrupt and business-like.

I tried to lie, but it was no use. I took a deep breath and focused as well as I could on lowering my pulse and heart rate, keeping cool despite the fear pounding through my body, but the lie detectors were almost foolproof. It was incredibly rare that anyone was ever able to lie themselves out of an Institution, and I’d been discovered in the Vaults, so the evidence was against me.

Even when they established that I was a Dreamer, they still wanted to know more. They wanted names and dates of birth and home city. They also wanted to know what I was doing under the city, but the detector could only sense answers to ‘yes’ and ‘no’ questions, and I genuinely didn’t know what I was going to the Vaults for—just to find whatever I could.

‘So you’re a thief too?’ asked the woman.

‘No!’ I snapped indignantly. The lie detector bleeped and sent an electric shock through me to show that I was not telling the truth.

They tried to find out the location of our base, but I wouldn’t give anything away. I refused to answer anything that I thought might give away valuable information, no matter how many electric shocks they shot through me.

When they finished with the lie detector, another man came in, and unstrapped my left foot. He attached a sort of tracking device around my ankle, and then strapped a hospital-like bracelet round my wrist. Then they untied me, cuffing my hands behind my back again, and marched me out of the room forcefully. I was led into another, similarly blank room where they took my photo from all angles; measured my height and weighed me; took retina scans and fingerprint records. Eventually, I left this second room, and they led me up stairs and along more dark, emotionless corridors before reaching a hefty door, which they unlocked and threw me inside of.

One of them took away my handcuffs, and I turned, ready to give him all I had, but he sensed I was a dangerous one, and he kept a firm hold on me. He searched my pockets, and they handed me a set of clothes—a grey sort of thing, and grey sneakers, and told me to get changed. They gave me meal times and exercise times and examination times, and they left me alone, in almost total darkness but for the tiniest light in the ceiling. The cell had padded walls, like one in a mental asylum, with no furniture and not even any windows. Already, I felt like I was going mad. I huddled in the corner, curled up into myself, and for the first time in well over a year, I cried.

I cried all night, and then I began to claw at the walls, and when the room began to lighten with some sort of unnatural daylight filter, and they returned with a tray, which they slid through a letterbox-shaped opening in the bottom of my door, I was already broken. I knew what they were going to do to me.

And by no means did it stop there. After breakfast, my door was opened, and I followed the masses—silent Dreamers, all in their grey uniforms with pale, drawn faces and empty eyes, to wherever they were going. It was like a large bathroom, where we were allowed to use the toilet and shower, as long as we did it in silence. Apparently, social time was not for a while yet.

Then we all went into another room. When everyone was in there—there were about thirty of us in total, but that was just ‘our block;’ a small section of the whole Institution, they read out a list of names, followed by times. I was one of them, and my time was ten thirty am.

At ten thirty, or so I assumed, as there was no clock in my cell, a guard came for me, leading me down the bleak, metal corridor and back to near the entrance where there was a series of small rooms, all offices, by the looks of it, and I was led in through the smooth automatic doors and strapped into a chair.

On the opposite side of the desk I sat in front of was a man. At first, I would have described his face as merely being stern, possibly also uninterested, but I began to realise soon after that it was blank, empty, lifeless, dreamless. He was probably in his late thirties, and had clean-cut, short hair and brown eyes that were so cold and vacant that they alone terrified me.

‘My name is Dr Bauer,’ he said coolly, ‘and I am going to be your doctor for your time in the Institution.’

He began to explain all the rules to me.

‘Every two days, you will be brought to me, here in my office, at the same time,’ he explained, sounding like he would be treating me kindly if I was the sort of person he could ever consider liking. But I was a Dreamer, and he was a destroyer. So he would never like me.

‘As it is your first time,’ he continued, ‘for about the next week or two, we will be delving deep into your brain to try and identify the root of your rebellion, and of course trying to zap it out of you. After that, the sessions will be the same for the following six months: every two days, you will come in, and the sessions will be much shorter. It will be a simple electrocution, followed by an injection, which consists of your medication. Once a week, we will do a brief assessment of your progress, and after the six months, you will be released. Is that understood?’

I refused to talk; I would not give him the pleasure of my forced agreement. So I just sat.

‘I repeat,’ he said, his voice calm but firm. ‘Is that understood?’

‘Whatever,’ I muttered, still refusing to strictly commit to anything.

He took this as a confirmation, and then began strapping a wire around my wrist, with a sort of padding bit in it. It came from a box on his desk which I hadn’t noticed a moment ago, and which in turn was plugged into the wall. He then took more wires still, attaching three to my forehead and the side of my face.

And then it began.

Pain more intense than any I had ever experienced shot through my body. I think I screamed, but it was hard to tell. Electrical volts of immeasurable numbers shot through my body, right from the devices on my head and straight into my brain. My mind was on fire, and nothing in the world made any sense. After what was probably about five minutes, during which time the whole world began to blur and strange nightmares plagued my vision; the only sense I could make from the agony; it stopped. He unstrapped me, and I was left, shaking and convulsing and holding my head which still throbbed painfully.

‘There,’ he said, his measured tone making him sound all the more sinister. I began to retch, thinking I was going to be sick, but however many times I heaved I could throw up nothing.

‘Just wait a minute until you feel a bit better,’ he said. The world was a little blurry, and spun slowly as though I had just been revolved round very fast in a spinning chair. It was hideous. I was a wreck, and this was only my first day. I truly believed I would not survive six months. I was going to rot and die in here—whatever I believed about myself, I was weak. There was no way I was going to make it out alive. ‘Now, how do you feel?’

‘Fucking terrible,’ I gasped, retching once again, coughing violently, but achieving nothing.

Dr Bauer’s face clouded with faint traces of anger. ‘Now, let’s not have language like that, shall we?’

I swore quietly, and presumably he couldn’t hear, and felt sure I would punch him if I so much as had the strength. But there were guards and Shadow Police and CCTV, and I’d never get away with it.

I took a moment to hold my head and let the dizziness ease, and when the room finally stopped turning, I sat up again.

‘Now, you won’t have to go through that every day,’ he said, ‘well, that is if you comply. Of course, it can also be used as a punishment if you choose to rebel, and I can keep it on for much longer than that if I need to.’

I clenched my fists so tightly I could feel my nails beginning to penetrate my flesh. I just had to not hurt him, and I’d be alright once I got out of here.

He then moved back round the desk and rolled up the sleeve of my right arm, taking it firmly in his hand and producing a large and unpleasant looking needle. I turned away, not wanting to see it anywhere near my skin.

‘Now,’ he continued, ‘this is a simple dose of amnesia-inducing drug. This is your medication, and you will be having the same injection every few days until you leave. Gradually, the memories of your rebellious life will get fainter and fainter, until you can scarcely remember them; at least, that is temporarily. When that day comes, you will be able to leave.’

And I did, indeed forget. As promised, I returned to the office about twice a week for six months. Dr Bauer gave me the electric shocks every time I went for the first month, and then again on occasion when he heard I’d been rebellious—which could be quite often when I was in the right mood, and every time I would end up screaming as electrical volts fried my brain, finishing up a convulsing, heaving wreck, and he began to break me all too quickly.

The memories of the Dreamers and my old life became a little fainter with every dose of medication, but only temporarily. As of this point, there were no ways for them to permanently erase those memories without erasing every memory I had—and that would be counter-productive for the government, as I would then need re-educating. Of course, when they did finally invent a way to permanently erase specific memories, the consequences would be devastating, but there was no need to worry about that until it happened. For now, we were safe.

So every few days, I would be injected, and I would black out briefly most of the time, and when I came round I would have no idea about anything—I wouldn’t have just forgotten the Dreamers; I wouldn’t even know my own name. I would be led, dazed and confused and nightmare-like, the ghost of my former self, back to my cell, and during the course of the next couple of hours, the memories would return, though a little fainter every time, as though I was watching them through a veil that grew thicker every day.

The problem was that forgetting did not mean contentment. Even five months in to my rehab, when ‘Dreamer,’ was nothing more than a word I associated tenuously with freedom, I still knew something was wrong. It was their way of breaking us: make us forget everything, and we would be happy. Make us forget almost everything, and we would be broken people, always searching for something we could never find.

So that was what happened. As my memories returned every day, and I could vaguely recall my name, and remember words such as ‘Dreamer’ and ‘imagination,’ I was depressed and haunted, plagued by nightmares and ghosts. I have heard this was the same for every Dreamer. I always knew there was something I was looking for; somewhere better I needed to be; something I needed to achieve; but as the months wore on, exactly what that something was became harder and harder to work out.

They still didn’t stop breaking me in every way possible. They would throw us into our cells after social and exercise times. They would have us electrocuted if we put so much as a toe out of line. They would send gas into our cells if we were being too loud. And most of us, myself included, were at some point being too raucous and rebellious for their liking, so we succumbed to the straightjackets. More disobedience, which again was something I felt on more than one occasion, confined us to Solitary, where we were thrown into a dark, basement room, chained and handcuffed to the wall if need be, and quite often tortured at the guards’ sick will. They tried to break me, and I tried to resist, but it was too late. I was tearing apart at the seams.

We had social time, but it was not like it sounded. Sixty Dreamers in a room together ought to be productive, but it was quite the opposite. We were like patients in a mental asylum, barely able to string together proper conversations; confused and dazed; just wading through distant, muffled memories and hazy brains until we were finally set free.

The day I was let out was the day I forgot completely. It was exactly six months after I was brought in—after all, I was hardly one to be let out a month or two early on grounds of good behaviour, was I? Before leaving, though, they injected me with a particularly heavy dose of drugs, which apparently left me completely anaesthetised and unconscious for over an hour. When I woke up, I had absolutely no idea who or where I was, and my memory was not supposed to return for several days. The idea was that if the person was never reminded of the words ‘Dreamer’ and ‘imagination’ and other similar things, they would never remember what those things were for the rest of their lives. It was to give them a chance at being re-initiated into society. ‘Dreamer’ was not even a word that entered my mind. In a way, this made me content, because I had no way of knowing what I’d forgotten, or what I’d missed out on.

The little wire tag was removed from round my ankle and I was given a change of clothes, which I put on numbly. They contacted my nearest family member—my parents were still missing—even I had no idea whether they were dead or alive, and my brothers were still underage, so they contacted my aunt. She lived in Prague, so I had to wait for several hours in a blank, locked room, unable to remember anything about the last twenty years of my life, and when she came to get me, she took me to a hotel for the night—she’d already driven several hours to get here.

Of course, the Dreamers were ready, as they always were. They sent along Jonas and Emilie to collect me. They tried to choose whoever the newly released Dreamer had previously spent the most time with to go and collect them, in the hope it might jog their memory. Of course, because of the nature of the Dreamer having forgotten everything, they also only sent along people who had already been to an Institution before so they had the best hope of dealing with them and understanding what they were going through. This made Jonas and Emilie the best candidates. In the year since I’d been released, I’d been to collect other Dreamers on more than one occasion.

They knocked on the hotel room after they’d got my aunt momentarily preoccupied—apparently they’d tracked us all the way from the Institution, and they led me to their car. I protested quietly, but I was still drugged up and sedated from all the medication, and I had no strength left in me. They took me back to the base and still I remembered nothing; even when Jonas said aloud the word ‘Dreamer’ over and over again it made no sense to me.

He took me downstairs to a small cell-like room, and enough of my thoughts and strength had by now returned that I began to panic; thinking I was being locked up again after a false sense of freedom. The room they put me in had no furniture but a concrete bed attached to the wall and a door leading into the tiniest bathroom. It was dark and made of concrete, and I began to cry once again. But Jonas was gentle with me. Later he admitted that it confused and scared him to see me in that state. He let me in gently, and locked the door, but promised to be back.

He came back about three times a day, and Carl came on occasion, though I could see it frightened him to see me like that, as he had never had any experience with an Institution. Jonas brought me meals, and he would sit in there with me, just telling me anything and everything about the Dreamers. This was typical re-education. Anyone having just come out of the Institution had to go through these same procedures.

After about twenty-four hours, during which time I slept a lot and thought a lot, I remembered my name—it was now a conscious memory, as opposed to just being something Jonas or my aunt had told me. Shortly after, I remembered my birthday and where I lived, and the names of my parents. That set off a spark inside me—I hadn’t thought about them for ages.

Then, with Jonas’s help, I began to remember the Dreamers. First the name, then that I was one of them, then what they actually did, and then more and more about them as the hours wore on.

It was about five days after being brought into the base that I was sane enough and had remembered everything with enough lucidity that I was allowed out, although my memory wasn’t absolutely complete for nearly a week. And I finally knew what I’d been longing to get to since I’d been put in that Institution. And I also now knew that it had been without a doubt the scariest time of my life. It hurt just to think about it, but I couldn’t ever forget it either.

But I was out, and it was all a memory. I was back, bearing the scars of my fear and torment, and in that respect I was stronger than ever. The hatred I had for the government and their policies had never been fiercer, and I was willing to do absolutely everything I could to fight for our rights and freedom.