‘Okay, so the waiver’s signed, and your medical looks good. Fighting fit.’ Janet ran down her clipboard as she led me down the facility’s hallway. ‘And you’ve had the briefing, yes?’
Somewhere between a hospital and a hotel, there had been a clear effort to make the place less sterile with abstract art on the wall and wooden accents, but the hard click of the doctor’s heels on the cold floor betrayed the medical nature of the building.
‘Yeah, but I’m still a little confused.’ I admitted, trotting along in her wake. ‘It was all very…’
‘Corporate?’ She asked, steering us down another hallway beneath fluorescent lights. ‘We get that a lot, they call it a briefing but it’s more of a sales pitch. Which I think is silly since this is an experimental clinical trial and we’re paying you, but what do I know? So is there anything you want to ask me before we begin?’
After a brief pause I prompted her. ‘So I’m going to be facing my own thoughts, right? Like, physically? You make them real somehow, pull them out of my head.’ My stomach squirmed at the thought. This was good money, money I needed since my last job interview had bombed, but it wasn’t the normal medicine trial I’d done before.
‘Inner demons. That’s the phrase I use anyway. And you’re going to be fighting them, not facing them. You’ve agreed to physically fight your inner demons. Ah, here we are!’
We came to a stop outside a plain wooden door with a plastic ‘14’ stuck to it, and Janet began checking through the paperwork on her clipboard as my mind tried to wrap itself around what she’d just said. ‘It’s the latest in therapeutics.’ She added almost absently.
Questions tumbled in my head, and I voiced them as I grasped them.
‘How?..’
‘Some biotech, some regular tech. I honestly don’t fully get it, my job is looking after you. All I know is that they’re made real for ten minutes, and you have to fight like hell. Manifesting, they call it.’ Janet said without looking up.
‘Is it safe?’
‘You can get bashed about, bruised, bitten, burned. There’s always risks, that’s what the waiver is for.’ Turning the clipboard, she indicated a page of dense text with my signature scrawled at the bottom. It had read like any other “This activity is dangerous” waiver, and I now realised I should have paid it more attention. ‘We’re always monitoring of course, and we’ll stop the exercise if things are looking bad. The bigger risk is that your negative thoughts will get stronger afterwards if you lose the fight.’ She fixed me with a look. ‘You need to actually beat your demons, you know?’
Another pause as I digested this. A cold, weightless feeling had trickled through me at the thought of fighting, of violence being done to me. Of my body being damaged…
‘Does it work?’
Seeing my fear, Janet lowered her clipboard and let out a breath. ‘Look Saif, this is the single most effective psychological therapy I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in this field for decades. I’ve seen people beat their intrusive thoughts to death, break the neck of their addictions. I watched someone stomp their anger issues to a bloody mess and call me two months later saying their life had turned around. If you can take this chance then it could change everything.’
Another moment passed as she waited for my reply. I ran a dry tongue around the roof of my mouth.
‘Do you want to watch some others? We have a few patients on the go at the moment.’
Without waiting for an answer, Janet flipped her clipboard over to reveal a screen on the other side. After a few taps she came and stood next to me, holding the tablet-clipboard so I could see and thumbing the volume up.
A video was playing showing a young woman around my age standing in a small room and breathing heavily. We were looking down on her from the ceiling corner, and she was dressed in the same grey jumpsuit I’d been asked to wear when I arrived, though covered in dark patches of something, the same something that was smeared on the floor. Her hand gripped a thin machete, and facing her a few paces away was a spindly humanoid on all fours like a spider. Its eyes were black circles, wide with what appeared to be terror, and it seemed to shrink back as the woman approached. A wide mouth split open on its face, but immediately snapped closed again as she fainted forwards with the blade.
‘What is tha-‘ I went to ask, but before I could finish the monster shot forwards with shocking speed. Using its stubby legs it launched to the side of the woman, before its wickedly long arms whipped out and grabbed her shoulders. In under a second it had pulled its emaciated torso onto her back and begun scrabbling its pencil-thin fingers into her chest and neck. The mouth split open again, and I could hear it begin to jabber a squealing nonsense directly into her ear.
‘Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!’ She screamed. Sarah, I saw her name in the top corner of the screen.
Sarah backpedaled, ramming the creature into the wall as hard as she could with her shoulder. Again, and again, until its left arm loosened and she drove her elbow into its ribs and finally threw it off. The monster squealed, and then even louder as she slashed the machete into it once, twice, three times; biting deep into its arms and head as it frantically thrashed away from her across the chamber, splashing more dark fluid that mixed with the thin streams of Sarah’s blood that its fingers had scratched.
‘Enough.’ I heard her growl, gathering herself up and advancing. ‘I am so ready to be done with you.’
The pitiful creature cowered, one thin arm held up to protect itself. Its stumpy legs coiled though, a round foot pressing into the ground.’
‘Wait!’ I shouted, unable to help myself, knowing it was about to spring. But as it launched itself Sarah’s blade swung outwards, catching it in the neck and sending it crashing into the ground.
She let out a scream of rage and triumph. ‘I know you, you bastard! I’ve known you for years!’ The blade came down again, the monster’s arm jerked, and then sagged. ‘You ruined my life, but never agai…’
Janet muted the tablet, and minimised the video into a barely distinguishable square as Sarah hacked at the prone form again and again. ‘It gets personal after the win, we’ll let her have her privacy.’ She said, turning to me. ‘We l et them hit the bodies a bit, process the feelings, but you’ve seen the important part.’ Indicating down the hallway, Janet pointed to where a yellow light had come on above Door 11. ‘They’ll get her cleaned and patched up soon, and she’ll be a new woman.’
‘That was live?’ I asked, staring at the door where a woman had just fought for her sanity against that monster.
‘Mmhmm, I said we have a few today.’ Bringing her clip-tablet back up, she flicked through a few scenes of violence and horror. A middle-aged man stood bleeding, swinging a knife wildly at glowing wasps the size of pigeons. Black tar crept up the legs of a young woman as a giant pulsating ball of ooze splattered under her hammer. A dark plank of wood cracked into a creature’s body, its torso opening in a howl as the embedded nail bit deep. My heart was pumping acid, my skin prickled on limbs as insubstantial as air.
‘What if I can’t do this?..’ Was all I could manage.
Janet turned to me. ‘Then it gets worse. If you lose, it gets worse. So don’t lose. No, look at me, give me your eyes.’ Her hand on my shoulder was firm. ‘We give you weapons because this isn’t a fair fight. You have every advantage here, we’re here to help you win. You get ten minutes, exactly ten, so use them. Don’t listen to whatever’s in there, don’t run, don’t bargain, don’t hide. Just pick up a weapon and kill it. No mercy, no hesitation, no fear. Got it?’
The eyes locked on to mine were hard as flint, and so I nodded. ‘Got it’, I repeated, not knowing what else to say.
Without another word Janet stepped forward and unlocked the door. My chest felt heavy and my face was hot as I looked into the slowly widening crack. Janet put a hand on my back and guided me through, and then the lock clicked into place behind me.