The Ambrose Object

[Unseelie]

He understood that he was being manipulated. That he was being controlled. No one had ever tried to hide that from him, they'd figured it would be ridiculous to even try. They even told him exactly how they were doing it, so he'd give up. He knew there was triptophan in the water, and thats why he fell asleep at night. He knew there were traces of cardamine, and Euphoria was delivered to him before the officials visited, and then after, if he told them interesting things. Stupid things, too, little things that they could understand. He was encouraged to be intellegent, but not to associate with the other nineteen. He was locked in a room, given all the information he could ever want, all the processing, but no capabilty to produce. When he was thirteen, he'd hacked the system with a lurking drop point virus:

He'd delivered a message by still drop, put it in a bouy in space, and left it there. When it found what it wanted, which might never have happened, it climbed aboard that ship, as part of the mail. Crawled halfway around sirius, and then back into the closed system of the research base, piggybacking an analog voice message. Things were done by hand even more now, so it was harder to get out. They were being controlled too, his handlers, and then theirs. It all led back to one man, in smaller and smaller rings of handlers. He had five, that he knew of. Five by twenty, a hundred people. Each of them had a less perfect set of control, but they were volunteers. So was he, understand, but he was a prisoner, signed in at seven and never allowed to leave. They could walk at any point, so long as they submitted to a tapeteach mindwipe.

He'd not done any work for a while, and this was not leisure time. They could tell he'd not done any work, because his eyes had lost their dillegent focus, he'd glanced around a couple times, flicked his eyes toward the porthole too many times in their interval(he supsected it was seven minutes thirty two seconds). The background static was ramping up, and the cardamine traces were being seived out of the air. The wall colours got darker, heavier, while the gravity eased just a bit more weight on. It was subtle. He didn't realize it was happening, never did, till he cound feel it in his chest, the tightness, as he began to stress. Back to work!

What the hell was that damn thing?

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