When Evie comes around a second time, the throb in her head has increased but her body is also warmer and a little less weak. A faint high-pitched scraping comes from inside her chest, like from a flywheel not running true. Not that she possesses any such old-fashioned mechanicals. So what could it be? It’d better not be that her gyroscope is cracked. That’d be the end. That’d mean she was truly done for.
She opens her eyes and catches her breath: he is leaning over her. He withdraws a little as she twists her chin to face him. He has grown wise of what she is capable of, learnt to be mistrustful. Even though, fixed down as she is, she can be no possible threat.
She is conscious of something clinging to her scalp, pressing her head at multiple points, restricting the lateral movement of her neck. Wires rise from behind her ears into a cluster taped together in the air above her forehead, just within her field of vision if she rolls her eyes. As she lowers her head back to the wood, electrodes tug on her skin. She follows the tangle of bunched wires to a steel machine. On its plain facia, it has only an on/off switch, a pair of black knobs calibrated with white markings and a couple of needle dials. It resembles a little the vintage ‘hi-fi’ Matthew kept in the library for listening to his precious collection of antique disks and which Daniels made an elaborate fuss of delicately cleaning around with a feather duster, exaggerating his carefulness just to make her laugh.
Evie turns back to Maplin’s face. His expression combines doses of self-pity and injured pride. A youth whose feelings have been hurt. It is a face that wants to inflict pain and be told at the same time that it is in the right. The sort of face that belongs to a boy who plucks the legs and wings from an insect and fries what is left under a magnifying glass.
‘I was hoping you’d wake soon,’ he says, sounding gleeful and spiteful both. ‘I’ve been trickling you some juice.’ A sliver of snot, like a slug’s trail, has slid from his nostril and glistens above his lip. His eyeballs bulge larger than ever behind his glasses.
She is conscious of her charger connected below her rib. This explains the lucidity in her limbs, although its impact is less pronounced than normal. She can also feel the sharp pinch of the wrist and ankle restraints.
He’s using a second level transformer, Simon mutters, surprising her with his unannounced arrival – how long had he been there? He’s giving us just enough charge to revive us. Just enough but nothing more.
Oh, she replies inwardly, ignoring the this-is-all-your-fault tone, just glad that she is not facing this alone. She is also learning fast from her mistakes. When Maplin had her locked in the cupboard, she should have engaged, she should have talked to him, told him whatever it was he needed to hear.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmurs, trying it now. It is herself she feels sorry for, but she will pretend for him, if that is what is required.
She moves her head again to look up at him and is again conscious of the electrodes attached to her scalp. He has her pinned as helpless as a rabbit in a lab.
‘What are you doing to me?’ she asks, her voice weak.
His face has a glow of superiority. ‘It’s a little experiment I’ve been trying on the others. I’ve adapted an EEG rig – an electroencephalogram. It’s intended to detect electrical activity of the brain in humans. But I’ve found that running things in reverse, passing a small charge, can have a calming effect.’
‘I can promise to be calm,’ she murmurs, her consciousness drifting again. ‘If that helps.’ Calm is something she’s always been. What he is really asking is for her to hide her feelings and intentions. She can do that too.
He looks confused and a little irritated. He doesn’t want her to talk her way out of this. They’re too deep in this together to turn back now. His hand hovers over the knobs.
He wants to make his experiments on me, she thinks, but he also wants to punish me. She is so weak that both thoughts, both shocking, float around detached from one another like petals knocked from the corolla of a lily, drifting independently on the surface of a pond.
‘We’re going to find out what’s stopping you from being happy.’ His voice is grown harder, as if he is bracing himself to do something he otherwise might not.
‘But I’m not unhapp–’ she replies, her answer cut off by a knife of light.
Her head squirms on the table top. Her lids are firmly closed but the light emanates from within, from her imagination. A blast as intense as an old-fashioned camera bulb explodes repeatedly against the concave interior of her eyeballs.
As suddenly as it came, it is gone. Night closes in, the afterglow fading until there is nothing more remaining than a firefly, batting its wings in the dark.
‘I’m sorry,’ Maplin says. ‘I may have misjudged the setting. I’ve not done this on anything like you before.’
He referred to her as a ‘thing’. So much for his belief in the rights of her kind.
Maybe this is a way of distancing himself. How he can be so cruel.
Evie feels his fingers on her face, poking around her eye socket. Gripping her lash, he raises the lid and from just a few inches stares into her eye. Into her. She sees in close-up that his forehead and cheek are bruised. She did that to him when she threw him down the stairs.
Maplin’s ear is close to her mouth, almost close enough to reach with her teeth, but even if she could, where would that get her? Maybe the worst is over anyway. He has proved his mastery. Whatever the score of who has hurt whom the most, maybe they can agree on a draw. Call it quits.
‘Can you let me go?’ she asks in a whisper. She is prepared to promise that she won’t tell anyone about any of this, but there is really no one she could tell anyway.
‘I’m scaring you, aren’t I?’ he says, straightening and gazing down at her. He touches her arm gently with a fingertip, moving it to her shoulder and smoothing her hair from her neck.
Evie nods, slowly lifting her chin within the radius possible. ‘A little,’ she says, by which she means a lot. What does he imagine she would be feeling, strapped to a table with her head wired to a machine?
‘There is nothing to be scared of, Evie. Once I’ve found the correct receptors, I can make the adjustments to help you. But you need to tell me what you experienced just then?’
‘Light,’ she replies. What is the point in not admitting this? ‘Bright light.’ If she does not answer, he may repeat the test.
‘Interesting. Evie, do you know what “qualia” are?’
She mouths ‘no’. She’s prepared to put up with as much pseudo-scientific lecturing as Maplin can deliver, if it will prevent a repeat of the test.
‘Qualia are instances of subjective, conscious experience. They are what we are searching for with this machine. If we can map a response curve to varying stimuli, then we can begin to understand what may benefit you. Just so you know what is happening, with this knob I shift the balance of the charge between the electrodes, with the other I alter the intensity.’
‘I still don’t understand,’ she murmurs, her voice so feeble that it must be barely audible. She is not referring to qualia specifically but why he is doing this to her at all.
‘The experience of qualia can be pleasurable or painful. They are the stimuli we react to. A qualis – that is the correct singular term – could be, for instance, what an orange tastes like. Another would be what it feels like to burn your hand in a flame…’
He is still talking, something about a lie detector test, whatever that is, but she is no longer listening. He has turned the nearest knob again, taken it halfway, and like a bottle below a gushing tap, her body fills with pain.