Story #189 - Sasha Grey

Sasha Grey

Sasha Grey didn’t want to die.

That was no surprise – who did – but she had never thought that she would find herself in a position like this, a situation where her death was actually a possibility in the near future, and at the hands of those she was supposed to trust.

It wasn’t fair!

Her father was with the agriculture ministry, and he was good man. Her mother was one of the most respected women in the Free Cities, and had made several important breakthroughs in the areas of animal science and behavior. It was an experiment her mother was running that had led to her unfortunate state, but Sasha had never believed for a moment that she would be treated like she was some kind of criminal.

What had happened to her wasn’t clear. She didn’t feel any different, unless she got overheated or found herself near an excited energy source. A day lounging in the sun had made her body quiver as if she had just come out of cold water, but it was a pulsing heat that rang along her limbs, rather than a clammy chill. A rock she tripped over on her way back to the house that had showed her just what the energy she hadd absorbed from her mother’s experiments had done, and when she woke up hours later, she learned that not only had the force from her body destroyed the offending rock, but everything in a twelve-foot blast crater around it.

The Lobbymen had arrived at her home shortly after.

At first, it was just with questions for her mother and father, and no one seemed interested in talking to her about anything, even though she was the one with the “abnormality”, as she heard them call it. As the days went by and the Lobbymen didn’t seem to like the answers they were getting from her parents, the focus turned to her, and suddenly she found herself in white-paneled rooms alone, being forced to endure question after question about what had happened and how she had felt while doing it.

Her answers were at first meek and said with head bowed, but as time went on they became more pert, acquired a bite that only the young could get away with. The Lobbymen were not amused, but she hid behind the protection of her parents, confident that the government they had told her about wouldn’t betray her trust.

When the black van pulled up in front of her house, she knew that trust had been misplaced.

She had wailed, and her father had been red-faced with anger, but it was no use. She was gently – but firmly – led into the van and very politely handcuffed to the seat. All of the agents of the Lobbymen around her were kind and deferential, but she could sense a fear there, a terror for the little girl that was riding in the back of their vehicle.

They were afraid she was going to kill them all.

The thought was almost laughable; she had no idea how she had used her newfound abilities the first time, let alone any idea how to call them up on command. She tried as she sat in the back of the swiftly moving vehicle, tried to pull in the energy around her and replicate the tingle on her skin.

Sasha had touched the barest edges of it when the van came to a sudden halt and a nice-looking older man climbed into the back. He held out a drink to her – Pofizz, her favorite kind – and made it clear she would be drinking it one way or another. She gulped it all down and felt a lassitude wash over her; they really were concerned about her, about the threat she represented.

She woke up in a well-furnished room with no windows. Tapping on the walls told her they were solid, and battery-powered lights flickered in each corner of the small space. Everything – from the clock to the toothbrush to the sink – appeared to be running on batteries, and it took her some time to figure out why.

Fear.

She couldn’t pull a lick of energy off of any of the batteries, and every four days a man in a dark suit would slink in the door after politely knocking and change them all. They didn’t want to keep her drugged up; they had questions to ask, and probes to use on her, but they didn’t want her pulling their entire building down on their heads.

It was amusing that they could be so frightened of a twelve year old girl, no taller than their chests and half as wide – so frightened that they kept her locked away, and debated over whether or not to kill her.

Sasha was bright enough, and questions about seeing her parents were met with stony silence and then shifting eyes from the men from she asked. The Lobbymen were deciding her fate, and she hadn’t even been allowed to speak for herself.

Three weeks passed and then a group of them, dressed all in black, came to get her. The lead man was a handsome, oily thing in a suit, and Sasha took an instant disliking to him. He roughly pushed her into a strapped electronic wheelchair when they arrived, and looked down at her with cruel eyes.

“This is for the good of the state, little girl,” he grated.

Hopelessness took her, and she stared blankly at the floor as they rolled her along. How would they do it? How would she die?

It was the humming of the electric motor of the wheelchair that caught her attention as she moved. The sound of it, the feel of it began to build inside her, setting her on fire and making her shiver all at once.

She smiled up at the oily man walking beside her.

He looked down, and she could see his eyes fill with fear.

Sasha Grey would be leaving – alive.

- D