THE SLIDE Part 2

Chapter 12: The Specialist Arrives, the present

Fantasy: The Military Seeks Conviction

[Warning: There are graphic images of brutality and violence in this chapter]

11/29/2031 AAE*

Milap Mika Ra strode into the Magistrate’s office ebullient with a sparkling visible light surrounding his body. The Magistrate rose from the desk to greet. They both bowed in the formal Hindu greeting.

“I am relieved to see you, Ra, at last. You still want to be addressed as Ra? Correct?”

“Yes, yes. You are quite correct,” the specialist said, smiling with his mouth and body.

“Do you wish to see Farha Izem straightaway, or do you need to be shown to your quarters?”

“Quarters first. I need bathing and meditative time. Let’s say four hours before meeting her,” Ra voiced.

Ra dressed in clean cotton attire after his bathing cleanse. He entered the tiny sitting room, laid a cloth over the high-backed comfortable chair and set-up a secure space. He triple-cloaked his presence, surrounded the sacred space around her space and entered in observer mode for an expanded moment outside time. In Farha’s ordinary space-time it was a wisp of a Planck length (the smallest measurement of time), but she was alerted to it and tensed her musculature. As soon as he departed, he felt her relax and fill her space.

Ra made himself invisible and waited, not expecting anything to happen. When he was about to decide to end his meditative trance space, she entered and filled entire space with her presence, giving him no room to be him. She left, leaving no trace that she had been there other than fragments of memory.

Fractured freeze-frame images were left in a wake for him to hold. He exhaled, stored them, and opened his eyes.

The Three

They could have been mistaken for clerks, paperwork tucked under arms in a hurry to slip into one of the many secret passageways of the castle. Expressions taciturn, a flurry of words half spoken audibly as dull or in code.

One of the three slid a bookcase aside, and a flashlight strapped beneath a cap’s bill he scurried into the dark alley down a few stairs into a sliver of a room with a light from outside above drown out by a cold electric light and hesitated.

“Well?” the small man inquired, paperwork crumpled beneath the crux of his arm. He sat in a chair while the two others were huddled on at their workstations.

“Did it work?” he continued, hovering above a cypher machine.

“In a moment,” one replied.

“In a minute,” the other said with plodding irritation.

“Halt,” Ra said and put out his right arm to stop the Magistrate and two guards at the locked metal doors of the Tan Room. He turned and looked down at the Magistrate who looked up slightly.

“A word,” Ra said and paused. The Magistrate seemed confused. “A word, alone, with you,” Ra said in a deeper tone.

“Of course,” the Magistrate said and suggested: “The Ante Room?”

Ra shook his head.

The three sighed with exasperation, and one spoke:

“It wasn’t a complete failure.”

It was as if mechanized thinking turned gears in their heads.

“Yes, but we blocked his perceptions from many miles away,” another said.

“Don’t get overconfident. There is more work to be done.” And they each nodded a few times.

The Videotapes

“You’d have let me go in there to see her like that?” Ra queried.

“I thought you knew?” the Magistrate said.

“How did she come to be so? So shackled and bound?” Ra asked and held up his hand. “I see. She was uncontrollable. Had the strength of ten men?

“You have the videotapes of this?”

“Yes, yes, we have some. We weren’t expecting this violence from her, so we were unprepared.” The Magistrate feigned pride covering his shame.

“Tell me of it, an oral report, if you will,” Ra used a soft yet firm command.

“When she awakened in the room near where the dungeons once existed, she began hitting me and…” and as the Magistrate explained, a neutral space opened for Ra to see Farha.

Despite Ra making himself small and with protection, he felt assaulted by fierce and chaotic emotions assailing him. And then there were the images, as if he had fallen through many windows of shattered glass, each with a scene of horror in them. It took all his strength to pull himself out of the timeless space of her world into the plodding reality of the bureaucrat before him: the magistrate.

The Magistrate was talking still about Farha’s strength and combativeness.

“Enough,” Ra brought himself fully present and took command of the room with a firm hand and his use of the voice. “Let me see the videotapes as soon as possible.”

Six hours later, Ra was led into a viewing room with the Magistrate. Ra ordered him out and took the remote from him, reading his mind for instructions as video was a new invention.

Two female military guards took Farha’s sleeping body to the shower room and attempted to give her a shower. Four more guards came in and one of the original females tasered her as soon as the water was turned off.

In the next scene, clothing was left for her in a locked cell. She attempted to hang herself with the clothing fragments that she had stripped away. Military guards removed her from the cell to a small padded room.

In the snippets that followed, the magistrate was attacked and beaten by Farha until the guards took her down. She was shown refusing foods and liquids. Finally, they shackled her and chained her, shooting sedatives into her body.

Ra deduced that some of the more violent scenes — where violence was perpetrated on Ms. Izem had been deleted.

Ra turned it off in disgust, both at its content and the attempt by the Magistrate to obscure the truth.

[Note: *the eleventh month or Endecaidus — known to us as November or 9th month translated literally.]

The previous chapter: A Long Recovery Hexember 21, 2029 The beginning: Chapter 1 — Audacity

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