Chained Soul – Part Nineteen

Welcome back to Chained Soul, my new serialised novel that I’m releasing right here on my blog, as well as on Tapas and Wattpad. Quick warning: this series does contain strong language, so if that’s not your thing, you’re free to skip this one!

Check out Part One, including a synopsis for the whole series, here!

If you missed Part Eighteen, you can read that here!

Day Nineteen

I’m fully aware that this isn’t actually ‘day nineteen’. They didn’t want to stop at stealing all of my liberties and freedoms from me, so they decided to continue by taking my time from me as well, and then didn’t even fucking tell me about it.

I’ll try to calm down so that I can explain. Basically, I woke up this morning, thinking that it should be day nineteen – and that’s not even a true day nineteen, because I only started counting from when they gave me a pen and paper. But anyway, it should have been day nineteen.

Except I woke up on the floor, so there was obviously something wrong there.

I never wake up on the floor. They’ve given me a bed, despite how fucking bare bones and basic it is, so I use it. I use every tiny little thing they give me. So when I woke up staring at the bed inside of being in it, I naturally got a bit concerned. The pounding headache didn’t help either, although I’ve taken the three-a-days since and that’s helped a bit.

So when I rolled over on the floor, which I wasn’t supposed to be on in the first place and I definitely didn’t fall asleep on, and then saw a huge fucking antique-looking computer unit in my room, I knew what had happened straight away.

I remembered the letter. The sedation and seclusion shit. See, I was optimistic enough to hope that they’d give me some sort of warning for when that was about to happen. I didn’t think that the letter was going to be the warning. So now I’ve got another hole in my memory, when I already had plenty of those, and the uncomfortable knowledge that I was man-handled to some degree while I was unconscious.

Or man-handled while I was conscious. I can’t remember the sedation at all. For all I know, they could’ve pumped gas into my room or held me down on the floor while they stuck a syringe in my neck. I have no fucking idea, and I hate that feeling – the not knowing. They’re just ripping chunks of my brain from me, for no fucking reason.

I didn’t touch the computer-looking thing until I’d taken my three-a-days and my headache calmed down. I might not remember much, but I know that screens do nothing good to headaches. But when I was ready, I went over and looked at it for a bit.

I wasn’t ready to touch it straight away. I mean, my room has been the exact same for at least nineteen days straight. No new furniture or anything like that, just some more bits of paper piling up and a food tray that makes an appearance once a day. So it was eerie to have this whole thing just appear there – even now, it’s standing there like it’s always been here, and I just detest the atmosphere that it has.

To describe it for you, it actually looks more like one of the old ATMs that they had back when a couple of people still used cash. They’re just gaping holes in the sides of buildings that used to be physical banks now, but I vaguely remember standing next to my mum when she used one once, when I was a small child. It’s not much of a memory, but it sprung up in my mind as best it could as soon as I laid eyes on the thing.

There’s a screen on it, probably so thick that I couldn’t punch through it even if I tried – and I bet they planned for that – and a keyboard that looks like something out of the really old sci-fi movies. No touch screen, like. I had to press one of the buttons to make the screen light up, but it was stuck as a plain black rectangle for ages before it decided to display some text. ‘E-Mail Privilege Computer’ in big, blocky white letters. Very inventive of them.

After that, I hit the space key and the enter key a couple of times, and it finally loaded up a login page. I put in the details that I got with that letter, and then got stuck on a loading screen for a tortuously long time. Part of me was hoping that it would display the time when I finally logged in, like you’d expect it to do, but no such luck.

The desktop was just the same black rectangle as the boot-up screen, with a single icon in the middle of it: ‘E-Mail’. Again, very inventive. However, while I was trying to figure out which button actually opened the stupid email thing (no mouse or trackpad, obviously, because that would make it too easy), the whole computer made a quiet ‘ping’ noise.

It was odd, because it was quiet in terms of volume, but the thing must have speakers all over it because it seemed to come from all sides of it at once. I was a little spooked, but then, after a few minutes, the screen blinked and the E-Mail icon had a little red bubble next to it. No number, as you’d expect, but I knew what that meant.

I had mail.

First E-Mail, After An Embarrassingly Long Time Spent Working Out That ‘E’ Opens The E-Mail Application

Hello “Robin”, if that’s even your real name,

I hope you’re very happy with yourself. You ##### are all the same. I hope you’re making lots of friends in the ##### who are just as ##### as you are. I can’t believe that taxpayers’ money is being spent on ##### when the country is on its knees as it is. I hope they change the ##### so that you can all just be ##### instead. It’s all #####. I don’t know why I’m even writing to you. You don’t know me, but your ##### and the way you ##### was the last straw for me. It’s unbelievable. I don’t know what the world has come to. I just saw the ##### and I had to say something – now that you’re finally not #####, I hope you come to your senses and realise what you’re doing to ##### and #####. It might be too late for your #####, but at least you can ##### in peace.

Regards,

#####

I honestly don’t know whether to be confused, offended, or just happy that I’ve secured a line of communication to the outside world, albeit a heavily redacted one. I hate everything about this place, and it all reeks of shadiness and malpractice (if they’re even medical or psychological professionals to begin with!), so I’ll take an angry outside world over this fucked up one in here any day.

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