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The woman from N Corp is back again.
She is doing something with Gubo. There are wet sounds. He is on his knees in front of her and she has her legs spread as she sits in the chair Gubo sits in sometimes. The chair belongs to Gubo, which makes this in Yi Sang's opinion somewhat rude, but Gubo seems to have agreed to it. Yi Sang is not focusing on them. He doesn't want to look at them. Instead, he looks at the blinding white of the walls and keeps them out of focus. Yeon-sim is under his pillow. He does not want them to see him.
He doesn't know how long all of that went on for except that Gubo eventually stands up and wipes his mouth as the woman rearranges her coat and pats down her hair.
"He would be of more use to us lucid," the woman from N Corp says. She is speaking in another language.
"He would not help you any more if he was sober than he would now," Gubo says, speaking in the same language.
She sighs. "Yi Sang," she says. Her voice is harsh, sharp, clipped. "Can you hear me?"
German. That was the language they were speaking. Now they speak English again. Or is it English? He is aware of the phonetics their mouths formed that proved they were different, and he still hears each movement of lips and teeth and tongue now, but his mind cannot form the connection to know which language these two are speaking in, whether the phonemes and morphemes are those of English or Korean.
The woman from N Corp backhands him with one leather-gloved hand and his thoughts are shattered. It is painful. His cheek burns. His body has fallen back, half-onto his back on the bed. "Gubo," he says in a tremulous voice.
"Can you hear me now?" she asks.
"Yes," he says. The part of him that was dreaming would have liked to play with the words to understand which language he was speaking, but he knows better.
Dreaming is useless. You cannot dream, not outside of a mirror. This knowledge is a stone that crushes his chest and makes it harder to breathe. The woman is continuing speaking but he cannot be bothered to even notice the sounds she makes.
She slaps him again. It is on the same cheek and it hurts more. It hurts so much that he cries out.
"Gubo," he repeats, a frightened child who has lost his mother, a dog looking for its master. "Gubo?"
Gubo puts a hand on his arm. It is heavy in the same way the stone of his knowledge on his chest is heavy but it is familiar and it anchors him. "Yi Sang, you need to focus on what Hermann is saying."
His face hurts. It feels like his cheek is on fire. He listens.
She asks him about the mirror. Gubo tells him what to say in response. She tells him to write some things down and her words slip out of his mind but Gubo tells him it is nothing serious. He nods as Gubo tells him too because his mind is hazy. He doesn't think he can trust Gubo.
Hermann—which is a strange name, and one that he is not certain suits her—leaves and returns. She has a spiral-bound notebook and a ballpoint pen.
"On the interfacing—write it down for us, please."
"Thank you," he says. He clicks on the pen's tip again and then again, turning it around in his hand. "...Writing is enjoyable."
Her mouth twitches in a smile that does not make her face look any softer. "The connection with the world in the mirror," she says, with a kind of laughter in her eyes.
"Yes...yes..."
When he doesn't remember what he is doing Gubo or Hermann prompts him. Both of them leave eventually, Gubo leaving his supplements besides him. He is consumed in the work. It is simple, it is things that he knows and they do not and the desire to teach, to share, fills him. For a second he thinks he remembers to be happy. His mind is going clearer. Consumed by his work, he does not take his supplements.
The alarms go off a few hours later when he rips the pages he's written to shreds and tries to jab the ballpoint pen into his neck. They scream and scream. He does not want his work to be misused. He must protect Yon-sim and Sang Yi. He does not want to be like the others he does not want a thousand thousand worlds being destroyed by his work he does not—
Guards come in. They grab his pen from him and he feels a sense of loss as they beat him and wrestle him to the floor. It is painful.
Gubo and Hermann come for him. "You said," she said to Gubo, "that he was going to be cooperative—"
"I wasn't expecting this," he says, frustrated.
"I could not let it happen," Yi Sang says. It feels wrong to be a bystander. One of the guards grabs his hair and slams his head into the floor on his bruised cheek. The world is white with pain for a short while.
Yi Sang does not fight back. He wants to curl up on himself but they are holding him down to the floor.
There is a sharp pain as someone sticks a needle into his neck. They don't need to tranquilize him, he thinks. He would go willingly.
Yi Sang wakes up in a grey room. It is not like the white room. It does not hurt his eyes as much but it has a pungent stink of blood and piss and shit and semen that tingles in his lungs. The floor is spattered with dark stains. He is tied to a chair. His head hurts and his face hurts. His body is sore. He has been stripped naked and a group of N Corp agents stand before him with hungry eyes as they look at the avian carcass in front of them, plucked of feathers and trussed for the butchering. This makes him think of Dongrang, which makes him sad.
Someone cuts the ropes. One agent pulls him out-his head is foggy and spinning and he thinks he might gag. His legs sway and do not hold him up properly. Someone kicks his legs out from under them and someone slams him to the ground.
Before, they pinned him roughly. Now, there is no end goal. The agents simply beat him, fists and feet raining down on him. They are angriest when he tries to curl up to protect his tender organs so he simply lies there and looks up at the ceiling. It is not stained. It is smooth and grey and featureless. The ceiling of the white room hurts his eyes and there is a comfort in that. There is no such comfort here.
He does not realize that they have stopped for a while. At some point he pissed himself and now he lies in it. There is a hole in one corner that must be intended for the correct disposal of waste. His body will not fit into it. What a shame.
His body hurts. The nerves in his body are singing and stinging and telling him that they hurt.
The ceiling is grey.
There is no mirror.
Has Gubo let him come here? Where is Gubo?
He doesn't know how time passes, now. This is normal. A few seconds, an hour, days-it is irrelevant to him. The people come in. Occasionally, he is given some lukewarm water and half-rotten food along with his supplements, which he at first does not touch. Then they force it down his throat while beating him and he decides to eat it since it's less painful that way. They beat him and cut him and burn him. They do not touch his fingers, since they are useful, but they break every toe on his right foot one by one and peel off two of his fingernails.
Eventually, after some time—he thinks it is at least a day—if he were to judge based on the feeding he would say that he has been here for three days now—Hermann comes in. She has a table that he has seen the others with N Corp using and he knows it contains tools.
"Gubo has been worried about you," she says. "He was very upset with this turn of events."
He is on the floor because he cannot stand. He does not move much, because he cannot. His throat is dry—not painfully so. It is one of the few things that doesn't hurt.
"It doesn't have to be like this," she says. "You can go back to Gubo and your room, if you agree to aid us in our research into the mirror."
He closes his eyes, hoping that if he withdrew from the world it would pass him by. He wondered if there was a way he could get them to break something important, so he could stop. He cannot hope for a happy ending or for this all to have been a dream-all he can hope for is an ending.
She sighs and turns. "Wait," he hears Gubo say from the door.
He moves his head at this, straining to see better. His head is heavier than he expected. From his place on the floor, he can only see some of him. "Gubo?" he asks. He does not know what he feels or if the stone that his heart has become is capable of feeling—true despair, he now knows, is not sorrow but the absence of anything.
"Yi Sang-" Gubo stops mid-sentence. "I don't think we can leave him here. He's not healthy even in isolation, with him being kept here..."
"We won't allow him to die, I can assure you of that. Are you asking me to give him a second chance? If I did, I'd need to give him incentive to make the right choice."
Gubo is silent for a moment before saying, "Yes."
"And I will need your assurances as well."
"...I'll be waiting in your office."
Hermann smiles, lines at her eyes crinkling with amusement. "So you wouldn't want to face it head on?"
"No, I would rather not. ...Besides, I do want him to trust me."
"You say that in front of him."
"I doubt he's listening. What was that phrase Dongbaek used to use... The lights are on, but nobody's home. It's like that normally, let alone in this state."
Yi Sang can hear them. Or rather, he can hear their words. He even processes them, in a way. They speak about him like an object. He doesn't mind, though. He is an object. It would be better if he was an object. Objects do not hurt people, nor did they feel pain.
Gubo turns and leaves and Yi Sang feels a small thread of fear and loss in the overwhelming despair.
Hermann looks down at him. "Are you listening to me? Nod if you are."
He inclines his head.
She huffs. "You're quite the forgiving one." Something comes over her face that he can't name. "You remind me of my son, towards the end. Yi Sang. If you do not agree to work on the projects I have given you, I am going to rape you, and it will be painful. Then I will call the guards in, and they will have their way with you in any way they see fit, be it rape or violence, until you give in and ease poor Gubo's mind. Despite his uneasy conscience, we do have access to the latest K Corp products."
Dongrang. He feels a twitch of something like resentment. He had gone over so easily. As if they had meant nothing to him, as if everything they were...
"Yi Sang. You can cooperate, or we can make you cooperate. Which do you choose?"
He opens his mouth. Speaking seems strange. He had screamed a lot and he didn't have much water so his throat is sore and hoarse and his voice scratchy and painful. "Why won't you kill me?"
Hermann sighs, sounding almost exasperated. "Killing you is the last thing we want." In her hands she holds a large phallus, attached with a harness made of several straps. He is familiar with this act in and of itself, but it is bigger than anything Dongbaek and him ever tried. It has studs on it—spiked not enough to hurt, but enough to batter and bruise. She mounts it over her hips, still clothed and dressed in uniform. It makes sense, though. Though they cleaned him off with painfully cold water from a high-pressure hose a few times she would not want to touch either the grimy floor she now knelt on or his own naked body.
Again, he looks to the ceiling for something to map, for a distraction. She does not prepare him. There is pain-which made sense. She is fucking him specifically to cause him pain, not to bring herself or him pleasure.
He loses track of time again. It seems like an eternity of the grey and the pain of something far too big being rammed into his insides again and again. She changed the angle when she thinks he is getting used to it. Yi Sang wonders if it could tear something and he could bleed out here. Hermann has hoisted up the pale grimy twigs of his thighs around her hips, her face icily composed. If he looked down past where his ribcage sticks out from under bruised and skin he could see it, far too large for the hole it sinks into, wet with blood.
How long has it been? She pulls out and slaps him across the thighs with it. It is wet with his own blood almost to the base and hits as hard outside as it did inside. His body does not close up, gaping wide. Hands grab him. Hermann's mouth is moving.
He thinks many people use him. He thinks at some point they start kicking his soft cock. He thinks they fuck him from front and back at once, or go two at a time with him gaped by the monstrous thing Hermann used on him. He does not know how long this takes either. Forever, maybe.
Hermann comes back and he manages to speak through a raw, ruined throat. "Take me back to the white room. I'll do what you want." These are the words he thinks. He does not know what he slurs out to her but he conveys his point again.
She injects him with something green that makes him think of Dongrang and hurt more. He is cleaned of blood and of semen with water that is not cold and does not hurt. He is given clinical, clean clothing which he does not have the will or strength to put on, so they put it on him.
When she brings him back to the white room, which almost feels like home after the grey room, Gubo runs to him and holds him in his arms. They are warm, too warm. On his neck is a bruise surrounded by a dark stain the color of Hermann's lipstick.
Gubo speaks words of concern that do not entirely register. He waits on him hand and foot, tends to any concern Yi Sang registers. He does not register any. He simply wants the mirror back.
Sang Yi's look when he sees what has become of him hurts but is almost satisfying after however long of not seeing him. His words, Yi Sang does not filter out. He wishes he could plunge into the mirror himself, have his flesh shattered and emerge in the world of Sang Yi where there is no pain. Then he hides it again, though he knows they know he has it.
The next day, they give him a notebook and a pen and a guard to keep an eye on him as he writes. He does not recognize his face and only recognizes that the guard is one of the ones who fucked him when he squeezes his shoulder and whispers in his ear.
Hermann smiles, praises him. This does not register. He does not care. She asks him about a reward. He does not respond. Gubo makes sure he takes his medication and they leave.
He lies in bed in the white room which is never dark, staring at the white ceiling, and listens to the muffled noises from Gubo and Hermann outside.