I still remember the day it all changed.

  I was in the Laboratory Wing, almost finished dusting the Bone Crushing machine, still smarting from being told, once more, that I was expressly forbidden from pressing its Big Red Button, when suddenly Otie rushed past me.

  His tiny robot feet were moving as quickly as they could in an adorable whirlwind of angst. He barely seemed to see me as he rushed by, his panic receptors flashing a shade of purple that my manual assured me required immediate clinical help.

  I chased after him.

  “Otie, Otie!”

  He continued down the hall, ignoring me completely, and disappeared into a room labeled DO NOT ENTER (That Means You, Ludo).

  There seemed to be many such doors around the building. I wondered if I should enter.

  From inside, I could hear screams — human screams. Who could it be? It wasn’t Tarvin — his pathetic daily sobbing was much more cavernous, performative.

  There was thrashing, the sound of clanging metal, and, most chillingly, the strange, indecipherable voices of the very same Technicians who made demands of me.

  The screamer was in pain of some kind, but resolute, determined to escape.

  I cracked open the door.

  Through it, I could see Otie, flanked on both sides by Technicians. He was attempting to reason with the screamer, who, back turned to me, was struggling against being placed into a sort of contraption I’d never seen before.

  It was a strange device: a long metal gurney with leather straps and metal clasps on the armrests, which fed into a sleek metallic tube that looked like a coffin.

  On its outside was a terminal of some kind, complex circuitry whirring with uncanny noises, and a monitor which displayed the dark abyss inside the machine.

  The Technicians stood back.

  Above their heads, they held large instruments that my advanced scientific mind quickly discerned were weaponized do-hickeys. Occasionally, in tandem, they zapped the screamer with these large metal whatchamacallits.

  The figure thrashed violently.

  Otie, point man of these proceedings, was in grave danger. Not to mention, perhaps worst of all, this kind of thing was hardly part of his job description.

  When will these fat cats realize it’s not the role of the working man to help them place dangerous captives in complicated scientific contraptions at the behest of strange Technicians?

  Countless folk songs written to this effect, and still the struggle continues.

  I instinctively lunged forward to protect him — a reflex I immediately resolved to work on getting rid of. The door flew open with a loud creak as I found myself suddenly standing in the middle of the room. The Technicians whipped their heads around in unison.

  They were relieved, it seemed, to find it was only me; a nuisance to them at worst.

  I did not share their sentiments, taught by my experience with these strange creatures to regard even their indifference with fear. I managed to muster enough composure through my abject terror to forthrightly demand an explanation for these strange proceedings.

  “Why you hurt the screamy man?”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  They simply scoffed at my presence, shooed me away, attempting to drive me off the way you do a pesky animal. Otie implored me via binary blinking lights to stand down. Or maybe it was something about the Balkans.

  It hardly seemed like the time.

  Through all this, surprising even myself, I stood my ground. I steeled my body and my mind, and, with a valor hitherto left lying dormant in me, perhaps simply waiting for a moment befitting its enormity, voiced my profound moral outrage.

  “Me no likey.”

  Meg’s voice appeared in my ear.

  > FLAG: Subject [Ludo Brax] displaying behavior beyond narrative thresholds. Further monitoring initiated.

  The Technicians immediately barked back at me in their strange language. Their voices, so familiar to me from their daily, formal announcements, dripped now with disdain and malicious intent.

  I had no time to think about what Meg had said, confused as I was. I was purely in survival mode.

  One of them, the largest of the four, now turned toward me. Electric sparks crackled at the end of his metal thingamajig. A small smirk crept onto his reptilian, lipless mouth.

  Otie, more clearly this time, begged me to leave them be. He was going to be okay, he promised me, and so was Croatia.

  I was conflicted. The tides were turning, it was clear, not only against me, but the Screaming Man, too.

  The rest of the Technicians, using Otie’s tiny metallic body as a shield against the innumerable kicks and punches the screamer set forth, managed to surround the man and grab his arms and legs.

  They hoisted him in the air.

  I quickly did a cost/benefit analysis. I could, I wagered, stay in the room, continue forward, save Otie, fight off these craven Technicians once and for all, rescue the screamer, and, reluctantly, be hailed a hero by a society that had long been crying out for a savior.

  Or I could, as I was already doing, rush out of the room in a panic.

  And so, carried by my traitorous feet, betraying the lion that now roared within me, my feckless body led me, as fast as it could move, back into the hallway.

  I craned my neck back, watching, to my horror, as the Screaming Man was forced violently into the contraption.

  In this moment, I was, for the first time in the ordeal, able to clearly see his face.

  He was about forty, grizzled, his face weathered and scarred from evident life experience that made me self-conscious of my baby-soft skin and uncalloused, moisturized hands.

  There was a genuine sadness behind his eyes, a sadness much different than the resigned emptiness that had overtaken mine so long ago. Something behind it smoldered still, unrealized but not snuffed out.

  It seemed to me like conviction — a concept I had heard about in TV shows and movies.

  In my former life, I’d have certainly instinctively hated this man, focusing only on the things that separated us: he, some self-righteous, undeniably handsome prig. And I, one of God’s timeless, eccentric wisenheimers, speaking truth to power only in my own small, hardly noticeable acts of daily rebellion.

  In this moment, though, cut off for so long from my fellow man, I could think of only one thing as I watched this square-jawed übermensch struggle tooth and nail against forces whose cruelty I had become so familiar with.

  He was a human being, just like me.

  A jolt of feeling ran through my entire body as the impatient and agitated Technicians roughly strapped his arms and legs into the machine. His gaze caught mine for a brief second as he howled out in pain. Our eyes locked, sharing for a moment some silent bond of recognition.

  He assured me silently, in no uncertain terms, that he understood why I must now tumble in ungraceful slow motion through the swinging laboratory doors back out into the hallway with tears in my eyes.

  I mouthed a thank you I’m not sure he received as they forced the metal gurney into the tube, which now glowed inside with a blinding neon light. He gritted his teeth, curled his mouth in a defiant, gorgeous smile.

  Through the slit of the closing laboratory door, I watched aghast as one of the Technicians, after several failed password attempts and apparent frustration with his choice of security questions, entered a series of commands into the terminal which sent the device into new fits of horror, pulsating and shaking now with a raw power I’d never seen before.

  Whatever this thing did, it didn’t seem likely my beautiful friend was meant to survive it.

  I fell to the hallway floor, woozy and stunned from the things I had seen and the caustic, undiluted fumes of MegaClean? #9. I lay there for a moment in a daze as a cacophony of muffled mechanical noises bellowed out from the Laboratory.

  There were buzzes and screeches, jolts of electricity, and then, cutting through all of it, the ringing out of the words which would come to define so much of my life going forward.

  They echoed, crystal clear even then, through the cavernous hallways of the Laboratory Wing as if I was always meant to hear them, shouted out for my ears only by my gorgeous comrade in one last act of defiance as, I could only imagine, they blasted his enviable body with malicious energy.

  “Someone has to carry the weight.”

  If only I had any idea what it was supposed to mean.