He has a scar.

The man standing outside your cell. Has a scar, faint and surgical, running from the corner of his mouth to the hinge of his jaw. Down his throat, to the pressed collar of his flax shirt. End hidden somewhere behind a neat windsor knot.

It was good work. Whoever cut him open was good at their job. He could have easily hidden the thin line, dusty pink against his much darker skin, under an equally thin layer of make-up.

You wonder why he doesn’t.

He’s been standing at your door for a few minutes, now, smiling blandly. Watching not only you, through the fully glass door sandwiched between two floor-to-ceiling windows, but the rest of your cell. You can’t imagine what he finds interesting about any of it — the lack of furnishings, other than the bed bolted to the ground? The off-white walls like blank sheets of paper? The slightly springy, off-white flooring? The cloudy-grey, semi-opaque privacy curtain hanging in the corner next to the toilet and sink? The way the whole room is identical to hundreds of other cells to both your left and your right? But he scans the room with that bland smile, only occasionally coming to look at you.

You haven’t gotten up. You don’t recognise him, and you don’t recognise his lack-of-uniform. He’s not from any department you dealt with before you became an ex-person, and that means he’s trouble. Dangerous.

More danger joins him. A guard stops outside your cell, gets his attention. They talk, exchange polite gestures, before the guard scans a keycard and opens your cell.

“Dr. Jones,” the man says, and every hair on the back of your neck stands to like he’d just called their names instead of your own. All of you at attention and very, very aware that no one has called you anything but ‘subject’ or ‘thirty-one-thirty’ for—

Your mind shuts down, trying to process how long you’ve been here. You don’t want to know. Don’t want to think about the likelihood it’s been longer than a year.

Longer than two.

“I’d like you to come with me,” the man continues. “I think we’ll be more comfortable in my office.”

You consider fighting. The cornered animal in you doesn’t want to go anywhere. The cornered animal in you knows that, when you leave your cell, you come back with less, or more, of you than you started with.

The broken animal in you knows what the guard will do if you resist.

You are more broken, now, than you are afraid. So you get to your feet. Hold your hands out for the restraints the guard lends you. And let them lead you away.

His office is on a different floor. You spend the elevator-ride thinking about ways to kill yourself. Give the guard enough reason to put you down, instead of knocking you out.

You don’t think you can. Not anymore.

The elevator opens on a carpeted hallway, lined with baby-blue doors, each with a shiny metal name-plate affixed to them at about eye-height. Your eye-height, anyway, which means they’re about half a foot above the-man-with-the-scar. He leads you and the guard to a door labelled SILAS YOUNG, then leads you through it. The guard stays outside, and you wonder if he’s going to just hover next to the door, taking up space in the narrow hallway, until SILAS YOUNG is finished with you, or if he’s going to find somewhere more unobtrusive to wait. Or if he’ll leave entirely, disappear back into the elevator and go find someone else to be intimidating at — but that last one seems unlikely.

“Have a seat,” the man says, gesturing at a barrel chair in the middle of the room. It’s a dark brown corduroy, sitting just off-center on a blue-and-brown striped rug. The man takes a seat himself, on an expensive-looking office-chair, next to but not facing a desk against the far wall. All around you are bookshelves, less expensive looking and stocked with as many knick-knacks as they are books. You see fidget toys, stuffed toys, animal-shaped bookends, one potted plant that hasn’t gotten enough water in a while, and a small collection of pewter figurines in a glass case above the desk.

You realise, as you sink into the chair, that you are being therapised.

“My name is Dr. Young,” he says, taking a notepad from the desk behind him and resting it in his lap. “You can call me Silas. I just have a few questions that I hope you’ll answer for me.”

You don’t say anything, and you’d like to imagine his bland smile gets a little more strained, but it probably doesn’t. He does tap the notepad with the end of his pen three, four times, before uncrossing his legs and smoothing out his khakis.

It’s not that you’re trying to be difficult. A different you of a different time would be, but you simply do not have anything to say. You haven’t had anything to say for—

A long time, now.

“Dr. Tiffany C. Jones.” The man reviews his notes before looking back up at you. You flinch, a little, at your full name, which he notices. He jots something down. “How would you prefer to be addressed?”

You shrug. Something in your shoulder clicks. You don’t have a preference, nothing seems right anymore.

More notes. “What do your friends call you?”

You’re surprised into laughing, and that you’re capable of laughing surprises you into doing it more. Four barks, three exhales and an inhale, beat rest beat-beat rest beat.

“I don’t have any,” you say, since he seems unwilling to take your outburst as an answer.

“None at all?”

“No one outside this facility knows I’m still alive, and everyone inside it has this nasty habit of keeping me locked in a cage.”

He nods. You feel like a real therapist would have argued with you.

You start to wonder what you’re here for. Surely Mestra doesn’t care about your mental health. They want something, something inside your brain.

“But you had friends, before.”

“I like to think so, anyway.”

“What did they call you?”

“I feel like you’re really hung up on this one.”

He doesn’t respond. Sits there, rolling his pen between his thumb and his index finger, all bland smile and raised eyebrows. Waiting, politely, for you to give him something to call you.

You sigh. “I’d prefer not to be addressed at all. Not by people who are going to treat me like a test subject either way. At this point, I’d prefer if I wasn’t around anymore for people to address me.”

“When you say you don’t want to be around—”

“I mean I wish I were dead, doc.”

He nods, writes that down. “So, when given the option to regain some of your lost humanity, as it were, to assert a name for yourself instead of a designated number, you would prefer to retain the number?”

Like he’s doing you a favour. “Something like that.”

“Because you would rather be dead?”

“Because you calling me Tiffany, or Kat, or Jones, or Jane Doe doesn’t make me any more human. When we’re done here, I’m going to go right back into my cell and they’re going to go right on calling me thirty-one-thirty, when they bother to refer to me as anything other than ‘subject’.”

“You don’t want to gain something you’re going to lose again.”

“I don’t want to pretend I’ll be gaining anything in the first place.”

“I understand,” he says, and smiles. “You didn’t answer my question — what did your friends call you?”

“If I tell you, are you going to start calling me that despite my clear desire that you do not do so?”

“I promise I will not.”

You frown, and look him over, trying to gauge how much you’re willing to trust him. He works for Mestra, so the answer is ‘not at all’, no matter how much or how little reason he’s given you to hate him so far. But you haven’t been in a position to say ‘no’ to anyone for as long as you’ve been here, and he is giving you that. He’s at least pretending to let you.

You decide it doesn’t matter.

“Katters.”

He writes that down. “What were they like?”

“My friends?”

“Mmhm.”

“I don’t know. Friendly.”

“You don’t know what your friends were like?”

It hurts too much to think about them. You don’t want to say that, so you shrug.

“Alright,” he says. “We’ll put a pin in that one.”

“You can’t have brought me all the way up here to ask me about my social circle.”

Can he? Does Mestra want something from your life before all of this? Could Mestra want someone you used to know? Are they going to hurt someone you used to care about?

“You’d be surprised what can turn out to be relevant,” the man says. “But I want to ask you about how you got here. Not very many employees end up on the other side of the glass, you know.”

“I’m talented like that.”

“Why don’t you tell me how it happened?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know? I came in to work one day and suddenly I was an un-person, no one told me why. No one told me anything, they all stopped talking to me after it happened.”

“That’s not true, is it? That you came in to work and you were suddenly a subject instead of a scientist. I recall that day being more eventful than that.”

“Were you there?”

He shakes his head. “I wasn’t involved.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Why don’t you tell me what actually happened.”