The Amnesia Experiment: A Young Adult Dystopian Novel

  The Amnesia Experiment

  CAROLINE WEI

  Copyright © 2020 Caroline Wei

  All rights reserved.

  For God.

  For my family.

  (*colon, close parenthesis*)

  1

  ALLE

  I had a dream that I was running.

  It was an unidentified time of night, and there was a constant feeling of vertigo, but I never fell. I had a sneaking suspicion that I was already falling.

  I couldn’t b r e a t h e

  and my heartbeat was everywhere—

  There was no semblance of time or space or understanding; this was too vast to understand. It confused me, it hurt me, it ripped and it broke until my legs were shattered mirrors.

  There was a vacuum—the night sky itself—and it was powerful, one with a writhing, unfathomable depth that morphed and undulated in sync with fear. It pulsed, it called to me, it pulled me in because my body was useless

  useless

  and I couldn’t fight, I wasn’t strong enough.

  I had a dream that I was running but

  it’s strange

  I’m already

  there.

  ~.~.~.~.~

  I woke up sitting on a chair colder than I was. Pain laced my wrists, the result of handcuffs welding my hands to the arms of the chair. When I looked up, fog obscured my vision, so deep and impenetrable it looked like a wall.

  I shook my head once, and the fog disappeared to reveal a field of summer green, rolls and lengths of lush carpet woven with flourishes of purple wildflowers. As if in sarcastic contrast, all around its perimeter were people chained to iron chairs, some struggling, some slumped with heads lolling. All of their seats were fused with the wall behind them.

  Up in the sky, there was a diamond refraction of light as the sun penetrated the roof. Four walls, towering and transparent, surrounded us on all sides, displaying the landscape outside but refusing to give entrance.

  We were in a giant glass box.

  I tried to move my locked hands but instead caught sight of something on my upper arm. It was a crystal armband, multi-faceted and sparkling in the light, with four letters and two numbers etched on its surface.

  ALLE 17

  “Congratulations on your admission.”

  I jerked my head up towards the ceiling, where the sound seemed to be coming from, but there were no visible speakers.

  A beat of silence.

  “Resistance is fruitless. Please cooperate.” The voice speaking was cool, female, and monotone. The people struggling were taking it up a notch, kicking with all their might. Those who were unconscious before were now awake, their mouths moving around incomprehensible words. My lungs shuddered as I took in a breath, right at the moment when, with one crackling snap, the chairs of those fighting emitted jagged bolts of blue lightning, burning skin and hair. They cried out, jerking.

  We were in a giant glass box, and we were in electric chairs.

  “Thank you,” the mechanized voice said. “Your name and age are contained on your armlets. That is all the information that will be required.”

  Alle.

  I couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t known that before.

  “We appreciate your cooperation. Initiating Trial One in two minutes.”

  Some people were talking now, their confused phrases being tossed across the glade in rushed, agitated tones. Their words roared in my ears, echoing my own thoughts.

  “Am I a prisoner?”

  “—can’t remember anything—”

  “Inhumane—”

  “Let—me—go—”

  Every syllable thudded in my mind. I was more alert now, and I was panicking. Pushing the thought of electrocution out of my mind, I yanked my wrists upwards, testing the strength of the handcuffs. All I felt was pain. I twisted in my seat. I slammed my elbows into the sides of the chair. I kicked my legs.

  It was useless.

  I tried to breathe. I couldn’t remember anything about myself. There was nothing to grasp onto, nothing to be sure of.

  My brain hurtling at a hundred miles per second, I realized that I had an understanding of how the world worked. I knew that grass grew and flowers wilted and that computers beeped and tractors plowed. What had my heart racing was that I didn’t know if I had a family or even if I went to school. It was like I had been dropped off on Earth at the age of seventeen, with nothing that came before.

  For the first time, I noticed the enormous digital clock being projected on one of the glass walls, beeping red. It was at ten...then nine…

  Initiating Trial One in two minutes.

  Three thoughts registered in my mind:

  It was counting down.

  I didn’t know what it was counting down to.

  I did not want to be around when it reached zero.

  Unfortunately, kicking and squirming was about as effective as a snail wrestling with its own shell.

  Eight...seven...six…

  Somebody was screaming.

  Five...four...three…

  The robotic voice was reverberating in my mind: “We appreciate your cooperation…”

  Two...one…

  cooperation cooperation cooperation

  ...zero.

  Loud breathing.

  Gasps rumbling in my ears.

  Then the handcuffs tightened, and the chair sparked to life. Every inch of my skin felt the metal heat up and start burning through my clothes. Little holes in the arms of the chair opened up, and, faster than perception allowed, wreaths of blue lightning shot out to lace my hands.

  At first, I hardly felt a thing, but then it was like a living, breathing monster was choking my body. Wrapping its limbs around my neck, its claws dug into my shoulders, my back, my legs. Its teeth sunk into my arms, and each of its talons pierced my fingers, emanating fire and fury—

  p

  a

  i

  n

  It was impossible not to scream. I was myself but I wasn’t myself—I had been thrown out of my body, exploding at the seams.

  In the midst of it all, I wasn’t aware of anyone or anything else. I didn’t know if the others were experiencing the same thing. All I could hear and see and taste was the roaring blood pounding through my veins.

  It was going on forever.

  It would never end.

  Over and over, I felt the thunder ripping my organs apart.

  And then it stopped.

  As the handcuffs loosened, I leaned over, retching, but there was nothing to throw up. My skin was still sparking with the remnants of the lightning and the fire of the seat, but I was too relieved to think much of it.

  Bent over, I caught my reflection on the legs of the chair. In a tired corner of my mind, I thought of how strange it was that I hadn’t even known what I looked like.

  My olive face was fractured in half by the two chair legs, each showing one chestnut brown eye. My lips were twisted in an expression of pain, and my singed eyebrows were furrowed together, sweat dripping from my temples. Faintly, I perceived the sound of people crying, but there was something else in the air—the smell of burned skin.

  “What is going on?” I croaked to myself.

  As if in answer, the manacles around my wrists tightened again, and the chair grew hot once more, baking my clothes. The lightning emerged, flashing and spinning, marking my hands with black lines.

  Whether it was intentional or not, the heat seemed twice as high. Sounds of suffering assaulted me from all angles—I could hear them now. My skin crackled against the chair, and my body spasmed uncontrollably from lightning.
I wasn’t even aware of it when the mechanisms seemed to turn themselves off again.

  It was clear there was no good that would come from staying in the seat. People all over were fighting to be freed, and I could dimly register the charred marks on their arms.

  When the pain resumed, the tears forming in my eyes didn’t get a chance to drop. Instead, the rippling heat that seemed to come from everywhere burned them to vapor.

  Screaming and screaming and screaming.

  It wasn’t ending.

  This time, it wasn’t ending.

  I was trapped. There was no exit, no entrance, no nothing. All I saw was black flashing with blue, my body losing the fight. There was no way I could endure this.

  All at once, the lightning died and the chair cooled, finally stopping the knives in my bones. The handcuffs separated in a small hiss, and suddenly, my hands were freed.

  I couldn’t move.

  ~.~.~.~.~

  Thirty-two dead.

  There used to be 200 people and now there were only 168. I didn’t really know what to make of that.

  The corpses were laid out in a neat grid, their bodies scarred and burned. Unlike the people wearing them, their armlets were pristine, without any trace of dirt or smudge. I stood there blankly.

  “It’s a wreckage, isn’t it.” The girl who spoke was reed-thin with freckles. She stood next to me, arms crossed. There was a woman beside her who was strikingly beautiful, her hair uniquely pale. They were both solemn, but the girl had a sardonic twist to her lips. She spat in the grass. “Dogspawn, all of them.”

  I didn’t have to ask to know what she was talking about. The people who had put us in this glass prison, in those torture chairs—I felt my own resentment boiling against them.

  “My name’s Clarice,” the girl said when I stayed silent.

  “I’m Alle.” I think.

  “What do you think we’re going to do?”

  I looked at the chaos around us. Since being freed from the electric chairs, everyone was gathered in the center of the square field, some talking frantically to each other, many of them yelling. The more badly injured—since ‘injured’ was technically all of us—were laid out near the dead, people trying to care for them. We were all in a state of panic, of fear, our bodies reeling from pain. No one dared venture to the metal seats lining the borders of our cage, in case they decided to spark to life again and zap everyone in the vicinity.

  It would do no good if we all stood around getting angry at each other.

  I looked to Clarice, to the silent woman beside her. There was something about her—the way she held herself—that was different from the rest.

  “We need to organize,” I answered. “I don’t know what the electrocution was about, but I doubt it was the last time that something like it is going to happen again.” The ideas came to my mind, one after the other, like a domino effect. “We need defenses. Medicine. Food. Water.”

  I threw a glance at the rows of dead bodies, the smell of smoke rising to my nose. My stomach turned.

  There was a particularly large rock jutting out of the grass, and I pulled myself on top of it, trying to get everyone’s attention.

  “Hello!” I bellowed, drawing from deep inside to project my voice. I wanted desperately to ask if anyone knew what was going on, but it was becoming clearer and clearer that no one did. There was no need to rouse more disorder. “Everybody—we need to assemble. We don’t know if something like the—electricity—will happen again. Those who know how to tend gardens, please move over here.”

  The once chattering crowd fell into relative quiet, until all I could feel were the daggers being thrown at me.

  “How old even are you?” A man demanded, his bearded chin jerking up in my direction. He was laughing in probably the most insulting way possible. “Yes, everyone, let the midget lead the way.”

  Two women with disgusted expressions were glaring at me. “Who put you in charge?”

  People started talking amongst themselves, shaking their heads. There were a few who seemed to think organizing would be a good idea, but that didn’t stop the embarrassment leaking in blooming colors all over my face. I thought I would die.

  Carefully, I stepped down from the tall, podium-like rock, wincing as I did so. Like everybody else, no doubt, I could still feel the fire from the electric chairs. Clarice and the pale-haired woman were waiting for me, Clarice raising sympathetic eyebrows while her companion stayed stoic.

  “Well,” was all Clarice had to say. Her sarcasm was much gentler than the crowd’s.

  The humiliation faded to be replaced by anger. We would get nothing accomplished by standing around trading opinions.

  The sky above our heads was a serene blue, keeping watch over the fresh grass beneath our feet. The glass box would have been a beautiful sight, if not for the ominous torture devices staring us down from every corner.

  The voice.

  The thought came to me almost randomly. There had been a woman speaking, automaton or not, at the beginning. There had to be speakers somewhere. Clues, hints, tracks—there had to be something left behind, whether intentionally or accidentally, by those who had put us here in the first place.

  I started running towards one of the glass walls, squeezing between two metal chairs while trying not to think about them. Somewhere behind me, Clarice’s voice called, but I ignored her too.

  The glass against my palms was cold. According to the limited memory I had, there was nothing out of the ordinary with what I was touching. The glass was smooth, flawless, and it refracted light. Beyond the wall was a landscape of frozen tundra. The ground was pale blue frosted over with white, sporting a few brave, brambly plants, spreading far into the horizon and ending in a range of obscured mountains. It was a stark contrast to the green warmth on our side.

  There had to be something. My eyes roved upwards. The voice had come from the ceiling.

  I was in the middle of trying to figure out how to climb to the top when I realized it was impossible. The glass surface was too smooth, there were no places to grip, and there was no equipment to use.

  “What are you doing?” Clarice had finally entered the scene, her hands on her knees.The woman who was with her earlier was still at the center of the field, standing alone.

  I pointed to the sky. “Trying to get up there.”

  Clarice scoffed. “No.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  She sat down, pulling me with her. We both stared out at the barren landscape ahead of us, a sort of melancholy in the air. Unconsciously, she rubbed at her armlet, up and down, up and down, her damaged fingers sliding on the cool surface.

  “Well, what do you think we did?” she asked, one side of her lip curled in a smirk. “What was the crime that fit the punishment? Think we murdered babies? Burned down a hospital?”

  I swallowed. “Hopefully something more minor.”

  “Loosen up. Not having a sense of humor in this place is going to kill you faster than whatever it is that—”

  “Maybe we led the greatest heist of the century. Or kidnapped a billionaire’s son. No, we probably hacked into a government surveillance system and replaced all the camera videotape with pictures of spaghetti noodles.”

  Clarice stared at me for a moment, then burst into laughter. “Clever.”

  “Obviously not, because we got caught.”

  “I would have replaced it with screenshots of static. That way they would always think something was wrong but never be able to figure out what it was.”

  We smiled at each other.

  The comfortable silence stretched into worry which stretched into despair. Neither of us had forgotten where we really were.

  Clarice picked herself up, her expression dark with resentment, and kicked the glass wall with a force that must have hurt. She reared back again and kicked harder, the toe of her shoe bouncing off the wall. Clarice’s shoes were just like everyone else’s—generic and gray. In fact, all of our clot
hes were the same too. I almost felt like a lab rat, which, actually, could be what I was.

  After Clarice’s third kick, the wall still stood firm. There wasn’t even a tiny crack in the smooth facade, and that was what made me sure this wasn’t just plain old glass. It was stronger, better, and harder to break.

  Clarice was getting angrier and angrier. She was looking around for something heavier to use, her fists clenched so tightly her knuckles were leached of color. For some reason I felt like I needed to stop her, but I didn’t. Some ugly feeling within wanted to do the exact same thing.

  Her hand grasped for her armlet, fingers pulling, straining, to get it off. She tested it in her hands, feeling its weight and power. With one hard, furious motion, she slammed the armlet against the wall.

  In that moment, two things happened.

  First, the armlet broke cleanly in half, only allowing a few dying pieces of fluttering quartz to fall to the ground. Immediately, a silver liquid started oozing from its broken ends, like a spider ejecting glittering webs from its body, melting onto the grass until it solidified into a long, coiled rope.

  Second, at Clarice’s final attack, fat, jeweled spikes shot out of the highest parts of the walls, lining up around the box’s perimeter in a similar fashion to the electric chairs.

  We both gaped at the rope in front of us and the sharp rods above as exclamations of surprise came from everyone else at the center of the field.

  “Did you see that?” I gasped.

  “How could I not?” Clarice bent down to pick up the rope, which was as thick as her wrist and looked to be woven from metal. Then her eyes crawled upwards again, to the spikes protruding from the wall. They had multiple surfaces, each one a million different colors, flashing alexandrite and topaz. Beautiful, but lethal all the way.

  At first, I thought Clarice was marveling, but then I realized that she was putting two and two together. The spikes on the walls. The rope in her hands.

  Before I knew it, Clarice had tied two expert loops into her rope, one bigger and one smaller. She beckoned for me to come towards her.