BZRK

rug, time to lie down right there and then. He was conscious of the doctor’s hand grabbing the back of his shirt and softening the facedown landing.
    No time passed—well, none that Noah was aware of—before he woke. He was sitting in a chair. Not a comfortable chair, a very sturdily built chair that looked as if it had been bolted together out of 4 x 4 beams. Wide Velcro straps held Noah’s legs to the legs of the chair, and his arms to the arms of the chair, and his back to the back of the chair.
    It wouldn’t have held the Incredible Hulk, but after a few experimental muscle flexes Noah decided that it would do a pretty good job of keeping him pinned down.
    Both of his hands were encased in black gloves, and the gloves extruded a tangle of wires. Red, blue, green, white, black. Thin little wires that tumbled messily toward a panel that had simply been placed on the floor. It wasn’t exactly elegant.
    A cable ran from the panel to a Mac on a small card table.
    Two moderately large TV monitors were directly ahead at eye level. They showed nothing but a creepy sort of logo, like a mechanical insect, and the word
BZRK
.
    All of this had been recently moved into place. Sofa, easy chairs, and tables had been shoved aside. A rug had been rolled up. Noah was certain that this apartment had been temporarily appropriated. The owners no doubt off somewhere warmer and dryer than London, entirely unaware of what was happening at home.
    “What the hell?” Noah said. His voice wasn’t slurred. In fact he felt perfectly alert. He’d gone from unconscious to conscious in record time, and he wondered if it had anything to do with the head band he was wearing. Wires seemed to be coming from it as well. They tickled the back of his neck.
    Dr Pound appeared. “Awake then?”
    “What the fuck?” Noah said, feeling this called for something a bit stronger than a mere, “Hell.”
    “Sorry to have to render you unconscious, but I had to check you out at the nano level. Don’t worry, you appear to be clean,” Dr Pound waved a dismissive hand. The hand was holding a lit cigar that trailed putrid smoke. He also appeared to have one of the sherbet pips in his mouth. It was pink.
    “From here on this will only take fifteen minutes,” Pound said.
    “Get me out of here,” Noah said. But not like he thought it would happen. Not even like he really, really wanted it. Because he had volunteered to take some sort of test. And his brother had done it, hadn’t he?
    Unless this was all some sort of elaborate trick. He tested the Velcro strap around his right bicep. Yes, it was still there, and no, he was not the Hulk.
    “You will play a video game,” Dr Pound said. “Two games, actually. One game on the left screen is controlled by your right hand. The one on the right by your left hand.”
    “Games?”
    “Games,” Dr Pound agreed. “But you don’t play for points. Points are an abstraction. On the other hand, pain is real.”
    As he said this he let the hand holding the cigar drift down until, as if unaware, the cigar’s hot glowing tip was near Noah’s arm.
    “And fear of bodily injury, say the loss of a limb, is also very real.”
    Noah stared at his captor, looking for evidence in his liquid brown eyes that he was joking, exaggerating, fooling, or anything other than speaking the truth.
    “Do you know the poet Ezra Pound?” Dr Pound asked.
    “What are you doing down there?” Noah asked, wishing his voice was not quite so obviously shaky.
    Dr Pound had wheeled a cart into place beside Noah’s right leg. It wasn’t tall, just maybe eighteen inches high, and it looked like it might be an emergency generator. Except that someone had attached a chain saw to it.
    “Whoa. No, whoa. No, wait up.”
    Again, testing the Velcro. Again, not possessing super strength. The Velcro gave up a few gritty Velcro sounds, but that was all.
    “Pound was considered perhaps the greatest poet of the twentieth century.” The doctor locked the cart’s wheels and swung a bracket around to affix the machine to the chair leg in such a way that the glittering chain of the saw came to within a quarter inch of the back of the chair leg.
    “Okay, I’ve changed my mind,” Noah said.
    “But I’ve gone to all this trouble.” Dr Pound winked up at him. “Unfortunately, Pound was also mentally disturbed. He was a rabid anti-Semite. And he was a supporter of Hitler.”
    Dr Pound had gone around to Noah’s left. He picked up a