Pain Case

Part IX

All things connected

each cell as part of the whole

Submission: freedom

We are lost when we lose our humanity, I have found.  Even without a soul, when death takes you and machines bring you back, the guise of such things as humanity are imperative to survival.  As I no longer have my soul, I have only the guise.  It is Heisei 25 according to my people but it is 68 years with my abilities and 18 years that I have been soulless.

I do not taste food anymore; I do not feel love or touch.  I am granted the gift of individuality and my control over my machines is absolute.  The price I had to pay for it...

It has been quite the struggle in New York City for power.  The number of people I had to kill just to move up these ranks was disgusting.  The thirst for blood is even greater here state side than in Japan.  I have also learned to use mostly English to conduct all my affairs unless necessary to do otherwise.  The Americans are a despicable people that take comfort over progress.  I find this evidence in almost every decision their country or the people themselves do.  They feel like terrorists are out to get them so they attack everyone with a turban on their heads while corporations and government destroy them like a child in a boxing ring fighting a sumo.

I can hardly complain.

My organization makes a lot of money on drugs.  Yet another way that Americans pacify their minds into a sense of false security.  Not that the Japanese are any different but video games and computer games give them the exodus from reality they feel they deserve and when they don't like it, someone gets shot.  They have even elected a man who smokes like a black man and screws his people like a white banker.  From an apathetic standpoint it's all very boring but to those who might find this journal, they may get a kick out of the times.

I take pleasure in human suffering.  Without a soul, all that is left are memories; memories of feelings I once had and those, which if I go to extremes, I may be able to remember feeling again.  Normally, I don't use guns but I remember shooting an informant dead once, simply to see if it would feel any different than all the years I killed people with a sword.  In short, it did not.  In fact, the blood rushing from somebody due to the immense pain of a cut was far more preferable of a remembered emotion than the simple bang bang he's dead "same shit different day."

I remember once, I had the Russian boy that shares the implant with me, torture a man with 2,000 paper cuts and lemon juice.  The pain he seemed to feel was so intense and real, I almost let the Russian know who I was.

When I was first denied my right of an honorable death, my nanites pumped me full of so much adrenaline, I thought I wanted to kill everyone involved with giving me the gift but now, after coming to America and reading their daunting tales about immortals both in horror fantasy as well as Greek mythology and stories from around the world that adorn their libraries like so many pretty distractions from life, I think I rather enjoy this 人生を通して浮かんでいます attitude.

Oh how care free it is to walk into the office of 強力なヤクザ中尉 and let him rip you full of holes, only to rise off his floor, moments later, and eat his face off while stabbing him over and over with a pen knife.  If only the Russian boy knew about the limitless potential of evil, right?  Living because of our gift to a life of tastelessness and apathy.  If only they all knew!  The implant was the new secret nuclear bomb.  Who needs a bomb, when you have one blood thirsty soldier that can't die?  Countries world wide were developing it and here I was at the center supplying the detail and study under the guise of a Yakuza boss.

I could see the ocular implants from around the globe at any time.  To me, night vision and infrared were like child's play.  I saw in data streams and every money transaction and every implanted human was at my finger tips because I could see and feel everyone's living souls.

As we speak, I can feel, hear, see, smell, ったく、ふざけんな！I can practically taste the American dough boy and the Russian torturer who come for me to ask the ultimate question.

All they really needed to know was something I would tell no one.  The secret to unlocking the full potential of the nanites, our usefulness as truly powerful weapons, and the full potential of what we could do with the implant: 死.

Power comes with cost

What is it worth: すべて?

would you pay with 死?

Pain Case

Part VIII

My trip to New York was less than comfortable. First of all, Nome to JFK Airport is one hell of a long trip. Not to mention that getting in to NYC is like coming from carefree Alaskans to hateful New Yorkers. Yes, it's the greatest city in the world but hell if it ain't because of the people.

I took the train to Brooklyn. Odds were that the man with the eerie, green eye was holed up in the apartment above the jewelry store; it had only been a week since the article and the picture showed him coming out of a door next to the place. In addition to this, I had an uncanny feeling in my gut that he was there. It was that same feeling that you get when the person in front of you, on a crowded platform, is talking about you in a different language. As I got closer, the feeling intensified and it was almost as if my body was preparing itself for a fight.

The train stopped a block away and I felt my heart rate increase. My muscles began to bulge and spasm like an excited virgin on the wedding night. All of a sudden, my mind was racing with fight scenarios and defense strategy but I consciously could care less. My eagerness was simply to meet this man and find out more about what I am now and as I stepped up to his door, I felt that it was this resolve that caused me to control my body and calm it down.

I knocked on the door.
There was no answer.
I knocked again.
No answer.

"Now, see here, mister...."

"Boom!"
A foot came through the door, instantly crushing and breaking my nose. Now, I was mad and the adrenaline surged through me with renewed vigor.

Using the door as a shield, I pushed it into the person behind it. He retorted by using his other foot and pushing off the door to land on the ceiling and pull an FN Five SeveN on me.
Sneaky bastard.

The bullets flew and I pulled my military side arm, a Beretta 9mm, and returned fire. Shreds of paper made it seem as if it were snowing and time its self seemed to slow. I could see the bullets slowly moving around while our bodies continued to move at regular speed. I watched as two bullets collided head on as I moved through mid air to hide behind a wall.

The tiny apartment was shredded and it looked like leopard skin adorned the faded orange walls as the dust began to settle.

[Are you alive?] A voice said in my head.

I didn't know how to answer in my head, so I simply yelled out, "Да! А у меня еще два клипа , мать ублюдок !"

What the fuck? When did I learn Russian?

"Good! You know some Russian," I heard a voice say.
"No! None at all," I said.
"Then why do you continue to speak it?"
"What?" I said.
"You're speaking Russian right now, asshole." He said.

It sounded to me as if I still spoke English but to him, he understood me in Russian.

He must have heard my thoughts because in my head, I heard [you're implant works but you don't. Your self control is impeccable to silence it but how foolish you are to not use it simultaneously to detect danger. Your reflex enhancements are working but... I wonder...]

From behind a corner and then in a flash from the ceiling, he shot me twelve times in the gut.

"It hurts; I know, but your nanites will heal you. You're like a child, doughboy..."
"My name is Ron!"
"Ron, then."

The bullets made their way to the surface of my skin and fell to the floor.

"You dirty sonovabitch..."
"I had to test you, American. Your government gave you 'our' technology and told you nothing? What do you know?"

I stood and stared at him like a lost dog. In all honesty, I was lost. Was I really a glowing green eyed roboman like this guy? I had no idea what was inside me or what "we" were but I'll bet he'd pondered it to no end.

"Actually, I just started thinking about 'us' as a 'we' and please don't refer to me as some sci-fi robot monster."

I forgot the Ruskie could read my mind.

We spent the majority of the night training and discussing the potentials of our device. He told me about the nanites and how they'd fixed me in the armed conflicts I'd been in. He even shot me a couple more times and let me shoot him to see them at work. He told me about torture and a dark essence stirred in me and I have to admit I think I might have liked it. He enjoyed the soldiering tales I had but I think his years of torture taught him enough about human beings that he'd probably have made a better spec. Ops boy than me. I say boy because we both still seemed to look like boys even though we were in our 80's. The nanites kept us young as a side effect of the healing.

To back up for an instant, I found out these nanites were attached to the ocular implant; like a blood, or virtuous humor, that gave it depth when being installed and then reproduced and spread out once inside the body.

In any case, boring and personal information aside, the dossier now set to a man named Hayao Mitzurugi. Apparently, he was the master of "our" device that held the missing links to end the limits on what we knew how to do with it.

So the torturer and the soldier sought the assassin. I may finally have a chance to feel my face again and find the department head that took my humanity and gave me this thing.

"Easy killer. We'll get there."
"Get out of my head, you Ruskie psycho."

Pain Case

Part VII

I could hear his heavy breathing from four kilometers away before he ever graced my disheveled hole in the wall.  I knew he had an ocular implant because I could feel the presence in my heart beat.  The same way a normal person senses someone standing behind them on a crowded platform.  His biological code was American and go figure they'd plop this technology into an average soldier boy.  Americans would have no idea the kind of power our kind could achieve.

Our kind.  It felt eerie to think about let alone believe in.  Who, Для черт возьми, were "we," anyway?  What set "us" apart?  It was a question I had been размышлял since doing some independent work for a powerful Yakuza named Hayao Mitzurugi (or Mitzu-Sama) for short.  He was quite into his honorifics and respect but what really got me on his case was an incident that happened in late 2002.  

The year was 2002, and I remember being drenched in the blood of some грязной итальянской, thinking about how good I felt to be torturing again.  We had taken refuge in an abandoned hospital somewhere in the New York state countryside.  Mitzu-Sama had had some run in with the Жадные Черт and had been insulted in the process.  Also insulted, however, were his group of wealthy Japanese businessmen.  For this, I had cut the man 2000 times with a piece of paper and doused him in a jug of lemon juice.  This was just the beginning as well.  Ребенка игра if you will but it pleased Mitzu-sama so much that he began to laugh uncontrollably and with such frivolity that all his associates began to laugh the same way.  It was in that moment that an overwhelming feeling of Чистое зло all of a sudden made me drop to my knees.  It felt as if someone with immeasurable power were pressing on my shoulders.  Shortly after they all got their composure back, I felt it lifted.  It was as if it never existed and I had simply lost трех или четырех секунд from my life.

The reason I even recall the story is that my apartment is now basically barren.  I have the money to buy things and furnish it, however, I do not need such things as others might and my wall paper wouldn't match anything anyway.  Across the walls, I have followed Mitzu-Sama's life since 1995 when he arrived in this country.  As far as I can surmise, from my studies, he was an assassin before coming to The States.  The unforgiving and almost ambivalent trail of bodies within the Yakuza ranks, that were the reason for his rise to power, were enough to say, and loudly I might add, that he was not afraid of people knowing he was dangerous but to what degree.  Obviously he killed people but he made it look, every time as if he had caught them by surprise and was simply in the right place at the right time.  In the underground world, the cases were solved but the police were clueless.  All of these killings could not be proven but the M.O. was always the same and he was always to benefit.

If Mitzu-Sama had come for me now, I'd have ghosted away but this Тесто мальчика intended me no harm.  After years of torturing, I had learned to recognize the instinct in a human being and the nanites that he had communicated no irrational thought besides the drive of a child to make it to the top of a hill.  It was as if the Americans had implanted this poor soldier with unimaginable technology (most likely stolen from us) and then planted him on an empty playground in order to test it.  It was obvious no one had trained him other than in the state of combat.  I know there's no manual for the potential power we reserve, but the least they could have done is told him what he was given.  It's so sad when a nation knows nothing about the art of war and only the war of it.  I'm sure it had kept him alive through several of those but the невинного ребенка had no idea what he was carrying inside him.

Please understand, the Japanese, and if my assumptions are correct, in specific, Mitzu-Sama are artists in their craft.  In addition to his assassinations, if he is able to control his visibility in "our kind's" eyes then he is indeed a master of this device instead of the other way around. Черт! He probably could see me for what I am while masking his own presence...

The American was down the street now.  I felt him as he neared me. Come, Тесто мальчика, let us see the metal of your American soldiering.

Pain Case

Part VI

The night caresses

the moon rises to meet me

one purpose alone

I hear the wind rustle through the trees and my country's call come at last.  I have killed 245 people world wide since my induction into this sacred order.  It's been 45 years that I have faithfully served my country and my empire with this device and it has been upgraded and enhanced over the years as well as granted me an eternal youth.  I have been most honored by my divine leaders.

They've informed me, however that tonight ends my necessity and with this, the end of my assignment and usefulness.  My last target is my maker who is now 83 years old and has also lived a wonderful life due to his involvement in this program.  It is said that he has been ordered to keep his honor by burying this program with his body, however, he is a coward and refuses to die with dignity.

"不名誉な," I mutter aloud.

In any case, I will give him the honorable death whether he wants it or not.  I think this as I watch him from the branch of his maple outside of his window.  He sleeps soundly with the lights on and using my enhancements, I can even hear him snoring.

I enter his room through the window and make no sound.  I raise my sword to end his life...

ためらい

What holds me back from my duty and honor?  What is this feeling in my soul?  A mix of programming perhaps?  A subroutine written in by him?

"お父さんを目覚めさせる!" I say with impatience.

He wakes up slowly and barely coherent.  I tell him that I want to give him the opportunity to accept a noble death.

"死は恥ずべきである,"  He said to me.

The anger and shame towards him built with in me.  My rage began to burn my soul and my clearheaded became clouded.  With one swift cut, I sliced through his neck.  The cut was so clean he managed to say one last thing before he died.

He said, "私は私の息子、あなたを愛しています。"

My heart might have sank but I was committed to what I did next.  I plunged my 脇差 into my chest.  Without the assistance of a second, I would have to wait to die.  I felt the blood leave me and imagined my marks.  As the light slowly left, I felt at peace in the darkness.

絶望

I awoke to feel what was not living and was not death.  The machines within me had brought me back to life but I no longer felt the pumping of blood.  I no longer felt my heart.  I no longer thought of memories besides the ones I'd had tonight.  I can not remember my mother's face and barely remember what mother or father means.

They took my life.  There is no honor anymore.  I have been programmed to kill and torture.  I did this for my country but I feel no sympathies anymore.  I feel the need to burn down the world.  Damn them for this emptyness.  Damn them for my lost soul.  Damn them to the hell I will send them to when I have made a plan.

I leave for New York City tonight.  It's time to make a plan to destroy their power and hurt them completely. 

In death my soul left

my nightmare awakened me

complete destruction.

Pain Case

Part V

I've been following the news for weeks and hardly slept a full night. Jesus Christ, have I really lost it.

Anything that could explain this odd conversion of mine.  The military discharged me after the mid 70's when they saw that I wasn't aging.  Something about, "We've played god and now it's up to you to right our wrong."  They still won't tell me what that wrong is but I'm going to find the mother fuckers that did this to me and make sure they get theirs.

The mid 80's were a hoot and gave me some time to cool off.  Designer drugs were kind to me as the cocaine era of the 70's only agitated my condition.  Often times I'd find after a coke binge that I had become covered in someone else's blood while the bodies would just vanish.  My wife left me during this era.  She said I wasn't the man she'd fallen in love with any more.  She said I was almost machine like and had some how drastically changed since that fateful blackout in 1965.

Luck was on the horizon though through a man named Shultz.  Shultz was a military shrink and had been with me since '68.  Sometimes I thought he might have been the reason I was covered in blood but he seemed to know how to... well... program me; if that makes any sense.  The horrible things I must have done in that man's name and couldn't remember a damn thing had me up late reading news articles from thousands of sources, some, simultaneously in my head.  I knew I would find something; some one; maybe even another with this bionic eye type device who was having similar reactions to me.  It was the mid 90's before I finally got a hit.

I remember I was scanning photos and then there it was.  In the background of a local jewelry shop opening, there was a man whose left eye seemed to glow a little that was too preternatural to be a glare.  On what little I had, I shredded my military issue debit card and bought a one way to New York City.  I left a note on  old Shultzee's desk telling him that I thought I might have found purpose.

I didn't know it then but he had apparently phoned HQ that night and told them I flew the coop.  I was doomed before I started but not if I could get to them first.  The assault would be much grander with two of us with this purpose.  I was ready to fight.

Pain Case

Part IV:

I imagine that if there are any others in my position, they very likely ask themselves what a new found sadist does with himself after vengeance?  Well, I'll tell you what he does, exactly what his фигня country tells him to do until his фигня country decides to retire him and he becomes a ghost.

I imagine many ex KGB feel the way I felt when they told me my job was over and that I was scheduled for execution due to the danger factor of keeping me alive.

"мудак!" I shouted over and over again to no avail from my cell.

For years, I had done things like calculate the depth of an incision to slowly remove skin from a persons body, in varying sections; I had calculated the exact position of nerve endings so as to cut every one so quickly that a person would experience indescribable pain before telling me and my government everything they needed to know before I disposed of him anyway.  Not many people know what it is to cut out a voice box with frightening speed and accuracy while denying the person the quick, "bleed to death" courtesy.  Better still, not many people know what it's like to have electrical impulses screwing with your moral compass to the point you enjoy said activities.

It was a Wednesday when they came for me.  Hump day.  Oh did I have fun with that one.

The guard was a педик.  I could tell from his intonation and the way he carried himself.  He didn't know that I knew and he made himself that much more macho in order that he might disguise his perversion as he dealt with me and my rather handsome form each day.

"Эй педик! Приходите дать мне минет!" I taunted from my cell.

He now knew that I knew and I counted on that.  In his fit of rage, he came to beat me and called for back up to hold me down.

"Собираетесь ли вы попробовать и ебать меня, педик?" I said.  I taunted more because the more pressure he applied to me, the more pressure I had to break the cuffs I had on and flick the metal at the light in the enclosed cell to do my work.

As the light smashed and went out, I grabbed his night stick and impaled the other guard from the bottom of his chin and out the top of his head.  I made sure I hit as many nerve endings as I could and also to miss the major arteries and veins so he might have knowledge of my act and even a little pain in the few seconds he had as he gargled his last breath.

In that same instant I had rapped Маленькая фея on the head so he had now passed out.

As I watched them both with night vision, the silence and darkness gave me an idea.  I tilted the impaled guard's head back and drove the stake into the wall. With his cuffs, I cuffed the other guard behind his back and pulled down his pants.  With his utility knife I cut off the impaled guard's phallus and ran it through with a pointed, whittled down night stick I grabbed from his utility belt.  I then rammed that into the анус of the passed out guard.

With their blood, I wrote on the walls, "For god and country.  I am your best.  Now I am free, Мать Россия ..."

That night, I would travel to America and let them know of what had been done to me and perhaps gain use and freedom through the defection.

I was wrong. America is no freer to the weaponized killer and ex compatriot that the Russians want for war crimes.  I was like the toy in the common phrase, "Мальчики и их игрушки ..."  

Fuck it.  It wasn't like this old Ruskie didn't know how to hide...

A Devil's Raid

At the top of a hill, we descended from land toward the small bay of the city built into the steppes.  While our warships waited in the harbor for a quick getaway; as catapulted heated rocks with flaming pitch at the poorly built defenses.  There was no military importance to this town.  The whores were none existent but the aristocratic women were more exquisite than any whore and were far more pleasurable as well.  There's no corrupting a whore but an eloquent girl of 15 from a finely adorned enemy's nobility?  Well, there's no joy greater than his pain.

I remember the whites and blues of those walls.  The steps toward the ocean were made of marble and my sword cracked open so many skulls, leaving fragments of bone and blood on the walls.  My men were the immoral lecturers but I on the other hand took greater pleasure, sexual and other wise, from turning a man, woman or whoever happened to cross my path, into a corpse.  War is hell, or so they say, but I could not help but enjoy the empowerment of causing death.  From this raid, we would get much gold and food and in the process, we would kill pagans who had no right to his good graces in the first place.

It sickened me how the blue banners flew from their window sills and how opulent this trade city had become from the ignorance to death and pain.  I remember slitting the throat of a boy no older than twelve to stain a banner adorned with a pagan god for the simple sake of turning it red with blood.  As the angel of death did with the first born of Egypt, so too did I do to these people that day.  Their door frames were painted red with their own blood as lambs to the slaughter.

The thick black fog swirled around in the half circle shape of the town that led to the bay.  It stunk of hell but cleansed like heaven.  God's judgement on these people was swift and absolute and we had no problem with their slaughter.  "Pirates," they called us; "Barbars!" They said.  And each one who uttered such blasphemy was put to the sword one by one and God saved no one.

I felt the heat as we neared the ships and smelled the stink of the pitch burning live bodies who struggled to get it off them.  It is pathetic to see a grown man screaming to have his skin scraped off rather than burned off as it were.  In my mercy, I slaughtered many who the fire licked with arrows and simple cuts from my sword.

The walls were blue and white, now they were red; The town was alive up and down the houses built into a hill that from far off, more than likely represented the stadium seating of a Greek theater. Now it was dead.  With confidence and the wretched love of the slaughter, I breathed in the smell of death and lived a little before the hunger began to lap at me like a ragged mange.

I ran back up into the hill and found survivors until behind a corner, I felt a knife drive deep into my chest.  I turned around and laughed.  I began to laugh heartily at the boy of seventeen who now backed into a corner in sheer terror until he began to grab for his knife as if to stab me again.

"What's your name, boy?" I bellowed.
"iben tal-bniedem," He said.
"Today, you've met the devil and I've brought hell with me."

I removed the knife from my chest and licked the sweet blood.  My head began to shift into that of a dog resembling a doberman.  I ate the boy and chewed on his flesh in that tiny little room, on the island nation.  I used his collar bone to pick my teeth as I descended the steppes and climbed aboard the boat.  I noticed a few new troops aboard my boat and I noticed that many of the men we looking a bit lifeless.

"Captain!" I said, summoning my head of the guard, "Throw some of our oldest soldiers to the waters when we get far enough out.  Only enough to cover the replacements to our horde.