#jon blake

2. When you sardonically ask your dad about the risk of you starving before his two years are up, he undoes the latches around your neck and for a second you stupidly think he’s going to free you. But he doesn’t. He shows you what he’s done to you and you’re glad you haven’t had anything to eat in a month or you would throw up. But your head isn’t connected to your stomach or anything, so you couldn’t do that anyway. You try not to think about it. You can’t.

3. Ananke doesn’t visit at all after that first day. Dad comes down whenever he has the chance, which isn’t often, between all the sex and drugs and whatever other bullshit he gets up to while living your life. You spend a lot of time alone with only your thoughts. In theory it’s no different to life before, but before was a choice. Now you’re trapped down with no one to talk to, and you never had many friends, but when you get out of here, you’re going to make some.

4. Seeing Dad is weird. You’re the only person who gets to see his face underneath the mask. You’re the only person who really knows him anymore. Maybe he likes that. Maybe he needs that, and that’s why he keeps coming back, taking off his mask just to chat with you. He never takes yours off, and you wonder if it makes it all easier for him. Whenever he puts the helmet on, you miss him, but you can pretend he’s someone else doing this to you. But he’s still Dad.

5. A beeping machine is the best you can do. It’s a good idea. It’s simple. It doesn’t look more or less important than anything else you’ve had to make for them, so it won’t draw their attention. That may be the downfall of your whole plan, but it’s something. It’s all you can think of. You’re scared. You’re trying. You have to keep trying. You can’t stop trying. It’s all over if you stop trying. If you give up, you’ve lost, and you can’t lose. You have to keep building.

6. You’re so tired. You don’t know how a head that doesn’t need a body to live can still get tired. You don’t know how any of this works, and you won’t stop to think about it. You don’t need to sleep, not really, but you do out of habit. That’s the benefit of not having a body, you guess, not having to get comfortable before being able to sleep. A head just needs a place to rest. You have that. You wish you could lay down. You’re so, so tired.

7. The cell is six feet long, six feet wide, and ten feet high. That’s your entire world. You used to be content just staying in your room half the day. You were never an outdoorsy kid. But you can’t even properly breathe the air in here, and you can’t move, and you can’t do anything about it. You keep trying. Every time they ask you to make something, you slip in something else that could lead someone to you. When you get out, you’re going to go to the park.

8. They could at least give you something to read. An ebook would be easy, they could just hook you up to a Kindle and you wouldn’t even need fingers to turn the pages. Or a DVD player, one of the portable ones from when you were a kid and needed entertainment in the car on the occasional day trips up north. You sometimes feel like your mind is melting from boredom, and it scares you more than staying here forever. If you don’t have your mind you don’t have anything.

9. You have to think about it. You finally stop to think about it. You consider your options. You’ve made robot armor, robot suits, you’ve built canons and mind-control machines, you’ve built things that should have been impossible outside of comic books and cartoons. You can build yourself a body when you get out of here. You start to draw up the plans in your head. They’ll be ready to go whenever you get out. It’ll be nice to build something with your hands again. When you have hands again, anyway.

10. You wonder how your mom is doing. You haven’t heard from her in years and you’d like to keep it that way. If she wanted you to miss her, she shouldn’t have left. But you still wonder. Does she know you’re missing? Does anyone? Dad pretended you had run away, he told you that, but he also told you he’d gone great lengths to "find you again". You wonder if he called your mom. You wonder if she’s worried about you. You don’t know if you want that or not.

11. You were never a violent kid. When the schoolyard bullies got you down, you fought back, but you didn’t like to. You weren’t any good at it, anyway. Now they have you building weapons. You don’t want to do it, but if someone has to do it, you’d rather it’s you, not them. You finally have a choice.  You could make it right, and you do. You make cannons, lasers, a giant robot warrior, mind control machines, and you hate it as much as you’re proud of yourself for it.