Black: Behavioural Analysis

After taking his blood sample, I installed a microchip in Black. Now I can track him if he goes AWOL. You know, I’m surprised by the amount of times a Proxy’s had someone at their mercy only for them to escape and they hadn’t used something like this. It’s very handy.

…I should probably not have said that, should I?

In any case, I’ve untied him from the bed for good. That may sound like a bad idea, but I’ve got my ‘discouraging’ taser and the keys to a Very Locked House, and I've put away the knives and anything that could be used as an impromptu weapon. I’m not locked in here with him, he’s locked in here with me, to pull in an appropriate quote.

I bandanged his wrists; keeping someone tied up for any length of time can do a surprising amount of damage to the skin. Nothing exciting happened while I did so. He just sat there. “Black,” I said experimentally. He looked up blankly. Good, I thought. That’s something I can work with. I sat down next to him. He followed the movement. I leaned back against the wall. I waved a finger slowly in front of his face. His eyes tracked it. Good, again.

“Can you understand what I’m saying?” No response. “Do you remember anything?” Again, nothing. I sighed. Onto the next thing. One thing I’d found is he acts like a sleepwalker; still capable of doing things, just not there. You put food in front of him, he eats it, you show him where the toilet is, he uses it, you show him where the fridge is, he raids it. Today, I was performing an experiment to see the extent of this.

“Black,” I said, to get his attention again. I carefully placed two bowls  equidistantly  apart in front of him, each filled with a certain colour of (undrugged, seriously who has that kind of time?) skittles, one yellow, one blue. “You can have one, and only one.” Then I waited.

The clock ticked by. I just kept waiting and watching patiently, chin on hands. Roughly about fifteen minutes after I’d presented the choice, there was a slight flicker of… something, in his eyes, and a hand slowly reached out and dragged the yellow bowl towards him. Then he ate them in the same unpresent fashion as he had everything else. I smiled, and took the blue bowl. Experiment: success. Also delicious.

So I’ve been letting him run around the house. Well, I say run… it’s more like I walk into a room and he’s just there. He seems to have taken ‘creepily standing around and doing nothing’ lessons from his former Boss, and I must say he is a natural. There was one point where he flipped out at me (thanks for the warning, Tilde), but the taser soon put a stop to that. At another point about a day after that he suddenly started running, trying to get away from me. I let him. He found the front door was locked, fought with it a bit, went for the other, and fell over one of the tripwires. I heard the thud from where I was sitting reading in the lounge. “Are you all right?” I yelled over my shoulder. “You know, if you want to go out, just say.”

Apart from that, there has been minimal change from his standard state. I gave him art supplies, but he only used them once and then lost interest in them. What he drew was… odd. No words, no drawings of lack of faces, just  short thick, methodical lines in a pattern more curved than a circuitboard. More like a form of esoteric writing than an actual depiction. From the indentation in the paper, they’d been drawn with great deliberation.

Fracture also suggested I give him a book. I deliberated a bit, and decided that giving him the one I took my name from would not be a good idea. In the end, I gave him Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch. He opened it to the middle, and looked at it as if trying to absorb the words via osmosis. For about a half hour. I gave up, walked away to make dinner, came back with it and found him in the same position.

I also gave him the laptop to write on for a bit. This is what he wrote, while not looking at the screen. 

“iiuihd  dadnf  ddthh.kad.h . uhgra.haehu.ah rh. Dberabf fuahahuf a.urhoagaf hcaehnf jncann;pa. ae.kae vaf haehajde tt kjd me aaoyrihg ahnfut auy aijrhg aiuana eigghn aito f ache  ai a .hfr  aika.gh auhe.ghfa  uahtuieguyh e.fuiyha .g E ugPU#O44/oyU Y P$ ye uhoghou.3a 8Y/ATo y at3 Y8/A4EUI / AR, UIY HAPk rho2u3 yo/; Y3/P3Y86 #FCKY; 08/AYPA UYEH. OAQYP8O3Y.;/P.iy.autg33t uyu ,”

I kinda had to pull him away from it; he was smashing the keys pretty hard at the end there. Even broke a few. Fortunately the damage was mostly superficial. I think it was still more a case of the usual “Object in front of me > Use object” than actual conscious thought.

In other news, my new iPhone has arrived. :D