MidReal Story
Golem's Child: Secrets of War Unleashed
Scenario: the story of war golems controlled by unborn children, and the fate of child testers of these PTSD after birth. The horror is that demobilized soldiers who survived the war and became heroes are still children, who now, a few years after the war, are 3-5 years old.
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I was the first one to wake up.
I’d been having a nightmare, and I’d woken up crying.
But I didn’t want to cry in front of the other kids, so I’d gone to the bathroom.
I’d splashed some water on my face, and I was feeling a little better.
I looked at myself in the mirror.
My eyes were red and puffy, but I didn’t look as bad as I felt.
I was small for my age, with curly brown hair that always seemed to be a mess no matter what I did with it.
But right now, my hair was the least of my worries.
I was scared of what would happen if they found out that I’d been crying.
They didn’t like it when we cried.
They said it was a waste of time and energy.
They said we had to be strong and not let our emotions get the best of us.
But sometimes, it was hard not to cry.
Sometimes, it felt like all we did was cry.
My nightmare was already starting to fade, but I could still remember some of it.
I’d been controlling a monster.
It was a big, scary monster with sharp teeth and claws.
I was making it do terrible things, and I knew that I shouldn’t be doing it, but I couldn’t stop.
I couldn’t stop myself from making the monster kill all those people, and now there was only one person left for it to kill.
And then its eyes had started to glow, and I’d known that it was going to kill me, too.
But then I’d woken up.
I couldn’t remember how the dream had ended, but I was pretty sure that I’d died.
Most of my nightmares ended that way.
But this one had felt different.
It felt like a memory, not just a dream.
And even though I knew that it couldn’t be real, it had still scared me.
I was still scared.
I was still so scared.
I took a deep breath and tried to calm down.
It was just a dream, I told myself.
It wasn’t real.
The monster wasn’t real, and the people weren’t real, and the glowing eyes weren’t real.
None of it was real.
But the fear felt real, and the guilt felt real, too.
I didn’t know what guilt meant, but I knew that I felt it when I thought about the things I’d done in my dream.
I felt like a bad person because of the things I’d done, even though I knew I hadn’t really done them.
At least, I didn’t think I’d really done them.
But the line between dreams and reality was starting to blur, and I didn’t know what was real anymore.
Or what might become real if I wasn’t careful.
That’s when I heard the voice inside my head.
It was soft and scared, and it sounded like it was coming from far away.
Wake up, Emily, the voice said.
Wake up before they control you again.
Before you do something you’ll regret.
Before …
The voice trailed off, and then there was nothing but silence.
But then there was a sharp pain in my head, and suddenly I remembered everything.
I remembered being hit over the head with something hard, something that had knocked me out cold.
I remembered being carried somewhere dark and cold and damp.
I’d been so sleepy, but I hadn’t wanted to go to sleep because I was afraid that I wouldn’t wake up again.
But then something—or someone—had whispered in my ear that everything would be all right if I just went to sleep.
That they wouldn’t hurt me if I just went to sleep.
And then they’d pressed something soft against my face, something sweet-smelling that made me feel even sleepier than before.
And they were right—I didn’t hurt when I slept.
DON’T GIVE UP, EMILY!
The voice came back, louder and more insistent this time.
Don’t let them win!
Don’t let them control you!
Don’t …
That’s when the pain came back, too—the sharp, throbbing pain in my head, the same pain that had woken me up and made me remember what had happened.
I tried to open my eyes, but it hurt too much, and everything was still too dark and blurry for me to see anything anyway.
The pain made me feel sick, and the sickness made me want to throw up, and the only thing stopping me from doing it was the fear of what would happen if I did.
But then the voice came back again, and this time it sounded like it was crying, and it sounded like it was saying something else, too, something that made my blood run cold and filled me with a terror even worse than the pain in my head.
he’s coming for you!
Get up, Emily!
You have to get up right now!
he’s going to kill you!
Please, Emily!
Please don’t let him kill you!
Please don’t let him kill me!
he’s going to kill us both!
Please, Emily, get up!
The voice was getting louder now, and the words were starting to make sense—they were starting to form sentences, sentences that told a story, a story about a monster and a little girl who could control the monster and make it do terrible things, things that the little girl didn’t want to do but couldn’t stop herself from doing anyway because she wasn’t strong enough yet, not yet, but she would be soon, she would be so strong soon …
But she wasn’t strong enough yet, and that’s why she needed the little girl to wake up before it was too late, before the monster came and killed them both …
The voice was yelling at me now, and the words were echoing in my head, and the pain in my head was getting worse and worse and worse …
And then suddenly there was no more pain, and no more darkness, either—just light, bright blinding light that hurt my eyes so much that I wanted to close them again right away.
But first I needed to know where the voice was coming from.
So I forced my eyes open, even though it hurt so much that my vision was still blurry from the tears that had filled my eyes.
I blinked a few times to try to clear them away.
Everything was still too bright at first, but it was already starting to get better.
I was lying on a bed that was much bigger than my bed at home—or at least it had been my bed at home before my real parents had died in a car crash and my new parents had put me up for adoption—but it wasn’t as big as some of the beds at the facility.
There were curtains hanging on either side of the bed, but they were open right now so that I could see where the voice was coming from.
It sounded like it was coming from a speaker by my bed, but there was no one else in the room with me.
I couldn’t see anyone else in the room with me.
I still didn’t know where the voice was coming from.
And then suddenly my vision cleared all the way and I remembered where I was.
And then I remembered that this wasn’t my old room.
This room was much smaller than my old room.
The walls were painted a different color—blue instead of green—and there weren’t any posters on them yet.
There was only one window with curtains instead of two.
The door was in a different place on one of the walls instead of on one of the other walls.
The bed was against a different wall instead of the same wall as one of my dressers.
My old room had two dressers instead of just one.
It also had a bookshelf and toys.
I hadn’t had any toys for a while now because I was too old for them.
I hadn’t had any books for a while now either because books made some people suspicious of you—especially if you could read them too well—but that was okay because I’d still been able to read stories online until they took away our tablets not long ago.
This bed was much softer than my old bed even though it was only a little bit bigger than my old bed; it felt like there was a lot more padding between me and the mattress than there had been on my old bed.
I sat up and looked around.
I was wearing clothes that weren’t mine.
They were a pair of blue pajama pants with a t-shirt that was at least three sizes too big for me.
The edges of it hung down all the way to my knees.
And then I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to be here—I wasn’t supposed to be anywhere because I was supposed to be dead.
But I obviously wasn’t dead because I was still alive.
I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten here.
But it didn’t really matter how I’d gotten here as long as I was still alive.
I’d have plenty of time to remember later.
I started to get up off of the bed so that I could go look around some more and try to find out how I’d gotten here and what I was supposed to do next.
But then I remembered that I needed to be quiet.
The voice had told me to be quiet.
It had also told me not to let them control me again.
But it didn’t know where we were right now.
We were somewhere new.
So they couldn’t control me again.
There was nothing for us to worry about.
I could be quiet if I wanted to.
Now I just had to figure out where we were and what we were going to do next.
I walked over to the door and opened it a crack so that I could look out into the hallway.
I could see some light coming from somewhere else down at the other end of it, but I couldn’t see any people or anything else that looked like it might help me figure out where we were or what we were supposed to do next.
The hallway looked empty.
The house was empty, too.
Maybe this was a different kind of test?
Maybe they were watching us from hidden cameras and waiting for us to make a mistake?
The voice didn’t want me to go back, but it was too bad for it because we needed to be quiet, and we needed to be safe, and we needed to be smart, or else they’d control me again—and then what would it do?
I waited a little while longer, listening for any sounds coming from the hallway, and then I opened the door just wide enough for me to slip through it and stepped into the hall outside my room.I left it open just a crack behind me so that I could still hear if anyone was coming and go back inside quickly if I needed to.
The night was still hot and sticky, but I shivered anyway as a memory flashed through my mind—a memory of a time when some of the adults had been talking about how we were going to control something called a Phoenix instead of something else called a Golem.
The Phoenix was bigger and stronger than the Golem, but it was also more dangerous because it got too hot when it was active, so we would have to control it quickly before it hurt us or melted down into something useless.
The Phoenix was big enough that we would all have to control little pieces of it together, while only one person would get to control all of it at once, so we would have to do what they said even if we were scared or it was hard.
The Phoenix was important because we needed it to help us win a war, but they didn’t care about us because we were just tools, and they wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of us if we stopped working, so we had better not let them down.
We had better not try and escape.
But we would escape.
I would make sure of that, no matter what they did or said, even if they hurt me or took me apart, and then I would come back for all of us, and we would escape together.
I put my fingers in my mouth and started whistling softly, trying to sound like a bird, like we had practiced before, but also trying not to make too much noise.
I didn’t want anyone else who might be listening in on us to hear me whistling and come and find me before I had a chance to escape.
The sound was small and faint at first, but then I made it louder and clearer as I walked down the hall towards the stairs at one end of it, and then softer and fainter again as I reached the stairs and started walking down them towards the ground floor of whatever building this was.
It was time for me to find out what we were going to do next, no matter what they said or thought about anything else.
My breath hissed out of me as my feet hit the ground, and I felt like my legs were going to buckle beneath me, but I managed to stay on my feet as I let go of the drainpipe at last and staggered away from the wall where I had been clinging so tightly as I descended from my prison cell.
My heart pounded in my chest as I looked around for any sign of danger, but there didn’t seem to be anything unusual about my surroundings—just the back of a building that looked like all the other buildings in this place, surrounded by a high fence topped with barbed wire that glinted in the faint light from the few working streetlamps outside, and beyond that, trees that looked as dark as shadows in the night, while somewhere above them, stars shone faintly in an inky black sky that seemed impossibly far away from me at that moment, as if it belonged on another world altogether, where things were very different from how they were here on Earth.
And maybe they did.
It certainly felt like it at times, especially now that I knew what those things were going to do with us next if they could help it.
I turned my head, keeping my eyes on the building where they had kept us, and listened carefully, but I didn’t hear anything except for the sound of my own ragged breathing and my pounding heart.
I knew that they were going to come looking for me soon, though, so I had better move quickly if I didn’t want them to find me before it was too late.
I had heard them talking before, and they had said something about how they were going to use us to control something called a Phoenix at four o’clock in the morning.
That was less than half an hour from now, according to my watch, and they would have to look for me before then if they wanted me to be there when they needed me, so I had better find somewhere safe and hide there until they gave up.
And then maybe, just maybe, I would find some way to stop them.
I hoped so, anyway.
I crouched behind a dumpster and peered around it at the building in which they had kept us, but nothing happened, and so after a few seconds, I got up on my feet again and started moving towards the trees that lay beyond the fence that surrounded this building.
It was just as high as it looked from a distance, but I could climb it if I had to, or maybe there was some other way of getting over it or around it that wasn’t too hard if I looked hard enough.
But that was something I would do later.
Right now, I needed to find somewhere safe where they wouldn’t be able to see me if they came looking for me or hear me if they called out after me.
And then I needed to hide until they gave up looking for me or it was too late for them to do anything about it if they found me, and then maybe I would escape at last.
The clock on my wristwatch read 3:27 am when I reached the edge of the forest that surrounded this facility, but by then, it was too dark outside for me to see much more than that.
