Hunted Season 1 Episode 3: Hunted Cyberpunk Serial, #3

By S. H. Miah

It's all over. The Enclave's regime dictates, their electricity limitless, their technology overpowering, and the Uprising lost.

 

Mason Sharp survives in a prison run by the tyranny of the Enclave. He hides away in a forgotten corner of the prison, whilst danger surrounds him as the Enclave seek to hunt and destroy everything he knows and loves.

 

Another plot looms under the surface, however. A plot hell bent on murdering Mason, and in the most twisted way imaginable.

 

An action-packed cyberpunk serial by S. H. Miah. Each episode runs roughly 100 pages for reading in one sitting. If you like quick action with high stakes and compelling characters in a near future dystopia, this is not a series you want to miss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Muslim Fiction Project
• Release date: Sep 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223666943

Book preview

Chapter 1

Mason

I’m all alone in the darkness of the rock caverns connected to the Enclave prison I’m supposed to be locked up in. The darkness conflates, shifting left to right before me, as if interrogating me with tiny shafts of light. The heat is oppressive, pressing against my nape and forehead, whilst my legs are doused in a waft of air that chills more than cools.

Oddly, this feels more suppressive than the cell I’m meant to be staying in. But after killing a high-ranking colonel in the Enclave prison system and escaping scot-free, I’m essentially on the run. Despite sitting on this boulder in the relative murk, and running nowhere since I can’t leave these caverns.

I look to my left and spot the cabinets in the records room I’m in. The Brotherhood, the shadowy organisation I’m part of that is attempting to overthrow the Enclave, keeps records filed in these cabinets. Records on history, records of different events and declassified documents of old governments and their sinister intentions.

And one particular report pertaining to me—it details the Enclave’s intentions of killing me, putting me ‘beyond life’, as they say.

My body still pulses with the remnants of their last attempt to murder me. Scars line the entirety of my body, littering from shoulder all the way down to fingertips, each with their own unique story I don’t wish to relive. The hyper-electricity the Enclave have can cause severe damage, yet never enough to kill. Perfectly enough, however, to motivate prisoners to do the guard’s bidding.

I hop off the boulder and my bare feet hit the rock. I almost slip, since my feet are clammy, and have to grab onto a rock face to keep myself upright. Since Colonel Zambol, the colonel I killed yesterday, electrified me to within an inch of my life, I keep getting random shocks seizing my body.

See, Zambol wasn’t trying to just electrify me normally. He was inducing psychological torture through activating pain receptors without actually firing a stimulus at me. Some strange kind of mind control. And once he got it through, it’s like those pathways embedded themselves into my memory, constantly activating for no apparent reason and causing me to trip, stumble, and jitter. Even when I’m not in that glass torture chamber anymore.

I slink through the dusty pathway in the centre of the records room, strangely at ease amongst the heat, cold, and silence. I breathe in the scent of parchment and paper—luxuries we don’t have after the Enclave digitalised everything and only print documents of the most importance.

The other members of the Brotherhood left a few hours before—though I haven’t exactly checked the time—to sleep in their respective cells. They’ll stay there, cooped up under the tyranny of the Enclave whilst I remain here, in the forgotten part of the prison.

These caverns present my life for the next few days at least, whilst the Enclave no doubt conduct a search across the prison for me. To put me beyond life—as they kindly word an execution—for good. I’ll have to fester in these rock walls whilst the Brotherhood comes up with an escape plan, a way into the outside world, and a step in the direction of freeing the country from the Enclave’s tyranny.

What would Dana say? I mutter under my breath as I step across some errant rocks and reach the small cabinet at the far end of the cave. Dana is my sister—long lost sister that I haven’t seen since birth. I never knew she existed, and for a reason I can’t fathom my parents never mentioned her.

She grew up in the prison system elsewhere, alone and unwanted, likely mentally brainwashed to become docile. But she managed to break that, find her way here to the official Enclave Prison, and reunite with me. Somehow, she knew she was my brother without me knowing.

And she was the one that ultimately saved me from Zambol, after all.

As I lean down and open the bottom row of the cabinet, I ruminate not speaking to her further after I woke up in these caverns. I lost my family to the Enclave almost nine years ago and have been imprisoned here since. My father and mother, both leaders of the first and only Uprising against the Enclave, were both executed before my eyes.

The image of their dead bodies has vanished from my mind, as if removed to preserve whatever remains of my mental sanity. If those images ever pervaded my nightmares, I think I’d find a way to die in my sleep.

I fish through the records cabinet for a particular folder at the bottom. It’s a light brown colour turned demonically dark in the dim light surrounding me. The light acts as a spotlight, blazing through the folder to a report right at the back.

It’s the report on me. I filter it out of the folder and hold it in my hand, then close the cabinet door. The paper is rough, rugged in a sense, and pricks my fingertips like baby electric shocks as I slink back through the path and hop onto my boulder.

I was here when I first read the report, and I’m here again for the second read-through.

The report is no longer surprising, yet sends shivers coursing over my spine as the words turn to meanings, which turn to thoughts in my head. Fears in my heart, too, since the report doesn’t use my prisoner tag—7856b—but my real name. They already tried twice to kill me, and they couldn’t get the job done.

Third time’s the charm, as they say. But would it be my third and final escape, or their successful attempt to kill me?

The report details my past as well as the Enclave’s intentions for me. I flick through the diagnosis of depression and insanity the doctor had given me, a diagnosis the Enclave ignored since they wanted me behind electric prison bars that would taunt and crackle at me every night. The report then mentions that, since my mental state is too questionable, the Enclave should murder me—put me ‘beyond life’—as soon as they can.

And they haven’t succeeded yet, and if everything goes to plan, they won’t succeed ever.

I place the report beside me and lean back. Listen to the silence reverberate around me, so quiet I can almost make out the frequencies in the air. My eyes flash back as I close them to the words my father gave me whilst we were hiking in the mountains near my childhood home.

We’d travelled to the summit, where icy caves resided amongst harsh winds and inch-deep snow, and where my father passed the torch of the Uprising’s mission onto me. He instructed me to do what’s right, to always be on the side of the light, to always fight for justice even when the battle seems so bleak that victory is nowhere in sight.

That mission thrums through my veins, thrums through the veins of all the Brotherhood’s members. We all yearn to fight the Enclave, defeat them, and restore Old Britain to the glory of freedom without tyranny.

I lean back, eyelids black with tinges of red depicting the thin lighting lining the edges of the cave, and then the silence shifts to a different frequency. Not