A/N: Hi everyone, Maplewing here, and welcome to the rewrite of that story I posted last year. Yeah, I stupidly waited to do this... procrastinated, really, since I just wrote it about five minutes ago. Enjoy, don't yell at me because it's even worse than the last one (god, I hope not). So I guess that's enough of me blabbing, since I have to put this up before I reread it and lose the nerve. I present to you... another crappy prologue. (NOTE: THIS HAS BEEN REFORMATTED AS OF 7/16/09)

Define Human Rewrite

[1. According to the lens]

The little red light on the security camera blinks at him. The boy is being monitored, and every five seconds it flashes as if to point that out, lest he’d somehow forgotten his unfortunate place in the world. He wishes he could forget, and every so often he comes close, only to glance up at the pathetic speck of an LED and have his memory come rushing back to greet him. The black lens stares and takes it all in, watching silently as he looks down at his feet or traces the lines in his palm or runs his fingers through his hair or, though it rarely happens now, attempts to dismantle the camera.

The boy blinks back at it with impassive brown eyes, every five seconds to remind it that he doesn’t care. Or at least to create the illusion that he doesn’t care. The image of that little red dot is burned into his retinas and halogen bulbs beat artificial light down onto the top of his head, bleaching blond hair white and fair skin anemically pale. He turns to the wall and scrapes off a piece of paint vertically with one fingernail. It’s slowly being stripped of beige color, just as he’s slowly being stripped of sanity.

His finger continues to trail down to the tiled floor, and he’s forced to complete his mark for the day on the crude calendar he’s made.

“Day number twelve of quarantine,” he’s writing, though merely in his head, “And I fail to see how this can possibly be for my own good.” Then he looks back up at the camera and blinks at it again.