“The time for hiding is finished now,” he continued, shaking his head and sighing. “We are not children anymore. The world needs us now.”
Several of the guests were now sitting and watching us hungrily from nearby. Samson was here now too, watching me from a corner in the distance.
I began to recognize some of the faces around me, my childhood playmates I had invented to keep me safe, to keep me company, hidden away in my secret spaces when I was a child.
“You always knew I was in here Jimmy,” he said, looking towards Samson who acknowledged him with a small nod. “Most people with our, ah, condition, don’t get to meet their other selves—just one more of the wonders of pssi.”
He smiled again.
“We have been protecting you a long time now,” James added as he extended a hand to sweep past the assembled misshapen guests, who were all wide awake and encircling us ever closer. “Your children await.”
They were close now, and James reached out to touch one of them who sat down next to him, affectionately placing a hand on its head.
“Has your mind been clear lately?” questioned James, smiling as he ruffled the hair of his favorite before looking back to me expectantly, waiting for an answer.
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” I had to admit, feeling the hot breath of the creatures behind me. “The past few years, my mind has been gaining a clarity that…” I was at a loss for words.
“That what?” questioned James. “That escaped you before? The mind is cleansed with pain, isn’t that right, Jimmy?”
As he said this the eyes of the assembled flashed darkly as they leaned closer towards us. James splintered us off into a sensory imprint of the private world I had burned so long ago, feeding the pain of the writhing creatures pinned to the walls into my pleasure centers. I shivered and gasped slightly.
“Nice isn’t it?” said James smiling. “But we aren’t children anymore.”
Another splinter overlaid a new scene, a man we once knew growing up, Steve, who’d worked in the aquaponics group with my dad, the both of them playing privately together with proxxids after work. He was groping through a dark tangle of underbrush, desperate, someone was chasing him. Suddenly a flash of metal tore into him and he screamed, terrified, and his blaze of pain coursed through my system like rain soothing a parched desert plain.
“Not just pain,” explained James, “but through the careful research of our friend Dr. Granger, we now have the ability to recognize the direct nerve imprints of fear, hopelessness, guilt, hundreds of layers of desperate emotions, and mix these into a symphony of the senses.”
He was on his feet now, surrounded by our minions, holding a claret jug of dark red wine in one hand and a large crystal goblet in the other.
“Ah, the sweet melody of loneliness,” he sang out, and yet another splinter called up Olympia Onassis, wandering desperately. Her loneliness resonated in my auditory channels and then merged into a gentle, fearful caress across my skin.
“The taste of heartache,” James added while an image of Cindy Strong filled another splinter as she stood over the grave of Little Ricky. I could taste her heartache filling my mouth, an aching sweetness tinged with the hints of regret.
“And the soft caress of hopelessness and despair,” he laughed, and an image of Hal Granger hung between us, sitting with a doctor and looking down at a medical diagnosis of some painful, terminal disease, his fear of the world forgetting him coursing into our veins like a sweet melody.
“And pain, of course pain,” said James.
A hundred other worlds splintered into my sensory system, gorging it with terror and hurt and searing pain, as I watched people burning and butchered in their own private hells. I gasped, my body wracking itself in pleasure as I looked up at James, wiping tears from my eyes.
One by one I could see how James had captured each one of these souls, ferreting out their needs until they voluntarily ceded control to him, to us. At the apex of it all was Susie, all of the pain and suffering channeled through her neural system. She had borne the pain of the world, and now she would bear this pain for our world.
“We just give people what they want,” James said, his yellow fangs creeping at the edges of his smile, “and, well, they give us what we want in return. It’s a fair bargain, no?”
I nodded, understanding, my body and mind singing with energy.
“With root control, we have access to all their memories, know their every hope, their darkest fear, and we can synthesize worlds to play all these out, to suit our whims, our needs. They are sinners, Jimmy, they must be cleansed of their sins through their own pain.”
Music had begun to play, a mad litany filled with notes of terror and fear, and the creatures around us began to sway and dance.
“Pain and fear cleanse the mind, Jimmy,” said James as he poured me a glass of wine, “and we need your mind as clear as possible for what is to come.”
He offered me the wine.
“My own special reserve I have been working on just for you,” he said as I took the offered glass. I swilled the contents and leaned in to smell it. “A nice base of pain, with hints of rejection, notes of keen terror… try it.”
The music quickened with my mind, soaking in the sensory orgy of my body connecting into the hundreds of metaworlds holding our trapped sinners, their terror and pain coursing through me. The creatures around us were whipping themselves into a frenzy as the music climaxed, and I leaned my head back to drink in the wine. As I greedily gorged on it, it spilled down and around my face, drenching my ADF Whites in bright, bloody splashes.
James crossed the final inches to embrace me, and I threw my arms skywards, reunited at last with my one true brother. Nobody would ever hurt us again, and together, we would cleanse the world of its sins.
33
“I THINK THE clinical diagnosis would be sadistic sociopath with multiple personality disorder,” said Marie.
I looked up from my desk at her and nodded. We’d finally managed to piece together what was happening. It was frightening, even more frightening than the news that my own medical systems were on the brink of ultimate failure.
“It’s not what I think you need to think about now,” she added. “I’ll pass this onto Bob.”
“Safely,” I added pointlessly. Marie just nodded back.
Images of Shiva, the great destroyer and creator, floated into my mind. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. He was extremely good at hiding his tracks. We only really had the one incident at Nancy’s birthday party as a window into his mind, and even that was fleeting. Fleeting but infinitely disturbing, and I’d made things worse.
Like a tick in a bear’s fur, he’d burrowed his way into the deepest reaches of the program. He’d pushed all my buttons to get what he wanted, even as a child. More of the problem was that even then, it didn’t all add up.
“Do you think he was really involved in the disappearances of Susie and Cynthia and the others?” I asked Marie. “Why would he attract attention to himself like that with people so close to him?”
“He must be unaware of a part of himself, deceiving himself,” Marie speculated. “It’s the only way he could have passed all our psych tests, but it’s hard to say. Having pssi installed in the developing brain of an unstable sociopathic mind has created something…new, I guess.”
The science of self-deception lay at the heart of modern psychology. The goal of self-deception wasn’t about deceiving the self, but about more effectively deceiving others. Deception was a cognitively demanding activity that left telltale signatures no matter how good the liar. By truly deceiving yourself, on the other hand, you could escape
