Markus.” She smiled bitterly. “He was everything a young girl could have wanted in a boy. I remember the accident, too, how horrible it was. I used to visit him in the hospital every Tuesday, when my parents would let me fly over to visit him. But when he finally woke up, he had… changed. He was quiet, sullen. Arrogant. But I didn’t let that stop me. He had been through a lot. I would not abandon him. We were friends.”
She stopped talking, her words drifting into the silent void that the room had become. Jodi felt her skin crawling at Tanya’s revelation. The picture of Borge’s evil, horrible as it was, was becoming ever clearer.
A single tear slid down Tanya’s cheek, glistening in the morning light. “I kept seeing him even after he left the hospital,” she went on, more softly now. “That’s when I first met Senator Borge. He seemed like such a nice man. Much like Markus’s father had been. I spent a great deal of time with them. That’s why Mama and Papa bought me this cottage. Just so I could be closer to them. To him. My friend, Markus.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “The friend who raped me when I was fifteen.” She smiled then, an evil, hateful smile that floated on a sea of anguish and pain. “But who could I tell? Who would believe me? That Markus Thorella had raped his best friend? No one would have believed it. I was no saint, even as a child, but Markus was. Had been.” She shook her head. “I said nothing, because I still thought he might… love me. But my body was all he wanted, and he took it whenever and however it pleased him. He made me do things, terrible things. And when he was old enough to enroll in the academy, he left without a word. He tossed me aside like rubbish. And now you’re telling me… that it was not even him.”
Jodi was now beginning to understand her own past. In her anger and self-loathing, Tanya had taken out on everyone else the love/hate she had felt for Markus Thorella. He had warped her, had emotionally and physically raped her, and she was trying to purge herself of the demons he had left inside her. And there had been no one for her to confide in, no one who would believe her accusations because of the legacy of the real Markus Thorella, whose word had once been honorable and true. She had never told anyone what had happened until this day. Jodi had been one of her victims, and doubtless there had been many more, some probably not as lucky as Jodi had been. But the greatest victim of all had been Tanya herself.
“I will help you,” Tanya said quietly after the tears had passed. “Tell me what you need.”
“Pray to your God that I never rise from this table, doctor.” For the hundredth time, Reza tried to free himself from the restraints that held him firmly to the cold stainless steel operating table. But as his determination crossed a magic threshold, he lost his strength, his will. He sagged back before the power of the restraints, exhausted. The electrodes pressed into his skull tingled as his head thumped gently against the table. He felt like Samson after losing his hair to Delilah’s hand; he could call upon neither his psychic nor his physical powers to extricate himself from his bonds.
“This is my god,” she replied as she worked the set of consoles that encircled him like hungry, flesh-craving electronic gargoyles. She shook her head in wonder at the data pouring from her instruments. “What a magnificent specimen you are.” She turned to him and smiled. “We’re going to become very close, you and I. Closer than you can possibly imagine.”
Reza closed his eyes and tried to concentrate, but he could not channel his power. Normally, he could have simply willed himself to be somewhere else, and he would be gone. But she had done something to him, something that interfered with his most basic neural processes. He was helpless before her, and the only thing greater than his anger was his shame. He could not even commit suicide.
“I was going to do to you what I had originally suggested when you returned from the Empire,” she explained, “to give you a deep-core probe. But I’m glad that things turned out differently. That would have been such a waste.
“You see, I’ve always hoped for an opportunity like this, and I’ve planned for it all these years. A deep-core, of course, depends on the external analysts being able to interpret the data that comes from the target brain. That means you need people who know the language, the culture, and who can understand the imagery that the target brain is projecting. We never recover everything, of course, but under ideal circumstances, we can successfully interpret up to thirty or even forty percent of the core data.”
“And this is all you get for the price of the victim’s sanity?”
“It’s a small enough price,” she said confidently. He felt her hands adjusting something on his head, almost as if she were checking the ripeness of a melon. A throb filled his skull, like a noise so low in pitch that it could not really be heard, but only felt. “But I’ve done better since then. Much better.
“Now,” she explained, “instead of a gaggle of analysts struggling to understand the massive output of even the most diseased and atrophied brain, I can actually link my own cortex into the data stream as an on-line interpreter, drastically improving the recovery rate, bringing it up to nearly one-hundred percent. In effect, I will know everything you know, will feel everything that you feel. And these computers will record it all for later study in a format any qualified analyst can understand.” He saw her face above his, looking down at him with eyes bright with anticipation. She wore a tiara of cerebral implants. “You’re looking at the one person in the Universe who in a few minutes will know more about you than any other.”
“You are a fool, Rabat,” Reza warned. “You do not comprehend what you are about to trifle with. My brain, as my body, is alien. You shall not find there what you expect.”
She smiled condescendingly. “Don’t flatter yourself so much, Reza,” she told him as she made some final adjustments on the small console in front of her. “I am the one who will be in control, not you. And I will also be the only one of us who will walk out of this room when we are finished.” She ran a hand over his forehead as she looked down at him, an expression of consideration on her face. “It’s a shame, really, to use you up like this. When we’re done here, you’ll be nothing but a drooling vegetable for Thorella to dispose of.” She shrugged. “But they were going to kill you anyway. At least I convinced the senator – the
“How generous of you,” Reza hissed.
“We’re going to start now. Just close your eyes and try to relax.” Suddenly he felt a dizzying sensation, as if a thousand tiny jolts of electricity were coursing through his body. “What I’m doing right now,” she said in a very clinical voice, as if she were speaking to a patient rather than a victim, “is scrambling your voluntary nervous system. You won’t be able to twitch a muscle unless the computer commands it. A security precaution on my part, obviously. You see,” he saw her smiling above him again, “you’ve been carrying a tiny implant around inside your head since just after you came back from Erlang. I took the liberty of implanting it while you were in your coma. A rather ingenious device, if I do say so myself.” Reza felt a curious tingling behind his right ear, a scraping sound that seemed to come from inside his skull. She held up a tiny white capsule that was stained with blood. “This is what’s been keeping you under control. Any time your brain waves reached a certain threshold, this acted like a jammer, influencing the key areas of your brain to reduce your adrenaline levels and critical neural signals. It has also been busy transmitting data on your brain activity all this time, allowing me to make much better calibrations for this experiment than otherwise would have been possible.” She paused as she ran a skin sealer across the small wound, dropping the tiny device into a waiting bowl. “This is also why you were in a coma for so long. I wasn’t ready for you until now, and it gave Borge the time he needed for his own plans.”
Completely paralyzed and unable to speak, Reza silently wondered if she really believed that Borge would let her live; long enough to boil the essence of Reza’s thoughts down to data understandable by her computers – and in turn by Borge’s people – but no longer. If she did not know everything, she knew enough. She was a liability. And Borge did not tolerate liabilities.
“But when Thorella comes for you,” she went on casually, ignorant of his silent monologue, “the capsule might make things look a little odd when you’re… discovered. Not to mention that it interferes with the cerebral interaction we’re about to induce.”
Reza had no difficulty imagining a scenario. It would be much the same as when they brought him here. He suddenly had collapsed, unconscious, in his hospital room, and the next thing he knew he was here. In the near- vegetable state he would be in after Rabat finished with him, Thorella could hand him a weapon – Reza might have enough gray matter left to understand how to hold one – and put him in any setting he thought fitting. And then he could simply gun Reza down at the end of some concocted hunt, walking away with the laurels of a hero. Easy. Clean. Simple.
“There!” she said. “That’s all done. Now we can get to work.” She looked deeply into his eyes. “I’ve waited for this for a long, long time.” On impulse, she leaned down and kissed him full on the mouth. Then her hand touched a control on one of the computers surrounding him, and suddenly the cold metal and machine world around
