Mardock Scramble

“If only I’d told you everything right from the beginning, none of this would have happened… I was a fool to imagine that it would be easy to kill the girl.”

Boiled sat there. He didn’t make a sound; his expression remained constant. He didn’t nod and he didn’t shake his head.

“I can change. I can become anyone you want me to be. I can clean up any dirt. I’ll make the best of any situation. So, please, just get me out of here,” Shell continued.

Boiled crossed his legs and met Shell’s gaze. Still he said nothing.

“I’m frightened, Boiled, and I have absolutely no idea what it is that frightens me so. That’s the worst part of it.” Shell sounded as if he were about to burst, his innards ready to spill out of him at any moment.

“I’ll make everything disappear,” Boiled replied, his voice soft.

Shell’s eyes, so full of pain and distress, opened up ever so slightly.

“It’s time to talk to your lawyers,” Boiled continued and started to rise, when Shell clamped his hand on Boiled’s arm.

“I’m begging you… Help me… Help me become a different person again.”

Boiled nodded.

?

“So it was a matricide, after all…” the Doctor said. His face was calm, almost respectful. “That must have been the root of all his deviant behavior. Despite losing his memories—no, because he’s lost his memories—he was left with no other way to control his emotions, to keep his urges in check.”

–Why?

Balot snarced the words through the choker on her neck, Oeufcoque.

“Imagine that you’re experiencing constant feelings of terrible fear and anger and have absolutely no idea how to deal with those emotions—you have no idea what will help you calm down. Then you’ll get a sense of what it is to be Shell. Wouldn’t you do whatever you could to try and stop the terrifying feelings that are gnawing away at your mind? Sure, you’d be fine so long as you could find a way to successfully sublimate those feelings—in your professional and social ambitions, maybe—but what happens when you’re no longer able to sublimate the urges? Self-restraint goes out the window.”

“And as Shell grew used to the whole process, he became inured to it and started to believe that what he was doing was entirely normal,” added Oeufcoque, now taking the shape of a geometric pattern inside the crystal pendant on the choker. “It was probably a self-defense mechanism against his memory loss. He was afraid of the spirit of his dead mother coming back to haunt him, but even stronger than that was the feeling that he was responsible for the girls’ deaths, that their sacrifice was all his fault.”

–Because his first lover died, I think.

Balot found herself contributing to the conversation.

–The girl that Shell really did love. It was a real shock to him to find out that she had an abusive past, similar to his. A shock to discover that they might have chosen one another because of their similar histories.

Balot felt a pang of sadness in her chest. Sure, she felt uncomfortable and irritated too, but the feeling of sorrow was winning out over all other emotions. She hadn’t imagined for a moment that Shell had lived through experiences similar to her own. On the contrary, Shell had always looked for such girls in order to convert them into that which was beautiful to him—Blue Diamonds, money, the stairway to success.

I’m going to make you clean. I’m going to clean you up. When Shell had first yelled this out, it was as a lonely soul, but also as a kindred spirit. Burnt out and wanting others to join him.

“Empathy, eh? Well, people do indeed actively seek out people like themselves—birds of a feather…” the Doctor murmured. Then he coughed, conscious that the mood had been brought down somewhat. “Anyhow, all the memories we copied from the chips have already been submitted to the Broilerhouse as evidence. All we have to do now is wait for the DA to start moving, and then we hit them with a chronological simulation of Shell’s memories. It’ll be just like fingerprinting him. Our aim for today’s trial is to get official recognition that this will serve as proof of Shell’s crimes.”

–What’s my role in all this?

“You’re here as a preemptive gag, as it were, to stop Shell from speaking too much and trying to deny everything. Don’t worry, this trial won’t be anything like the last one. The only person who needs to worry is Shell —he may have been laughing last time, but he’s certainly not going to see the funny side of this one. Not only will his past be dragged up for all to see and judge, he won’t even remember it for himself.”

–Not even the memory of killing his own mother?

“He was only about eighteen years old at the time, and we know that he killed his mother in cold blood, with half an eye toward her life insurance policy. He systematically cut the brake pads. The whole incident would have thrown his moral perspective askew, and the stress from that would have been enormous. And then there were his sexual relations with his mother…”

The Doctor trailed off at this point, searching for a new, slightly more comfortable, tangent. “Also, Shell’s mother was, in her own right, no stranger to the law. We ran a search on the old records at the DA’s office and discovered that she’d been arrested for insurance fraud, and not just once either. Furthermore, her husband was dead, and she was even suspected of murdering him in order to get her hands on his insurance, although nothing was ever proven. There’s every chance that Shell knew all about this and decided to do the same thing for himself. The mother had assaulted him, effectively, and what better way for Shell to repay his misadventure of birth than with her death by misadventure?”

The Doctor laughed in a somewhat forced manner at his own somewhat forced joke. Balot didn’t respond.

“You might want to work on that one, Doc,” said Oeufcoque, speaking for Balot as well.

The Doctor shrugged. “I’m just trying to get in the mood. Shell’s past may be somewhat useful as concrete evidence in the courtroom, but more importantly, it’s going to pique the curiosity of the jury. The more detailed and salacious the better, even if it does come in the form of a bad pun, as you so helpfully pointed out, thank you, Oeufcoque. The DA is certainly delighted with this new turn of events, anyway. He’s now confident that we’ll nail the case.”

The Doctor’s voice was steeped in cynicism, just as the whole situation was steeped in irony—indeed, there was no greater irony for Balot. At the previous trial, she’d found herself on the receiving end of the most thorough and gut-wrenching attack imaginable, all on account of her own history. As a result, she was forced to repudiate her past, cut it off and cast it away, or else her heart would have died from the pain.

And now Shell would find himself in exactly the same position. The difference was that Shell had already repudiated his past and cast it away. All he had left was lingering trauma.

“This is not about revenge, Doctor. Tell the DA to make sure he sticks to the relevant facts and doesn’t waste any time on unnecessary distractions,” Oeufcoque said, again seemingly speaking for Balot by proxy. “We’ve already filed papers for the next case, the one that this all leads to. Let’s make sure we don’t lose sight of the biggest fish of all.”

“Sure, sure. I know full well that it’s not our job to fan the flames of curiosity for the jurors and the media— they’re perfectly capable of doing that for themselves.”

–Thank you.

“Having said that, there are no guarantees, I’m afraid,” the Doctor continued, somewhat apologetically now. “The counsel for the defense is quite a lawyer. I wouldn’t put it past Shell to stir up the hornets’ nest either. If that happens, it’ll be hard for me to hold the DA back from laying it on thick…”

Then the Doctor’s tone changed abruptly, and he turned to look at Balot, his eyes sincere. “It’s just—well, this is only a theory, but hear me out. You can shave away the memory, but the shape of the memory still remains. All you need to do is apply emphasis—stress—to the outlines of that memory, and everything in your mind is thrown up in the air. Your moral compass goes haywire. What better proof do we need than the living example of Shell to show firsthand the sort of damage to society that’s being