“Well, humans—females in particular—are such illogical creatures. They start to lose the will to live and hate the world the moment something affects their sense of worth. We’ll just have to try and reason with her.”
“Will she choose the path of
“Probably best not to let her know the latter option exists.”
The girl—Balot—felt nothing of the world, but just then she saw a curious thing emerge.
The one called the Doctor: a tall, lanky man. Splotchy hair, Tech Glasses, a reddish-brown half-coat that covered a colorful patchwork of a doctor’s gown, with syringes, portable microscopes and all sorts of other contraptions hanging from the chest and waist. It was as if the lead singer in a psychedelic band had suddenly decided to say
Even more bizarre than that. A golden mouse perched on the Doctor’s shoulder.
“Anyway, look after her, will you—she could turn out to be a new
“Yup, though at the moment she’s more
The golden mouse just looked at Balot, completely ignoring the Doctor’s reply.
The mouse’s dim red eyes seemed to contain hidden depths, as if he were a mature, older man. The tiny pants that he was wearing as if to cover up a bulging belly—held in place by a tiny pair of suspenders hanging off his shoulders—seemed hilarious to the girl.
Sharp, focused golden whiskers. And she could see in his solemn face a gentleness that she’d never encountered before.
Their eyes met unexpectedly. A clear expression of concern flickered across the golden mouse’s face.
“She’s conscious. She looked at me.”
“Well, she’s drugged to the hilt with morphine, and with these burns she’s not in a state to take in anything at the moment. Anyway, you’re going to be partners, right? You should at least be prepared for her to
“Generally speaking women aren’t too keen on mice…” The golden mouse’s eyes were a little downcast. The Doctor stroked his little back as if to say
Balot tried to move herself in order to see them better, but could barely lift a finger and just lay there shaking. She realized in some faint way that she was ensconced in a large capsule. She felt a strange sense of security, floating, surrounded by foam, steeped in liquid, in an egg-shaped portable pod designed for intensive care. Her whole body, scorched through, in fetal position, barely able to lift a finger—floated in that bulky egg.
The word drifted through her mind, suddenly with different feelings, associations…
And she dozed off the moment she closed her eyes, losing consciousness again.
While Balot lay half dreaming, the Doctor and the mouse held a curious conversation.
“Memory loss?” The mouse’s querulous voice chirped up. The Doctor’s voice answered. Balot opened her eyelids a crack and looked out through the solution she was suspended in to see the back of the Doctor’s head, covered in its tie-dyed hair.
“Yup, that’s my guess, based on the stress and pleasure levels that you sensed coming from him. The side effects of his
“Suicide of the memory…”
“And it looks like it was triggered by the murder of the girl. There’s some connection. Each time he kills a girl, he probably forgets that he’s done so, but then finds another similar girl and kills again. A sort of
“What?”
“Widows had to be immolated along with their dead husbands. There were cases when the woman objected and had to be doused with gasoline and burnt to death. I think this is similar to that.”
It appeared that the Doctor was now driving. From the back seat where Balot was placed she could see the mouse perched on his shoulder nodding along to the conversation.
“So, Doc, the death wish I could smell from the man was his
“That fits with everything we know. We’ve never psycho-analyzed Shell directly, so we can’t know for sure in detail. But
This was the one fact that registered in Balot’s hazy state of consciousness.
If there were ever a moment when her compassion for others could redeem her then this was it.
“It’s hardly decent to try and explain away his actions as
Balot’s feelings were shattered in an instant by the mouse’s words.
“Death is a solitary thing. It’s not as if someone else’s death is somehow going to add value to your own, or even give solace to your own life.”
Balot unconsciously tried to remove the oxygen mask attached to her mouth. She wanted to say something to the mouse. But she couldn’t even lift a finger.
In her muddy consciousness, conflicting feelings of indignation and gratitude toward the mouse were swirling around together.
“Yup, I’m with you there. And in any case, cleaning up after his romantic notions ain’t half racking up the expenses. There’s lots of upkeep now, Oeufcoque: you, and the girl.”
Balot heard the Doctor grumbling just as she was on the verge of collapsing back into unconsciousness.
Many times Balot’s consciousness floated back into the real world before plunging back down into the depths of sleep. Each time Balot began to fade, she was assailed by incredible anxiety, only to be rescued by a curious sense of relief. That relief could come in the form of the mouse’s voice, or the Doctor’s. The prospect of death was steadily fading away. Reality was coming back into focus, and she would now have to live.
Someone spoke in a dream. It wasn’t an order. Rather, it was closer to a question.
Balot was dreaming. She was floating in the darkness, and another version of herself was gradually swooping down on her from above. And her other self asked:
Her other self collapsed in a tangled heap, right on top of her.
She remembered the noise from the glitter of the city.
But—
The question surfaced like a bubble in the melange of her consciousness.
There was no answer. When you realized this, truly understood that there was no answer to the question of