Conversation
with the Empty Girl
I was not old enough to see it; No
one was. From what the unincorporated
old say, the burning of the world was an epic performance, complete with an
orchestra of Neros playing at a grave pace, as their palaces were demolished
along with their cities.
The failure of those who ruled the former
world was this: they assumed they had that which they did not have the rights
to. With money that had no value, they hoarded ammo, weapons, vehicles, and
politicians that they were not contractually authorized to use. Once their power was revealed as a fake, their
money hollow, and their authority imaginary, they also found the corporations to
be legitimate, and formidable. It was
truly the corporations who were able to fend off the armored trucks and
bullets, not with equal and opposite force, but with conscription and
deactivation. Not one shot was fired,
because the bullets were not the government’s to begin with. The armored trucks posing as law enforcement
simply did not run, because the corporations owned the keys and gasoline
anyway. Instead, the firms that
infiltrated those government settings simply ran their equipment without
minding the power structure that struggled to exist, moved their special
operatives with impunity and the security firms were born. Thus the Cold Coupe ran its course and
started the new era, from AD to PON…
---Jack
Durden, official secretary for the corporation of archival works, wiki, server reclamation
and intelligence gathering, a subsidiary of Waxer/Tori/Musashi Power.
My name is… escaping me, how strange
and unladylike. Introductions are
difficult then as I have nothing to be called, no moniker to trade in cordial
politeness with yours. I cannot tell you
what I am known as but I can tell you what I remember about my life as a
PsiMaTEK Ops. Candidate, which is what you wanted to know all along, I
understand. That will satisfy who I am
as well as any name or title, but I do apologize for length in this case; a
name would be shorter.
I
was born under the insurance and legal umbrella of Corporate Health and
Representation, a subsidiary of the IHP.
Since my family could not cover the liability each month for having 3
children, I was given up for adoption and cultivation. As it turns out, it was for the best,
considering my infant aptitude for manipulating PSI. I was inducted into the PSiMaTEK Operative
program at age 5, where I excelled in telekinetic manipulation and basic
temporal distortion.
Many people consider the methods of
the IHP to be questionable, and I would have to agree to an extent; many tests
and observations were extremely taxing and exhausting. The reality was this securities firm was not
creating soldiers like USA Corp., or espionage agents like ATOM, or even pain
resistant enforcers with psychological trauma and torture like the Burton
Securities, but whole armies self-contained within a single person. Punishment for a whole platoon was required
for a single man. Pain was eminent to
regulate a company of many. The same was
required for an army of one highly trained, highly talented person who wielded
the “power of the Gods”, the very fabrics of the universe and reality, Matter,
Energy, and Entropy.
I
shall start from the beginning, and when I reach the end I shall stop, with
points in the middle that are interesting and pertinent. I am entirely not used to looking at time in
such a linear fashion after all, but for the sake of my named listener, the one
with no name will be polite.
My first memory was playing with a lab
rabbit that I had named “Soft”. Soft
was exactly that, a fluffy mass of creature that seemed to be bigger than what
it was. When you held her, her real size
was revealed to be quite skinny, but surrounded by fine fur that filled her
out. I was asked by the nice evaluator
to pick up Soft without touching her. I
complied, unaware that this was impossible.
Instead of continuing to gnaw on the metal water straw, Soft floated out
of the small cage door. She levitated. She hopped.
She did a flip and made me giggle.
I started to bounce her up and down, like she was now a super bunny with
the power to leap and fly. Of course as
a child of 7 I was excited by the idea of a flying bunny, but that excitement
turned into a lack of concentration. I
lost control of her when she was at the top of her biggest jump yet. The poor bunny kicked and squirmed, the
reaction of the creature’s adrenal glands prepping the fight or flight mechanisms
in her biology. Soft was scared, and if
outside indicators were not enough proof of this, there was another avenue of
observation I tapped into in that moment: I felt the fear.
Soft saw the height not as a fun flight
of fantasy, but as a large fall that would kill her when it was over. She was reacting to having her life taken
from her and it resonated with me. I
could feel what her small rodent brain was projecting, no words, no plans, just
this feeling I can only describe as molesting, a bad touch. I was later to find out that as a PsiMaTEK
Operative, emotional empathy was a constant source of mental scarring and in
fact many people would avoid important jobs if any inclining of memories or
trauma was showing symptoms. Many had
taken to even erasing memories via electroshock therapy, which made the trauma
go away for the most part, but had its own consequences of constant
practice. Truly, the body could heal,
but the mind wears its impediments until The Vault or the end. I had not yet learned to struggle through the
trauma and ignore it until the job was complete. I instead began to cry.
In that moment I felt like I was
watching the scene through the rabbit’s eyes as it saw the floor rush up to meet
her. My own internal voice was pleading with
the bunny, the floor, the air, please do not smash me on the floor. Then the floor stopped. I had caught the bunny with telekinetic
impulses, and the fear stopped broadcasting in the bunny’s brain.
Of course, there was no other emotions
being conjured in the rabbit’s brain either. In my emotional state I had caught it too
hard. It had missed the floor, but it
floated in midair like it hung on a noose, back legs kicking and body
twitching. I screamed her name and ran
to her, but when I ran to her, an ideomotor response sympathetically moved the
bunny. I was throwing Soft away from me. I almost laugh now at the fact that a
potential vegetable was chasing a rabbit in an ironic twist, but as a 7 year
old with a new pet, I spent most of my childhood mourning my actions that day
with a disregard for levity. I still
remember the quiet, wet slap to the painted cinderblock that changed the color
from institutional green, to a black and red smear. I was simultaneously wanting to save the
creature, and killing it. The closer I
came to it, the more I was destroying it.
Slap after slap against the wall, spatter after splatter running down
the wall, it was all under my control, but I was out of control. I finally screamed no, fell on my knees, and
wept. The release inside triggered a
release outside and Soft’s body slid down the wall, no longer twitching, no
longer flying, just adhering the wall and bleeding. I could not see the other things I was in
control of in those moments. I didn’t see the broken out the glass of the
observation room, or the doors ripped from their hinges, or bent the bars of
the cage Soft once lived in. I was aware
of nothing until the soft hand of the evaluator touched the middle of my back
and, with a subtle whisper, told me “That was fine… We will get you another bunny, OK?”
My first memory is trauma. This is the same as every other candidate
that comes through the front doors and into the mezzanine of the PsiMaTEK
training center. Everyone develops trauma here.
It is just a way of life: trauma
from the testing, trauma from the empathy of those marks we have contractually killed
in the name of the Institute of Human Potential Unlimited, trauma from our
personal failures which surely weighed on ourselves, but also incurred
punishment on our fellow pod members.
As we approached our candidacy in
our group, we were exposed to a reminder.
I call it a revelation, a picture of what was ahead, and what we all
were in for. Before, I thought of my pod
mates as friends, acquaintances, confidants.
I saw them for what they were: fuzzy hazes of independent obstacles,
surrounding more solid intentions. I saw
a hazy façade where the solid self resided, a cloud around a particle. They were all atoms, bunnies, planets. Oh, perhaps an attempt to be less concrete and
more topical is in order here. I apologize.
They brought out her blue eyes one
evening. We had all gathered in the
mezzanine. From the mezzanine, there was
an entrance, the bunks, the lavatories, the cafeteria and in the most stared at
and yet the most ignored space of the central area, the annex to The Vault. I always found it odd that the necessities of
life were being given out, joined by this vaulted halfway point to a strange
and dark evil, the kind of evil that as kids one dares another to touch. And yet, with food and shelter, there was
also this: The long hallway, the long
walk, and the reason the colloquialism for forever was “until The Vault or the
end”. Walking toward us was a young
lady, and in the lady, among other twisted and vile features were her blue
eyes.
The obvious reason why those eyes
are still in my mind are simply that they were all a person could see beyond
that leather mask. The mask itself was
more than a muzzle, equipped with psionic dampeners, a redundancy clasp only
sprung with a twisted key device, and a latch and pole to provide the handlers
with control over her head movements, standard items in which we as candidates
were briefed and educated. She was
shackled at her ankles and wrapped up with a strait jacket, walking with all
manner of pole and chain about her, small steps from the leg irons, all prepared
to prevent non-compliance, and yet she walked with no struggle, no force,
almost no volition of her own. An entire
body covered in canvas, leather, steel, and iron, all but her brilliant eyes. Perhaps that is why I remember them but
probably not. The reality is that those
eyes were not looking around, not peering erratically. Out of her whole body, the only thing she had
control over was her eyes, and those eyes peered at me. They would not break their stare, no matter
how anyone would stand, move, direct a normal person’s attention, she continued
to stare at me.
“Young candidates,” The one of the ajudicators
started “This is one of the inmates of The Vault. You all have been training to one day become
PsiMaTEK Operatives, however only one of the pod will enter the operative
stage. The rest of you,” he paused for
the drama, then reached into his pocket for his muzzle key “this is your
future”
The key slipped in. turned, and the
muzzle came off, revealing a head of greasy blond hair that fell over Blue
Eyes’s face. Her lips were scarred and
her skin shone with oil. A film of body
filth, face sweat and split ends from years of confinement with no upkeep
glowed against the light of the central area.
Her head hung from her neck in a somber, stoic manner, and then the
smile cracked her dry lips, revealing a maw of filed teeth and infected gums. Perhaps it is more appropriate to call them
stubs and pits than teeth; years of grinding them down to pebbles no
doubt. Her chapped lips dripped a small
amount of blood onto her gaping maw, and slowly held fast to her chin, as soon
as I saw this, I no longer could see much of anything.
Annic, our electromagnetic
specialist was the first to fall, holding her head and crawling into the fetal
position. Michael was next, bleeding
from his nose and having his eyes roll back into his head. Katherine fell over, crying and uttering
something. I could not hear her over the
screaming, the loud unnatural screaming.
It was too high to be Michael, of course, and Annic was already passed
out. Who was screaming? I could not
quite see the person making such an unholy noise. I suddenly noticed the soreness of my throat
and the shortness of breath; Was it my screaming? It checked out when the blood from my
hemorrhaging nose dripped down my throat and gurgled the scream I was listening
to. An all-out assault on our psyches
rendered our team, my faithful pod-mates utterly useless.
Bad touch. That was all I was thinking. Bad touch.
Bad touch? Wait, who is asking the question? I am not asking anything. The voice in my head sounds different than
that. A flash of my bunny went across my
mind. Bad touch? Wait. Blue Eyes…
are you… poking around in my head?
Bad
Touch. A flash of images burst into my conscious mind. Flashes of my prior experiences and prior
actions, a shot of the ground coming up to meet my face and a broken sound of a
gasp, accompanied by a millisecond of flesh and fingernails. You are in my head, aren’t you? Touch
is bad. Get out of my head.
All at once, Soft was floating
outside of the cage in my mind again.
That is MY thoughts, my memories. They are private and you have no right
to play with them. The gasp returned and
I saw the skin of a naked shoulder and a hand on it. No, stop.
Bad Touch? Bad touch is not bad, but bad touch is
connection. Pain is the connection.
Blue Eyes’s mind was freely connected
with my own consciousness now, shaking me around, twisting my brain around,
playing with me, making me fly. Bad Touch is the connection… No, I cannot let her twist my mind around
like that. I have to fight. I had
learned some basic techniques on how to strike a psionically enhanced person
with my own Psi, which is what Blue Eyes obviously was doing to me, and I
retaliated. Fight? You fight me? Normally it is
an ordeal to try to complete a psionic attack at the level we were at as
cadets, but Blue Eyes had already opened a conduit, so striking back would be
easier. I forced a channel of Psi into
her own consciousness. You are weak. You are weak and whole, and not open. I will open you, open you to connection. Connection.
Connie… Sheon. It continued
to echo in my mind, Connection. She was
echoing that thought in my mind. She was
obviously in control, but she was out of control. She grinded her stubbs and tilted her gold
and grime maned head and concentrated on me.
She began to look at my trauma, my bunnies, my thoughts about my pod
members, my thoughts about the only male in my pod. Stop it, those are mine? Stop? Stop the bad touch? I
channeled some Psi and attempted to belt her with a shot. She did not flinch. In an instant, I saw glimmers of Annic’s thoughts
and consciousness. She had already been
trying to take pot shots on Blue Eyes.
Blue eyes was overpowering all of us in the room, too powerful to take
down with the little bursts we were capable of.
Images of my life started to flash across again and I tried to shut out
the proding. The cacophony of words that
were now floating in my mind were garbled between the constant refrain of
Connie Sheon and Badad Touch. My mind
was being flooded with images, feelings, empathetic resonance and I could
barely stay on my knees with the assult.
Then something curious happened.
I had a memory that was not mine. I stood naked in front of a mirror with a
kitchen knife and proceded to cut into my own face. The door opened and a man in uniform came in,
grabbed my naked shoulder and drug me out of the bathroom, blood dripping from
my cheek. I was kicking and squirming
and trying to break free. I saw my arms
covered and gashes and cuts and scabs. My
heels squeaked over the mezzanine floor as I was escorted back to my courters,
strapped down and given seditives. Bad Touch? I began to see field tests, attempts to crush
tanks with matter manipulation and receiving bad marks from adjudicators, the
scorn of pod mates I did not know but that knew me. Connie
Sheon. Is her name Connie? No, but
now it is! I saw the day they
muzzled her had put her in The Vault. Future she said into my mind. No, not mine.
I forced myself to open my eyes. As things came into focus, blood from my
nose, ears and eyes pooled in a rabbit shape in my immediate field of view. Bad
Touch? Oh yes Blue Eyes, it is
coming. I picked up my eyes and looked
at my assailant standing on the other side of the room. I took my hand and held it toward her and
closed a fist. Her greasy hair tightened
in a bunch behind her head. My closed
hand shook a bit as a test to see if I indeed had her hair with telekinesis or
not, and the violent shake of her head showed me the indicator I was hoping
for. The voices in my head became louder
as I struggled against the agonizing mental assault. The feelings from when Soft lost her life
were being brought up in my mind and I tried to choke them down. No, Those are mine. No,
Connection. Connection. Connie SHEON.
Connie SHEHAN.
I tightened my telekinetic grip on her
hair and started to pull up as hard as I could.
This jerked her head back as though she was getting a noose wrapped
about her throat. Memories of my rabbit
flashed in my mind again, this time the splatter against the wall. Bad
touch? I thought to myself, and by extension
to Blue Eyes 3 simple words. This ends
now. She made eye contact with me one
last time. I gritted my teeth and pulled
my hand across my body, which drug her body across the floor in the same
direction. I then threw my hand to the
outside, and the Ideomotor Response did the rest.
Her scalp ripped off. Her scalp ripped off and her body slipped
across the floor in a bloody mess. Her
scalp ripped off and her hair fluffed off, leaving behind a skinny thing underneath. The voices stopped at that point, and I was
in control. I was in control, but I was
out of control. I gritted my teeth and
concentrated on moving her body. I
lifted her body off the ground and slammed her head against the ground. My hand dropped; the body dropped. My hand dropped again, and her body dropped
again. Over and over I slammed her head
into the tile floor. I slammed it until
when I picked up her face I could not recognize it as a face. I slammed it until it was nothing more than
blood and bone. I slammed it until those
blue eyes were little more than sockets and jelly. I slammed it until I was distracted by crying
from some other place. Was she still
alive? The exposed skull should have
been enough of an indicator that she was dead, and the crying was not in my
head. Now I was once again disconnected
from my own awareness, and I once again realized that the sound I was hearing
was in fact my own crying. I gave the
body a toss into the wall and let my arms fall to the ground, laying by body
prostrate on the bloody tile floor.
I would be later be congratulated for
my actions, completing a mark for my pod and gaining favor from my
evaluators. I walked away from this with
a new resolve to get to the end, to become a PSiMaTEK Operative, and not become
a twisted vault creature. I now had no
classmates, no pod members, no friends, no people, only objects in my way,
objects requiring to be moved. I was
alone in this lonely universe, a lone nucleus among a cloud of distracting
sparks.
So we have covered the first name,
now we cover the middle name with the gory details, and now we cover my
surname, the part that ultimately defines where I have been with the program. Let
me tell you where I met Connie.
I knew it was over when they came
into the bathroom during one of my morning “constitutionals.” I had been dealing with so much at the
molecular level you see, and it was hard to deal with the truth many days. An atom is nothing more than a solid ball
with a cloud of sparks. The universe is
in fact mostly empty. It is sparsely
littered with molecules, protons, neutrons, electrons, photons and
radiation. For the most part, reality is
empty, with a bit of something floating in it.
I can move a single molecule into a position with no effort, pinch the
windpipe of a dignitary, crush a tank with a thought, and throw a car through
the air just by wanting to. I don’t even
need my hands anymore, totally in control, and yet totally out of control. What does it matter? Matter, I mean. Car, prisoner, rodent, it is all emptiness
peppered with stuff, no individuality, no difference.
To cope, I would spend my mornings
watching red lines create themselves in the porcelain basin of the lavatory
sink. I watched nothing constitute the
cracks between shards of reflective surface, skewing my face into a broken
version of me, with my eyes in the wrong part of my forehead, my mouth unevenly
sitting above and below my chin, and my teeth, slightly grinding, making two
halves of the same smile. The mirror was
intact, save for only one forked shard that was digging into the palm of my
hand. In those moments I knew why Blue
Eyes would cut herself. It was not for
attention, or for the feeling, or to deface herself. It was to assert an impossibility, to fight
what we both knew as truth, that in all probability, because the universe is
mostly empty, the chances of things colliding with other things is impossible,
and yet, the soft flesh of my hand, arms, shoulders, hips and legs always
seemed to stop the sharp objects; collision was achieved, and it reaffirmed my existence
and sentience. I was already on watch
for sharp items, so I had to improvise with the glass from the mirror. The crash tipped off the security and I was
escorted out, given tranquilizers and woke up to hear that Mike was going off
to become the graduating operative. Good
for him too. Katherine failed a lot of
marks, so they could not trust her performance, even though she did pull down a
spy satellite, which was impressive, but not impressive enough. Annic was a lost cause, of course. She would use her electromagnetic acclimation
to burn away bad memories, until that fateful day in June when she had
lobotomized herself by overcooking her brain.
She thinks she is 5 years old and likes milkshakes some days, and
others, she regains her age but forgets how to make a spark, totally
unreliable. It was between Mike and me,
and apparently self-mutilation, for whatever reason, is not seen as a
positive. I guess it is an ironic
condition for me, like a carrot chasing a rabbit. I spend a good part of my day on
tranquilizers to keep me from crushing the orderlies throats. The muzzle went over my face and I was
escorted down the long annex. Kids were
watching me like I was some sort of boogey man.
They marched me into the room and locked the gate behind me.
Supposedly, no one has ever escaped The
Vault, but rumors of a Connie Shehan seems to circulate in here, a woman who
escaped, or who was free to roam around the vault, torturing the inmates there,
Satan herself. I used to consider escape, but now I sit and wait for my turn to
die at the hand of the IHP. I am too
powerful after the training to be allowed out anywhere, and yet with all that
control, I have none. The muzzle is
uncomfortable. I could remove it of
course. No really I could. It takes my pinky finger twisting and breaking,
but I could get rid of it. It is not
worth it really, or at least I thought it wasn’t.
She came to me. I don’t know how but she did. I was hearing voices in my head, which is
normal, but it was not my own voice. It
was smaller, mousey, slightly snarky, definitely not my voice.
“Sweetie, let me help you out of this
vest.”
I said nothing. I was used to this sort of thing. Always voices speaking to me, always something
in my psionically dampened mind.
“Enough with this imaginary audience
interviewing you. Let me help you out of
the vest” I could feel my arm start to move and twist. I looked around in the dark. There was a figure I could not quite make out
standing in front of me, holding my chin, wait was she pulling my arm or
holding my chin up? It’s hard to
tell.
“I can’t unbuckle the straps so, I am
sorry in advance, but I am going to have to break it.”
I thought What?
“Break your shoulder. Then I can pull your arm over and work on
that nasty little face cage. I felt
tension in my arm as it started to move beyond what it was intended to. A pop and a twist ended the pressure and
replaced the sensation with pain. Again,
I heard screaming, disjunct screaming from my own mouth, gaged behind a leather
mask. “See I tried this with Blue Eyes
and she couldn’t really pull it off.
That is why she only carried the connection out to you and let her
die. It was her time of course.”
The arm flopped at my side, no longer
tied behind my back, but no longer able to move on its own power. The girl snickered at me and grabbed my hand,
placing it at the key to the muzzle.
“now, I can’t very well have you working
for me without being able to use your powers, now can I.” Was she still holding my chin? Caressing my
muzzled face? Or was she putting my
finger in the lock, the lock I knew would trade my finger for a free face. “Sweetie, I need you to work this trigger.” My hand was forced into the hole and I could
hear it crack and pop. My arm twisted
and I jabbed the tumbler behind my head, dropping the muzzle to the floor.
I kneeled in my pain. Crying and reaching my broken hand over to
touch the dislocated shoulder.
“Shut up Sweetie. I will fix it”
My body floated in the dark and both my
shoulder and finger set. I screamed and
fell to the ground. A hand went through
my hair in a comforting movement.
“There there sweetie. It’s over now.”
“Who are you?” I asked, grasping for her hand. There was nothing there, no hand, no
girl. The voice was gone and I remained
in my small cell in this massive container, once again alone in the
universe. I was left to my own thoughts
again.
The walls of the vault have two
properties. The first is that they have
Psionic dampeners operating on its own personal generator. The other properties is simple, it is matter,
just like everything else in this world, and though I have no freedom, right
now, I am in control, but out of control.
It is only a matter of time. If
Connie Shehan made it out, I could do it too.
The IHP had made a monster like me, and I will be damned if this monster
will remain under this bed, in the shadows, scaring small children. I want out, and I will make it out.
I am all talk of course, just a scared
bunny waiting to die against the wall.
But perhaps, just perhaps I can fly.
Perhaps I can fly myself out of here.
“That is why I freed you Sweetie, now
get us out of here.”
The wall is only dots and clouds after
all.
No comments:
Post a Comment