1
“The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest
another world.” - Thomas Ligotti
If you are reading this then you are safe. The worst is over. You can relax.
Apocalypse. The end of the world. Blood, death and darkness. We were all there. We
can't unmake the past.
I know you have questions. Hoping to hear the real story from the source. My account of
what happened. It's probably going to disappoint you. There's a lot I don't know. Probably a lot
that no one knows.
Since this is my version of the story I'm going to start at the beginning. My beginning.
And it's probably going to take a while. I apologize in advance.
But relax. Really. Relax. Then let me tell you a storyAs I stood in front of the student housing supervisor and turned first white with horror
then red with rage. Dreams of college freedom dashed in seconds by a few dozen words and an
official seal.
“The Enhanced dorm? You have a dorm for Enhanced students? You're segregating us?”
“I think you're looking at it the wrong way.” Smiling like a toothpaste commercial, “Think of it as
an opportunity to meet other students like yourself.”
I lobbed a few insults at her terribly smiling head. No effect. Tried pleading. Then
begging.
It was useless. My only weapon, my otherwise undefeated charm, has no effect on
women. Head hung low, I slunk away, defeated.
That woman, that paper, was the beginning. Because of them I came to know the man
who would later be known as the Golden God.
The “Enhanced Dorm” ended up being quite a distance from the housing office and other
main campus buildings. It was a squat concrete structure that looked like it had been build to
survive a nuclear bomb blast.
“Do they think we're terrorists?” I muttered to myself, shocked.
At the time it seemed ludicrous, clearly unreasonable. But with the events not even a
year later, I wonder now if it was a sign that the government at that time knew more than they let
on.
At the age of thirteen I learned two problematic facts at the same time: that I was gay
and that I was a Mind.
As first crushes go it was fairly stereotypical. A particularly muscular gym teacher with a
penchant for tight shirts and a shaggy beard. I spent a decent amount of time denying it to
myself, catching occasional illicit glances from the corner of my eye while the other boys
bounced various balls off various things, but nothing particularly obvious.
Then one day he motioned to me from the sidelines. Took me into his office. A setting
that I found intimately close. I sat, shaking, avoiding his eyes.
“Now then, Calvin.” His eyes were cast nervously aside, “Do you know why I called you in
here?”
That made me look up. Look deep into his eyes. At that moment I knew without a doubt I
wanted him. That's when it came.
“That look. Definitely a fag. Don't know how the school expects me to deal with the swishy
bastards. If I had my way-”
“I'm not-” I jumped up, blushing. Saw the look of shock on the teacher's face. Then I knew that I
had Heard for the first time.
If I'm honest, I'm not sure which realization terrified me more. But why, you ask?
Learning you were a Mind, that you had the potential to be an Elite. That much have been at
least a little bit thrilling.
But even at that time I knew my chances at Elite status weren't good. Over 90% of Elites
were discovered before the age of five. Often so powerful that they had to be taken from their
parents for their own safety.
No, I knew immediately that I was destined to be a Reject. Forbidden from any
government or military work, marked as Enhanced in such a way as to make any employer
nervous. A terrifying unknown in romantic relationships that were already made more
complicated by my now apparent homosexuality.
Still I went for the tests. They stuck me and probed me and ran me through machines to
watch my brain tick. And in the end the technician just shook her head pityingly. Showed me a
psy score so shockingly low I hadn't known it was possible. Even as a Reject I was pathetic.
Not to say that it's completely useless. It has one consistently beneficial use. It took me
quite a while to be sure, but I now know that it is 100% effective for one purpose: knowing
whether or not a guy wants to have sex with me.
The inside of the “Enhanced Dorm” wasn't much more appealing than the exterior. Stark
dark hallways with grey tile floors. Only a few bare lightbulbs lit the nearly entirely windowless
interior. At this point I openly gaped in horror at my new home.
Then I saw him. An angry blond streak that hit me like a train. I went sprawling, his body
covering me.
He was warm. Large. As he lifted himself off of me with his muscular arms I locked onto
his blue eyes and Saw-
An angry man. Older. Shouting something. Intense panic and arousal and“-sorry are you okay?” Looking down at me with those bright blue eyes of his.
“Ah. Ha. Fine. I'm fine. Just a flesh wound.” I jumped up. Brushed myself off. Extending my
hand. “Hi, I'm Calvin. I've been assigned to live in this Nazi death camp with you it seems?”
“I'm not staying here.” Flat, icy tone, voice shaking. “They can't do this to me.”
“I already tried arguing-”
“I don't argue. I demand.” His entire 6'4” frame was suddenly very evident. He loomed over me
menacingly.
“Look, if you go looking for a fight they-”
“There's no bed in my room! No desk. No chairs. Just this-” Face contorted with rage, “This foil
everywhere. This isn't a dorm, it's a damn prison!”
“They certainly didn't make much of an effort, I'll admit.”
A girl stood in the doorway. Short, with bright orange hair. She smiled so that her teeth
showed, but it didn't reach her eyes, giving her the look of an African jungle cat.
“It's inhumane.” He pushed past me and I staggered away, “My father's a lawyer. We'll sue.”
“It won't work.” She shook her head, “The precedent in Culver v. the State of New York was that
Enhanced represent an unknown risk and that segregation was therefore acceptable as long
as it didn't measurably cause us harm.”
“Well it's causing me harm! There's no windows! There's no anything! It makes me sick.”
Hyperventilating, the whites of his eyes showed.
“I don't think I'm a risk to anyone.” I laughed. “Generally I struggle against a strong wind.”
“This isn't funny.” The blond turned on me, “How can you joke about this? First my scholarship
now-”
“Ah, you're Jacob Walker.” She nods knowingly, like she just solved a particularly satisfying
puzzle.
“Why the hell do you know my name?” His hands balled into fists and I thought for a moment he
might hit her.
“When they told me I would be here with you guys I Looked at your files.” She snorted, “They
put us in a lockbox but despite my talent being written right in front of her the woman at the
housing access gave me full access to all your information.”
“So you're an Eye?” I asked.
“Yeah. And you?”
“Mind.” Self consciously.
“Ha! We are a dangerous bunch.” She folded her arms across her chest and shook her head,
“You might tell someone what card they're thinking of and I'll read a book over their shoulder.
Now Jacob here is another matter. He's a damn Sp-”
“Don't call me that.” Teeth gritted.
“Spark?” Innocently.
“I'm not-”
“File says you are.”
“It only happened one time and-” He shook his head, looked away. “And it won't happen again.”
“They said you tested extremely high on the psy scale. Feds wanted you bad but daddy-”
“I said, it won't happen again.” He turned and threw open the door. “You two have fun in hell. I'm
going to fix this.”
With that he was gone. My heart was beating fast in my chest. There was just something
about him. A presence.
My talent has come in handy on many occasions. Awkward, obsessed with long dead
authors, outed both as gay and as a Reject, my life in high school was pretty much hell. And as
is usually the case my biggest harassers were generally the members of the school football
team.
But after several iterations of being beaten to a bloody pulp I started to notice something.
A rugged cornerback who always pulled his punches. Who often hung back from the crowd
altogether.
And one day, when the team was really going at it, calling me 'Fag' and shoving me, I
looked up and saw him looking down at me. There was something in his eyes. And just like that
I Heard him, or rather I SawAn incredibly vivid image. Both of us naked in the locker room. Steam swirling around
our bodies. Him moving close to me. Kneeling down. Leaning in andAnother punch brought me back to my senses. The cornerback's eyes had gone wide.
Somehow he knew I Saw.
I didn't say anything. Continued to be beaten until the team got bored and wandered off.
Waited until after school to go looking for him. We kissed. It was lust at first sight.
And that's the story of how I lost my virginity. As you might expect, the cornerback was
never really comfortable with his sexuality. After a few hot hookups we broke it off.
However I met several others by the same method over the years. Like I said, 100%
effective. And lucky for me, since my type are muscular man mountains who'd likely murder me
for hitting on them if I was wrong.
I became comfortable with the fact that I was a Reject whose powers were only useful
for getting sex. After a while no one seemed to notice I was Enhanced at all. I started to forget,
to blend into the background.
“Anyway.” The redhead turned to me, “A Mind huh? So you’re Calvin then.”
“Yes. And although you apparently know quite a lot about me I think I still haven't had the
pleasure of learning your name?”
“Patricia.” She tilted her head to the side, “Or Trish. Or just Sha if you like. Several good friends
call me Sha.”
“Really?”
She smiled the tiger smile and said, “No.”
“Fine. Trisha then.” I peered down the dark corridor, “I'm afraid to look.”
“I went in mine earlier. There was a bed. Sounds like they really went all out for Jacob.”
“Well, a Spark can be destructive, I mean-” I blushed, “Not that it makes it right.”
“Right.” Trisha narrowed her eyes, “'First they came for the Sparks and I did not speak out', that
sort of thing.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” She shook her head, “Clearly you're not reading my mind anyway.”
“I'm a Reject I'm afraid.” Shrugging, “If they had negative psy values I'd be one of those.”
“Really I'm not much higher than you. Two or three psy points tops.”
“That is abnormally low for an Eye. Can you only Look at something if it's two feet in front of you
in large print?”
“Close to that actually.” She flashed her teeth again, “My range is about five feet and I can only
See something if it's not obstructed by an opaque object.”
“Wow.” I laughed, “Sounds useful.”
“You'd be surprised.”
The door slammed open and I jumped. An African American kid stalked inside, looked at us
briefly, and continued past us without stopping. After a minute we heard the sound of another
door slamming.
“Friendly.” I noted.
“Peter.” She shook her head, “Poor kid. Black and a Mover.”
“How many more of us are there? I mean, there aren’t that many Enhanced in the world, right?”
“Five. The ones we met so far and then Thomas.” She shrugged, “It seemed like a lot to me too.
Maybe that's why they went crazy and put us in here? They think it's a conspiracy or
something?”
“Maybe it's a conspiracy by the university. Get us all in one place and experiment on us.”
“Cheery thought.” Her eyes became distant briefly, then cleared, crinkling with mischief, “You
should go Out with me.”
Discussing this with people now, I tend to get a lot of the same questions.
1) Why didn’t the government acknowledge the threat the Enhanced represented
sooner?
I am baffled by this one honestly. In the year 2035 the Enhanced made up 0.01% of the
population. An extremely small minority. And at that time there had already been several federal
cases denying us basic rights in the interest of public safety. The only way the government
could have acknowledged the threat any more clearly would have been to put us all into
concentration camps and slowly murder us all. Historic precedent shows how that sort of thing
usually works out.
2) When did you learn about Project Bloom?
Honestly I still don’t know much about it. The effect became obvious over time. I think I
probably heard the term ‘Project Bloom’ right around the time of the second Reckoning. At the
time we were all still innocent college undergrads worrying about normal undergrad things. And
considering how the Enhanced were being treated at the time, it didn’t seem that strange to us
that they’d try to keep us isolated from the other students.
3) Do you believe there was a conspiracy between the government and Alden Co.?
Everyone really wants to believe this one I think. It makes everything so neat and tidy. I
was and am close friends with Steve and Patricia Alden and I can say with 100% confidence
that they had no idea what was happening. By the time anyone knew anything it was already
too late.
I froze, mouth open, made some noises of negation. She just laughed, eyes more
demonic than ever.
“Not like that. Out. With this.”
She reached into her backpack, pulling out something covered in randomly distributed
wires. In the center there was a light that swirled and occasionally blinked.
“No way.” I reached toward her and she pulled the device back, smile flashing teeth.
“Yes. It’s my little Jumpy.” She stroked her fingers over the wires, “We’re very close.”
“How do you have that?” Trying to act cool but unable to keep the awe out of my voice.
“Dad always has three or four lying around. He doesn’t mind if I play with a few.”
“Your dad just has port jumps just lying around? Are you-” Suddenly it all clicked. My head
began to spin. Holding the wall for support I asked, “You’re- you’re Patricia Alden.”
“Shh.” She lifted a finger to her lips and smiled, “It’s not a big deal. And you didn’t answer my
question. Do you want to go Out with me?”
“Is-is that thing safe?” Eying the lose wires swirling around her hand.
“Perfectly safe. I used it to get here.”
“I’ve never seen one that wasn’t behind a security fence with a guard.”
“Paranoid overkill.” She rolled her eyes, “It’s perfectly stable with the standard containment field.
Look.”
With that she reached into the wires, grabbed the light and pulled. I gasped, throwing my
hands up in front of my face. When I failed to be completely annihilated on the spot I slowly
lowered them.
“See?” The light was sitting in her palm, suspended between two metal prongs attached by a
metal bar, “Very stable.”
“They say those things have the destructive power of a thousand nuclear bombs.”
She rolled her eyes, “Well technically so do you. Matter is energy, you’re made of
matter, therefore you are very dangerous.” She held the little light up to her cheek, stroking it
lovingly, “But my little Jumpy would never hurt anyone, no he wouldn’t.”
I think a lot of people forget that at that time we were unofficially in the middle of our
second Cold War. Territory grabs and energy dominance by the Chinese and Russians in the
2010s and 2020s gradually morphed into the Sino-Russian alliance. They had over two thirds of
the world's population and more than half the world's gross domestic product, and everyone
was rightly afraid they would want it all.
Even before the Enhanced existed there were rumors about new technologies,
advanced weapons research that they were keeping to themselves. Nanotechnology and
robotics both improved by leaps and bounds in that time. People lived in fear of a supervirus
being unleashed on the population at any moment.
It's a miracle that extra-dimensional transport, or 'porting', was discovered in the United
States first. The news was all about the end of the energy crisis and space exploration. Real
'Yay Humanity!' stuff. But of course, shortly after porting there were the port bombs, which lead
to a new international arms race. We were always seconds away from destruction.
So of course they wanted to turn us into weapons. They were afraid of what the
Enhanced were ultimately capable of, and they weren't going to let the SRs find out first. We
were all expendable when the fate of the world hung in the balance.
“How does it work?” My fear was slowly being replaced by curiosity and excitement. Human
teleportation at the push of a button has its appeal.
“Hmm.” She froze for a minute, fingers twitching, biting her lip. Then she smiled and said,
“Nope. Too complicated. Let’s say it’s magic. ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic’ and all.”
“I’m not an idiot.” I was livid. One thing I never tolerated is condescension. “I understand the
basic idea of temporal relativity.”
“Good then. Then I don’t have to explain it to you.” Smiling again, “So are we going or what?”
“Fine.” I was way too excited to say no, but I kept my voice neutral because of the slight.
“Cool. We’re going to go see my dad.”
“Wait, wh-”
Before the words were out of my mouth the world inverted. It was unlike any experience
I’d ever had at an ED transport terminal. There it was almost like getting your picture taken, a
flash of light and then ‘Boom!’ off you go. This was more like being sucked inside out by a
vacuum cleaner and then ejected upside down.
“Are you alright?”
My head was spinning and I stared intently at the ground, trying not to vomit.
“Fine.” I managed in between deep breaths.
“Ah, do you get motion sick?”
“A bit.” The dizziness was beginning to recede.
“Sorry about that. I should have warned you…”
“Patricia, is that you?” A deep male voice called somewhere nearby.
“Yeah dad, just getting some more of my stuff.” She called back.
“Who’s that with you?”
“Just a weird kid with psychic powers I met in school.”
“Oh.” There was a mild crash, followed by some cursing, followed by a wiry dark haired man
appearing in the doorway. He kicked something on the floor back into the room he had just
exited, extended his hand and said, “Hi. I’m Steve Alden.”
“I figured.” I said politely, trying not to stare at his half unbuttoned shirt and randomly stained
pants.
“I haven’t had a chance to meet many Enhanced persons besides Patricia.” He gave a cold
eyed smile reminiscent of his daughter’s, “What is it that you do?”
“He’s a Mind.” Trisha’s voice was muffled, as she had wandered away into another room at
some point in the exchange.
“I’m talking to your friend dear, don’t be rude.” He shook his head, “I tried to civilize her, but after
her mother died-”
“The car accident.” It was a well known fact that Mary Alden was killed by a teenager who failed
to stop at a red light. “I’m so sorry.”
“It was more than ten years ago.” His lips thinned to a line, “And I’m still fighting to make sure
what happened to her never has to happen again. If the government would just-”
“Are you complaining about the government again Daddy?” Patricia reappeared as suddenly as
she had disappeared, as if by magic. And since she had her own teleportation device ‘magic’
was a possibility.
“Ah, Patricia, you were gone so I didn’t show you.”
He waved his hand toward the wall and a internet video started playing, “-have
confirmed an increase in security at ED transport terminals after the recent terrorist attacks. The
suspects used transdermal implants to bypass the scanners and create dangerous port
resonances. A failsafe in the device was activated, but several employees at the facility were
injured by the initial-”
Angrily he closed his fist and the video disappeared. “Increased security! A few people
were injured. No one was killed. The failsafe worked. There have been zero fatalities in the last
year. Zero. Compared to thousands of fatalities from car accidents per year. But still the
government-”
“Is stupid and dumb and blah, blah.” Trisha waved her hand and another video popped up. It
was a kitten chasing a cleaning robot. “I like this one better.”
He shook his head. “You see how she is? Completely untameable.”
“I got that impression.” The cleaning robot in the video sprayed water on the kitten, making it
yelp adorably and run away, and the video ended. Mr. Alden just stared angrily off into space.
“Oh, also daddy, the school put us in some kind of bunker so I am taking my 3Desire.”
“Wait, what?” For the first time his eyes focused and he seemed truly present in the room.
“Patricia, do you need me to-”
“Ungh, Daddy, no!” She rolled her eyes, “Don’t get all power trippy about this. It’s fine. Anyway
Jacob’s already run off to tattle.”
“And who’s Jacob?”
“Another psychic kid with a rich lawyer father.” She put her finger thoughtfully to her lip, “His
psych profile says he has issues with authority.”
“Meaning you already read all his files.” He sighed and turned toward me, “Again I apologize
profusely for my daughter’s behavior. She’s-”
“Untameable.” I agreed.
“Did you-” His face paled, “Did you read my mind?”
“Ah, No. I-”
“He’s not that good of a Mind, Daddy.” She said, smiling sweetly.
There were warning signs though. Over the course of ten years the Enhanced
population grew dramatically. The number of Elites also grew, as well as the relative number of
Elites. All this information was freely available. It wasn’t like anyone was hiding it from us.
And of course there were the Oracles. Like many of us they couldn’t use their powers on
command. Still, of all the Enhanced they were the most likely to be dismissed as crazy, or to be
outright committed.
After the psy score was developed, people finally started to believe in their powers, but
nobody believed everything they said. The things they saw, they seemed impossible. Deluded
visions out of insane nightmares.
But of course they weren’t. If anything the visions understated the horror that was
coming. Or maybe the Oracles who saw the whole truth went too mad to tell anyone about it.
Trisha and I spent the better part of the next hour back at the dorm, printing various
things with her 3Desire. It was one of the nicer models. Unlike any that I had previously seen, it
could print electronic components. So we experimented with different things like clocks and hot
plates in addition to simpler decorations and furnishings. Decorating was therapeutically
soothing after spending time in the chaotic Alden household.
“Still no Thomas.” Trisha remarked casually, as we were hanging some curtains over the bare
windows of the common area.
“Maybe he’s not the orientation type.” I focused intently on my curtain, not wanting to encourage
her mischief.
“You know he was committed.” Smiling, knowing I couldn’t ignore such tantalizing bait.
“Oh.” I was determined that I wasn’t going to give in.
“Come on! You can’t pretend you’re not curious.”
“I’m sure if it’s important he’ll tell us himself.”
“You are the most boring Enhanced person ever!” She flopped into a blob of foam and it formed
itself into a chair around her. “Is your power reading only the most boring of boring thoughts?”
“No.” The curtain was a little sticky on the top, but if I didn’t fix it in the window it would become
firm, or worse, adhere to a random surface. I began carefully lining it up with the windowsill.
“He’s an Oracle.” She continued, ignoring my indifference, “And everyone knows they’re all
crazy.”
“If you believe everything they say about the Enhanced, then all of us should be in cells.” I
growled.
“Sorry. No offense.” For a moment she almost looked contrite, and then mischief filled her
green eyes again and she smiled. “I guess I touched a nerve.”
Suddenly the door popped open, narrowly missing me and my nearly complete curtain.
There was a flash of gold and those beautiful blue eyes. I was too overwhelmed by his presence
to mind that he’d nearly flattened me.
“Pack your things.” He gestured at all of the 3D printed items we’d been working so hard on.
“We’re leaving.”
“Did you tattle to your Daddy and get them to give us a new dorm?”
He turned the full force of his gaze on Trisha. Her smile faded, and for a moment she
looked legitimately scared.
“No.” He turned and strode purposefully toward the rooms. “My father made arrangements for
us to rent a house nearby. Temporarily. While he works on our case.”
“So we have a case now?” Trisha couldn’t help but be snarky, but her smile still hadn’t returned
to her face.
Ignoring her, Jacob began knocking on the doors in the short hallways. When he got to
Peter’s room the door flew open with a force that made my near flattening seem tame.
“What?” Peter’s face was like a thundercloud before the storm.
“Pack your things. We’re not staying here.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Tension thrummed between them like electricity.
“Let him stay if he wants.” Trisha called, turning the force of those eyes on herself again.
“Anyway Thomas still isn’t here. Someone should stay to tell him where we went.”
“Fine.” Jacob conceded grudgingly. He and Peter shared another angry look and then he turned
back to the others.
“Follow me.” He said simply, and then strode purposefully out the door.
“Charming.” Trisha grumbled.
“Isn’t he?” I sighed.
“If that’s what it takes to get your interest, I’m glad I don’t have it.” Her voice was sharp but there
was no real sting to it. Still it grated.
“He got us out of this hell hole, didn’t he?” I pushed past her, “You could try to be a little
grateful.”
“Peter might have the right idea. ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’ and all that.” Despite her
words she followed me out, carrying the 3Desire with her.
“I don’t think Jacob is Greek.” I joked. And for once Trisha had no come back.
So we narrowly escaped spending our freshman year of college in a concrete box.
Knowing what I know now I’m sure it was full of surveillance equipment and other things to keep
track of us. And maybe in the end if we had stayed there it would have prevented some of the
things that happened. But at the time all I felt was relief.
Sometime in the late 2020s, with the advent of widespread nanotechnology, and the
growing robot workforce, homelessness and poverty functionally ceased to exist in the
developed world. Materials and labor were cheap. Time had become the valuable commodity.
The result was that even the simplest homes were luxurious by the standards of the
twentieth century. Everyone had food on demand, some kind of vid screen, and at least one
personal robot for cleaning or even child care. What had been a crazy dream became the
expected reality overnight.
This is important context in order to understand how impressive the house Jacob’s father
rented for us was. Neither Trisha nor myself came from a lower class background. But when we
saw the house all we did for several minutes was gape in awe.
It had an underground garage. An indoor swimming pool. Eight bedrooms and six
bathrooms and more than twice as many robots as were needed to clean them all. A study, a
library, a common room, a game room(with full virtual reality set), a small personal gym and two
kitchens (one on each of the upper levels). I think there may have been a helicopter pad on the
roof, but I never saw anyone use it.
The basement was also furnished and for whatever reason that is where Jacob decided
he wanted his room to be. Later I found out that it was actually not only a basement but also an
official fallout shelter. It was kind of funny after Jacob had so strenuously objected to the
‘bunker’ that the university had chosen for us.
My bedroom was on the second floor, near the library. Trisha, for whatever reason,
chose to take two bedrooms, one on the first floor and one on the second, because “why
wouldn’t I take two rooms?” Honestly I don’t know why the rest of us never did.
After the initial shock of the house wore off, Trisha and I were sitting in the common
room. She was casually flipping through cat vids on one wall while I watched news on another.
The U.S. president was flying to China for some kind of important diplomatic meeting. Various
internet personalities injected their opinion about the situation, occasionally also with cats.
“It’s not over you know.”
I jumped a little, not expecting any conversation. A dark silhouette stood in the doorway.
He was the one who had spoken.
“The school messing with us. Those rooms, that was only the beginning.”
“What-”
But he was already moving. He pushed past up and moved down the hallway.
“Thomas I guess.” Trisha said absently, still focused on her cats. “Told you he was crazy.”
2
“Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of
consciousness.” - Thomas Ligotti
I used to keep a list of things that Thomas would say. I jokingly called it ‘The Prophecies
of Thomas the Creepy’. I started calling him that early on, since his name was Thomas Crespi,
which sounded similar, and because he really was creepy.
The first entry in ‘The Prophecies’ was the first time I saw him, after that brief first
meeting. For a while after that he kind of disappeared. No one saw him around the house. Then
one day I walked into the common area and he was sitting there, writing in his notebook.
Thomas was a very Oracle looking Oracle. Dark sunken eyes, pale skin. A penchant for
black clothing that hung off his emaciated frame. He looked a bit like an animated skeleton.
“Hey.” I tried to inject friendliness into my voice even though honestly walking in on him
unexpectedly had actually given me a pretty bad scare.
His eyes flicked up from his notebook. They were pale grey, and seemed to be looking
at some far off point in the distance. It seemed more like he was looking through than at me.
“I guess you’re pretty busy.” I smiled in the placating way someone smiles at a bear they
accidentally meet in the woods, “I’ll just-”
“Calvin, puppet master.” His voice was deep, cold. I think the word is ‘sepulchral’. It suited him.
“Actually my name’s Calvin Harrison.” I started backing away. My stomach felt like a heavy
weight. “And I really should-”
“Your wicked tongue will cause you trouble.” He stood, abandoning the notebook on the coffee
table, “The puppets dance to your songs but you cast them aside to burn in the flames. When
the music stops your mouth will fill with ash. You would do well to be careful what you say.”
“Thats- good advice.” I hit the door to the stairs and gasped. The hair stood up on my arms. It
felt several degrees cooler in the room.
His eyes flicked from my face, to the floor, then away. There was no emotion in his face,
just a perfectly blank mask. If I hadn’t heard him speak I would not have believed it was possible
for his face to move from its perfect bland flatness.
We stood like that for a minute. Me watching him. Him looking off into the distance.
Saying nothing.
Then I turned and fled up the stairs to my room. Needless to say I avoided Thomas after
that. Unfortunately he had a habit of turning up when I wasn’t expecting it.
In my first year of college I was an incorrigible flirt. My power took away all the
uncertainty in terms of attraction. If they wanted me I knew. And for a while I was satisfied with
taking sex wherever I could get it.
After a while though, I got bored. So I invented this game. I had a stable of pick up lines
that I’d honed from years of hooking up, and they worked a large fraction of the time. So
instead, I decided that I’d only sleep with guys that I picked up using lyrics from popular songs.
I know. It’s cheesy. And dumb. But it was fun. And surprisingly a lot of guys were really
into it.
If someone comes up to you and tells you, “Your eyes are like endless pools that I want
to sink myself into.”, you pretty much know they’re full of shit. Of course if you’re horny you may
not care, but no one really believes that kind of hokey nonsense.
I’d go up to them and I’d say, “Hey Mickey, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my
mind, Hey Mickey.” and invariably they’d crack a smile. It was a great icebreaker.
It didn’t hurt that we had gotten a bit of a reputation. After Jacob pulled his stunt and got
us moved off campus there was a total media shitstorm. Even if I’d had any interest in attending
the few classes I had that weren’t entirely online I would have struggled. We literally could not
get out the door, there were so many people.
Luckily, unlike the bunker, our house was fully equipped. We had cleaning robots,
3Desires in each room, and a top of the line ComplEat. It gets a little old eating nothing but
ComplEat RealMeals for an entire week, but we weren’t exactly suffering.
Peter probably suffered a lot worse. The press was really interested to know why he
didn’t choose to come live with us, and what that might mean. So they bothered him just as
much as they bothered us. And after Trisha took her 3Desire the bunker was basically empty. I
don’t know what he did for food. He eventually gave up and moved in with us anyway, after all
that.
Anyway, all of that attention turned out to be good for picking up guys. So good that I
barely had time for anything but sleeping, eating and having sex. For the most part I avoided
bringing them to our apartment, even when they seemed really interested. Didn’t want them to
get too attached.
One day I was hanging out with this guy I’d picked up with a line from one of those
infinite sampling songs, where they get some phrase from an internet video and it just repeats
over and over. It was, “couldn’t we-couldn’t we-couldn’t we-learn to-love-love-love-”. Just the
most inane thing ever. Still in this case it worked pretty well.
I don’t really remember his name. Probably wouldn’t have spent so much time with him
except it turned out we both had the same English class. That was one of the classes I was
actually required to attend every so often, you know, since I was majoring in it and all. Right up
until all of us were officially banned from taking real classes forever anyway.
Since it was a real class of course there was almost no one in it. Maybe thirty or forty
people. But for some reason the professor always went out of his way to ask me annoying
questions.
“Mr. Harrison, what is this character’s motive?” And other inane questions were very common.
I’m sure he saw me in a video somewhere, after all the publicity. He knew I was one of
the Enhanced kids. But that wasn’t the only reason. Jacob was also in my class and he never
asked him a single time.
No. I’m positive it was because I was gay. It was public knowledge, some of the vids
mentioned it and he knew.
I had learned he and his husband had been happily married for almost twenty years. My
theory was that he was one of those old school gays who really hate guys like me. They feel like
if we don’t settle down, if we sleep around, that we’re just perpetuating gay stereotypes. It’s
hypocritical. They wanted the freedom to love who they wanted but they want to deny me that
same right.
I think discrimination is like energy. You can change it from one kind to another kind, but
in the end, it never really goes away.
After Peter moved in, he and I actually kind of bonded.
One day I was leaving my room and I passed by the library. I heard the sound of some
old documentary vids playing so I poked my head in. Peter was sitting there with two different
vids playing on two different walls. He must have had a different ear bud in each ear or
something. I don’t know how he could concentrate on both, but he clearly was, and that wasn’t
the only time I saw him do it. The kid was definitely smart.
The vids caught my eye. There are some uplifting historical documentaries about war,
but these weren’t that. These were very graphic. Lots of images of bodies and explosions.
“Cheerful.” I commented, mostly to myself. With two earbuds in I assumed he couldn’t hear me.
“People try to ignore the unpleasant things.” He turned toward me, “And that’s why they’re
weak.”
“If graphic violence is what you’re into, there are some pretty terrifying vids of the fighting in the
South China sea-”
“This is not a joke!” Peter removed his earbuds and the vids stopped. “Do you know anyone
who has been to war?”
“No one goes to war anymore.” I was officially getting annoyed with his condescending tone.
“We just send robots and nanites to kill people now.”
“If no one goes to war anymore, why is the government collecting Elites?” He actually rolled his
eyes. I was livid.
“They aren’t collecting them. A lot of Elites chose to work for the government because they pay
so well.”
“That’s what they want you to believe.”
“Who’s they? There’s no-”
A vid started playing. He didn’t even wave his hand. I have to assume it was a
manifestation of his power.
It looked a lot like the documentary he had been watching, but it was clearly more
recent. Instead of gunfire and explosions there were nano clouds and drones. The people also
tended to explode in showers of blood instead of writhing in agony on the ground. A sort of
progress I guess.
This played for a while. I was getting bored and about to ask what I was supposed to be
seeing when it suddenly became very obvious. Everything, the people, the drones, the nano
clouds, flickered. Then suddenly vanished. Nothing left but rocks and dirt.
The camera got wobbly for a bit, like someone or something was backing away very
quickly. A figure appeared in the corner of the frame. It was a child, no more than six or seven
years old.
The child turned. Seemed to notice something. They raised their hand andThe video ended.
“That video’s clearly been altered.” I said, once I got over the initial shock.
“I know for a fact that it wasn’t.”
“You can’t possibly know that.” I was basically yelling at this point.
“I do!” Suddenly he was standing in front of me, and I saw that we were almost the same height.
“I know because they took him too!”
“They took who?”
“My brother.” He looked at the wall. “The government took him. ‘For his own protection’. Like
they’re always saying. He’s the one who sends me these vids.”
“You mean- your brother’s an Elite then?”
“My brother is someone with powers who wasn’t smart enough to keep them hidden and whose
parents didn’t have enough money to correct that mistake.” His voice was a low growl. “When
they tested him they tested me too, and if my psy score hadn’t been so low, I’d be there now.”
“It’s impossible, what you’re saying.” I shook my head. “If the government was taking people
against their will we’d hear about it. People wouldn’t put up with it.”
“You’d be surprised what people will put up with if it means they can go on living their lives.”
Another video came on. People being tortured during the Spanish Inquisition. Another
video. Artist renderings of slaves packed into slave ships. Another video. Emaciated Jewish
prisoners in World War II death camps.
“Okay, okay. I get it.” I waved at the wall and the videos stopped. “So what? How is watching all
these old documentaries going to help your brother?”
“It won’t.” His hands clenched into fists. “I can’t change anything. All I can hope to do is to learn
as much as I can, and convince as many people as I can, until finally there’s enough of us that
they can’t ignore us anymore.”
Peter had this insane intensity on the subject of his brother. I decided early on that even
if I didn’t really believe in his conspiracy nonsense, it was probably better to play along. Never
mess with a true believer. Anybody who can believe in something without question is clearly
dangerous.
“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m convinced I guess.” I shrugged noncommittally, and smiled.
“Though I don’t really think I’m that useful to your cause.”
“Are you serious?” His eyes were wide, then wary. “Don’t joke about this.”
“No I believe you. After what happened with the bunker-” And with Thomas, I thought, though I
didn’t say that, “I am starting to understand how the rules of the world don’t really seem to apply
to us.”
“Thanks. That means a lot actually.” He reached out his hand. I smiled again and took it and for
the first time since I had met him he smiled back.
Anyway, back to my last actual real university lecture. For whatever reason, that day my
English professor was really laying into me. “What is the main tension in this story?” or “Can you
explain the symbolism in this passage?” Just an endless series of questions.
So I was pretty annoyed. And I couldn’t really control my power very well, I really
couldn’t. But I was really building up this irritation, and wanting to get back at him, and it just sort
of happened. I SawThe professor was down on his knees. Tied up. Gagged.
I stood over him. Pulled sharply on his ropes and kissed him.
“Please master.” He begged.
“No.” I taunted.
My fingers reached out. Grabbed a nipple. Pulled.
“Mr. Harrison?”
His voice pulled me back into the present. A smile slowly spread on my face.
I admit what I did was childish. If I’d had a few minutes to think about it I probably
wouldn’t have done it. But a cute guy was sitting next to me and I was feeling kind of cocky.
“Symbolism, you said, right professor?”
I leaned forward in my seat in anticipation.
“That’s right.” His voice wobbled slightly. Uncertain.
“I think all these questions symbolize how badly you want me to tie you up and spank you like
the bad boy you are.”
The room erupted in laughter. The professor flushed bright red. His mouth opened and
closed a few times, but no sound came out. My cute guy was grinning a cute guy grin at me that
made it all seem so perfect.
Of course, since we were all famous, the class knew I could read minds. And from the
professor’s reaction, it was obvious I’d hit a nerve. And of course he must have known how it
seemed, and that just made him turn even redder.
“C-Class dismissed” He stammered.
The class burst into applause. It made the professor blush even harder. Then, clumsily
picking up his stack of old books, he stormed out.
The laughing continued for quite a while. Then people started slowly filtering out. Soon it
was just me and my current fling.
“So.” His voice was a seductive whisper, “Do you want to spank me?”
“I don’t know. Have you been bad?”
“Very bad.” He smiled and I pulled him in for a rough kiss.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement. I glanced quickly in that direction. Saw
Jacob standing there, watching us, turning a similar shade of red as the professor had
previously. Except it was clearly not embarrassment he was feeling.
Like I said, I was feeling cocky. But even so what happened next was very, very, stupid.
Impulsively I broke the kiss and called out, “Want to join us Jacob?”
First there was a blinding light. Then a wave of intense heat. Then a loud siren started
beeping insistently.
“Crap!” I tried to stand. Fell back as my kissing companion rushed past me. The smoke was
very thick and I couldn’t see, only feel the tremendous heat. I tried to stand again, and again I
fell back, buffeted by a wave of flames.
It turns out that chair cushions catch fire really easily. And these weren’t even the new
nano-material chairs, which will put themselves out. No, the university believed in tradition, and
that includes old fashioned padded chairs in the lecture halls.
Just as I was beginning to really panic I felt arms around me. A glowing, naked man
looked down into my eyes. His body was perfect in every way, like a statue made of gold.
He lifted me up and immediately the feeling of heat disappeared. It was then that I
recognized Jacob. His broad shoulders, his face - and those eyes. Even glowing gold he had
the same intensity in his eyes.
We moved through the flames like it was water. I tried not to think about it, keeping my
eyes on his face. It would have been hard for me to look away anyway.
A small crowd had gathered outside by the time we exited. There was no sign of my cute
guy. So much for learning to “love-love”.
Jacob gently lowered me to the ground. His eyes closed. In a flash the gold was gone.
He swayed. His body collapsed on top of mine.
I can’t say I entirely minded him being on top of me. All that muscle is a little heavy
though.
After initially seeing so much of Trisha, we barely spoke in the first few months of our
first year of college. I would see her sometimes wandering the halls but then if I looked around
later she was gone. It is hard to keep track of someone who can literally be anywhere she wants
at any time.
At some point I started to notice that the study was filling up with a lot of equipment and
things. Old laptops and circuits, ancient technology like that, but some new stuff too. Cans and
cans of nano spray, robot parts, even what looked like some complicated stasis field equipment.
Then one day I walked by and she was actually there. She had a bunch of tools
suspended around her (a wasteful use of a stasis field generator, but she did also carry port
jumps like they were pocket screens), and was spinning a screwdriver between her fingers. Her
red hair was sticking up wildly around her face. It looked like she hadn’t brushed it in a while.
“What is this all for?”
She jumped at the sound of my voice, dropping the screwdriver.
“Don’t scare me like that!” She reached out and tapped something inside a nest of random
wires. “These things are very delicate.”
“Should you just poke it like that then?”
At that moment the stasis field chose to spark and stop working. All of the previously
suspended tools fell to the ground with a loud crash.
“Oops.” A nontrivial amount of smoke was coming from the generator pack. “Stupid black
market stasis generators.”
“Why do you have a black market stasis generator?” I waved at the smoke around my face
absently. “Couldn’t you easily afford a real one?”
“My father could easily afford one.” She smiled one of her evil smiles. “And there are some
things I don’t want him to know about.”
“Do these things threaten your safety or the safety of the other members of this house?” When
the smoke cleared I noticed that there was a decently large scorch mark on the floor that hadn’t
been there before.
“Probably-” She squinted her eyes and rubbed her chin thoughtfully, then smiled, “Not?”
“Where are you even getting all this stuff?” Now that I was standing in the room I noticed several
more terrifying items. A one touch welder, portable manipulator, even some taser balls for
whatever horrifying reason.
“I worked it out with my professor’s in the physics and engineering department.” She waved her
hand vaguely at the junk, “I showed them some of the stuff I was working on and convinced
them to let me do independent study instead of coming to class.”
“You-you can’t do that. Why would you do that?” The whole point of in person lecture classes
was that you couldn’t get out of them. One on one time with the professors was why people paid
to come to college at all (besides the drinking and parties of course).
“To get access to all of this stuff?” The tone in her voice indicated that I was clearly one of the
stupidest people on the earth for not understanding this obvious point.
“I don’t believe that a professor gave you this-” I kicked the stasis pack with my foot,
“Questionable black market technology.”
“Well-” Trisha squinted her eyes again, turning her head a bit one way, then the other. “I guess
technically I did not get all of it- legally.”
“Are you or any of us in danger of going to jail because of this?” The volume of my voice
surprised even me.
“You worry too much Calvin.” Trisha turned her attention to the stasis pack. She had gotten the
screwdriver back from somewhere and was busily unscrewing the top. “Some rules were meant
to be broken.”
“Well, when the police show up here we’ll know who to blame, I guess.” And then I shook my
head and walked away.
Of course I was wrong about that. When the police showed up the first time it was
because of me.
“Go away.”
“You can’t ignore me.” The box slipped. I adjusted my grip, “I brought pizza.”
“I said go away.”
“Look. What happened wasn’t your fault. I-”
There was a loud bang as something hit the door, hard. I stepped back, nearly dropping
the pizza box again.
“You don’t scare me!” I kicked the door, “I nearly burned to death today and you are trying to
scare me with that?”
“Damn it!” The door swung open as I was preparing to kick it again. The slippery pizza box
wobbled but did not go down. My pizza handling skills are excellent.
“Thank you.” I handed him the pizza. “Can we please talk?”
He looked down at the pizza. “There’s nothing to talk about.” Then back at me. “It won’t
happen again.”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that one before.” I pushed past him into the room. “But I’d rather that
the next time it ‘doesn’t happen’ that I don’t almost die.”
“Will you stop saying that!” The pizza box crumpled in his hands, spewing little pieces of meat
onto the carpet. One of the cleaning robots began industriously vacuuming it up.
“Stop saying what? That I almost died?”
“I carried you out. It was fine.” The last part was almost a whisper. His eyes were far away,
empty of their usual intensity. He almost looked small.
“Can you at least acknowledge what would have happened if I hadn’t told them I started the
fire?”
“No one believes that you did it.” He sat down heavily on one of the plush furniture balls, and it
molded itself to his body.
“It doesn’t matter. The university can’t prove you did it, and I said I did it, so I did it.”
Jacob’s little fire ended up gutting the first floor of the English department. It was pretty
noticeable. As I lay on the ground, being suffocated by Jacob’s body, a sizeable crowd had
already gathered to watch the destruction. By the afternoon it was on every major news station.
Oops.
A half dozen firetrucks and some angry campus police showed up eventually. I gave
them my report. My irresponsibility when showing off had started the fire. But instead of telling
them about Jacob I said that it was one of those finicky black market stasis packs.
I guess I had Trisha to thank for the idea. She was a consistent source of plausible fire
hazards.
Anyway, the story spread pretty fast. Basically there were three camps of people.
1)
The people who thought the whole incident was funny and that burning down the
English department was a good joke on my part
2) The people who thought that Jacob did it, that both of us were dangerous, and that he
and I should both be kicked off campus permanently
and 3) The people who thought that Jacob and I should both be taken by the government ‘for
our own safety’ and/or killed
The university seemed to settle somewhere between 1) and 2). We didn’t get kicked out.
However after that all of us were banned from attending classes in any of the lecture halls on
the grounds that the Enhanced were clearly an ‘unknown element’ and that the university was
taking ‘all necessary precautions’.
The police came and questioned us all. In the end they didn’t find any evidence that we’d
planned anything. Miraculously they didn’t ask to search the house, and so they didn’t find any
of Trisha’s contraband.
We were all assigned new special one on one classes with our professors. Special
classes in special facilities to meet our special needs. Monitored at every possible opportunity to
make sure nothing bad would happen again.
It meant that from then on I would have all my English classes in a tiny room. Isolated
from the other students. With the professor that I had humiliated. Yay.
Despite that I felt like we’d gotten off pretty lightly. I felt bad for the others though. When
Trisha found out that she had been banned from the science and engineering buildings she
howled for several hours.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“It’s not like it really made a difference.” I took the pizza from him. Helped myself to a
slice. “But anyway, it really was my fault. I mean-” I paused, chewing, carefully considering what
to say. “When I met you, I Saw something in your memory. I mean, I knew-”
“You Saw that?” Jacob shot bolt upright. A little gold wind whipped around his body. The
temperature in the room went up dramatically.
“Almost nothing! Barely anything!” I clung to the wall, hiding behind a curtain.. Everything in the
room was nano, unlike the stupid lecture hall.
“Sorry!” The wind died down. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry-”
“No. It’s okay.” I slowly came out from behind the curtain, “I think this proves it.”
“Proves what?” The temperature in the room did not change but his face burned crimson.
“That this thing can be controlled. I mean, just now you didn’t even singe my hair.” I ran my
hands through it dramatically to demonstrate.
“Oh.” He looked away, “I thought you meant-”
“That I thought you were gay?”
That time the temperature did go up a bit. However there was no wind. Progress.
“I’m not gay.” His voice shook, “I like girls. I enjoy having sex with girls.”
“There’s no reason you can’t enjoy both.” I made quotes with my fingers. “It’s called being
‘bisexual.’”
“Nooooarrghh.” Collapsing on his bed he smothered his face with a pillow and moaned.
“I don’t understand why you’re so upset about this.” I rescued another piece of pizza from the
abandoned box.
“If I can choose either men or women,” Jacob’s face protruded only a little below the pillow,
making him look like he was wearing a strange fluffy mask, “Then why can’t I make the right
choice?”
“The right choice?!” My pizza fell from my fingers and messily splattered on the ground. The
cleaning robot gave a ding of dismay and fled the room to find reinforcements.
“Ah.” The pillow slid off his face as he quickly sat up, “I mean-”
“It is pretty clear what you meant!” Three little robots were now busily whirring around my feet.
“No, you don’t understand! The first time this happened I burned down someone’s house!”
The statement hung in the air for a few minutes. Jacob looked away, his face pale and
drawn. Then slowly the words started to pour out.
“It was a friend of mine. We had a few classes. Played on the same soccer team. He was
always hanging around me. I had a lot of other friends though. And we all hung out all the time. I
didn’t think anything of it.”
He paused. Shook his head.
“There was a party at his house that night. His parents were gone and everything. I got way too
drunk. I tried to take my keys and drive home and he wouldn’t let me. Made me stay on his
couch.”
His voice got higher. His eyes wide.
“I woke up and he was touching me. It wasn’t like that, I mean, I-I vomited on myself I guess.
And he took off my shirt and was cleaning me and-”
He started shaking.
“I was still pretty drunk. He was in his boxers. I didn’t think. I just reached out and I-I touched
him. Lightly at first, and then when he didn’t say anything, a little more. And then-”
Tears formed in his eyes. He looked down.
“We were kissing. And he was touching me and I was touching him and it felt so, so good and
then-”
He looked up at me.
“Then my father was there. I guess he called him after I was vomiting or whatever. I’m not
certain. But he was there and he pulled me off of him and he was screaming and-”
His body was visibly wracked by sobbing.
“He was so angry and so-so- disappointed!” He began slowly rocking, “And I felt so ashamed, I
felt like I would die from it and then-”
The sobbing stopped. Jacob looked down at his hands. Held them up in front of his
eyes. Looked up at me again.
“Then the fire came. And it all burned.”
Jacob looked like a puppet with its strings cut. The light had gone out of his eyes. He
looked lost.
“Oh. My. God.” The words were so inadequate. Words are often inadequate in the face of true
human emotions.
“I burned down his house. I was lucky his parents weren’t there. Lucky that they both got out
alive.” He choked on the words, looked moments away from breaking into tears again.
“Jacob.” I felt close to tears myself. “it wasn’t your fault.”
“It was my fault! It was my fault because I made the wrong choice! My father-”
“Your father is an asshole.”
“No, you don’t understand,” He sighed, pinching his nose, eyes regaining a little of their usual
intensity. “In my family there are certain expectations. We set high goals and we achieve them.
And one thing my father expects is-”
“You care too much what your father thinks.” A cleaning robot had begun washing my leg, but I
think I managed to sound pretty angry.
“My father is one of the greatest men who ever lived.” His eyes shone when he said it. He
meant it.
“Okay. I get that your dad means a lot to you.” I walked over to the bed and sat down, “But
whatever he expects, being in denial about this is clearly not an option for you.”
“Damn it!” He flopped backwards and covered his face with the pillow again. Then more quietly,
“Don’t you think I know that.”
“I think I could help you.”
The pillow retreated slightly, revealing a single eye and mouth. “Help how?”
I wiggled my eyebrows suggestively, then smiled.
He threw the pillow at me.
“I just explained what happened to you! There is no way I am doing anything-”
“I wasn’t trying to seduce you. Trust me, you would know if I was trying to seduce you.” I
wiggled my eyebrows again.
“Okay.” He was still cautious, like I was some kind of gay snake trying to bite him, “Then what?”
I reached over, touching his hand. As he watched I moved my hand up his arm. Letting
myself enjoy the feeling of him.
He gasped. A burst of golden wind pushed me backwards. His eyes had gone
completely gold.
“Jacob, Jacob, it’s okay, I-”
And then it dissipated. He shuddered, then looked up at me angrily.
“You said you wouldn’t-”
“And I wasn’t. I didn’t do anything.” I held up my hands as if I were under arrest, “I’m pretty sure
even in Mississippi that isn’t considered sex.”
“You really wouldn’t-” He looked away. Blushed. “You really don’t want to do that with me?”
“I promise I won’t.” I couldn’t tell him I didn’t want to sleep with him. That would have been a lie.
“So that’s it? Your plan is just to touch me until- what exactly?”
“It’s not touching. I flirted with you. Clearly what is triggering you right now is just flirting.” My
face split wide open with a grin. “And as it turns out that is my specialty.”
I never told any of the housemates about the first time that I heard a prophecy from
Thomas. Still I talked to Peter and Trisha on several occasions and they mentioned he said
things to them sometimes. Nothing overly specific. Just ‘eerie Oracle crap’ according to Peter
and ‘oogie boogie nonsense’ according to Trisha.
“One time he said something like-” Trisha did a good impression of Thomas. She’d make her
face very flat and droop her eyelids just right. “ ‘You see many doors, and you think they will
lead you to the information you seek. But beware. Behind every door is the lurker at the
threshold.”
I laughed really hard at that one. “Who even says ‘Beware’? It’s like something out of an
old horror movie.”
“I know!” We both almost died laughing about that.
3
“Nothing belongs to us. Everything is something that is rented out. Our very
heads are filled with rented ideas passed on from one generation to the next.” Thomas Ligotti
Red. I remember how red it was. The human body contains a surprising amount of
blood.
“We have to call an ambulance.”
“No, you can’t. Don’t.” Her protests were getting fainter.
“Who did this to you?”
“No time.” She reached out. Began writing something on the floor in her own blood.
“Why won’t you let me help you!” I was covered in blood. It was everywhere. My clothes, my
hands, even my face where I’d pressed it to her chest.
“No one can help me.” Her head lolled to the side. “It’s too late.”
The light went out of her eyes. I could feel it. Until then I didn’t realize that I could feel
people’s minds. Not until I felt one disappear forever.
“No.” I pressed my face against her. “Why-”
“Calvin.”
It felt like I had swallowed a block of ice. I looked up. She was standing in the doorway.
Standing there, looking down at her own corpse.
“How-”
“No time for questions. What did I say to you?”
“You-” It was hard to get the words out. My mind was rebelling, trying to deny reality. “You were
writing something.”
“Writing? Where-” then she saw the bloody letters, “Oh my God. I know what happened.”
She turned and walked out the door. I looked up. Looked back down at the body.
And then it just vanished. Blood, body, everything. I was left, sitting by myself, crying,
staring at nothing.
That was the first time I saw Trisha die.
I think there are some things that are very basically necessary for human health and
happiness. Food, shelter, all of that of course. But on top of that, we need to be able to interact.
Humans need other people to listen and respond to our thoughts in order to make sense of the
world.
And of course there’s sex.
After the school forbade us from attending classes, that suddenly became very hard.
We weren’t allowed within a certain distance of most of the buildings. Some people would
actively avoid us if they saw us on campus.
Worst of all, it got really hard to hook up with guys without taking them back to our
house. My plans to help Jacob with his powers definitely didn’t include taking the chance he
might randomly walk in on me with some guy again. Rather than deal with the mess that would
have caused, I just started going out into the city.
Skirbeck is pretty close to the university anyway. I heard that the university was even
originally founded there, way back when, but it burnt down. So because people a few hundred
years ago were playing with fire it takes about ten minutes to get there now, if you go by stasis
car. And, as much as Trisha’s father hated them, our underground garage was fully stocked.
That’s when I first started to hear a lot of rumors. A bunch of big unsolved crimes.
Fighting in the streets.
Sometimes the guys I dated like to bring it up because they thought I’d be interested.
One guy even claimed to have seen it first hand.
“I was walking down State Street and I saw someone lift a bag. The woman just started yelling
her head off like, “Hey! Stop!” and everything.”
“They must have had some black market nano because the bag didn’t even try to go back to
her. Or maybe they used their power somehow? I don’t know. So of course everyone was
flipping out and like, grabbing at themselves to keep anything else from being lifted right? But
things were flying out all over. I lost a pocket screen I think. Not one of those cheap Yallo ones
either. A nice new Gabbo.”
“But then there was like, this flash of light? And all the stuff that hadn’t already disappeared kind
of crashed to the ground. Then this girl ran by, covered all in black. She yelled ‘Sorry’ and
dumped a bunch of the other stuff on the ground and then, like, disappeared.”
“So yeah. Things are totally crazy with the Es in ‘Beck right now.”
So that is how I first found out about what what they call the ‘mask phenomena’.
Otherwise known as ‘superhero and supervillain wannabes’. Basically people who decided that
because they were Enhanced, the laws didn’t apply to them.
Or basic fashion sense. Nobody looks good in spandex.
Going out to the city wasn’t my only source of social interaction. Jacob and I still had our
class together. Needless to say I wasn’t enthusiastic about it. I was however far more
enthusiastic about the excuse to spend time alone with Jacob.
My experiments in casually flirting with him had met with mixed results. I saw Jacob
walking down the hall from the shower one day. Water dripping off his massive, firm body. Lips
parted and eyes still heavy from sleep.
I decided to be daring. We were safest in the house, where basically everything was
nano, and he was already wet. Pretty much as fire proof as possible.
“I would love to hold you down and lick the water off of you.” I purred.
He froze. At first I thought maybe it hadn’t worked. Then his eyes looked up into mine.
Solid gold.
“Damn it, Calvin.” He growled. But his eyes were already changing back to their usual blue.
“You know you like it.” I smiled my wickedest smile.
He pushed past me without saying anything. Heat poured off of him. His body and the
towel were both completely dry.
So the next day he was avoiding looking at me as we walked to class. It was driving me
a little bit crazy. On top of that he was wearing this tight black shirt that didn’t leave much to the
imagination. And, high off the success of my previous attempt, I was feeling a bit overconfident.
We were standing outside of the building where our class was assigned. A hulking
concrete monstrosity similar to the bunker they’d originally given us as dorms. The professor
had the only key so there was nothing to do but wait by the door until he showed up.
Jacob was leaning against the wall. His blond hair was blowing around his face, and he
had crossed his massive arms over his chest. I was standing there, watching him and being
ignored by him.
And then, impulsively, I closed the distance. I pressed my body against his body. When
he didn’t react, I leaned in and whispered in his ear.
“You can pretend you don’t want me, but your body gives you away.”
A force knocked me backwards. Then I felt the heat. The grass around me smoldered
and blackened.
I looked up. Gasped. Jacob’s body had gone fully gold again.
“Jacob-” I began, “It’s okay, I won’t-”
“Grraaaughh!” Jacob’s body contracted. He fell to his knees, gripping his head. I felt another
surge of heat.
Little flakes of gold peeled off and fell to the ground, smoking a bit and then dying out.
Jacob shook his head and the pieces dripped off of him like rain. There was still a tremendous
amount of heat coming off of him, and I didn’t dare try to get closer.
“Jacob, are you-”
“What is going on here?” The angry voice of the professor made me turn. He looked at me and
then down at the prone figure of Jakob. “Are you going to try to convince me that this was
caused by a ‘black market stasis pack’ too?”
“We were just practicing.” I towered over the much shorter professor. “Nothing burnt but some
stupid grass.”
“Are you trying to frighten me Mr. Harrison? You should know that you are on very thin ice and if
I report you then-”
“Please.” Jacob croaked. “Please, don’t. It wasn’t his fault.”
“You, Mr. Walker, need to understand that this-” He waved at himself and then the building,
“This arrangement is contingent on the fundamental requirement that you can keep your, your
abilities, from endangering your instructors and school property. You can’t-”
“I promise, it won’t happen again.” Jacob put up his hands in a placating gesture. After a
moment the professor nodded grudgingly, then pushed past us to unlock the door.
Jacob glared at me, and I didn’t even try to argue. I deserved it. My impulsiveness had
almost gotten us expelled for the second time.
Given the long cultural history of superhero fiction I guess it is more surprising that it
didn’t happen sooner. Like most kids I was into the old superhero moves from the early 2000s.
There probably wasn’t a single kid born after those movies who didn’t wear a cape for at least
one Halloween.
Still, crime was basically non-existent. The problem of food and shelter was solved. No
one had to steal to survive. And you were never more than five feet from some sort of recording
device, so it was pretty hard to get away with crimes at all. I mean, at that point many people
were starting to get them embedded in their bodies.
So we didn’t really need superheroes. At least, not until we started to have super villains.
The first major incident I heard about in Skirbeck was a month or so after we all got
banned from classes. A large area of downtown was completely blocked off by the police for
several days. Of course that just made people more curious, and soon everyone knew someone
who had snuck in, but no one really knew what was going on.
Then all of a sudden the news was everywhere.
Like many major cities, Skirbeck had a large financial district. In old movies the criminals
would always break into a bank and steal a bunch of paper money or gold and run away. But
paper money had become all but obsolete. The wads that people sometimes hoarded under
their mattresses were still honored, but for the most part it was being slowly phased out by then.
Most financial information, like most everything at that time, existed as data on the
internet. And unlike the initial, terribly unsecure data of the early 21st century, our financial
information was coded to our handprint, and was therefore incredibly difficult to steal. And all of
the financial information and security details were stored on massive computers with
complicated layers of encryption and top of the line nano-security.
So then, when people started saying someone had robbed a bank, we all thought they
were crazy. We couldn’t even imagine what that would mean. Even if, by some miracle, you
could get into the building, how could you decrypt the information you stole? If you decrypted it,
how could you ever use it without being able to reproduce the person’s handprint?
And then it was on the news. The director of the bank had to come out and admit they
had lost over a million dollars and they had no idea how it happened. All they had was security
camera footage of a person dressed all in black standing next to the server rack. For five
minutes the person stands there with a notebook and a pen. And then they’re just gone. No idea
how they got in, no idea how they got any information when they were there.
Of course everyone knew it had to be an Enhanced person. No normal person could
have done it. But it didn’t fit any of the known powers, and a thorough scan for genetic material
did not find any matches in the Enhanced database.
The crime went unsolved. Soon incidents involving the person in black were being
reported on a weekly basis. A little internet community sprung up, dedicated to recording
sightings. They called her the ‘Spectral Lady’. Skirbeck’s first official supervillain.
“Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only
weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength
of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt,
he needs weapons, and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity
to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we
have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.’
My head was drooping, listening to the professor drone on and on. Of all the worthless
no talent authors the one I can least tolerate is Ayn Rand. Not only is her prose dry and
pompous, not only are her characters flat and unbelievable, but even her philosophy is
hypocritical. She wanted people to ‘depend on nothing’ but she died taking money from the
government. There is nothing I hate more than phoniness.
“Mr. Harrison.”
Since there were two of us in the class it was harder to judge him for calling on me. Still I
felt like he hardly ever said Jacob’s name.
“Yes, sir?” I was being obnoxiously overly polite. It was obviously annoying him, but he couldn’t
exactly get me in trouble for my being too nice.
“You seem bored, Mr. Harrison.” The smile on his face was closer to a sneer, “Can you explain
to me why a work of fiction that has influenced our society so heavily is not worth a few minutes
of your time to listen to?”
It was so condescending. The tone implied ‘Can you explain to me why you are so
stupid Mr. Harrison?’. So in my anger I let my tongue get away from me again.
“It is more accurate to say that Nietzschean philosophy was so influential that it inspired Ayn
Rand to write a mediocre novel.” The words came boiling out of me. If I’d had Jacob’s power the
professor would have been incinerated on the spot.
“And I suppose that Nietzsche’s ideas were formed in a vacuum?” There was a tremendous
thud as the professor slammed his paper copy of The Fountainhead on the desk. “He had no
influences?”
“Ayn Rand took an interesting idea and made it boring.” I was staring right into the professor’s
stupid beady eyes. “Nietzsche makes a statement about morality, that the idea of ‘good’ and
‘evil’ are judgments that are made in order to control human society. He shows us this new way
of thinking and he says here, this is what you should strive for, strive to get meaning from your
own struggles and don’t worry about morality.”
I was really angry now, practically shouting. “And Ayn Rand takes this idea and gives us
Howard freaking Roark, her messiah, the perfect embodiment of ‘good’. And people love it,
because everyone wants to think that they are special, and that they have found the ultimate
belief that will make them better than all the rest. People want to believe that suffering is
something that only happens to ‘bad’ people who deserve it, and not to the perfect
‘ubermensch’.”
The professor was turning red again, but I wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. “And that’s not
what Nietzsche meant at all! It is an idea as old as time, and it is stupid, and it is boring! And
that is why I have no interest in hearing you read this terrible book to me.”
We just sat there for a minute. Staring at each other. Not saying anything. Then he broke
the silence.
“You are quite the expert on Nietzschean philosophy Mr. Harrison.” The smile on his face was
too deep, wicked, deep lines standing out dramatically.
“I did get a high school diploma and everything.” I was beyond livid. Incapable of seeing the hole
I was digging for myself.
“Well then, you and Mr. Walker can write me a twenty page paper on the similarities and
differences between Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” Manic glee lit up
his eyes. “By next week.”
“What?” Jacob was standing up now, “I didn’t-”
“And that will hopefully teach you, Mr. Walker, that you should speak up every so often instead
of letting Mr. Harrison always speak for you.”
“I-” Jacob began, but then he looked away. I would have paid a lot of money to have been able
to read his mind at that time.
“I think I’ve taught you both enough for today.” The professor started walking out, but as he
passed Jacob he added, “And I promise you, that if I see anything like what happened before
class again today, no one, not Mr. Harrison, not your father, not God himself will keep you from
being expelled from this school.”
Jacob turned completely white. As soon as I heard the sound of the door slamming shut
I rushed over to him.
“Don’t listen to him. He’s just an old, idiotic faggot who-”
“Just shut up!” He covered his eyes with his hands, “God damn it Calvin! Why can’t you ever
shut your damn mouth!”
I just stood there. Not saying anything. There was nothing to say.
“I can’t write a twenty page paper in a week.” Jacob sobbed, “I don’t know anything at all about
Nietzsche or Ayn Rand or anything.”
“I’ll help you.” I tentatively reached out, touching his shoulder. Jacob flinched, and lowered his
arms. It was the most upset I had seen him since the English building burnt down.
“Like you helped me before?” He shrugged off my hand. “Just leave me alone Calvin.”
Then he left.
That first bank robbery seemed to spark something. There was a sudden dramatic uptick
in the number of crimes in Skirbeck. And not just those committed by new Enhanced
‘supervillains’. Seeing that the system was fallible inspired criminal minds of all kinds.
I hooked up with the guy a few more times after he told me the story. He was the one
who told me about the Spectral Lady. Everything I described I learned from him and some other
guys several weeks after it happened.
“You say you saw her?” Most of the time I wasn’t very interested in talking. The guys might talk
but I never started any conversations. But that day the sun was shining and we were laying on
his bed under the skylight and I didn’t feel much like going anywhere and it sort of happened.
“Saw who?” He asked. His eyes were slightly glazed. I think generally he was always on some
kind of substance when I saw him, but I never asked about it.
“The Spectral Lady. You actually saw her?”
“Oh yeah man.” Suddenly he was full of energy, excitement overriding whatever he was on,
“She was so intense. Just appeared out of nowhere and bam, bam, bam, everything happened
at once. Like she could be in more than one place at a time.”
“You said she stole your pocket screen?”
“No. No, no, no. You don’t get it man.” He waved his hands dismissively. “She’s not like that. My
pocket screen got lifted and she saved it.”
“The same person who stole over a million dollars also decided to charitably protect you from
pickpockets?” The conversation was starting to bore me, but I saw the shape of a contradiction
and I felt like pursuing it. He wouldn’t have been the first guy I’d slept with to lie to me in order to
impress me.
“Why? You think because she stole from some rich guys she couldn’t ever do anything good?”
He reached over and pulled out his pocket screen. “Look man. I have proof. When she saved
my pocket screen it got a picture of her. One of those auto captures they take every few
seconds and send to you if the nano gets screwed up.”
Then he touched the screen and it was suddenly filled with blackness. A perfectly black
mask. Nothing showing except two mischievous green eyes.
“Huh.” I reached for my pocket screen. “You mind if I copy this?”
“It’s a free country.” He leaned back, long dark lashes closing over his eyes, lush mouth slightly
parted. The long tan lines of his stomach beckoned to me.
I got distracted after that. But I still kept the picture.
The book report ended up being very irritating. I hadn’t read Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a
while. It was longer than I remembered. That was why I was sitting in the library at three o’ clock
in the morning one night.
There was a crash. Not very loud, but loud enough to jolt me out of my reading. I turned
my head toward the door and almost shouted with terror.
“What-What do you want?” I asked the dark figure in the doorway.
“Nothing.” Thomas walked toward me, inspecting the text I had pulled out of the library records
onto my pocket screen.
“What was that noise?”
His face was as blank as ever. Nothing moved but his eyes, reading the words in front of
me.
“You know it’s impolite to ignore someone when they’re talking to you.” My voice shook when I
said it. Being around Thomas was unnerving.
“Were you saying something important?” Anyone else would have smiled, or scowled.
Something. But his face was the same blank mask.
“Do you like Nietzsche?” His eyes still hadn’t left the screen since he had walked in.
“No.” Something almost like amusement flickered in his eyes.
“I would have thought with your penchant for flowery language that you would identify with
Zarathustra.” Irritation made my voice stronger.
“The things that I say are actually true.” For the first time he turned from the book and looked at
me.
“You don’t agree with Zarathustra then?” It was the longest conversation I’d had by far with
Thomas and I was sort of curious where it would go.
“‘Be of good cheer; what doth it matter? How much is still possible!’” Thomas quoted in his cold
dead voice, “The opinion of a short sighted man.”
“So much better to be negative all the time, I suppose.” I refused to flinch, even those his eyes
were like dark voids.
“Better to see the world the way it really is than to comfort oneself with lies.”
“Why?” I quoted the next passage, “‘What hath hitherto been the greatest sin here on earth?
Was it not the word of him who said: "Woe unto them that laugh now!"’ Why see only the worst
in the world when there are songs to be sung, and drinks to be drunk and men to seduce!”
His eyes became very serious. “The longer it goes on the more darkness piles up. It’s
always worse the longer it goes on.”
“But even if we pay for every ounce of joy with a pound of suffering, doesn’t that just make the
joy more valuable?”
“I wonder if you will find the price that you pay is too high.” There was something like an emotion
in his face. He looked legitimately curious.
“What-”
But he was already walking away.
I never did find out what caused the noise.
Since I was up late I dragged myself into the gym the next day later than usual. I’m not
that big on exercise really, but I like to keep up my appearance. Otherwise I’m naturally skinny
to the point of nearly skeletal, and no one wants to go to bed with a skeleton.
The treadmill and I were good friends. It had an embedded entertainment system that
knew my eclectic musical preferences. I got a decent number of my pick up lyrics while working
out.
The door opened. Jacob’s massive body filled the doorway, wearing nothing but a pair of
running shorts. He looked up and saw me. Then he turned and walked out again.
My heart felt like it would beat out of my chest. I turned off the machine and ran out of
the room. At the sound of the door opening he turned and snarled. Started to say something,
but I cut him off.
“No. Let me speak.”
“I told you to leave me alone.”
“So now you can’t even look at me.” My voice cracked a little.
“Don’t pretend you care.” He was still snarling but some of the heat had gone out of it.
“Everything is just a game to you. You don’t care who you hurt if you get what you want.”
“That’s not true. I-” I tried to think of a rebuttal. Some redeeming act. And I couldn’t. My stomach
sank.
“Have you ever cared about anyone but yourself?” His voice wasn’t angry now. It was almost
sad.
“Yes.” I said firmly. That much I was certain about.
“What do you want Calvin?” His eyes were closed, head turned away.
“I don’t want you to hate me.” I said honestly. It surprised me. Honesty wasn’t really my thing.
“Ha.” He laughed. A little at first and then gradually a loud guffaw.
“Why are you laughing?” Usually when it comes to talking I feel in control. For the first time in a
long time I felt lost.
Suddenly he closed the distance. Pressed me against the wall. His breath was warm
against my neck. I gasped.
“How do you like it?” He grabbed my arms and held them above my head. His lips stole tastes
of me as I writhed, helpless.
“Jacob. Please-” I sighed.
Then he pulled away. I was shaking uncontrollably. It felt like he had lit me on fire from
the inside.
“I don’t hate you. I’ve spent the last few days trying.” Jacob looked down at me, smiling a bitter
smile. “And you know what? I don’t know if I even can. I close my eyes and I see your face. You
know how hard that is? Knowing someone doesn’t give a damn about you and not even being
able to hate them?”
“Jacob-”
“Why do you do this to people Calvin?” He shook his head. “Just tell me why.”
“I-I just wanted to help.” My mind was still pretty foggy.
“Don’t lie!” He growled.
“Because I could.” So much honesty in one day. “I just wanted to see if I could.”
“Well you can’t” He turned away from me.
“Jacob, don’t go.” I reached out. Grabbed his shoulder. “I was a dick. I admit it. Let me make it
up to you.”
“I told you, I don’t want your help.” He shrugged away from my hand. “The price is too high.”
“Seriously. I was up all night reading Zarathustra. I know you didn’t read it yet. There’s no way.
Let me help you.” I sighed. “Please? And I promise that afterwards I will never, ever bother you
again.”
He stared at me. Narrowed his eyes. “You promise?”
“Yes. I promise.”
“Fine. And for now you’ll leave and let me use the gym in peace?”
“Yes. Done.” I hurriedly agreed.
“See you later Calvin.” He said casually, as if nothing had happened, and pushed past me.
“See you-” I watched the massive mountain of his back disappear behind the door. “Later.”
I only saw the message that Trisha wrote for a second. At the time it didn’t mean
anything to me. It would more than a year before everything clicked for me all at once. But of
course by then it was too late.
Just four words. One of which was gibberish as far as I knew.
‘The Shoggoth are free’.
4
“Officially there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion
of such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate
worse than death itself.” - Thomas Ligotti
Fear has a smell. It’s been scientifically proven. Human beings excrete pheromones in
their sweat when they’re afraid. And on top of that, when other human beings smell fear, they
become afraid. It’s contagious.
I’ve been afraid a lot in my life. Growing up with just me and my mom, an Enhanced gay
kid, there was a lot to be afraid of. There was a point in my life where I thought I’d forgotten how
to be afraid, I’d just gotten so used to it.
But then I experienced it for the first time. The smell of fear. And not just a little fear, but
the overwhelming fear of a crowd.
It made me understand a lot of things. I think it might have even saved my life. Because
once you’ve smelled fear you recognize it. You get a sixth sense for when something really
terrible is going to happen.
I fully intended to keep my promise to Jacob. I really did. Unfortunately events conspired
to make that completely and utterly impossible.
I mentioned that everyone in the 2030s was terrified of port bombs. However, a port
bomb had never actually been detonated on the earth. Several were tested on asteroids and
even some moons. There was however only one incident on a human occupied territory.
People in the early 21st century were mostly really gung ho about going to Mars. They
made some plans and built rockets and even wrote some books and movies about it. It made a
lot of sense at the time, since it was physically closest to the earth. Still no one believed we
could even get there in their lifetimes, let alone build colonies.
Teleportation changed everything. Even in the early days of teleportation, when basically
nothing could be teleported by anyone but the government, they were already teleporting things
into space. In a short time scale you deposit enough port hubs on or near whatever object you
wanted to get to and make it accessible. Then jumping around on the hublines was trivial.
Suddenly we had full access to a wide range of planets and moons. Mining of the earth’s
moon, Mars and the asteroid belt became popular. Then we moved on to the moons of Jupiter
and later Saturn. Soon people were starting mining colonies. Humanity was haphazardly
scattered throughout the solar system by the late 2020s.
But of course, where you have port hubs you can have port bombs. The defenses of
these new small colonies were inevitably sparse. They were focused on quick profits early on
and then later they had built up a false sense of security.
In 2031 a port bomb was dropped on the largest city in Ganymede, Galileo Regio. It was
an early prototype and the scattering width was a few feet instead of a few inches. Initially the
damage was almost invisible, just a few holes in a few places. Still, given that the city was still
relying on artificial habitation in the sparse Ganymedean atmosphere, the result was a nearly
instantaneous 100% fatality rate.
That was also when the majority of the public learned about port chaining. The
government had tested a variety of port bombs and must have seen the effect before. What
happened on Ganymede was a large part of the reason that commercial teleportation was so
heavily regulated, despite Patricia’s father’s protests.
The initial devastation was not the end. In the days following the bombing, monitoring
satellites continued to record the settlement. Bits and pieces of the habitation would disappear.
More disconcertingly, pieces of human bodies would sometimes appear. They would even
sometimes give the illusion of motion. Disembodied legs walking in and out of the habitation.
Disembodied heads floating around by themselves.
Then one day, about a week or two after, the entire habitation and the surrounding area
imploded. A large crater was formed, several times larger than the settlement. Similar to the
habitation, as the satellites continued to monitor it, bits and pieces of earth would appear and
disappear.
Incidents like this continued for almost a year. Some catastrophic implosion would
happen, following by steady fluctuations. The crater ballooned until almost 10% of the mass of
Ganymede had been lost. And then finally, when some people had begun to whisper that the
devastation might never end, that it might spiral forever until it consumed us all, it stopped.
No government or group ever stepped forward to take credit for the bombing of
Ganymede. There wasn’t any obvious reason for someone to have wanted to specifically
destroy that colony, which consisted of greedy members of most of the world’s countries. No
one profited from the annihilation, and in fact colonization of Ganymede was completely halted
by the event. Therefore the incident was frequently referred to as the ‘Ganymede Accident’.
After the ‘Ganymede Accident’ internet vids from the government were continuously
posted. They were generally scientists explaining that port hubs and port jumps were stable and
that there was no reason for widespread panic about a port chain event. A few of the videos
directly addressed the Ganymede incident, and gave some ‘tips’ on what to do in the case of
another port bomb ‘accident’.
The advice was amusingly similar to the old concept of ‘Duck and Cover’. In fact many
internet vids were made to compare the two and make jokes. However, the advice in the case of
port bombs was to lay down flat against the ground.
As in the case of ‘Duck and Cover’ there was some logic to this advice. There was
evidence from Ganymede that the port explosion spread out in a sphere. Therefore outside of
the initial blast radius anyone laying flat on the ground would be least likely to be affected.
Things might still collapse on top of you, but you wouldn’t get the brunt of the explosion.
But like ‘Duck and Cover’ this advice would be completely useless to anyone actually
caught in the initial port bomb explosion itself. And, as I would later discover, it was absolutely
no defense against port chaining.
Anyway, there was a yearly drill where an alarm would go off and we would all practice
getting flat on the ground as soon as possible. In high school we all kind of enjoyed these drills,
since it inevitably meant less actual class work. The only net result of these drills for me, as far
as I can tell, was that I instantly recognized the sound of the port bomb alarm. Three shrill tones
followed by the quiet sound of a woman’s voice.
“Take cover. Lie flat on the ground.”
“Take cover. Lie flat on the ground.”
“Take cover-”
We were all in our beds, sound asleep, when we heard the siren. My first woozy thought
was, “It’s strange to have a drill this late at night.”
Then all at once I understood. Not a drill.
I don’t know how to describe existential fear to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. It isn’t
like normal fear. With normal fear there is some rational part of your brain that whispers
soothingly to you, even as you shout or even run. A voice in your head that is still in control.
Real existential fear completely shuts that all down. If I had never had those drills in
school, I would probably have stayed in bed, not moving. But because of those drills I did what
my body had been trained to do. I jumped up and plastered myself against the floor.
“Take cover. Lie flat on the ground.”
My entire body was stiff as a board. Outside I heard crashing and screams. People
shouting things at each other.
“Take cover. Lie flat on the ground.”
Three tones. My heart felt like it was trying to jump out of my chest. My mind was as
blank as a piece of paper. Completely empty with terror.
“Take cover. Lie flat on the ground.”
The soothing voice seemed almost a mockery. Like someone calmly smiling while slowly
cutting into one of your veins.
“Take cover. Lie flat on the ground.”
Tone. Tone. Silence.
It stopped. One minute a terrifying siren, the next nothing.
There are very few true silences in the modern world. Generally wherever you go you
are surrounded by some ambient sound. Passing cars. People talking on their pocket screens.
A human induced cacophony.
At that moment it was deathly silent. The kind of silence that makes you wonder if you
are the only person left on earth. For a while I just sat there in shock. And then in that silence
my mind suddenly screamed with a stream of terrified thoughts.
I jumped up and waved to activate one of the windows. Outside a bunch of cars were
stopped in a random pattern on the road. There were people too, some still laying flat against
the ground. A few were now standing and looking around like me.
From my view at the window there was no obvious sign that there had been a port
bomb. I waved at another wall and started some vids from one of my news feed channels. I had
to flip through several before I found any that were actively streaming. Most were only a
disconcerting blackness that filled my veins with ice.
“-reports from all over of a PBS siren. So far there has been no confirmed sighting of any port
bomb explosion. The mood of our panel of cat judges is currently ‘cautious optimism’ but their
little tails are prepared for terror.”
The wall screen filled up with a bunch of kittens rolling around together. I turned off the
vid.
“Calvin? Peter?”
I heard Trisha’s voice and activated the door. She was standing in the hallway wearing
footie pajamas which made her look like a human cat hybrid, including ears and a tail. It was the
first time I had seen her night time attire and I laughed a little. There is also a certain absurd
edge to fear that makes strange things funny, and my mind had not quite recovered.
“That is an impressive outfit.” I commented.
“Have you seen Peter?” She crossed her arms, ignoring me. I saw that the tail actually moved. It
was twitching irritably now.
“No, but-”
“What the hell is going on?” Peter suddenly stormed out of his room, his angry scowl even
angrier and deeper than usual.
“Calm down okay.” Trisha’s face was very serious, something extremely uncommon. “Dad says
there was a sudden spike in port resonances across the country but that so far there is no
evidence of any actual bomb.”
“How could that happen? All the ED transport terminals are secured against resonance
generators… This isn’t some, some moon, with no defenses!” Peter was glaring at Trisha as if
somehow she was the one responsible for everything.
“It shouldn’t be possible.” Trisha frowned. “It is very worrying.”
Seeing Trisha be distressed was very distressing. Typically her only mood was manic
optimism. If she was upset, then something had gone terribly wrong.
“The darkness will breed darkness.”
Thomas was standing in the hallway. His face was blank as usual. If he was upset he
didn’t show it.
“You and your meaningless jabber are not wanted here!” Peter seemed eager to have a target
for his rage.
“Bad news comes in threes. You will lose more than your temper. The one you seek will find
you, but the reunion will be short lived.”
“I said, shut up!” Peter stalked down the hall. But Thomas was already gone.
“Well.” At some point during the tirade between Peter and Thomas Trisha had gradually started
smiling her mischievous smile. “At least whatever it was, it’s over now.”
Of course it wasn’t.
Shortly after I learned that I was Enhanced, my mother decided that I should see a
therapist. I’m not entirely sure it was for my benefit. She wanted to feel like she was doing
something for her weird, defective son, and that was what she apparently settled on.
“I’m worried about the effect this Enhanced thing will have on your impressionable teenage
mind.” There was a kind of weird, nervous smile that my mother usually wore. Like someone
was holding a gun to her head and forcing her to smile.
“I’m fine.” At that time, despite having my own official psy profile I hadn’t actually had any
psychic incidents besides the first time. People at school made fun of me, but they had always
made fun of me and I was used to it.
“Calvin, you don’t want to end up like your father.” She lectured for the millionth time. “It’s
important to be in touch with your feelings.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t bothered Dad so much about his feelings he wouldn’t have left.” I thought. I
didn’t say it though. It would have been pointless. My mother had a way of not hearing things
that upset her.
For some people this would be the beginning of a heartwhelming story. They would meet
with someone who they connected deeply with and then really learn to love life and humanity.
Or something like that.
The story of my first therapist doesn’t go like that. I punched him. Pretty hard. And after
that he didn’t want to see me again for whatever reason.
“Calvin.” My mother said calmly as she was driving me home afterwards. “What happened?”
“Nothing.” The calmer she was the more it irritated me. Like I wasn’t even worth getting angry
at.
“If you won’t talk to me I can’t help you.” She was using that tone she had, like I was a five year
old that she was going to have to spank.
“Why won’t you just leave me alone?” I cried. It’s embarrassing, but I was still pretty young at
the time.
“This has clearly upset you a lot, dear.” Whenever she started calling me ‘dear’ I knew I was in
for a speech. “You’re feeling a lot right now and that makes perfect sense. It seems like you and
Dr. Simmons didn’t get along and I understand that, I really do. But I think you should give this
therapist thing another try, and that means that we need to find someone that you will get along
with. Now, can you please tell me why you punched Dr. Simmons, Calvin? Please?”
“He just wouldn’t stop asking me questions. It was stupid.” I was still crying.
“What kind of questions?” She sounded a little confused and I felt a little thrill that I’d finally said
something that threw her off balance a little. Something that wasn’t in the perfect script inside
her head.
“Just questions. How is school? How are my friends? Family stuff-” I trailed off.
She was quiet for a minute. “Calvin, is this about your father?”
I didn’t say anything. Just continued crying softly from the passenger seat. We had one
of those intense silences.
“I should have told him you were sensitive about that.” The stiff, overly cheerful tone was back in
her voice. “It was inevitable really. Next time I’ll be careful and it will be better.”
For a moment I thought that maybe she had understood. That we would finally talk about
it. But of course she hadn’t. The gap between us was already pretty large at that point.
She was right though. The next therapist was better.
“All of you are to remain in this house until further notice.”
“What?” Jacob was incandescent with rage. I hadn’t seen him this angry since the first day of
orientation.
After my arrangement with Jacob he started spending the majority of his nights outside
the apartment. Every so often I would see him bring a girl over. I ignored it. We had a deal.
Then there was the port bomb scare. Following the national PBS alert the news was
silent for a while. No one knew what happened. And then all at once there was a target on our
backs. The Enhanced in the country were being put under surveillance. Lockdown basically.
“You don’t have the right-”
“This is a matter of national security.” The man at the door was wearing light nano armor and a
visible weapon. Probably some kind of military.
“So now we’re, we’re prisoners? In our own home?” He towered menacingly over the gun
carrying man.
“This is only temporary. If you cooperate it will be easier for everyone.” His fingers strayed
visibly toward his gun.
Jacob deflated. He turned and stalked toward the door to his room. Probably going to
call his father.
“Excuse me, but is there any explanation for why we are not allowed to leave?” I asked politely.
Politeness will sometimes get you surprisingly far.
“That’s classified information.” And sometimes not.
“It’s just-” I smiled at him. Sometimes flirting will get you further than politeness. And then of
course there’s threats. “I think I might be able to calm down my friend and his extremely wealthy
and powerful lawyer father if you could give me just a little explanation.”
The man hesitated. He lowered his voice and said, “They’re looking for someone. An SR
terrorist. Just keep your heads low and this will all be over soon.”
“Thanks.” I said, still smiling. Politeness is very important.
It wasn’t really surprising information. The internet was buzzing with rumors about the
lockdown, and of course everyone suspected the SRs. The military man hadn’t really told me
anything I didn’t already know.
In the end he was right thought. The lockdown was over quickly. But what followed was
worse.
“Calvin, huh? Are you named after the kid with the tiger?” The second therapist was a middleaged man, probably in his late forties or early fifties. His brown hair had distinguished wings of
grey. He was just overweight enough that I didn’t find him physically attractive.
“No. I’m named after a DJ. Calvin Harris.” My parents met at a party. My father’s name is
Harrison. I guess ‘How Deep is Your Love’ was playing. That’s the whole story. It’s kind of a
weird thing to obsess over, but that’s my mother for you. It’s not even his real name.
“Really?” He laughed. I sat for a moment in stunned silence. Laughing at a kid about his name
doesn’t exactly seem like typical therapist behavior.
“Look. I know you probably don’t want to be here.” He smiled and shrugged. “I don’t like to take
cases like yours in general. Usually more of a problem with overprotective parenting than
anything wrong with the kid. Am I close?”
“Uh.” My mouth hung open in shock. I’d never met anyone who spoke so openly in my life. I was
a little in love with him at that moment.
“I am not really sure what you mean by ‘Uh’” He joked, and laughed again.
“Uh- I mean yeah.” I nodded dumbly, still a little overwhelmed. “My mother, she’s crazy. She is
always making me do stupid stuff.”
“What kind of stupid stuff?”
That first session I probably talked about my mother the whole time. And he would just
laugh and agree with me that it was ridiculous. It was so good to have an adult I could talk to
who actually seemed interested in the things I was saying.
It wasn’t until the second session that the topic of my power finally came up. “Mom used
to always tell people I was sick. She’d make me cough and everything. I think she always
wanted there to be something wrong with me so people would feel bad for her. And now that I
found out I’m Enhanced-”
“Ah, right.” He flipped open a stack of papers that I hadn’t seen until that moment. “A Mind right?
Pretty cool.”
“It’s alright.” I blushed. My initial admiration of him was developing into a full blown crush.
“So, can you tell me what I’m thinking?” He raised an eyebrow.
“No. I’m a Reject. And it only ever even happened that one time. My mother-” And then I went
back to complaining about my mother.
I saw the therapist a lot that summer. In truth, I think he was probably my first real friend.
Trisha was sitting in the common room when I walked in. She had been sitting in there a
lot lately. Often one of her signature cat videos would be playing but every so often I caught her
watching something serious. This was one of those times.
“Any updates?” I asked.
“Suspected terrorist at large. All of us are to remain in our homes, blah, blah. The same thing
over and over.”
“It doesn’t seem to make sense.” I plopped myself down on one of the furniture blobs. “Why
would the SRs want to set off every PBS alert in the country but not actually destroy anything?”
“You can’t spell terrorism without the ‘terror’” Trisha turned and smiled at me, then became
somewhat serious. “The better question is, how could anyone set off every PBS alert in the
country?”
“The government knows more than they’re letting on.” Peter walked in, settled near the wall
where the video was still streaming. “They say it’s terrorists. But it’s like Ganymede. No one
stepping forward to take credit. You can’t make people afraid of you if they don’t know who you
are.”
“So maybe it’s the SR, messing with us. I mean, we have been killing a lot of their guys in the
South China Sea.”
“That’s disputed territory. Not like we’ve been bombing the mainland or anything. And even so, if
they wanted to retaliate they’d retaliate. Not just scare us by setting off some alarms.”
“This conversation is going in circles!” Trisha folded her arms. “I don’t care if the government did
it, or terrorists did it, or the SRs! I just want to know how they did it.”
“Well, you keep telling us it’s impossible right?” I put on my best Trisha imitation. “You can’t
cause a significant port resonance without knowing the right combination of frequencies and
that information is encrypted and impenetrable and all that.”
“Maybe it was the Spectral Lady.” Peter joked. “She didn’t seem to have any trouble stealing
encrypted information before.”
Trisha’s eyes got wide and she was suddenly very pale. “No. No, that’s not possible.”
“It was just a joke.” Peter was instantly back to his usual irritable demeanor. He looked over at
the other wall and another video started playing. One of his war videos.
“Ugh. Could you not watch that please?”
“Why do you care?”
“You always want to fight about everything. Can’t you just-”
“Hey! Chill out you guys.” Now they were both glaring at me. “This situation totally sucks, but we
are going to have to deal with each other for the next few days, so we should try to be civil.”
“He started it.” Trisha stuck out her tongue.
“You try being civil with a small child!”
Since reason hadn’t worked I decided to go with distraction. “Ah, Peter, I saw you a
couple times turn on the wall screens without moving. How does that work?”
“Huh?” He was still scowling, but he turned in my direction. The distraction seemed to work. He
frowned, then shrugged. “It’s my power. I can control nanites.”
“Really?” Suddenly Trisha was interested. “It didn’t say anything about that in your profile.”
“That’s because they don’t know.” He smiled, but it was a dark, vaguely crazy smile.
“So you lied on your psy test?” She didn’t seem angry. Her head was tilted like a cat inspecting
an interesting bug.
“They didn’t ask. At the time I had never actually manifested.” He shrugged again. “They only
tested me because of my brother and it was positive. That’s all.”
“But it says you’re a Mover.” She was looking far away, like she was remembering something.
“So you must have told them something.”
“No.” He shook his head. “That was because of- an incident.”
“What happened.”
Peter looked away, then back up at Trisha. Seemed to come to a decision. “Well-”
He never completed that sentence, because at that moment there was a sudden
explosion.
“Calvin, can I ask you something?”
It was a few months after my initial therapy appointment. We’d gotten into a kind of
rhythm that I was used to, where I’d talk and he’d occasionally comment on what I said. The
sudden question kind of shocked me.
“Uh.” I hesitated. “Sure, I guess.”
“I’ve been seeing you for months and you always complain about your mother. Why do you
dislike her so much?”
“I mean-” I couldn’t even understand the question. After all the times I’d complained about her it
seemed like he should understand what was horrible about her by then. “She just annoys me, I
guess.”
“I think it is more than that.” He leaned forward in his chair, looking straight into my eyes.
“People don’t obsess about someone the way you do with her if that person just ‘annoys’ them.”
“Well, she-” The word annoying kept popping into my head. But what he said was true. The kids
at school annoyed me. Most adults annoyed me. Still the one I always complained about was
my mother.
He leaned back. “What are you thinking Calvin?” He laughed. “I’m not the one who’s a
Mind, remember?”
“She-” It hurt a little, once I started to think about it. There were little flashes. Yelling. Crying.
“What Calvin?” His voice was very gentle.
The world was spinning. I felt like I was losing my grip on something. Something I had to
hold onto. The feeling grew, became overwhelming and then I Heard:
“So close. I hope we’ve built enough trust to broach the subject. The file says he is very
sensitive about talking about it. Children from domestic abuse households often side with the
abuser. It gives them a sense of-”
“No!” I jumped off the couch, holding my ears. “Stop it! Don’t say that!”
“What Calvin?” His face was white. “What did I say? Did you- did you Hear me? Just now?”
“I-” The room felt uncomfortably tight. Like it was closing in. “I have to go. You can’t make me
stay!”
“That’s fine.” He held out his hands in a placating gesture. “You can leave at any time. I’m sorry
for whatever you… Heard, but I never meant-”
“I have to go.” I stalked out the door, slamming it behind me. Everything was a blur. Suddenly I
was outside.
I sat down heavily on the sidewalk. Everything narrowed to a pinprick. I focused on the
cracks in the sidewalk as if they were vitally important lines on a map that would lead me to
freedom.
Then it cracked like an egg. Emotion washed over me. My body started spasming.
I was still sitting there, crying, when my mother finally came to pick me up.
“-live from Arkham.”
“-report that a building has been-”
“-police and military are investigating the area-”
“-footage of the suspect. A young African-American male, seen here fleeing from the wreckage
of the abandoned Arkham Asylum after the incident. The current whereabouts-”
The three of us sat in the common room in stunned silence. Multiple vids were
streaming, all showing the same incontrovertible fact. The equivalent of a small port bomb had
been detonated in Arkham. Barely a half hour drive away.
And it wasn’t a port bomb. It was an Enhanced person.
“-failed to consider the magnitude of the danger. Enhanced-”
“-can’t control them! The government knew how dangerous they were and yet-”
“-this level of devastation, and we are supposed to believe that the government doesn’t know
anything. Their program of-”
On one side, I felt this bone deep terror. Knowing someone with this power existed. That
someone could unleash the kind of destruction we saw on Ganymede with only their mind. A
person who was standing a scant tens of miles away from where I was sitting. That there could
be more like him. Or even more powerful.
On the other side I felt a weight in my stomach. Thomas had been right. None of the
things that had happened to us before would compare to what was going to happen after this.
There were already vids calling for our blood, for a complete and utter massacre.
None of us said anything. Our eyes were glued to the wall screens.
“There is no sign of a chain yet, but it was several days until we saw anything at all on
Ganymede. We can’t-”
“-and he’s still out there. There have been reports of smaller explosions in the Arkham area.
Residents have been advised and an evacuation has begun. It is yet to be seen if-”
“-here in our reenactment of the initial incident. Mr. Fluffkins here represents our terrorist. Now,
when the other kitties approach-”
I heard footsteps and turned. Jacob was standing there. His face was expressionless.
He knew as well as we did what this would mean.
“-just in we’re-”
“-we’re getting reports-”
“-sources are reporting-”
“-another explosion in the center of the town-”
My heart beat out of my chest. The footage they were showing was impossible. It
couldn’t be real. If it was real we were all going to die.
“-with a scattering width a hundred times smaller than Ganymede and an initial range ten times
larger-”
“-described the explosion as ‘the world turning to a thousand grains of sand and blowing away’.
When Arkham-”
“-have witnessed the complete destruction of Ark-”
“-explosion of collosal magnitude in Ar-”
“-in A-”
“-that Danvers has barely escaped destruction-”
“-are saying the explosion nearly hit Danvers but-”
“-a near miss. Luckily Danvers-”
My head was spinning. I heard a strange kind of ringing. There was something in my
mind that didn’t make sense. Arkham? Like some gibberish word in a book or video game.
I opened my eyes and everyone was staring at me. Except Peter, who was still staring
intently at the vids.
“What happened?”
“You were freaking out.” Jacob pointed at one of the vids. “The town of Danvers nearly got
destroyed.”
“But-” I weakly protested. The ringing and the strange word were starting to fade.
“We got lucky.” Trisha shook her head. “They already wanted to kill us after he blew up an
abandoned building. What would they have done to us if he destroyed a town?”
“Right.”
I shivered. The room felt cold.
When I looked up I saw that Thomas was standing in the doorway. He was smiling.
My mother tried to get me to go back to therapy for a while after that. I made excuses at
first and then just started refusing. But soon her nagging got to me and I relented.
I remember watching the pocket screen as she dialed the therapist’s office. A young
man’s smiling face appeared and said, “Hello, how can I help you?”
“Hi. We’d like to schedule an appointment. Calvin was in before to see Dr. Hart and-”
“Oh.” The smile wilted. “I’m sorry. Dr. Hart no longer works here.”
“Really?” She looked over to me, then back at the screen. “May I ask what happened?”
“I can’t really give you that information. I can set you up with an appointment to see a different
therapist.”
My heart sank. He was gone. It was irrational, since I’d worked so hard to avoid him, but at that
moment all I could think was, “How could he leave me?”
Something must have shown in my face. I saw my mother’s mask waver. There was a
glimmer of wetness in her eye.
“No. Thanks very much.”
“Your welcome, ma’am. Have a nice day.” He smiled again and the screen went dark.
I never saw another therapist again.
5 “It's fascinating, you know, how an obsolete madness is sometimes adopted and stylized
in an attempt to ghoulishly preserve it. These are the days of second-hand fantasies and
antiquated hysteria.” -Thomas Ligotti
When I was a kid my mother used to take me to the mall sometimes, back when there
were still malls. By then they were already half abandoned, three quarters of the shops dark and
covered in boards. Sometimes you could walk the entire length and not see another person.
Like you were the last people on earth.
Mom would smile and point at the mannequins in the shop windows. I think she saw
something else when she looked at them. Maybe some previous life where the mall was
bustling and the shop windows were overflowing with items to buy. Not the sad, pathetic
mannequins that I saw, covered by one or two pieces at best. Or crumpled up into a pile of
misshapen body parts at worst.
In general I disliked these trips, but there was one thing I hated the most, and that was
the carousel. I think my mother thought it was great, that this mall had this big carousel. And she
really seemed to think I’d be excited about it, every time, even though my reaction was always
the same.
We’d be walking and I would start to hear it. A far away merry tinkling sound, distorted
by the empty corridors. Echoing. I’d try to pull away but she would just start pulling me.
“Don’t be a brat Calvin.” She’d say, or something like that.
Then it would appear in front of us. Ancient lightbulbs flickering. An army of cartoonish
horses marching around in a circle, with wide, terrifying grins on their faces. Spinning around
and around in sickening repetition.
My mother would march me over to it. She’d smile at whoever was standing guard,
usually an old man with milky white eyes. He’d smile back and look down at me, not quite
seeing me, his teeth half rotten and uneven.
When I was younger I’d usually start crying at this point. That would save me from the
worst of it. Mom would yell at me for being a brat and finally, when I refused to stop, she would
reluctantly turn and go.
But as I got older the embarrassment of crying in public, even in front of a single old
man, was too much. At that point it got much worse. Then I actually had to ride it.
The filthy, greasy feeling of the horses. The unbearable droning of the music. Forced
cheerfulness drilling into my skull. Being surrounded by those gruesome smiles as we spun and
spun.
It magnified the horror of the mall. Showing me the sad lonely figures of the mannequins
over and over. My mother’s hollow smile next to the corpse-like guard. A series of endless,
empty corridors.
Those carousel rides stuck with me. I still have nightmares where I’m trapped, spinning
endlessly in circles, forever.
But sometimes I wonder. What was it about the carousel that made my mother so
determined to take me? What story did she tell herself? And was that story worth all the
suffering that it caused?
I have always hated waiting. It’s like someone rushing in to tell you something important
and disappearing mid-sentence. If I can do something or know something immediately I’ll
choose that every time. I don’t even procrastinate.
In the week or so after the Danvers bombing I was a wreck. We knew something was
coming. People all over the internet were demanding that something be done about the
Enhanced threat. Like we were some kind of insect or disease.
There were reports about assaults on the Enhanced. Some people were badly injured.
Many vids argued that it would be safer for them and for us if the Enhanced were segregated
from the general population.
Nothing had changed, but everything changed. Trisha still had her room full of junk, but
a lot of the more questionable items vanished mysteriously. Peter stopped his usual habit of
watching war vids and just started watching nothing but reports about Danvers. Jacob and I still
had class together, but when we walked together in our enforced silence the other students just
stopped and stared.
All those eyes were the worst. It felt like the entire world was turning to look at us.
Whispering dark secrets to each other that I couldn’t hear but knew anyway.
I wanted to run. To fight. Something. Anything. Anything but endless waiting.
But there was nothing.
I tried to distract myself with sex. It didn’t help. Waiting was casting a dark cloud over
everything.
So for me, when I heard the insistent banging on the door, when someone shouted,
“Open up. This is the Skirbeck police.” all I felt was relief. Because no matter what happened to
me it was better than waiting.
They lead us out to a large van. It was solid black. One of those standard self-driving
police vans with no windows.
None of us resisted. Not even Peter. He looked almost bored.
Of all of us Jacob came closest. I saw the rage flicker on his face. But they had guns and
taser balls, and there were more of them than there were of us. He could do the math.
There were others in the van. Kids. None older than ten. One girl had her arms around a
little boy who was crying. Possibly siblings. The others were all alone, sitting in little huddled
balls.
The door closed, locking us into darkness. I closed my eyes and couldn’t tell the
different. There was a soft whimper.
Stasis cars are almost completely silent by design. The police van was like a tomb. The
momentum absorbers were also set extremely high so we could never tell if we were moving or
not. Just every so often we would stop and the door would open and another person would
come in. And then it was back to the eternal, silent darkness again.
No one spoke. We didn’t have anything to say. Any words would have sounded
ridiculous as soon as they came out of our mouths.
It’s maddening to lose your sense of time. In everyday life we don’t realize how
dependent we are on things like the angle of the sun or clocks to dictate the rhythm of our
thoughts. I felt adrift. Like I was floating out of myself.
Then there was the crying. The sound of human suffering, when you can’t do anything
about it, is almost irritating. Especially if you feel like crying, or screaming, and you can’t.
Because you’re an adult and you know that crying and screaming don’t help.
My legs became stiff from sitting. I was very thirsty. The need to use the bathroom was
also becoming more pressing every moment.
And then the door opened one final time. A terribly bright light blazed into the dark of the
van and I was blinded for a moment. I blinked, blinked again, and then saw it.
It was the old mall.
In the end there were probably about twenty people in our van. We filed out one by one
and the police herded us forward like sheep. At some point we’d picked up a few teenagers.
Some maybe about my age.
All the windows in the abandoned mall had been boarded up, and now they were
covered in black like the windows of the van. There were large, bright spotlights on the roof that
lazily scanned the ground around us. That was what had blinded me before.
Besides the police there were several robotic units. Quadrupedal giants that were taller
than me and about three times as broad. They stalked around the perimeter of the mall,
occasionally turning to look in our direction.
At the entrance of the mall there was an official looking woman in a suit standing next to
a series of racks filled with packages. As we passed she smiled and handed us each one.
Inside was a suit of grey pajamas and some shampoo.
“We hope you understand this is a temporary measure. Please cooperate so we can all do our
best to make both you and this city safe.” Her smile didn’t waver. “Inside you will remove your
clothes and hand them to the attendant. They will lead you to the showers where you must
scrub and wash your hair. After that you will be processed and given your identifying tag.”
My heart felt like it was trying to climb out of my throat. It was such a combination of
terrible things. Everyone around me was frozen in shocked silence, and the guards pushed us
with their guns to get us to go in the mall. But no one complained. The imminent threat of death
was there and it held our minds in its icy grip.
The water was lukewarm. I washed as quickly as I could, with my eyes closed. It was
bad enough to have to shower in a line of naked children. I didn’t want to have to feel like a
pedophile.
The grey pajamas were scratchy. Very cheap fabric. It had been a long time since I’d
worn anything that I hadn’t printed myself. I had forgotten how uncomfortable it was.
The processing room looked very familiar. It had the same apparatus as the testing
facility they took me to after I first manifested my ability. Next to the machine there were racks
covered in rings of various colors. As I watched a child entered the machine, it beeped, showed
a low psy score, and they were handed a light green band.
Jacob was already ahead of me, standing in line by the machine, and I saw him stiffen.
Still he said nothing. Just continued moving slowly forward as they processed the children
ahead of him.
I saw him go in. He closed his eyes, refusing to look at the attendant. The machine
whirred to life and then began frenetically beeping.
It was a ludicrous psy score. Extremely high. The attendant moved down the line of
collars to the end and extracted the last one. Black.
Jacob was visibly shaking when they put it on him. The guard had to push him forward
again. Still he just stood there in the corridor on the other side of the machine. Staring off into
nothing.
He looked right through me, not seeing me. Not seeing anything. At that moment I
wanted to talk to him so badly. For him to forgive me so I could try and wipe away the hurt and
fear on his face. The separation between us felt like a real physical wall.
Someone pushed me forward. I was hooked up but I barely noticed. My mind was on
him, thinking only of him.
There was a shrill shrieking sound. The attendant near the machine gasped. I looked
over and saw the output on the screen for a moment before it refreshed. A dramatic rising spike
in psy score that rose to almost ten times what I had seen for Jacob’s.
“Sorry.” The attendant waved their hand apologetically. “Sorry you guys. Just a malfunction. It
happens occasionally.” They pushed some buttons and the screen refreshed.
My eyes were fixed on the screen, heart in my throat again. But after a second the same
reassuring line appeared. My terribly low psy score.
The attendant reached over and took a light green band. It snapped snugly around my
neck. Probably contained some kind of nano.
Jacob was looking at me. He must have started when they were testing me. But when
he saw me stand he immediately turned and walked away. After a moment of staring at his
retreating back I sighed and walked silently after him.
The corridor was long. Probably originally one of the wings of the mall. All the shops
were boarded up. Not even a single abandoned mannequin.
My memories kept trying to intrude. I could almost feel my mother walking beside me.
Could almost see her empty smile.
There was a repetitive noise ahead of us. A robotic voice like a chiming bell. I was so
lost in my thoughts I didn’t realize what it was actually saying until too late.
“41, Walker.” I heard a buzz from Jacob’s collar. “And 42, Harrison.” Then felt my own collar
buzz. “Your bunk is in Area C. Please follow the yellow line-”
“Shit.” I could already see Jacob’s rage building.
“Why are you following me!” Jacob wheeled around and I didn’t hear the rest of the
announcement. “You knew this would happen! I told you to leave me alone!”
“I wasn’t following you! I didn’t know-”
“Don’t talk to me. Don’t think this changes anything!” Then he stalked off.
I froze. My knees felt weak and I started shaking. There was this vast emptiness in the
pit of my stomach that was radiating outward. Dizzy, I leaned against the wall for support.
The corridor stretched out in front of me. I could almost see the end. Little flickering
lights.
I forced myself to take a step forward. And another. The sick feeling in my stomach got
stronger and stronger as the lights got closer.
“No, no, no.” I heard, then realized I had been speaking out loud.
I felt like I was sleeping. Everything was far away and covered in a thick haze. The
tunnel was closing in on me. But the only way out was toward the blinding lights.
The sound of my own footsteps was almost deafening. My heart felt like it would beat out
of my chest. I was gasping. It felt as if the air had turned to soup.
The lights got brighter, and brighter, and brighter. I realized that I had been looking at my
feet for a while. Forced myself to look up.
They had gutted the carousel. Where it had been there was a large empty pit. It was
covered in graffiti that was still visible despite the tape that had been placed around its edges.
A rainbow of colors extended outward into the other corridors. I looked down and
realized that there was tape leading out of my corridor too. A long black string of tape, almost
invisible in the darkness, disappearing into the giant dark maw of the pit.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. Visions of milky white eyes filled my head and I almost
screamed.
“Calvin!” Green eyes flashed, followed by a familiar mischievous smile. “There you are. You ran
off so quickly.”
“Trisha.” I almost hugged her, I was so relieved. But luckily some vestige of sanity remained
though, and I simply said, “I was trying to get away from all those annoying crying children.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Well, I think you’ll probably find more of them here anyway.”
She tugged at her collar, which was light green like mine. “I guess I’m in the yellow area. And
you?”
“Also yellow.” I almost mentioned Jacob but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.
“Well, ‘it’s not safe to go alone’ and all that.” She wrapped her arm around me. “So take this. We
can follow the yellow brick road together scarecrow.”
“It is very mean of you to make fun of my skeletal thinness like that.” I complained, but I was
smiling. She smiled back and we went on together.
“-remain in your bunks. If you leave your bunks at any unauthorized time your collar will beep,
flash, and contact the central control. For everyone’s safety it is important that you stay in your
area.”
There was a pause, then the voice began again. “Please remain in your bunks. If-”
The bunks had been set up inside an old shop at the end of the corridor. Our yellow
brick road ended at the doorway and was replaced by a bright yellow tarp that had been spread
across the room. Old fashioned metal bunk beds were set up against the wall, with mattresses
of some unidentifiable material. It was black and had a vaguely oily appearance.
In the center of the room there was an old ComplEat. It was obvious that it was one of
the older models because it had been programmed to speak. Nothing very complicated, just
asking for requests and responding in a subservient manner. Everyone had universally found
the talking ComplEat’s creepy and all subsequent versions were silent.
This one was currently in use by a small child, maybe seven or eight years old. It looked
like they were trying to get a drink out of the machine, something that was notoriously difficult
with the old version. Something about the programming meant that any drink request tended to
result in the same unpalatable brown sludge.
The previously mentioned sludge was being dispensed by the machine as Trisha and I
walked into the room. As it finished the machine beeped and replied in it’s tinny overly cheerful
voice.
“Share and Enjoy.”
Unfortunately what little joy the child might have had before attempting to use the
ancient ComplEat was certainly gone after they saw the contents of the cup. They started crying
immediately.
“Here.” Trisha wandered over to the child and took the cup. “You can get water out of the
machine too. You just have to push these buttons.”
On closer inspection the child turned out to be a little girl. She looked small and fragile
but her collar was light red. I felt a spike of fear thinking about what she might be capable of,
and then immediately felt bad about it. If I was afraid of this little girl with her light red collar,
somehow it made it seem like what they were doing was right. Protecting us from dangerous
little girls.
I looked around the room at all the tear stained faces with their multi-colored collars. A
warm feeling of anger rose up in me. It pushed the fear back, like a fire beating back the
darkness.
“Calvin, do you want some water?” Trisha was holding up a cup, and I took it.
“Thanks.”
“You looked a little pale.” She was tilting her head in the usual way. Somehow the fact that
Trisha was still so much herself despite everything was comforting.
“I’m fine.” I sipped the water. It was flat tasting, but cold. Not objectionable. Significantly better
than brown sludge.
“What’s your name?” Trisha was kneeling down next to the girl.
“Phoebe.” The girl looked down at her water. Shy.
“Hi Phoebe. I’m Trisha. I’m an Eye.” Trisha made circles with her hands and put them over her
eyes like glasses. “I see things but only if they are very close.”
Phoebe laughed. “Everybody sees things that are close.”
“Well, I see things better than most people.” Trisha extended her hands out and then back in
again, wiggling her eyebrows. Phoebe laughed again. “What about you Phoebe. What do you
do?”
“Oh. I-” Phoebe blushed. “I can fly- a little.”
“That is so cool!” Trisha jumped up and Phoebe smiled. “That is way better than what I do. Can
you show me?”
“Umm. Sure.” Phoebe scrunched up her forehead. “But don’t laugh okay?”
“I promise.” Trisha crossed herself and held up her fingers with the thumb and pinky crossed.
Phoebe extended her arms to the side and closed her eyes. She started spinning slowly,
then faster. I was so mesmerized by watching her spin I almost didn’t notice when her feet came
off the ground.
Trisha was clapping. Phoebe smiled, eyes closed, still spinning. I just stood there,
watching her. Suddenly I almost felt like crying. Just an overwhelming surge of emotion.
Only a moment before I had been afraid of her. But her power wasn’t terrible. It was
beautiful.
Not everyone in Yellow was a kid. A group of teenagers had gathered against one of the
walls. They were talking loudly and making aggressive gestures.
I walked past them on the way to my bunk. The numbers were screwed into the beds on
large metal plaques. As I inspected the uninviting mattress I overheard their conversation.
“It’s not fair. None of us did anything wrong. We aren’t dangerous.”
“What are they worried that we’ll do?” One of the teenagers pointed at their light green collar.
“Most of us are Rejects. Everyone knows all the really powerful Elites end up working for the
government.”
“They told us it was safe. That they knew what they were doing with the Elites.” He shook his
head angrily. “And now, when one of those overpowered jerks goes crazy, who gets hurt? Us
innocent Rejects.”
At that moment Trisha and Phoebe walked by. Phoebe was smiling and holding Trisha’s
hand.
“What are you smiling at, red collar.” One of the teenagers walked up to them. “Don’t think that
you’re going to get whatever you want because you’re stronger than us.”
Phoebe’s smile vanished. Her eyes sparkled with tears. Trisha pushed in front of her,
giving Phoebe the chance to quickly run away. She glared at the teenager, daring him to try
something.
“Leave her alone. She’s just a kid.”
“Nobody with powers is ‘just’ anything.” He gestured around. “They put us in here because of
kids like her. They get so much power so young and it turns them bad.”
“I said, leave her alone.” Trisha stepped forward so her face was just below the teenager’s. She
was really short, so the effect was not entirely frightening.
“Who’s going to make me? You?” He pushed her and she stumbled backwards. “I’m not afraid
of you Tiny. We’re both Rejects and I’m pretty sure I could take you in a fight.”
Trisha’s eyes narrowed. Her body was tense like she was about to jump. But then a
larger body appeared in front of her, blocking the light and covering her in shadow.
“You hate Elites?” Jacob fingered his collar. “Then pick on someone who’s actually an Elite. And
not a third your size.”
The rest of the gang of teenagers jumped up from their spot on the wall. Their eyes were
fixed on Jacob. Probably they outnumbered him more than five to one.
“They should just kill all of you Elites.” The first teenager said, stepping close to Jacob. This time
he was the one who had to look up. “Nobody can control you and you can’t control yourselves.
You just endanger everyone.”
It happened so fast I didn’t see it. The kid was just suddenly lying on the ground, nose
bleeding. Jacob had gone slightly gold, and the air hissed around him. The temperature spiked
and started rising worryingly fast.
“Jacob, don’t!” I said without thinking.
He looked at me and the gold dissipated. Seeing an opening, one of the goons jumped
on him. Jacob was knocked over and the kid was punching him over and over. The other
teenagers started cheering.
“You. Don’t. Deserve. To. Live.” He punctuated every word with a punch.
Jacob was disconcertingly motionless. Blood poured from his nose.
“Stop it. Stop! You’ll kill him.” I yelled, but the kid ignored me and continued.
Trisha suddenly slammed into him. They went flying a few feet and she wrestled him into
some kind of prone position. He struggled but she managed to hold him.
“Hey! Let him go!” One of the other kids moved in her direction. Then suddenly he stopped,
clawing at his throat.
“What is this?” It was Peter. His collar was dark red. He looked down at Trisha and Jacob’s
prone bodies with disgust. “Are we animals now? Fighting in the dirt.”
The teenager was turning purple. His eyes bulged. Peter walked up to him and touched
his collar.
“They collared us like animals, but that is not an excuse to behave like animals.” Suddenly the
teenager started gasping and color returned to his face. “Now, tell me what happened?”
“You-” He gasped again. “You’re dangerous.”
“Everything is dangerous. Life is dangerous.” He pointed down at the teenager. “You have seen
what happens when society decides to label people as dangerous and then do what they want
with them. But apparently you still didn’t learn anything.”
“But-” The teenager shook his head, then glared at Peter obstinately. “If it wasn’t for you
dangerous ones then we wouldn’t be here.”
“No. Your logic is wrong. They caged us all.” Peter fingered his collar. “We have this in common.
Focusing on our differences can only make us weak. To fight this we have to band together and
be strong.”
“He’s right.” One of the others interrupted. “We’re not enemies. The people who put us here are
our enemies.”
“Yes.” Peter stepped backwards, pointing at Jacob’s body. “This is what they want. They want
us to destroy each other. To prove to them that we don’t deserve to be treated like human
beings. But we won’t give them what they want, will we?”
“No!” A few of the teenagers agreed this time.
“Who do you think you are?” Trisha had apparently released the teenager she had pinned, and
now he walked up to Peter, snarling. “Acting like you know everything. Trying to control us. You
think because you have a red collar you are king of this place?”
“No. These collars, they chose those for us. I refuse to be defined by their hatred.” He held out
his hands, indicating the room around them. “We are all the same. Prisoners in Yellow. There is
no king.”
“Yeah.” There was a general chorus of agreement now.
Peter smiled and looked back at the angry boy. “I have some ideas. Those of you who
want to do something useful, follow me.” Then he turned and stalked off.
Four of the boys followed immediately. The last looked down at Jacob, then at Peter.
Then, after a moment, he reluctantly followed.
Trisha stood and quickly checked Jacob’s pulse. Seemingly satisfied, she walked over to
me.
“He’s okay. Just unconscious.”
“I wasn’t prepared for this.” I looked at a point just over Trisha’s shoulder, not able to look at her
eyes. “I couldn’t do anything. I don’t know what would have happened if Peter hadn’t shown up.”
“Don’t be too thankful.” Trisha shook her head and looked in the direction where the teenagers
had gone. “Whatever he says, Peter doesn’t consider himself equal to anybody. He wants to
rule. There will be a King in Yellow, you just wait and see.”
6 “As a fact, we cannot give suffering precedence in either our individual or collective
lives. We have to get on with things, and those who give precedence to suffering will
be left behind. They fetter us with their sniveling. We have someplace to go and must
believe we can get there, wherever that may be. And to conceive that there is a
'brotherhood of suffering between everything alive' would disable us from getting
anywhere.” - Thomas Ligotti
I would never have called myself a goal oriented person. My major was English and I
had no intention of becoming a lawyer, unlike Jacob, so that should be pretty obvious. But I
always had a nebulous idea about my future. Maybe travelling. Maybe writing a book. Maybe
just sleeping with men until I got too old to be physically able.
There is a difference between having no set idea about your future and having no actual
idea what the future might be. A place like the Yellow bunks teaches you that. Technically any
of us could die at any time. But you don’t think about it until the possibility of death is staring you
in the face.
There were no guards or attendants in the mall. However, if we tried to go outside of our
area the collars would start beeping and then, if you ignored it, would deliver a painful shock.
Basically like those invisible fences they use for dogs. And any time anyone attempted this we’d
hear an announcement.
“Do not leave your area. This is for your own safety.”
It was an outrageous lie. The fact that Jacob was almost beaten to death on our first day
showed just how little thought had been given to our safety.
We had old LED lights but no nano glow and no windows. There were no wall screens,
or 3D printers or serving robots of any kind. I guess they didn’t trust us. If they hadn’t needed to
feed us they probably wouldn’t even have given us the ComplEat, but it was ancient and
harmless enough.
We had all been forced out of our homes without any of our belongings. Assured that our
captivity would be temporary. Our pocket screens and any other possible entertainment were
taken upon entering the mall.
Initially my mind had basically shut down. I felt like a passive observer of everything that
was going on. Then after the incident with Jacob I became hyper aware. Even the slightest
noise would wake me from a sound sleep.
If we turned the lights off at night, it would become so dark. The kind of darkness that
makes it impossible to see your hand in front of your face. So there were always a few bulbs
burning. They cast long shadows over everything.
When you don’t know what will happen, everything seems like a threat. Every shadow
could be hiding a monster. Every sound could be your last warning.
And sometimes it is.
Trisha and I took turns watching Jacob after the first day. Neither of us knew enough
about medicine to diagnose if he had a concussion or any other problems. We checked that he
was breathing and pretty much hoped for the best.
On my shift I was sitting there in the dark, sort of staring off into space, listening to the
background noise of snores and children crying, when Jacob suddenly sat up.
“You shouldn’t-” I reached out, then hastily withdrew my hands. “He hit you pretty hard. Try to-”
“Don’t.” He shook his head a little, then closed his eyes in pain.
“Sorry.” I leaned back against the wall and looked away.
“Why are you here?” For the first time in a while he didn’t sound angry. The tone of his voice
was sort of sad. It put me off balance.
“Trisha was tired and we were both worried-”
“I mean, why bother with me?” Jacob’s voice cracked. “That kid was right to punch me. I could
have killed us all. When it happens I’m not myself I-”
He covered his eyes with his hands. I wanted to reach out to him but I held back.
Watched in silence for a moment while he sat there shaking.
“I know you don’t-” I hesitated. “I know I’m not someone whose opinion you value, but I think
that what you did was brave. I couldn’t even move, it was all so overwhelming. You made it look
easy. And what happened, it wasn’t your fault. That kid-”
“Not my fault.” He wiped his eyes. “How is it not my fault? I’m like a loaded gun. Or worse, much
worse. Like a bomb with a short fuse. What was I even thinking?” He laughed. “You think it’s
brave, but I just think that I should have known better. My father always said-”
“Spare me the quotes from your father.” I looked away. Usually words came easily for me.
Jacob made me feel like my tongue was tied in knots. I had so many things I wanted to say and
all of them seemed inadequate.
“You should have let him kill me. I have no future anyway. We have no future. This place-”
“So that’s it then? After all your speeches about your father? You want to give up as soon as
anything in life is even a little difficult?” I vibrated with anger. “Life gave you everything. Wealth,
privilege, physical beauty, intellect. You don’t know what it’s like to be a real human being.
Being denied things. Failing. Having people hate you. Everything isn’t always easy Jacob. For
most of us things are almost never easy.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. Just looked down at his hands.
“Do you really think that?”
“What?”
“Do you really think that my life has been that easy for me?” He looked up at me, and now he
looked angry. “You think it is easy always having to be perfect at everything? I never had any
excuses for failure. My parents worked so hard to give me whatever I needed. They always did
everything right. I could never blame them for anything. So anytime I failed I knew, I always
knew, that it was my fault. Having everything is a prison that you can never escape Calvin.”
“Excuse me if I don’t pity you for being able to get whatever you want by snapping your fingers.”
I pointed angrily at him. “You blame everyone else but yourself for your problems Jacob. No one
is making you do anything.”
“Maybe that’s true.” He leaned back, resting his head against the flat, hard pillow. “I think I owe
you an apology.”
“What?” I felt shock like prickles of ice. It was like pushing against a brick wall, expecting
nothing, and suddenly breaking through.
“Ever since I-” He grimaced. “Since the fire, I wanted so badly to forget everything and have
everything go back to the way it was. You tried to tell me that wasn’t possible and I hated you
for it. But you were right. Everything is different now and I can’t ignore it. I am just too
dangerous for that.”
“Jacob-” The words died. I wanted to deny what he had said, but it was true. It felt wrong to lie to
him when he was thanking me for telling him the truth.
I remembered what Patricia had said about the port jump. ‘You’re made of matter,
therefore you’re very dangerous.’
“Everyone has the potential to be dangerous.” I paused, trying to choose my words carefully. “I
think the intention has to matter. It matters that you don’t want to hurt people. You want to help
them. If that doesn’t matter, if everyone is responsible for all the bad things that happen
because of them despite their intentions, then we are all damned.”
Jacob sat up again. “Most people can’t kill a room full of people in a few seconds with
their mind.”
“But they can kill them with guns, or nanites, or bombs.” I shook my head. “No. You are not
inherently worse than anyone just because you can do these things. Sometimes bad things will
happen no matter how hard you try, but it’s not your fault just because you exist. Maybe in some
ways existing always means destroying something else.”
“What about Ganymede? Or Danvers?” His eyes were wide, teeth clenched. “Are you saying
that we shouldn’t do anything about that just because existing means destruction or
something?”
“I don’t know. Do you really think this-” I gestured around the room. “Was justified because of
what happened in Danvers? Maybe trying to prevent destruction just leads to more destruction.”
“Would you be saying that to me right now if I’d killed that kid? Or Trisha? You don’t really think I
could have, but you don’t understand. It isn’t me Calvin.” He clutched his head. “This thing isn’t
me.”
“It is you. You’re just trying to run away from yourself. I’ve been trying to make you understand
that.” I reached out tentatively, putting my hand on his arm. He didn’t pull away. “It isn’t random.
I proved that. There are definite triggers. And if it can be triggered then it can be controlled. But
in order to do that you have to stop denying that it’s a part of you.”
“I can’t.” His hand slipped down to touch his collar. “I want to be angry that they put us here.
That they collared us and treated us like things. But I can’t, because I don’t blame them. I
deserve to be here. Everyone is safer if I’m here.”
“Can’t you at least try?” I jerked away from him, eyes fixed on the floor. “Maybe I don’t want to
see you throw your life away. You could do so much more. You’re not a pathetic loser like me
who-”
“What do you want from me Calvin?” He tried to sit up further and then was overcome with
dizziness.
“Don’t move so fast. You’re still-”
“Don’t. Stop.” He waved me away. “Stop trying to help me instead of answering the question.
You are always so happy to offer me advice, acting like you just want what’s best for me. What
do you get out of this?”
“Screw you.” I hissed. “Do you really think it’s a crime to want to be someone’s friend?”
“I think no one does anything for nothing. So what is it that you want from me? I thought it was
sex or maybe even love but it’s not is it?” His face was grotesquely contorted with anger. “You
just want someone that you can pity, that you can feel better than. You-”
“I don’t pity you Jacob.” My eyes stung and my stomach ached. “I honestly admire you. I think
you have the potential to do truly great things. And I guess I just kind of wanted to be a part of
that.”
He looked up at me and the intensity was back in his eyes. I felt a little dizzy. There was
something almost physical in the air between us and I Saw:
“I don’t need you any more Calvin.”
We were standing in the middle of a giant smoking crater. Jacob was fully gold, but he
was talking to me somehow. Around him the air smoked but I stood a few feet away and didn’t
feel a thing.
“You can’t do this without me. It’s too dangerous. Let me-”
“What are you going to do?” He reached out his hand and the earth moved. I barely kept myself
from falling. “I was always the one with the power.”
“Let me help. I just want to help.” I begged.
“You always say that.” The earth surged violently, trapping me. I struggled but couldn’t escape.
“Goodbye Calvin.”
“No. NO! You can’t. You-”
“Can’t!” The world rushed in around me violently. I felt like I might vomit.
“Calvin?” Jacob asked tentatively. “Are you alright?”
“I don’t know what just happened.” I fell heavily on the bed. “It’s impossible.”
“What? Why?”
“I think-” I took a deep breath and then shakily let it out. “I think I might have seen the future.”
There was no one over the age of eighteen in the Yellow bunks. The vast majority were
under ten. At first they spent most of their time crying alone, but soon they became lonely. For
that reason Trisha attracted a crowd of children that would follow her like she was the Pied
Piper of Hamlin.
Phoebe was one of them of course, and one of the only ones with a red collar. Green
collars dominated the general population, and Jacob was the only one of us with a black collar.
The children seemed frightened of him at first, but at Trisha’s urging they became braver and
would come sit by his bed and talk to us. I think in the end that helped him a lot more than
anything I ever said or did.
Peter, of course, developed his own following. All the kids he had converted on the first
day and also most of the kids over ten who wanted to feel like they were adults. Then we
discovered a new use of his power that made him even more popular. He could use the nano in
our collars to get radio broadcasts from the outside.
Skirbeck was still locked down after what happened in Danvers. Military men were
everywhere. It was the largest nearby city, and therefore a potentially attractive target for
terrorism. Everyone was on edge, expecting the worst.
And of course they had rounded us all up and put us safely out of the way while they
searched for the terrorist. There were a lot of news reports about Enhanced kids who tried to
run, or worse, to fight. None of them succeeded. At best they injured themselves and others.
And instead of coming to the mall temporarily they went away to wherever the government took
all the Elites.
They talked a lot about what should be done with us. The parents of Enhanced kids
were protesting. They wanted us all released immediately.
But of course the general public didn’t support that. Many people were still making the
argument that it was safer for us and them. Politicians made noises about liberty and justice but
no one had any real plan. It would have been political suicide to support us too strongly when an
Enhanced terrorist might strike at any moment.
Worse, people were suggesting that more facilities be opened. A decent number of
people thought we should all be caged permanently. Usually whenever we found a broadcast
like that we’d switch away quickly. It was too terrifying.
Still it was on everyone’s minds. The possibility that we might never leave the mall. We
were all scared and alone and completely without distractions.
And then we’d turn from our dark thoughts and Peter would be there, with a speech
about how we had to stick together. Peter spoke as if he knew there would be a future and that
made people want to listen to him. He acted like he had a plan so people followed him.
It’s amazing what people will do to believe they are moving towards something.
I saw Trisha with all the younger kids one day and I walked over to sit with her. They
were running around in circles, the way kids do. The game seemed kind of strange to me
though, so I asked her about it.
“It’s sort of like tag.” She explained. “But the Movers have an advantage in tag right? They can
fly or push the others wherever they want them. And a lot more of the kids can See or Hear and
they think it’s unfair. So they made up this game they call ‘piggy’. They make the person who is
‘it’ close their eyes. Then that person is the ‘piggy’ and if they get close to you then you have to
squeal.”
One of the children let out a high pitch shriek as if to emphasize this point.
“Like regular tag if the ‘piggy’ touches you then you become the ‘piggy’. However the original
person is still also a ‘piggy’. So it is contagious. Basically the game goes on until everyone is a
‘piggy’ and then it ends.”
“It sounds like the Mover kids are at a disadvantage then right? Since the other kids can still
‘See’ even with their eyes closed?”
“Well, that’s why they squeal. So no matter who the ‘piggy’ is they still have a way of knowing if
they are close. Anyway, since it is contagious, all the ‘piggies’ help each other out. So it doesn’t
matter too much who starts out as ‘piggy’. Anyway they seem to enjoy it.”
It was pretty easy to tell which of the kids could still See and which couldn’t. I watched a
little girl stumble forward awkwardly until she heard the telltale squealing and then the air
around her shimmered. The squealer froze and she easily tagged them, grinning. Then the new
‘piggy’ started running around with abandon and it was obvious they could See perfectly well
with their eyes closed.
“I guess it works.” I conceded. “How long have they been playing?”
“I don’t know. An hour or so. They usually play for a few hours until they get tired and then have
a nap. Not much else to do.” She shrugged. “I take a lot of naps myself.”
“So you haven’t been recruited for Peter’s ‘training’ yet?” I pitched my voice low in case he or
one of his minions was listening.
“I think I am too pathetic even for his band of Rejects. Why?” She raised an eyebrow. “Did he
recruit you?”
“I went.” I nodded my head in the direction of the corridors. “To see what it was like.”
As I explained, the Enhanced made up a tiny fraction of the world population. Because
of the terrorist all the Enhanced in the Skirbeck were rounded up, and in the Yellow bunks we
probably had twenty or thirty. Since we weren’t allowed in the other bunks I don’t know how
many they had, but if we assume that all the colors were about equally represented there would
have been a hundred or so of us altogether in the mall. And that is from a city of about a million
people.
Before I came to college I had never actually met another Enhanced person. There was
no one around encouraging me to use my power. Actually the opposite. As much as I could I
avoided using or talking about my power. We all did. It was easier to try to be normal as much
as possible.
Peter told us that trying to be normal was making us weak. He held meetings every day
and had everyone using their powers. He wanted us to not only be using them as much as
possible but to try to improve every day.
To say I was unenthusiastic about this would be an understatement. My ‘vision’ during
my talk with Jacob had shaken me badly. I didn’t know if the frightening future I had seen was
real or not, and I had no desire to learn by having any more. But Peter did not know about the
possible evolution of my powers and I did not tell him. So I tried to have a little fun in his group
and ignore the ostensible purpose.
They met in the corridor near the old abandoned carousel. He made everyone stand in a
circle with one person in the middle. That person could use any of the others in any way, as
long as they asked. For the Movers that might mean pushing them around. For Minds obviously
it meant we got to choose who we would read. That sort of thing.
For the most part it was always the same. Someone would get up, stand in the middle
for ten or twenty minutes, nothing would happen, and they would step back. We would all clap
and Peter would give a nice speech about how important everyone’s effort was and we’d move
onto the next person.
Standing there waiting, expecting nothing, was torture for me. I wanted something to
happen, to justify all the time I was wasting. Every time someone got up to stand in the center,
unmoving, I would stare at them accusingly. Growing steadily more annoyed.
Then he walked into the circle. The kid who had almost beaten Jacob to death. I saw
him and I was filled with this sick acid rage. My hands clenched and unclenched, but I didn’t
move. Just stared at him as he looked tentatively around the circle.
“What do you do?” Peter asked, as he asked everyone.
“Ah.” The kid blushed. “Sometimes the air around me just starts to crackle. Like wadding up a
piece of nano foil.”
“Well, try and see if you can do it now.” Peter said encouragingly.
For a moment nothing happened. It seemed like I would at least get the satisfaction of
getting to see the kid completely fail to do anything. But then it started. A low crackling like the
sound of a campfire.
“Good. That’s interesting.” Peter walked up to the kid and started waving his hands around.
“Seems basically like static electricity, but I don’t feel a shock.”
“Yeah. It doesn’t do anything. Just crackles.” The noise was getting gradually louder.
“Well, we are here to learn.” He smiled and stepped back. “Just try and see what you can do.”
The kid had a kind of smug satisfied smile on his face. I was overwhelmed with the
injustice of the situation. After what he did to Jacob this kid still got to stand in front of everyone
and feel proud of his stupid pointless power. The acid was burning through me, turning my
thoughts to little red pinpricks. I had never been so angry.
Suddenly the crackling stopped. The kid looked up and he opened his mouth once or
twice, like a fish trapped on the shore. I felt my anger drain out of me instantly and turn to fear
as his eyes turned a vibrant blue. There was a sudden intense pressure and then a pulse of
blue light burst out of him.
We were all pushed back. I saw him fall to the ground, holding his head as sparks
flickered all over his body. He was crying something over and over but I couldn’t hear it over the
now intense crackling.
Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. The kid was still huddled in a ball on
the ground, shaking. No one moved for a moment, but then Peter was moving quickly to his
side.
“Hey. Hey. It’s ok. You’re ok.”
“I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t.” He looked up at Peter like he was the only one in the world who
could save him.
“It’s fine. That’s why we do these things. Aren’t you glad it happened here, with all of us looking
out for you, and not out there, with them?”
Still shaking, the kid nodded. Peter clapped him on the back and then turned to the rest
of us.
“There is nothing to fear here. We are not like them. Come on now, and show him your support.”
A few people starting clapping. Then, feeling socially pressured, the rest of us joined.
Soon the kid was laughing and smiling.
Peter was smiling too. I wanted very badly to know what he was thinking. Felt my mind
reach out for his. There was a flicker of an image and sound and thenA sensation. Like when your leg goes numb. But not a physical sensation. Like pins and
needles inside of me. In my mind.
Thoughts going in circles. Turning one way to be pushed another way. As if they are
being hunted.
Long tendrils reach out for me. Caress and grab. Trying to get in.
There are thoughts attacking my thoughts. And worse, they are hungry. It is a trap for my
mind and I have to escape.
Escape, escape, escapeI snapped awake. Peter was looking straight at me. He must have known I had seen
something.
Someone else stepped forward to stand in the center of the circle. The clapping was like
thunder. My head was spinning.
And that’s when I left.
I finished telling Trisha about my experience with the training group. She didn’t say
anything at first, just sat there looking intently at me for a while.
“Was it a vision?” She finally asked. Trisha was the only one I had told about what happened
with Jacob.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t like anything I ever Saw before.” Just thinking about it made it feel like I
was back there again. Like those horrible tendrils of thought were trying to embed themselves in
my skull. “It felt- evil.”
Just then one of the little kids ran up to us. Trisha’s face quickly changed from pensive to
smiling, then wary when she saw their face.
“Jimmy, what’s wrong?”
“Miss Sha, don’t be mad okay?” He looked down and back up. “We were all just playing.”
“What happened?” Trisha was suddenly on her feet.
“Phoebe is gone and we don’t know where she went.” A tear dripped down his face. “We were
all being piggies and she sneaked off and even Kevin said he can’t See her.”
“Kevin is a pretty strong Eye.” Trisha was pale. She flicked her eyes in my direction, explaining.
“If she were in the building he should be able to find her.”
She kneeled down in front of Jimmy. “Why are you telling me this? Where’s Kevin now?”
“He ran off looking for her Miss Sha. I knew you would be mad but-” Jimmy dissolved in little
broken sobs.
“No. It’s okay.” Trisha pulled him into a hug and rubbed his shoulder gently. “It’s okay. We’ll find
them.”
“I’ll go.” The words were there, but I barely realized that I said them until Trisha looked at me.
“Calvin you don’t have to-”
“No. You should stay here with the kids.” There was a kind of uncommon warmth that filled me,
watching Trisha with Jimmy. Something in me didn’t want to spoil it. I shrugged and smiled. “It’s
probably nothing. They couldn’t have gotten far. The collars would have stopped them.”
“Okay. Just be careful.” She flicked her eyes to the corridor. In the direction of Peter and his
followers.
I nodded and turned quickly away. Felt the lingering warmth fade as I stared into the
darkness ahead.
As I passed the ancient ComplEat it gurgled and the tinny voice piped up randomly. It had
deteriorated significantly from multiple uses. What had already been creepy was now almost
grotesque.
“Sha--grth-an- grr-y”
I stared at it for a moment. Brown sludge was puddling on the ground. Nothing else.
Then I shivered and continued on.
The air felt charged as I entered the corridor. My skin prickled all over as the hairs stood
on end. I heard the soft echo of clapping for a moment and then silence.
Between the Yellow bunks and the carousel pit there was nothing but a row of boarded
up shops. I walked up to the first one and pulled on a few boards. Once I was satisfied that they
were all firmly in place I walked on to the next.
The old LED lights flickered above me. It made my shadow twist and dance like smoke.
There was no sound but my footsteps and the creak of the boards as I tested shop after shop.
Sometimes the boards did not completely cover the old shop windows. Then I could see
vague shapes inside. Menacing humanoid lumps that were almost undoubtedly the last
remnants of the old mannequins.
As I continued down the rows my hands started to sweat. It got a little harder to make
myself lean in and pull on the boards. I closed my eyes to try to to avoid looking into the
darkness.
Skreeeee. Crack!
I looked down at my hands in horror. One of the boards had moved, exposing a fairly
large gap. A gap large enough for a child to crawl through.
My thoughts raced. I took one deep breath, then another. Telling myself it was foolish to
be scared. Unable to make my body move forward into that dark hole.
“Phoebe?” I shouted into the hole. “Kevin? Are you in there?”
Silence. I sat by the hole, listening, feeling small cool breezes leak out. Rubbing my
arms to ward off the chill.
Crash! Clang. Ting, ting, ting ting.
My heart was in my throat. The sound was unmistakable. Something had definitely
moved in the room.
“Phoebe?” I tried again. Still no response.
“One. Two.” I counted under my breath. Steeling myself. Focusing on the numbers. “Three.”
I knelt down and crawled through the opening. The air was stale from disuse. It was very
musty and I had to breathe shallowly to keep from coughing.
At first I couldn’t make out very much. Even compared to the dim LED lighting in the
corridor it was very dark. Then slowly vague shapes started to appear.
“Hello?” I croaked, pushing myself slowly forward, feeling around for obstacles. “Phoebe?
Kevin? It’s me, Calvin.”
There was a scraping sound. Like something was being dragged across the floor. Then
silence again.
“Are you hurt?” My voice was strained from struggling to breathe. “I came to try and find you.”
Something flickered at the edge of my vision. I turned to look. Head, shoulders. The
silhouette of a person.
“Who-” I started, and suddenly it lunged at me.
I shot back, desperately throwing my hands to cover my face. Closing my eyes tight.
Expecting an attack.
Nothing happened. I looked up.
An old mannequin lay on the ground in front of me. It’s blank face stared into mine. Arm
reaching out toward me menacingly.
I laughed. It just happened. For a moment I just sat there, staring at the mannequin,
laughing at nothing.
“Calvin.”
I jumped up. Almost tripped over the mannequin. Panic rose up in me, but then I
recognized the voice.
“Trisha?”
“Arkham or Danvers?” She asked. It was dark, but something looked different about her.
“What?”
“The town about thirty minutes of Skirbeck that landed you all here. Arkham or Danvers?” Her
voice was shaking a little.
“Ah. Danvers.” Then I noticed it. Her hair. It was longer. “Who- Who are you?”
“I’m me.” She reached out and grabbed my shoulder and I flinched. “You have to trust me
Calvin. It’s important. I can’t go past the second Reckoning anymore. Something happened.
You’re the only one who will remember.”
“I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”
She crossed her arms angrily. “Every time I explain this to you we waste time. You
remember the city of Danvers but it never existed. Danvers was pulled together out of pieces of
nearby time and space. The way you can tell is that little things about it don’t make sense. Like
the name. Arkham was named after James Arkham. Danvers is supposed to be named after
some guy named Danvers Osborn, but Danvers isn’t even actually a valid first name. It makes
no sense. Reality tries to patch itself but there are holes and that’s what you have to use to
remember.”
“Have we had this conversation before?” I felt chilled. Something was very wrong. I was
suddenly very aware of how small and far away my only exit was.
“We always have this conversation.” She stopped, became very still. “Did you say something
just now?”
“Say what?” My stomach turned to ice. Everything in me screamed at me to run.
“I’m too late.” Her voice was cold, flat despair. She looked up at me. “You have to go.”
“What-”
“Go now!” She pushed me. I tripped and fell, tangled in pieces of mannequin.
Something was happening to the air around Trisha. Little wisps of darkness were
dancing around her. She writhed and moaned.
“I said go!”
I crawled backwards. My legs didn’t seem to work. The Trisha thing shrank and then
exploded outward. My mind was filled withClaws. Clutching. Hungry, hungry.
Run. Run, run, run.
Going toward something. Something.
They’re everywhere. In everything. Of everything.
I can’t. They are too many. Can’t, can’t.
I turn and there’s an opening andAwareness returns and I’m running. I’m in the mall but it’s different. The shops aren’t
boarded up anymore. It’s how I remember from my childhood.
I hear it first. The far off tinkling sound. But I know that the lights come next. And after
the lights the milky white eyes and the spinning. The endless spinning.
I scream and“Calvin?”
Trisha was standing over me. I scan for the telltale signs. The hair is the right length. It’s
her.
I reach out and hug her. Like she was saving me from drowning and if I let go I’d fall
back into that darkness.
“We found Phoebe and Kevin, but then you went missing.” She frowned at me. “Are you
alright?”
“No.” I shivered and couldn’t stop. The cold was inside of me. “Definitely not alright.”
7 “The natural world existed when we did not, and it will continue to exist long after we
are gone. The supernatural crept into life only when the door of consciousness was
opened in our heads.” - Thomas Ligotti
I never really questioned reality when I was young. Despite being forced to read the
works of many philosophers I felt that I understood everything I needed to about what was real
and what wasn’t. As long as I could partition my days into passing whatever classes I needed to
get by and seducing as many men as possible I was content. I didn’t even understand why
anyone would want to ask the questions that so many people had asked over the centuries.
As I explained, it was well known that Oracles often went mad. The assumption was that
seeing the future broke their minds. Given the nature of what they were seeing that seemed to
make sense.
I thought at first that my power might have driven me mad. The things I saw were
impossible. Suddenly I didn’t trust my own senses. I was questioning everything.
But eventually I started to wonder if it might not have been the other way around.
Because I realized that in my case the madness began before the visions. When everything was
taken from us, when all the things that had anchored my life were suddenly gone, that’s when I
started to See the future.
Reality is a construct that humans create to try to make sense of the world. But
underneath our feeble structures there lies a sea of possibilities we cannot even imagine.
Things we choose not to see because they would threaten our very conception of ourselves.
Sanity is a barrier that protects us. It keeps the monsters that live in the darkness out,
shows us only what we expect to see. But it also blinds us.
“What is this?” Jacob pointed angrily at his pocket screen.
“Your grades for the last three assignments. Like it says right there.” The professor explained in
a sarcastic tone, pointing right next to Jacob’s finger.
“We were in Quarantine.” Jacob was shaking with rage. “There was no way-”
“I don’t do favoritism Mr. Walker.” He snarled. “I don’t care about your excuses. I don’t care who
your father is. I hope you are starting to understand that.”
“Understand?” Jacob was suddenly looming over the professor, inches away. “You don’t
understand! I’ll-”
Something rubbed against Jacob’s leg. Began wrapping itself around him like a furry
garland on a Christmas tree. The little kitten face slowly inched up toward his, purring softly, and
he went pale.
“No threats against Mundanes. Section 3 Paragraph 4 of the release agreement you signed.”
Irene looked up from filing her nails, green eyes half lidded, bored. Her short blonde, almost
white, hair brushed against her black collar. “Do not underestimate Jaspurr. If I wish it he’ll
strangle you like a boa constrictor.”
Jaspurr rubbed itself against Jacob’s identical black collar. Continuing to wear the collars
had been another part of the agreement we had signed. At the time anything had seemed
preferable to continued imprisonment or “Quarantine” as we were told to call it.
“There is no way we can pass this class with this many zeros.” I was standing slightly behind
Jacob, keeping myself as far away from Irene as possible. The creepy cat girl scared me badly,
and at that point I was already always on edge. “We’ll do whatever you want. Just give us a
chance to make up the work.”
Something shifted in the professor’s eyes. He smiled. “You’ll do ‘whatever I want’?”
“Yes.” Jaspurr was slowly tightening around Jacob and his eyes bulged slightly. I did my best to
avoid looking at the horrible thing.
“Alright. Read all the assigned chapters by this weekend. I will post an inclusive exam Friday,
including essays, due next Monday. I’ll use your score on the exam as your score on the
assignments.”
“Thank you.” I turned, staring the evil creature in her dead eyes. “Now let him go. We worked it
out.”
“Fine.” Irene sighed, like I’d asked her a challenging favor. Jaspurr shrank back down into the
form of a cute ginger kitten and meowed sweetly. He bounded up the stairs and nestled into
Irene’s lap with her other cats.
Jacob gasped, then shivered. I can’t explain to you the creeping horror of warm fur that
Irene could produce. It nearly destroyed the net for me forever. I’ve had nightmares of writhing
balls of cutely mewling kittens.
But she just smiled and snuggled Jaspurr against her cheek. It made a beautiful picture,
this tiny woman and her cohort of adorable kittens. But beautiful things can also be terrible.
Irene was a nightmare from the worst of my nightmares. Like a bad dream she haunted
me, even through multiple Reckonings. I will never forget the first time we met.
Generally the sight of a troop of armed soldiers would inspire fear. But when I saw them
it lit a little flame of hope inside me I hadn’t know I had. I almost cried with joy.
After the incident in the corridor I kept seeing things out of the corner of my eye. I would
turn and it would always be gone, but a feeling of being watched would linger. Every night I slept
with the light on my bunk turned on. Still I could barely sleep at all.
So when I saw the soldiers I knew one of two things was true. Possibly they had finally
come to free us, and I would finally be able to leave that house of horrors forever. Or else they
had come to kill us, and then I would be free in a different way.
“Do you see them too?” I whispered to Trisha. More and more I felt the need to confirm my own
reality.
“Yes.” She stood and I followed. The children were all standing around, staring, as the men filed
into the Yellow Bunks.
“No one move.” A woman whose uniform was covered in a lot of important looking bars was
suddenly standing in front of us. “Your collars will shock you if you try to come within ten feet of
us or if any excess use of psy is detected.”
This speech did not improve the mood in the room. A few of the children started crying.
From across the room I could almost feel Peter’s anger like a wave of heat, even though I could
barely see him.
“We thank you all for being so cooperative during this temporary Quarantine.” She spoke like
she was reciting something she had memorized, and maybe she was. “Your sacrifice has been
invaluable in helping to determine the whereabouts of the Enhanced terrorist suspect. As of
0500 the suspect has been located and neutralized. Therefore all of you will be reintegrated
immediately.”
The room was suddenly echoing with voices. Mostly exclamations of joy. Still I heard
some angry grumbling as well, hiding underneath.
“Quiet! Please!” There was a flash of blinding light and some confused shouting. Then silence. I
blinked stupidly for a minute, seeing only spots.
“Thank you. Please remain silent until I am finished.” The woman’s voice commanded. “In order
to reintegrate you we will need to process you. Please line up single file starting at the edge of
the yellow tape in the order of your bunk numbers. Incorrect ordering will slow the processing,
so I reiterate, please line up in the order of your bunk numbers. Once the line is formed we will
escort you to the Processing center.”
Getting a bunch of small children to line up in order wasn’t the easiest task. Still we
managed it fairly quickly, given that everyone was very eager to leave. Soon I was standing,
waiting, between Jacob and Trisha.
Jacob had recovered by that time. Unlike Peter he didn’t seem angry at all. Quarantine
had drained the anger out of him.
“Alright.” The woman inspected our line and nodded her head in grudging approval. “Now, follow
us to Processing. And remember, any unusual actions will be swiftly punished.”
Processing. It made us seem like cattle that were being led to the slaughter. I’m sure I’m
not the only one who thought of that. But we all followed anyway. What else could we do?
There was a door. We watched as each person in line was lead through. Their collar
would flash and the door would open, then close behind them without giving any hint of what lay
ahead.
Some people hesitated when it was their turn. Then the soldiers would just point their
guns at them and motion toward the door. Certain death or a possibility of freedom. They all
entered the door.
The line got shorter. My number was close to being called. Then Jacob turned slightly to
me, some unidentifiable emotion reflected in his eyes.
“I don’t hate you.” He whispered. Then turned back.
The words hit me like a punch in the stomach. It wasn’t the strongest statement, but it
meant a lot, given the circumstances. I knew he was also wondering if we were going to make it
out of this. And in that uncertainty he had risked punishment to say those words to me. It was
actually a little overwhelming.
Then I watched him enter the room and wondered if those were the last words he would
ever say to me.
“Damn it Calvin.” Jacob had cornered me almost immediately after we left the class. Irene
ignored us. The papers we signed didn’t prohibit threats against other Enhanced. “How do you
always agree to do things that you must know I can’t possibly do!”
“I helped you last time didn’t I? It was fine.” I glared at him. “And at least now we have a chance
to pass. Your threats weren’t helping us with that.”
“How can he treat us like this.” Jacob was looking at me but he didn’t seem to see me. “Our time
in Quarantine doesn’t mean anything to him. Like we just took a long vacation.”
“Well, from the perspective of the Mundanes I guess that is what it was like.” I don’t remember
exactly when I started calling them Mundanes. When the line between Us and Them became so
clear I didn’t even think about it. Unfortunately it was probably partly because Irene was always
saying it. “A vacation. They don’t have any idea-”
“They don’t want to know. They don’t care.” Jacob backed away from me and glared at Irene.
“You knew I wasn’t going to use my power. You had no reason to use yours on me.”
“A threat is a threat.” Irene was holding one of her kittens, a white one that matched her hair,
and didn’t even look up at Jacob when he spoke. She was smiling one of her horrible satisfied
smiles. “Section 3 paragraph-”
“You don’t care about the rules.” He didn’t get too close to her. We both knew enough to fear
her power even then, when she had barely used it. “You enjoy it. Tormenting us.”
“There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your work.” She did look up then, fixing the full force of her
green eyes on Jacob. “The difference between you and I is that you still think you can belong in
their world and I accepted what I am long ago.”
“Screw you Irene.” Jacob snarled, then stalked off.
Irene looked at me. Her creepy eyes had a knowing depth that made her seem five
times as old as she was, if not a hundred. The kitten in her arms was purring like it was being
tended by its mother.
She turned and followed Jacob and her gaze fell away from me like a weight. I shivered.
That woman was the devil incarnate.
Waiting after Jacob entered that room felt like an eternity. The entirety of our stay in
Quarantine felt like less time than those moments. Standing there, staring at the door, thinking
about Jacob’s words and trying not to think about what might happen.
Then it opened. I saw the room, empty except for a table and a man sitting behind it.
That and a handful of armed robotic dogs.
My legs wouldn’t move. Someone gestured angrily at me with a gun and I stumbled
forward. The door closed behind me with a final sounding thud.
“Mr. Harrison?” The man asked.
“Ah, yes.” I managed to walk to the chair and sit down. Then I noticed the array of papers that
were laid out on the table.
“I think we both agree that we want to keep Skirbeck safe, right Mr. Harrison?” He clasped his
hands in front of him. Looked into my eyes in what I’m sure was supposed to be a friendly
manner.
“Yes. Yes.” I managed to read a little bit of what was written on the papers. My heart beat a little
faster.
“We have a few questions for you. You must answer truthfully. We will require your signature on
these statements-” I watched his finger land on one terrifying page. “And this waiver-” And then
another. “Before we can allow you to exit the facility. And remember, perjury is a federal crime.”
I nodded. He smiled again, teeth showing. Like this was an excellent joke he was telling
me and he couldn’t resist.
“Do you know this person?” From somewhere behind the table he pulled out a photograph. Laid
it on the table.
I stared at it. Tried to keep myself from shaking. My mind was screaming that I was
going to die, and it was all I could do to answer the question.
“He-He looks just like Peter.”
“This is a photograph of the Danvers terrorist. A Mr. Eric Johnson.” He leaned back. “For the
record, have you ever seen his face before?”
“No. I never have.” Peter’s brother was the Danvers terrorist. I was suddenly painfully aware of
the nearness of the robotic dogs.
“But you admit you know Mr. Peter Johnson?” He sounded bored. Like the answer to the
question didn’t interest him either way.
“Yes.” There was no way he didn’t know the answer already, and I was certainly not going to
perjure myself so obviously while surrounded by two tons of metallic power. “We live together.
And he was here with us, in the Yellow bunks.”
“Thank you Mr. Harrison.” He pulled the photograph back under the desk. “To your knowledge,
has Peter Johnson had contact with his brother while he has been living with you?”
“I-” My tongue froze to the roof of my mouth. Because of course I knew the answer to this
question too, and probably the man behind the desk knew that.
A host of terrifying possibilities flooded my mind. Little snakes of black were suddenly
flickering at the edge of my vision. I closed my eyes tightly to make them go.
“Mr. Harrison?” His voice was calm. Patient.
“Sorry. Yes. Ah.” I shook my head. The blackness had gone. “Peter’s brother sent him videos.
He told me about it.”
“What was the content of these videos?” He leaned forward slightly. I pretended not to notice.
“He claimed-” I hesitated. “He claimed that they were videos of Enhanced children being used
as weapons.”
“Thank you Mr. Harrison.” The man leaned back and smiled. Like we were having a friendly
conversation about the weather. “Now, since the incident in Danvers, has Peter Johnson been
acting suspiciously in any way?”
“He-” I remembered Peter watching the videos about Danvers on repeat. And then how he had
organized everyone in the Yellow bunks into his group. Did they already know about that? Were
we all implicated in the terrorist attacks somehow by associating with him?
“Take your time Mr. Harrison.” His blue eyes focused on me, unblinking.
“He was very interested in the attacks. And after, afterwards when they brought us here-” I
swallowed. Closed my eyes again. “He was very angry. But everyone was angry. We all-”
“Have you ever seen Peter Johnson use his power Mr. Harrison?”
“Huh?” The question stalled me. It didn’t seem to relate to anything we had been discussing. “I
mean, yes.”
“And when was that?”
My thoughts were kind of scrambled. I reached for the most recent occasion. “He choked
one of the others in the Yellow Bunk with his own collar.”
“Would you describe Peter Johnson as aggressive? Violent?”
“No. I mean, not really.” I shook my head. “Do you, do you think he had something to do with
this?”
“Please just answer the questions as best as you can.” Bored again, with no sign he had heard
my question.
“No. I wouldn’t describe him as aggressive.” I looked him straight in the eye. He nodded, as if in
approval.
“I reiterate, to your knowledge has Peter been involved in any suspicious behavior? Anything
that might cause Skirbeck or its citizens to come to harm?”
I thought about what had happened in the Yellow bunks. Peter’s speech. The circle
meetings.
I thought about telling the man those things. Let the words run through my mind.
But in the end I couldn’t. I was afraid that by participating in the circles I might be
implicated. And I was haunted by my vision. Somehow it was tied to Peter and I needed to
understand it, to figure it out.
So for the first and only time in that interview I lied. Lied while still looking straight into
the man’s eyes, without blinking.
“No. Nothing.”
Peter was sitting in the living room with a few of his groupies when Jacob, Irene and I
walked in. A girl that I was pretty sure he was dating and two guys. You could pretty much tell at
that point by the number of guards at the door that they were Enhanced, but they all were
wearing collars as well.
When Peter saw Irene a look of undisguised hatred passed through his eyes, but he
smiled anyway. After what I’d seen her do to him both were understandable. He knew not to
make her angry.
“Hello Irene.”
“Peter. You are always doing your best to just barely avoid violating Paragraph 2 Section 1, ‘No
more than five Enhanced persons are allowed to congregate in one place at any time’.” Her
eyes passed over his followers and they abruptly stood. “Now that we are back you are in
violation.”
“My friends were just leaving.” Peter nodded and the groupies scattered. After a moment I heard
the clinking sound of several guards moving away. Given that several had mechanical suits it
was a fairly conspicuous sound.
Like the rest of us Peter still wore his collar from Quarantine. However, in addition to the
collar Peter also had wrist and ankle cuffs of the same color. If he tried to leave our apartment
without supervision they would shock him. Or so we were told. Peter was careful never to try it.
Irene and Peter were still staring at each other. She was smiling and stroking a particular
cat, which rubbed against her very affectionately. Watching her, Peter paled. I am not sure if it
was from fear or rage or both.
“Well.” As usual I was desperate to get away from Irene. “I really need to read some chapters
and prepare for this exam, so I guess I’ll see you later.”
Irene didn’t acknowledge my words. Just kept petting her cat and looking at Peter. I
turned to Jacob, who was staring with wide eyes and motioned that we should go.
“Oh.” He startled out of his shock. “Right. Calvin and I should go study.”
Once we were far enough away I reached out and stopped Jacob with my hand. “Are
you trying to pick fights with Irene now? Because I don’t think you’ll win.”
“What?” He honestly looked surprised.
“Earlier? When you told her she enjoyed tormenting us? What was that about?”
“I don’t know Calvin.” He slumped against the wall, rubbing his eyes irritably with one hand. “I
just can’t take this. Always being afraid all the time. Being treated like we’re not even human.
Honestly I barely even know what I’m doing or saying anymore. Sometimes I almost wish-” He
trailed off, shaking his head.
“What?”
Jacob opened his mouth as if to answer me and then stopped, staring. I turned to look
and saw it. One of Irene’s kittens.
“Let’s go to my room.” Jacob suggested. “To study.”
“Right.” I agreed, following him, trying not to look at the kitten. I could feel her eyes boring into
my skin even though she wasn’t there.
After I had signed the papers I was led to another room. Jacob and Thomas were
already there. Since we didn’t see Thomas in the Yellow bunks I assume he got assigned to one
of the others. There was apparently a color lower than light green, though I have never seen it
since then, because his collar was white.
The guard left and the door shut behind me with a final sounding thud. My stomach felt
like a ball of lead. There was nothing in the room besides the three of us.
Thomas was being his usual friendly self and staring off into the distance. Jacob waited
until the guards had left and then he grabbed me in this big hug. The feeling of his warm arms
around me was almost too much. I pushed away.
“The Danvers terrorist-”
“I know. Peter’s brother. It’s so crazy.” Jacob shook his head. “I didn’t even know he had a
brother.”
“What do you think they’re going to do to us?” I looked around the room. It was stark and
foreboding and did not encourage optimism.
“We didn’t do anything wrong. It will be fine.” He smiled but it didn’t show in his eyes.
“The sun becomes black, the moon like blood. They speak of the woman and the dragon.”
Thomas mumbled quietly. “But never that the woman is the dragon.”
“Would you be quiet!” I shouted angrily. But Thomas had already stopped talking and was sitting
as if he had never moved in the first place.
Either Thomas’s prophecy or my outburst had deflated Jacob’s optimism. He leaned
against the wall, emotion drained from his face. I looked away, trying to keep my mind from
dwelling too much on what Thomas had said, or what it might mean. Time passed.
The door opened again. Trisha walked in. She looked pale.
Jacob walked over and hugged her too. She numbly put her arms around him. Her eyes
fixed on me intensely.
I didn’t say anything, just shook my head slightly. Hopefully imperceptibly. She visibly
relaxed. I wondered what questions they had asked her. But since I had gotten no questions
about Trisha I had to assume they didn’t know what I had seen.
Because of Peter’s power over the radio collars we heard about the capture of the
Danvers terrorist before the soldiers came from us. It was early in the morning, and a lot of
people were in bed, but I happened to be listening. And of course what I thought after I heard it
was, I need to get Trisha to come and tell me if this is really happening.
Her bunk was adjacent to ours, since her number came immediately after. I sat on the
edge of the bed and reached out to shake her shoulder. But instead of the firm resistance of
bone I felt nothing but pliable cushion.
I heard something fall with a soft thud. Looked down at the floor, knowing already what I
would see.
Trisha’s collar was lying there, empty. It’s occupant was missing.
I reached down and picked up the collar. Placed it back on the bed and left.
The next morning I saw her at the ComplEat. I walked over to her and looked in her
eyes. She looked confused, then slightly afraid.
“Tell me something Trisha. And don’t lie to me.” I whispered. “You disappeared last
night. Did that really happen, or did I imagine it?”
She didn’t say anything, just turned away and walked over to where the children were
playing, but the silence and the look in her eyes told me the answer. And then shortly after the
soldiers came for us.
Jacob and I actually ended up studying in his room for several hours. When I left I was
surprised to see that it was already night. Since he lived in the basement it was easy to lose
track of time.
I passed Trisha’s room on my way back to mine. I saw that the light was on. On impulse
I knocked.
“Who is it?”
“Calvin.”
“Ah. Come in I guess.”
The door opened. Trisha was sitting on her bed with her pocket screen. Her activities
had gotten much more innocent since Quarantine and with Irene’s constant supervision.
She looked at the door, then at me. I realized her meaning and closed it behind me.
Trisha let out a sigh of relief.
“I hate thinking that she might be spying on me.” She said quietly, almost a whisper. “After what
she did to Peter just seeing her little kittens makes me sick.”
“Jacob yelled at her today.” I sat down on one of Trisha’s cushions, keeping my voice at the
same level as Trisha’s.
“Really? Oh my God.” She put down the pocket screen and stared. “Is he okay?”
“It was fine. She just said something creepy and ignored him.” I shook my head. “Anyway I’d
say that out of all of us she likes him the best. She always seems to find excuses to be around
him.”
“Sounds like someone else I know.” Trisha’s eyes twinkled with a little bit of her old mischief.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I put on my best exaggerated look of anger and shock
and she laughed.
“Trisha.” I dropped the face, giving her a serious look. “Are you ever going to tell me what
happened the morning before we left Quarantine?”
The light went out of her eyes. She looked toward the door. Leaning in she whispered
quietly, “I’ll tell you, but not here. If you trust me, I’ll find a time and place to tell you about it so
we don’t have to worry about her.”
“Okay.” I stood up. “It was good talking to you Trisha. We should do this more often.”
“I’d like that.” She smiled and the light was back in her eyes again. “Now you should go to bed
before the kittens get you.”
“Anything but that!” I joked, and we both laughed.
When the strange girl walked into the room with us none of us knew what was going on.
I saw Jacob smile. Despite being short she was good looking, and her clothes fit her well. Her
green eyes were striking and she flicked her blond hair over her ear in an adorable way.
“Hello.” She said sweetly. “My name is Irene Banderas.”
Jacob stood up from his position at the wall. “It’s good to meet you. You must be from
one of the other bunks. I would remember if I had seen you in Yellow.”
“Oh, no.” She shook her head and her hair swirled cutely around her face. “I just got here. I’m
here for the questioning.”
“The- questioning? What-” I started to ask, but just then the door opened. Three guards came
in, leading Peter. They had already cuffed his wrists and ankles at that point.
“This is the one Irene.” One of the men said. “He claims he had no idea about his brother’s
plans in Danvers or that he was trying to find him in Skirbeck.”
“You must be Peter.” Her voice had dropped in pitch and was no longer a little girl’s singsong.
Anticipation shone on her face. “I’m kind so I’ll give you one last chance to confess before we
start.”
“There’s nothing to confess.” Peter glared at her, impervious to whatever charm she had worked
on Jacob.
“Oh, good.” Her eyes narrowed and I saw the darkness in them for the first time. “Then we can
begin.”
All at once Peter was screaming. He fell to the ground clutching his stomach. Irene just
smiled.
“What are you doing to him?” Trisha cried out, grabbing Irene’s arm.
“Don’t touch me or you’re next.” Irene snarled. Her face was contorted in a horrible rictus of a
smile.
Beneath Peter’s hands something was moving. His stomach bulged upwards and then
sank. The screaming was getting louder.
“It wants to get out. Should I let it?” Irene knelt down. “This can all be over if you just tell me
what I want to know.”
“I don’t-” Peter screamed again. “I don’t know anything.”
“I guess it will just stay in there and play then.” Irene stood and Peter’s stomach bulged even
larger. She tilted her head. “It’s having fun now. Your intestines are like a big fluffy ball of string.”
“God. Stop. Please stop.” Peter crawled toward Irene, moaning.
“It won’t stop until you let me know what I want to know.” She said sweetly in her little girl voice.
“Okay. Okay. Aughh!” Tears were running down Peter’s face. “I knew. I knew that he planned to
escape. That’s all he told me. Please. Ah! Arghh!”
“Are you sure? Is that really all?” She sounded like a mother reprimanding a naughty child.
“I swear. I swear. Please. Ple-agghh!”
“It feels like you’re dying, but my power won’t let you.” Irene spun in a circle. “You will hurt and
hurt and hurt until I decide.”
“Please. I can’t tell you anything else. There’s nothing. Please.” Peter was openly weeping now.
“Alright.” Irene pouted. “I guess I believe you. I’ll let him out.”
Suddenly blood pooled in front of Peter. He gasped and writhed. His stomach bulged
one final time and something came out.
It was a little black kitten. Blood dripped onto the floor as it padded over to Irene. Sitting
by her feet, it began cleaning itself, as if it had just been out in the rain or something.
“You bitch!” Peter had regained enough of himself to be angry. “What the hell is that?”
“How insulting. Bitches are dogs.” Irene turned up her nose.
“Pulling kittens out of people to scare them?” Peter laughed. “Why not insects? Or squids? Or
flying squid insects?”
“Anyone who thinks a flying squid is scary is an idiot.” Irene turned to the guards. “You can go
now. I will handle them from here.”
“What?!” Peter was livid. “You’re leaving us here with her?”
“Irene is your appointed Elite guardian. You agreed in your release forms to let her monitor your
activities for as long as is deemed necessary.”
Irene smiled. I stood in shock, looking at the pool of blood and thought ‘the woman is the
dragon’. It was the first time I saw one of Thomas’ prophecies come true.
8 “If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the
limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.” Thomas Ligotti
After Quarantine and the capture of the Danvers Terrorist people had a lot of questions.
They weren’t satisfied with being told that the government had things under control anymore.
Some people didn’t even believe they’d actually captured the terrorist. There were a lot of
conspiracy theories.
And it wasn’t completely crazy. Things were still happening. ED terminals were shut
down because the fail safes kept going off. Travel worldwide was crawling. It was like
technology had been set back twenty years overnight.
And port chaining had finally started in Danvers. When nothing major happened after a
month a bunch of the bolder residents decided to violate the evacuation orders and go back.
The result was not pretty, and was splashed across the headlines for weeks. It reminded people
just how terrifying the terrorist was, and how dangerous the Enhanced were.
Suddenly Peter’s brother was a celebrity. You saw him more often than the president or
the most famous vid stars. It was everywhere. He was the face of a new era.
In Skirbeck it was a war. People would throw things at the Enhanced when they walked
by. They shouted Peter’s brother’s name like a curse. Without the guards things would definitely
have escalated to violence.
As much as I hated Irene, having her around was useful sometimes. Everyone knew
about Peter. They knew where we lived. We got more and more angry stares every day when
we went walking around campus. The army of cats was all that dissuaded anyone from causing
us physical harm.
We were trapped. The government told us that the collars and the security were
temporary, but things were only getting worse, not better. Other cities were already making
collars like ours mandatory. It was only a matter of time before it became normal, just another
part of being Enhanced.
People hadn’t been this upset about the Enhanced for over ten years. Since the first
famous incident of Enhanced violence. Then, like now, everyone had focused on a single
person at first. The boy who made people believe that psychic powers existed, and that they
could be dangerous. That eventually made psy testing mandatory for anyone who was
suspected of possessing them and labeled us forever as outsiders. The infamous Tommy
Timmens.
I spent a lot of time in my room immediately after Quarantine ended. Partly because I
didn’t want to take the chance that I might see Irene, but mostly because I had to read a lot to
try and make up the work for my English class. Except for Jacob I barely spoke to anyone.
So I was pretty exhausted when Friday came around, but I thought I was prepared for
the worst. Our professor didn’t like us but surely he would consider our circumstances and at
least give us a fair shot. But no. Never in my life had I hated someone as much as I did at the
moment when I saw that exam appear on my screen.
“Damn it!” I yelled. My book flew across the room and smashed into the wall screen, which
vibrated tinnily. I leaned over and buried my head in my hands.
“Calvin?” A female voice asked, making me shoot upward violently.
The door opened and Trisha let herself in. She looked warily around the hallway and
then shut the door behind her. Noticing my posture and the discarded book she briefly tilted her
head. Then her face quickly resolved into an anxious frown.
“I don’t know what’s up with you Calvin, but if you want to talk, we should talk now.”
“What?” I growled. My anger was only grudgingly turning to confusion.
“Seriously. Irene went off with Peter somewhere and this is probably the only time we have.”
She folded her arms.
“Wait. Peter actually left the house?”
She sighed dramatically. “There’s no time to talk about this now. Do you want to talk or
not?”
“I mean, I do-”
“Good.” She grabbed my hand. “Don’t say anything. Just trust me.”
Trust. I would have laughed, but at that moment the world inverted, and I felt too sick to
do anything but close my eyes and hold on.
I was very young when Tommy Timmens became famous. My memory of it is pretty
fuzzy. It was around the time my parents split up though, so there are bits and pieces of it I
remember vividly.
My mother liked to use the television as a babysitter, back when people still had
televisions. I remember sitting on the couch and hearing her and dad argue in the background.
By that time they were always arguing.
On a good day that is all they would do. This was not a good day. I heard him hit her and
then some crashing. Probably she fell or he knocked things over. I don’t know. That’s when I
really started focusing on the program that was playing.
It was a news show. Back then news was very different. They had people sit behind
desks like they were at an office, wearing fancy clothes and basically reciting the news like a
grocery list. These kinds of shows were usually so unbearably boring that I would immediately
turn the channel.
This time was different. First, I did not want to make any movements or noises that might
draw attention to myself. Second, this news report was different in every way from any I’d ever
seen before.
They kept showing pictures of this kid, only a little older than I was at the time. There
were some videos of him doing normal seeming things. Riding a bicycle. Blowing out candles on
a birthday cake.
Then they showed another very different video. In that video little Tommy was standing
outside a house, surrounded by a bunch of police cars. It was a little hard to recognize him
because he was covered almost head to toe in blood.
He was standing there, crying and staring at the police cars. One of the policemen pulls
out a gun and starts shouting something. And Timmy just looks at him and screams.
So of course I’m expecting to see this kid get shot on television. And I’m sitting there
shaking because he’s just a kid like me and because I’m afraid of what is happening in the other
room. My little hands were gripping the sides of the couch so hard they turned white.
But that isn’t what happened. Instead, the policeman pulls his gun back and points it at
his own head. And then he shoots himself.
By the end of the video three policemen were dead. But then some brave officer at the
end of the video walks calmly up to Timmy. She talks to him in a soft voice and he just stares at
her crying and shaking his head. And then he runs to her and holds her.
So that’s how it ends.
I didn’t even understand what was happening. The news reporters didn’t understand it
either. They had groups of people who came on the show to talk about what might have
happened. Most suggested some kind of mass hysteria or group hallucination. No one even
said the word psychic then. It would have been crazy.
The show ended after that and my parents stopped shouting so I finally changed the
channel. I forgot about what I’d seen. It was only years later when the Tommy Timmens story
really blew up that it all came back. And that’s when suddenly everything changed.
The room where we arrived was dark. I only knew that we had stopped traveling
because I felt the ground beneath my feet. My head kept spinning for a moment, trying in vain to
find a reference point.
“Oh. Sorry.” I heard Trisha’s voice and then suddenly the room was flooded with light.
I blinked, then began to resolve shapes. All of the stuff that had gone missing from her
room was here. In fact there were several new terrifying things as well.
“I’ve been keeping a secret from you all. For months now.” Trisha gestured around the room. I
looked at her neck and noticed for the first time that, similar to her escape from Quarantine, our
collars had been left behind. “Not just this stuff. I-”
“You’re the Spectral Lady.” I looked into her eyes calmly to let her know I wasn’t surprised.
“Well, yes.” She shook her head. “You knew about that?”
“I suspected for a while. I met someone who had a picture of you.” I pulled out my pocket screen
and showed her the close up photo I had gotten from my hook up. “I thought I recognized your
eyes. But I wasn’t really sure until now.”
“If you figured it out, you’re probably not the only one.” Trisha frowned. “But that is actually not
what I was going to tell you about.”
“Really?” This time I was surprised. “You have another secret you are keeping from us besides
being Skirbeck’s most notorious supervillain?”
“I am not a supervillain.” She crossed her arms angrily. “That one time I stole some money and
that makes me a ‘supervillain’. I even gave it back. Eventually.”
“How did you do that anyway?”
Trisha looked down at her hands, then held them up, showing me her palms. She
reached down and pulled the pockets out of her pants. Then she shook them vigorously to show
that nothing was hiding inside of them.
“What-” I started, and then it hit me. “Wait. Where’s your port jump?”
“I lost it. Months ago.”
“Then how-” I stared at her. “You- We- Without a port jump?”
“Exactly. There are things about my power that I didn’t tell you. That I didn’t even really
understand until recently.” Trisha took a deep breath. “How much do you know about quantum
uncertainty?”
Tommy Timmens was the first, but it was still a single isolated incident. Dramatic but
quickly forgotten. What happened in California officially made the problem too big to ignore.
When the fires first started no one suspected anything unusual. It was summer and dry
enough that sometimes fires would just happen. But they kept happening, and kept getting
bigger and more destructive, and then people really started to pay attention.
Arson was suspected, but there was no evidence to implicate anyone. The authorities
were stumped, and the fires were still getting worse. There were enough fires that it seemed to
require a team of arsonists, but the investigations went nowhere.
Soon after we saw Tommy on the news again. But this time he wasn’t the suspect.
The governor of California announced that they had new evidence in the case. A man in
a suit stepped forward, Tommy Timmens following close behind, smiling shyly. He explained
that he was in charge of a research group that was studying cases like Tommy’s. They had
discovered that the use of abilities like his produced a measurable signal, and had confirmed
that the fires coincided with large visible spikes originating from a single location.
Then they announced that they had already confirmed the identity of the arsonist. A
video played. In it the man and Tommy walked up to a house and knocked on the door. A
woman answered and Tommy said something to her. She turned and came back with a little
girl, not more than five years old.
Tommy kneeled down and said something to the little girl. She shook her head and
looked like he would cry. He spoke to her again, more firmly, and then suddenly a small fire
appeared on the ground in front of her. The girl immediately burst into tears.
Suddenly Tommy Timmens was a hero. And not just a hero, but a redeemed hero with a
dark past. Everyone knew and loved him.
And that was when the world officially started to believe in psychic powers. The
researcher was the famous Dr. Aaron Grant. Of course we all know that almost immediately
after that broadcast he was recruited by the government and Tommy Timmens and that girl
became some of the first Elites. Not only that, but using the signal he had discovered, anyone
suspected of having psychic powers could immediately be tested and ranked with what became
known as the ‘psy score’.
At that time people were comforted by the idea that psychic ability was something that
was understood. Something that could be measured. That there were ‘Minds’ like Tommy
Timmens and ‘Sparks’ like the little girl and that was all they had to know about it. The smiling
children on their screens were familiar, and friendly, and it comforted them.
But of course that wasn’t true. The truth was far more frightening.
“You know I’m an English major right? Please use smaller words.” I frowned and stared at
Trisha, trying to see if I could find some trick. Maybe she was just hiding the port jump really
well.
“You really don’t know anything about quantum mechanics?” Trisha sounded like I had told her I
couldn’t understand how to add one and one and make two.
“I’ve heard that if you put a cat in the box that sometimes it turns into a zombie.” I shrugged. “Or
something like that.”
“Well, that is pretty much wrong in every way, but if you have heard of Schrodinger’s cat we can
start there I guess.” Now she sounded like someone lecturing a small child for failing to correctly
use the potty. “The original idea is that you have a radioactive isotope in a box. When the
isotope releases radiation into the box it triggers the release of a poison. If you put a cat into the
box then the cat will either be alive or dead depending on whether or not the poison has been
released.”
She looked at me to see if I was following and I nodded vaguely so she continued. “Now,
there is always some probability that the isotope emits radiation, but it is impossible to know if it
has or has not without observing it. Therefore as long as the box is closed the cat is both alive
and dead at the same time.”
“That’s stupid. A cat cannot be alive and dead at the same time. It has to be one or the other,
and whether or not you look at it shouldn’t affect it.”
“That’s what Schrodinger thought too. The whole purpose of the thought experiment is to show
how stupid the idea is.” Trisha took a deep breath. “But it is true. On the quantum level, if you
observe things then you change it. You change reality.”
“Okay. Let’s pretend I understand and believe you about this zombie cat.” Trisha groaned but I
ignored her. “What does that have to do with you robbing a bank? Or teleporting without a port
jump?”
“So, you know my power right?” Trisha sounded impatient.
“Yes?” I shrugged. I had no idea what she meant. “You can see things with your mind if they are
very close to you.”
“Yes! I see them! I am observing them!” She was practically shouting at this point.
“You’re saying that your power is like the zombie cat situation?” Slowly I was coming to
understand. “Somehow by looking at things in the right way you change them?”
“Yes! Exactly.” Trisha beamed. “Honestly it took me a while to realize that I could. When I first
started to See I didn’t know what it was. At first I would only see the waves when I was near a
port hub or port jump. But then I started to see them everywhere.”
“Wait. So you can see port waves?” My mouth hung open.
“Yes. I thought you understood that?” Trisha just stared at me and tilted her head in confusion.
“No, you definitely skipped over some things.” She sighed and I pinched my nose in frustration.
“I think you need to start over.”
“Fine. I’ll start at the beginning.” Trisha took a deep breath. “It all started when my mother died.”
So since that first incident Tommy Timmens was always there when there was some
problem with the Enhanced. Always smiling in victory on the tv screen, or the net. He was the
face of our confidence that things would work out.
After we were released from Quarantine, when I finally saw the video of the capture of the
Danvers terrorist, I wasn’t surprised to see his face again. The team of Elites had swelled to
almost a dozen members but the camera still always found him, in every shot, at every angle.
As if it were magnetically attracted to him.
Most of the net vids made it look very straight forward. The group of Elites locates the
terrorist. He attacks them, things go flying, some things are on fire. Your standard Enhanced
fight.
Finally they corner him. Then our hero steps forward, speaking slowly. And gradually the
terrorist steps toward him and the police descend and it ends.
The length of the vids alone is enough to strain credulity. A bare five minutes. Otherwise
you might risk losing the attention spans of the net addicted populace.
But there are deeper parts of the net. Those are the parts where my friend showed me
vids of the Spectral Lady originally. After Quarantine, after finding Trisha’s empty collar, I
needed to know what really happened. And that is where I learned the truth about Tommy
Timmens.
“I was with her in the car the day she died.” Trisha’s eyes flicked upwards, searching mine. “Did
you know that?”
“No. I never heard that.”
Trisha’s eyes shone with tears and she blinked them away. It was the first time I’d really
seen her show emotion without restraint. Usually you had to interpret the strength of the
irritation in her words to decipher the human feeling beneath her constant intellectual
condescension.
“My mother was always so nervous. She hated to drive. When we went out she always took our
autocar.” Trisha shook her head. “Daddy made sure the AI was top of the line. A human driver
would never be able to drive as well as that car drove us. But in the end it wasn’t enough.”
“I knew it was an autocar. I mean, everyone knew that. After that the autocar sales just
plummeted. If even Steve Alden couldn’t-”
“Don’t remind me. Daddy was always so guilty.” Trisha looked away. “But I was there, and there
is nothing anyone could have done. I just remember that I blinked, and suddenly it was there.
That fast. They pulled out of a narrow alleyway and slammed right into us. Right into-right into
my mom.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Trisha just ignored the words and continued. “Mom, they think probably she died
instantly. I was crushed, pretty badly I guess. But luckily this woman saw it happen and called
for an ambulance very quickly, so when they arrived them were able to stabilize me and get me
to a hospital.”
“But I was lying there in incredible pain for a while. Mom was leaking blood everywhere and I
knew she was hurt pretty badly. And I just kept thinking to myself ‘If only I’d seen it. If only I
could have warned her.’”
“And that’s when I first Saw. And I didn’t understand what I was Seeing then.” She moved her
hand up and down, making a wave. “It was like the world was shimmering in and out. I could
see the woman on the sidewalk dialing her phone but at the same time I could see a completely
empty sidewalk.”
“But how could you see both-” I sighed, exasperated. “Is this another zombie cat thing?”
“Basically.” Trisha nodded, smiling at my ignorance in her usual condescending way. It was
oddly comforting.
The long version of the video starts out like the short version. They didn’t alter anything,
just removed pieces. A lie that contains a little bit of the truth is easier to believe.
In the short version it looks like the group of Elites finds the terrorist. In the full version
it’s clear that the terrorist finds them. Basically one of them goes flying and then suddenly he is
there, moving between them faster than the eye can see.
The Elites react to this in different ways. Some of them are clearly focusing to try and
See him. Others are throwing fireballs or projectiles seemingly at random.
And what about our hero? Where is Tommy Timmens during this chaotic disaster?
After the terrorist appears Tommy gets this look of abject terror and just runs. For literally
the first fifteen minutes of the video he is nowhere to be found. And if you looked closely in the
short version you’d see that he didn’t show up until the last minute or so even there.
After a very short while things are going really badly for the Elites. One by one the
terrorist attacks them and they fall down, unconscious if not dead. It is clear that if nothing
happens they are going to be completely defeated and the terrorist is going to get away.
Then something very strange happens. The camera starts to vibrate, blurring the outline of the
fighting. A small, indistinct figure moves into the frame.
Suddenly the terrorist appears out of thin air, standing frozen in place. It’s hard to make
out but you can vaguely see him staring at the approaching figure. The camera is shaking more
and more violently as time goes on.
He starts screaming. Something is forming in the air around him. Pockets of nothing that
the mind refuses to see.
But there were shapes inside the nothing.
“So how did you do it? ” I finally asked, after a few moments of silence had passed. “The
robbery? Escaping from Quarantine? You still haven’t explained that. ”
“I told you I can see port waves right?” The atmosphere had visibly lightened but Trisha was still
frowning.
“We established that I don’t know what that means, but yes.”
“Basically it is like when I saw the woman who was both there and not there. As you should
understand from basic temporal relativity, port waves work by creating a matter superposition
state instead of a standard matter wave. The matter functionally ceases to exist in our temporal
reference frame, and then reappears only when we collapse the wave function.” I shook my
head to indicate I had no idea what she was saying but Trisha was staring off into space and
didn’t seem to notice. “And for me that’s visible. I can see the propagation of the superposition
of the existence and non-existence of the matter that is being transmitted.”
“So, you see waves of zombie cats?” Trisha groaned, but this time I ignored her. “That still
doesn’t explain anything.”
“Let me finish.” She glared at me. “So it took me a while to figure this out. And I did a lot of tests.
Borrowing the money was part of that. I wanted to see if I would be able to affect the quantum
encryption. It is theoretically impossible, because, like the famous Alice and Bob analogy, any
Eve who tries to eavesdrop should have to collapse the wave function and destroy the
information, which will be instantly detectable and set off the security features. But since I can
view the superposition state without disturbing it, I found a way to extract it and then
impersonate the ‘Bob’ in our analogy by collapsing the wave function in such a way that the
money was transferred.”
At this point my eyes had glazed over and I just kind of stared at her. Trisha shook her
head and threw up her arms in exasperation.
“So anyway I never had the money, I never spent it, I just moved it and then I moved it back,
okay? I’m not a supervillain.”
“And the teleportation?” I asked, although I was now not certain that I really wanted to know or
could possibly understand any explanation that Trisha might give.
“For a long time I thought I needed the port jump to teleport. I could always collapse my own
wavefunction in order to travel wherever I wanted without a hub, but I thought I needed
something to initialize the superposition state.” Trisha was grinning now, all appearance of
melancholy completely vanished. “But then my port jump went missing, and I started to think
about it. It’s temporal relativity right? Anything that is in a superposition state in our reference
frame is collapsed in a different reference frame right? And by the same token, if I am in a
collapsed state in this reference frame, there exists a reference frame where I am in a
superposition state, and therefore if I observe myself correctly, I can collapse myself into that
reference frame, therefore initializing my superposition state in this reference frame! And then I
can teleport myself anywhere I want, anytime I want!”
“You know what? I don’t really want to know how you did it.” Trisha groaned and started to
protest but I held out my hands in surrender and she quieted. “Please don’t try. I’m clearly too
dumb for this. Just tell me why. Why did you leave your bunk that morning?”
“Oh.” The color drained from Trisha’s face. She leaned against the wall for support, then looked
up at me. “You’ve seen the videos right? Tommy Timmens and all that.”
“Yes.” I agreed.
“But did you see the real ones? Did you see her?” Her eyes burned into me like hot coals.
“I have.”
“Then you know the answer. You saw what happened.” Trisha’s eyes had become distant. Cold.
“But you didn’t see what I saw.”
The video starts to warp and flicker for a while. I found that I could not look at it or I
would feel sick and I closed my eyes for several minutes. But the sounds weren’t much better. A
high pitched screeching sound and an odd low pitched crackle like static.
Then all of a sudden the sounds stop. I opened my eyes, and for the first time I saw her.
It was the little girl from Peter’s vid. She was standing perfectly still, her eyes focused on
something off screen.
At this point in the video you hear a woman’s voice. Of course I recognized it
immediately. Trisha.
“What are you?”
“I am the Alpha and the Omega. And you aren’t supposed to be here.” The girl starts to lift her
hand and you can hear Trisha cry out.
“No!” Peter’s brother reappears and tackles the girl. Her frail body offers almost no resistance
and she goes down, seemingly unconscious. After checking the body he stands and starts
limping away.
“Go!” He shouts over his shoulder, in the direction of Trisha’s voice. “Go while you still can!”
“I can’t let you leave.” Her voice says sadly. Peter’s brother cries out, and he freezes.
And that’s when Tommy Timmens shows up. After all the fighting, and all the
inexplicable horror, after someone else has already solved the problem. He turns to the camera,
and he smiles, and then he does what he always does, without a flicker of shame.
“That girl.” Trisha’s voice was shaking. “She’s not human. She can’t be. I can’t accept it.”
“What happened?” I asked quietly, trying to shake her out of her terrified stupor.
“You know in Quarantine, when you told me you saw me? Only it wasn’t me, it was, like, a
different version of me?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Well, I thought what you thought then. That it was some mad side effect of Quarantine, or your
Oracle powers or whatever. But I think I might actually understand now, after meeting her.”
“What are you talking about?” I was shivering. Remembering the other Trisha made me
remember the thing she had become.
“I see the possibilities that exist in the world, right? All the superpositions of what is and what
could be.” Trisha was staring at me again. “That girl, she’s like a black hole for possibilities.
They just… they vanish. Like they never existed.”
“What does that have to do with the other Trisha?” Despite the intensity of her stare I looked
straight into her eyes.
“When I saw what she was doing to the port waves as they passed by I-I didn’t just see them
disappear.” Trisha’s body was shaking now too, in big shuddering waves. “It was like I could see
through the nothing. And what I saw on the other side was… was me. Was us. Like looking so
far ahead of yourself that you see the back of your head.”
“I don’t follow.” I wanted to reach out to her, but I was afraid if I did she might stop.
“She twisted it so small and so tight that all the possibilities became nothing. I didn’t see it until
then, but now I do. I see how all the paths that lead forward also lead back. How everything we
are and everything we know is contained in this fragile little loop. And when I saw what was
happening, when I saw her destroying the loops, I had to stop her.”
“Trisha, you’re scaring me.” Darkness swirled at the edge of my vision.
“Good.”
She stopped shaking. Reached out and grabbed my shoulder. Then the world inverted
again.
9 “Long exasperated by questions without answers, by answers without consequences,
by truths which change nothing, we learn to become intoxicated by the mood of
mystery itself, by the odor of the unknown. We are entranced by the subtle scents and
wavering reflections of the unimaginable.” - Thomas Ligotti
I remember waking up to the sound of insistent beeping. My pocket screen was next to
my head, where I’d left it the night before. Somehow I managed to fall asleep at my desk.
Reading five chapters of the Fountainhead in a few days is pretty challenging by itself.
But since our English professor had outdone himself making up questions for our exam, I had to
read each of the chapters again. Three times. And then there were two essays.
But stubborn arrogance is pretty much my only outstanding quality. I managed to finish
the stupid thing at around five in the morning the day before it was due. And then there I was,
sleeping at my desk, hating that pocket screens existed and that they made noises.
Someone was calling me. I didn’t recognize the number. Calls from unknown strangers
were pretty common for me but after Quarantine I was almost as celibate as a monk. Being
followed by Irene just killed the romance for me. So I was confused and dazed from sleep
deprivation when I answered.
“Hello?”
“Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out?”
It was our professor. Being called by our professor had a vaguely unreal quality. My half
asleep mind rejected it.
“Is this a dream?” I mumbled.
“If it’s a dream it’s your nightmare Mr. Harrison. I know that you cheated on your exam, and I am
going to report you to the student conduct officer.”
“What?!” That woke me up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your quiz? You and Mr. Walker gave identical answers. And the essays? You barely even tried
to change the wording. It’s obvious that you copied his work.”
My mouth hung open. I was caught between anger at the professor and also rising
disbelief and betrayal. Because it was obvious what had happened, and it wasn’t what the
professor thought.
“Nothing to say for yourself? You can expect to see me at your hearing.” I could hear his
condescending smile over the line.
“Go screw yourself.” I said, and hung up.
After Peter started being allowed to leave the house he started bringing more and more
people over. They were mostly normal, since we weren’t allowed to have more than a certain
number of Enhanced around at any time. And by ‘normal’ of course I only mean that they had
no powers. In other ways they were anything but normal.
Probably there were three recognizable types. First there were the ‘retro’ ones. Kids who
refused to wear or eat anything that came from a printer and sometimes carried old clunky cell
phones instead of pocket screens. Those were distinguishable in that they always dressed in
poorly fitting, ugly clothes.
Second were the pseudo-intellectuals. They wore printed clothing with absolutely no
subtlety. Ridiculous stripes and dots of all colors, like some old fashioned drip painting, were
common. Or sometimes just a dramatic solid black. Some of them even smoked electronic
cigarettes, like they were trapped in the 2000s.
Then there were the crazies. They called themselves anarchists, but what they really
were was insane. Generally you could distinguish them because they looked like they hadn’t
printed any new clothes in a while. Or bathed. Or deodorized in any way.
But no matter what kids Peter had over they were always having the same
conversations. How the government was corrupt and oppressed the people. How the
interminable war in the South China Sea was just a distraction so they could perform
experiments without any complaints from the citizens. Sometimes they speculated that Peter’s
brother was falsely accused, that it was all a government conspiracy.
Irene watched these things without commenting. She even got bored sometimes and
wandered off. It seemed like she didn’t care what Peter did as long as he stayed in the house.
But then that changed.
There’s an old pseudoscience theory that says that there are stages of loss. The first
stage is denial. The second stage is anger.
After the call from my professor I spent an hour or so in my denial phase. I paced in my
room. Not wanting to walk out and take the risk that I might see him. Trying to convince myself
that the call from our professor had never happened.
Then the anger started building. I kept flashing to our time in Quarantine. His last words
to me. How grateful I had been to hear them.
At that stage of my life I had built a series of habits to protect me from exactly this
situation. I didn’t get close to people. Most of the time I refused to see guys I had dated more
than a handful of times. They meant nothing to me and therefore they couldn’t hurt me.
But somehow I’d let Jacob crawl inside me. I let myself care about him and value his
opinion. And he had taken my trust and shattered it into a million tiny shards.
I’d always been solitary and my world since Quarantine had shrunk to a pinpoint. We
weren’t allowed to go anywhere unsupervised. No one could possibly want to come visit us.
There was the house, our classes, and each other. I’d needed someone and so I let myself
depend on him.
The anger was everything. I had never been so angry. My hands balled into fists and I
just started hitting things. Whatever was nearest. Pillows, the bed, the wall. The last made me
cry in pain and distracted me for a moment.
For a moment I just sat there, cradling my hand. I tried to come up with some plausible
explanation. Anything that would mean that Jacob didn’t just betray me in order to save himself.
But there was nothing. Just this horrible sinking feeling inside me. An old familiar
emptiness.
Darkness threatened to overwhelm me. I felt myself slipping away. My mind had gotten
so fragile that it felt like it might crack at any moment.
But I fought it. Fought to hang onto the anger. It flooded into me like an antidote, driving
the darkness back.
I couldn’t sit there and let my hurt consume me. There was only one thing I could do and
maintain my tenuous grasp on reality. I had to confront Jacob.
But first I had to deal with Irene.
When the first few incidents happened we barely heard about it. Some statues got
defaced. Old glass windows were broken. Stupid little things like that.
Isolated as we were, we didn’t spend enough time on campus to be concerned with
these things. But honestly I don’t think anyone really took it seriously. Childish acts of vandalism
happened sometimes on college campuses for many reasons.
Then there were the protests. Again it started small. Some students standing outside of
the main classroom buildings with signs. Shouting things like “The government is lying to you!”
and “You don’t need to be a Mind to use yours!”.
And of course I recognized many of these protesters. The anarchists with their unkempt
hair and the retro kids with their ridiculous jean pants. They had all started their nonsense while
sitting in our living room while Peter nodded.
There was a backlash against this of course. Other students formed their own protests to
shout angrily at Peter’s friends. Our campus was like dry tinder, just waiting for a spark. People
were afraid and they were just looking for a target at which to aim their hatred.
Soon there were protesters everywhere. You couldn’t move five feet without hitting one
protest or another. They started relatively innocently, just making more and more hateful signs
and shouting at each other. But things got more and more heated, and of course it inevitably
escalated to violence.
“I need you to help me.”
Trisha blinked and rubbed her eyes as I closed the door. She squinted irritably at me
and sat up.
“What is it Calvin? You know that I’ve been out late trying to find out more about the Omega.”
The Omega is what we had taken to calling the little girl. It had basically a short version
of what she called herself after all. Trisha was convinced she was still in Skirbeck, but despite
her frequent outings she hadn’t seen any sign of her. Otherwise I didn’t know too much about
Trisha’s investigations and I didn’t really want to know.
“It’s important. I need to talk to Jacob and I need you to take Irene somewhere while I do.”
“Are you serious?” Trisha flopped back into bed and pulled the covers over her head.
“Come on.” I sat on the edge of the bed. “Please do this for me.”
“What-” Trisha uncovered her face. “Is so important that it is worth me spending unnecessary
hours with Irene? And now of all times. You know after what happened that she practically
never leaves Peter’s side for five seconds.”
“There’s no evidence Peter is responsible for what happened to those kids.”
“That doesn’t matter to Irene.” Trisha rolled her eyes. “She’s really more of a ‘shoot first, ask
questions later’ type. And then after those vids-”
“Can you just accept that it is personal and it is important?” I let the intensity of my anger show
on my face and Trisha softened. “You know if I talk to Jacob while she’s around then I know
she’ll interrupt us. She always has one of her little cats following him around.”
“Fine. But you owe me. And I mean major, major favors. Your life for mine kind of deal. This is
Irene we’re talking about.”
“Done. Anything.” I agreed.
“Ok. Give me ten minutes.” Trisha said, and shooed me out of the room.
Many of the protests did not actually contain any Enhanced people. They never would
have been as large if it had just been us. We simply did not have enough people.
I think there are some people who always want to be be protesting something. They are
just so full of anger, and they need to point it in a direction. It doesn’t even matter what they’re
protesting really. Peter had mastered the art of controlling these people in Quarantine, and they
came out for him in droves. It was surprising how quickly it all started to happen.
They blanketed the net with vids too. Vids that repeated the messages I had heard
discussed over and over. That the Danvers terrorist and Quarantine were a government
conspiracy. A distraction that at best was meant to keep us quiet and that at worst was actively
deceiving us about what was actually causing the problems with the ED terminals. Paranoia
turned out to be contagious, and the vids quickly got thousands of views.
Within the first week there were already hundreds of people protesting. Not always in the
same place or at the exact same time, but spread out over the campus in the course of the day
there were hundreds. Some of the protestors set up little camps and stayed overnight, keeping
the protests going 24 hours a day. It even spread to the mainstream net and vids about the
terrorist started to include segments about the protests and even the conspiracy theories as
well.
Once people started taking them seriously, that’s really when things started to go wrong.
There were always little fights. Some overly excited member of one side or the other would
throw a punch and campus security would come and break it up. Nothing really crazy.
But as soon as the protests were national news it got worse and worse. First there would
be fires, usually in the camps but sometimes piles of signs or nearby garbage cans. Even
though it was happening on both sides the anti-Enhanced protesters shouted loudly that it was
being caused by some Spark and this news was frequently repeated.
Because they were being attacked, some Enhanced kids started attending the protests
as bodyguards. They could See and watch out for any intruders and of course the Movers and
the Sparks could fight back. It made sense but it was also obviously a very bad idea.
So that’s how, within a week of escaping Quarantine, the net was flooded with videos of
an Enhanced kid electrocuting a crowd of people.
Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why you were there?
My memory after Quarantine became fuzzier. But there are some things that are harder
to remember than others. And some things that feel both real and unreal at the same time.
After talking to Trisha I remember walking down the stairs to the living room. It just
seemed like there was something I should be doing. My thought was I would see if Irene was
there while I waited for Trisha. Then I could see if I was going to need to help Trisha distract her
or not. Because if she was there with Peter, it might make things difficult.
Something flickered at the corner of my eye and I turned my head.
Blood. It was dripping from the walls. I looked down and realized that my pants were
soaked in it. A river of blood.
Something rubbed against my ankle. I saw one of Irene’s cats bound away, its fur
matted with blood. Below me I heard a cacophony of meowing.
And underneath the sound of cats was a terrible low gurgling. Like water flowing down a
slow drain. Against my will I walked down the stairs and looked into the living room.
Irene was standing in the middle of the room. She was pristine, her white hair and her
clothing completely untouched. Everything else in the room was coated in dripping redness.
In front of her a lump of twisting, bloody meat writhed. It was no longer recognizable as
human. Somewhere in the mass an eye turned toward me and I nearly vomited.
“You thought you could fool me. You thought you could fool me!” Irene laughed coldly. “I know
everything. You never understood agony until you met me. I will make your existence a hell!”
I was shaking. Partly in shock at what I was seeing. But there was something else. A
feeling that I recognized too well.
I felt the familiar presence. The alien voices that tried to press into my mind. Evil.
The walls started to shake. Red blood turned black and started to ooze downward. The
voices were getting louder.
“What are you doing?” Irene sounded worried.
Darkness puddled on the ground, then moved toward the lump of flesh. It surged
upward, then down, like a wave. The lump was getting larger.
“What are you doing!” Irene shrieked.
The darkness was getting larger. I couldn’t breathe. My mind felt like it would break
apart. ThenI blinked.
Thomas was sitting alone in the living room. He was holding something, which he
casually dropped on the table as soon as he saw me. His face went from its usual blankness to
something between curiosity and surprise.
“You aren’t supposed to be here.” He stood and came toward me. Looked me up and down.
“Impressive… determination. But it doesn’t matter. Not anymore.”
Then he left the room. Just like that.
I walked over to the table, to where Thomas had been sitting. Picked up the object he
had left.
It was Peter’s pocket screen.
Trisha chose to come down right at that moment. She looked at me and turned her head
in her usual way. Then she came over and sat down next to me.
“What are you doing?” She whispered. “I told Irene I needed to go out and get some things for
my experiments. You should get out of here before she comes down here and sees you and
starts asking questions.”
“Right. I-” I hesitated. Even though I had told Trisha about a lot of my episodes I still didn’t feel
comfortable telling her about some of my memory lapses. They scared me too badly. I shook
my head, trying to dislodge my dark thoughts, and then simply answered. “Thanks again.”
I heard someone moving upstairs. Trisha made a shooing motion with her hand and
looked behind her. Quietly I turned and snuck down the stairs to Jacob’s room.
“Did you say something?” I heard Irene’s voice ask from above.
“No.” Trisha chirped happily. “I was just excited to be going. Sometimes I make random noises
when I’m excited.”
I waited for a little while longer. Tried to prepare myself for what I had to do. Then I
turned to Jacob’s door and knocked.
There was no answer. For a moment I worried that he might not be there. But of course
it was impossible. We were basically prisoners in our house at that time. I knocked again.
The door swung open. “I already told you Irene, I don’t-”
Jacob’s eyes widened. He started to shut the door but I jammed my foot in it, activating
the safety feature. It popped open again and then we were standing face to face.
“You know.” He said simply.
“Why Jacob?” My voice was so soft and low that I barely recognized it. “After everything, why
would you do this?”
“I don’t- I couldn’t-” Jacob’s eyes looked into mine, then away, then back again, frantic. “Calvin,
please, I-”
“You told me once I don’t care about anyone. But I would never do what you did to me Jacob. I
just feel-” My voice cracked. “I feel so- betrayed. I thought- I really thought that you cared. How
could you-”
“Calvin. Calvin, please.” He backed away, shaking his head violently. “Please don’t-”
“I needed someone so badly. I trusted you.” Tears were running down my face. “But you don’t
care. You’ll do anything to succeed. You don’t care who you hurt.”
“No. I wanted- I didn’t think.” Jacob’s eyes were incredibly wide. “Sometimes I can’t think. I
didn’t know what I was doing-”
“Excuses, it’s always excuses with you Jacob!” I was practically shouting. “You have to take
responsibility-”
There was this terrible intense flash of light. I felt this terrible pressure and flew
backward up the stairs as Jacob’s room suddenly exploded.
There were a lot of vids showing the incident, with a lot of points of view. My own opinion
was fairly conflicted. On one side I was wary of Peter and actively disliked some of his followers,
especially the ones who had tormented Jacob in Quarantine. It didn’t pain me to see the face I
remembered clearly from Peter’s inspirational circles being lead to a black police van.
At the same time it was clear that this incident, so soon after the terrorist was arrested,
could only make the public more nervous about the Enhanced threat. In some of the vids the
footage had been cut to zoom in on the writhing victims, increasing the horror of the scene. It
was too easy to identify with them, with their helplessness and pain. Too easy to just hate us
and want us all dead.
But surprisingly the incident was controversial. On the conspiracy side many took it as
evidence that the government wanted to play up any violence on the part of the Enhanced, no
matter how small. They played videos showing the kid’s face, rigid with fear and ultimately
remorse. Even disliking him as much as I did, I found it hard to not feel bad for him after that.
Anyone with powers knows that you can sometimes be only inches away from losing control,
even when you want control the most.
However security did immediately increase. The vague promises that had been made
about our guards and collars being temporary measures became harder and harder to believe.
For us it meant that Irene was watching us all the time, and we had almost no privacy.
For Peter it was worse. His activities had not gone unnoticed. The ban on gathering
Enhanced in one place was extended for him. He was no longer allowed to gather with more
than a certain number of people of any kind at any time.
Of course this didn’t really stop him. It didn’t even really slow him down. It was already
far too late for that.
I remember thinking two things. One, that I was surprised that I wasn’t dead. And two,
that Jacob was far more powerful than any of us had understood.
Jacob’s room had been built to survive anything short of a port bomb. The walls were
layers of nano material and concrete. Nothing should have been able to even dent them.
When the initial blast cleared and things became visible inside the room, everything
inside was gone. The impenetrable walls had not fallen, but had visibly moved. The ceiling was
dripping, with occasional large chunks falling only to hiss into a molten pile as they hit the floor.
It was just possible to see Jacob’s outline in the middle of the destruction. His body was
like a living flame, pouring heat into the room. But somehow from the spot on the stairs where I
had been thrown I felt only a warm breeze.
“Jacob.” I croaked. The smoke was starting to flow up the stairs, and it made it hard to breathe.
He didn’t respond. Just continued pouring more heat into the room. The walls were
starting to glow.
Jacob had told me that he burned down his friend’s house. But somehow I hadn’t
understood what that had to mean. When your friends were as wealthy as Jacob’s friends, when
they could build their houses from almost unburnable materials, just how difficult it would be to
actually burn it down.
Now I understood. Because it was happening again.
After Peter was banned from gathering with his followers a new strain of vid started
appearing online. These were vids of Peter, sitting by himself, talking to the camera. It was a
stark, open approach. Very much a Millenial style, which I’m sure appealed to the retro kids.
“They tried to silence us.” Peter never spoke about himself anymore. It was always this
nebulous ‘us’. Like he had ceased to be an individual person and now lived in the bodies of his
followers.
“In human history controlling information has always been the key to power. The government
lies to us in order to control us. It tells us that are enemies are all around us, and that we always
have to be vigilant.”
It wasn’t anything that hadn’t been said before. But there was just something about
Peter. The intensity of the emotion on his face, the charismatic poetry of his words. It made you
want to listen. Even though I knew him very well, which removed some of the magic, I still
sometimes found myself moved by his speeches.
“George Orwell said, ‘In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’. Well, we have
been telling the truth. And what has happened? The government treats us like criminals.
Imprisoning us, then trying to stop us from spreading our message. But the truth is bigger than
they are. It cannot be silenced. We will fight them, and we will win.”
Since he was sitting alone in a room there were no cheers after his conclusion. But
these videos bred like rabbits. There were reaction videos. And then there were reactions to the
reactions.
The original video disappeared one day. Of course Peter’s followers blamed it on the
government, and spread copies everywhere. If the government did do it, it was a terrible
miscalculation on their part. The attempt to silence the speech only made it a hundred times
more popular.
Peter’s new popularity made Irene unbearable to live with. She watched us all like we
might attack at any second. There was a violence in her eyes that reminded me of that day in
Quarantine. It seemed like only a matter of time before something terrible happened.
“Jacob!” I shouted, forcing the words past the pain in my throat. “Please stop this! You have to
stop!”
He didn’t even seem to hear me. The ceiling looked dangerously close to falling in on
itself.
Jacob’s outline was blurring. I wondered if it was possible for him to burn hot enough
that he burned himself away. The thought made my chest ache, and the tears in my eyes
weren’t entirely from the smoke.
“Please.” I stood, then immediately fell down again as I was overwhelmed with smoke and
started coughing. “Please! Jacob I forgive you! Just stop! Please stop!”
The glow was getting bright enough that it was hard to look at. Smoke blanketed the
stairs and I heard a siren go off upstairs. If the house was responding, something bad was going
to happen, and soon.
“Jacob! Jacob, don’t do this! I need you! I-” Between the smoke and the glow I was losing sight
of Jacob. It was impossible to know if he was still there, mentally or physically, or not. I felt like I
was being torn in two.
“I love you! I love you damn it!” I screamed into the smoke. It was thick enough that I could
barely breathe, could barely move. But I didn’t care. “I love you and you will come back to me!”
Something flew out of the room. I felt his arms around me again. Just like that first time,
in our lecture hall. The Golden God was standing over me.
“Damn it, Calvin.” He said to me. His voice was rich and low, the way it had been in my vision.
Behind us the room collapsed with a sudden crash. Hot sparks flew out, but I didn’t feel
them. Nothing could touch me when I was in his arms.
Then, as the smoke swirled around us and the walls began to glow, he leaned down,
and he kissed me.
“This is the police! Come out with your hands up.”
Jacob turned away from me and I was startled out of my blissful stupor. Smoke
blanketed the stairs and I could see nothing, but I heard the voice from above us. Something
about Jacob’s golden form meant we were protected from both smoke and fire, but I knew that
the heat had penetrated the stairway by the glow on the walls.
“We’re not finished.” Jacob whispered to me, lifting me up like I weighed as much as a feather.
“No.” I agreed. My mind still hadn’t completely returned, whether from arousal or fear, but I was
past caring. I rested my head against Jacob’s shoulder and let him carry me.
There must have been a dozen men waiting for us when we came out. I knew something
was off when I noticed their uniforms. They were the same kind of military men who had been
set to guard the other Enhanced kids after quarantine.
“Hands up!” Someone in the back shouted. “And powers off! Don’t make us shoot you.”
Jacob looked at me and I jumped down. He closed his eyes, shivering, and the gold fell
off of him like rain. When he opened his eyes again he looked entirely normal, like nothing had
happened. We both turned and raised our hands above our heads.
“Good.” The voice barked. “Now, tell us where we can find Peter Johnson.”
Peter wasn’t in the house. He must have known that people were coming for him. There
couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes between the time Trisha and Irene left and when
the police showed up at our doorstep.
They found his collar and the ankle and wristbands in a pile in his room. He just left them
there and walked out. Like they were jewelry he didn’t want anymore.
The first attack must have happened before I woke up. There were several bombs
planted on campus, in the vicinity of the protests. Despite this only a few people were injured.
Some unlucky kids walking to early classes. No one was killed.
Both sides of the protest assumed the bombs had been planted by the other side. They
attacked each other like two opposing armies. The fire and destruction spread as the conflict got
more heated.
Someone called the police, and they swarmed over the campus. The military men were
there as well, since so many of the protestors were Enhanced kids. So the riot actually got shut
down pretty fast.
But none of that mattered. It was only a diversion. And while the police and the military
men were distracted, Peter and his friends were executing their real plan.
I found myself in another little room. The walls were white and featureless in a way that
suggested there were probably people watching me from the other side. There was no clock
and the sluggish passage of time was a kind of torture.
Finally a man entered. Indistinguishable from the man that I had talked to in Quarantine.
He laid a pocket screen on the table and unfolded it until it covered the surface.
“If you answer my questions truthfully Mr. Harrison you’ll be out of here soon.” The table screen
flickered and showed Peter’s face. “Did you assist Mr. Johnson in planning the attacks?”
“No. I still don’t even know what happened.” Between the incident with Jacob and the police
showing up at our door I still hadn’t seen even a single news vid.
“This is your last chance to confess.” The smile on his face was one of those unconvincing ones
I’d come to dread.
“Just tell me what happened!” After everything my renowned social graces were fraying. But the
look in my eyes must have convinced him. He just tapped the table screen and a vid started
playing.
I recognized the court house. The video zoomed out and showed Peter standing in front
of it by himself. He looked angry.
Peter walked up the steps, ignoring the guards. Someone turned and yelled at him to
stop. Aimed their weapons at him threateningly.
“They think he was after the Enhanced kid.” The man narrated. “Showed up at around 0900 and
then this happened.”
Suddenly the world dissolved. Or so it seemed. Black liquid leaked off the guards, off the
streets, off the walls. It flooded around Peter in a surging black tide.
The guard’s weapon turned to jelly in his hands and joined the black mass that was
forming. Peter raised his hand and the black tide rose up with it. It towered over the court house,
which was already groaning as if it might collapse. Then he brought his hand down and
shattered the walls in a single blow.
“Those are nanites.” The man explained. “They’re so small that people forget how much of
everything around us is made of them. But clearly your friend didn’t forget.”
“He’s not my friend.” I said coldly, watching as Peter dismantled the court house, scattering
guards and other employees without any noticeable concern. Above him the giant black mass
twisted and turned. A black mass that was very familiar.
The darkness at the edge of my vision was back. Nearby the man was trying to say
something but I didn’t hear. Everything seemed very far away.
I kept hearing Irene’s voice. Over and over. Words she never said, couldn’t have said.
“What are you doing. What are you doing!”
10 “It’s strange how you’re sometimes forced to assume an unsympathetic view of
yourself through borrowed eyes.” - Thomas Ligotti
“Ladies and Gentlemen, what happened today was a great tragedy.”
I remember standing on the stage with Jacob, Thomas and Trisha. We were prevented
from seeing the full extent of the gathered crowd by the bright wall screens all around us. They
reflected the image of the speaker in every direction.
“I know that many of you are angry. It’s natural to want to fight back when something hurts us.”
He gestured towards us. “They’re angry too. Angry that this heinous crime was done in the
name of Enhanced people everywhere.”
Dr. Aaron Grant. That was the first time I met him in person. The charismatic force was
impressive.
“Until now we have focused our efforts on helping those of the Enhanced who have the most
potential to develop their powers and use them for good.” He shook his head sadly. “The recent
events show that this approach was short sighted. We missed an opportunity to recruit valuable
allies to our cause.”
Unspoken was the clear implication that they had also missed the opportunity to stop
Peter before he could become a problem. But that was part of Dr. Grant’s charm. He never
really said anything negative, but you still knew he was on your side anyway.
“So as of today we are ending the Elite program.” The crowd erupted with chatter, but he waved
his hand and silenced them. “And in its place we are beginning something entirely new.
Something I call the ‘Friends of Humanity’.”
I have to say, I was never a fan of the name. It sounds a bit too much like a children’s vid
series. But the crowd seemed to like it, and they broke into spontaneous applause.
“Now- Thank you.” He smiled and waved at the crowd again, and they quieted. “Thank you very
much. Now I know you are wondering, what comes next? What are the plans to stop this threat
before it gets out of control?”
On queue a stream of Enhanced children swarmed onto the stage. They were all
wearing solid black uniforms, similar to the ones the Elites had always worn, with silver bars on
the shoulders. I recognized Kevin and Phoebe among them.
“We’re enlisting the help of all our Enhanced Friends as well as all of you out there.” His arm
swept grandiosely over the audience. “Together we’ll build a network of information to root out
terrorists like Eric Johnson and his brother Peter, and keep this country safe.”
The children formed a line on the stage and saluted. There was another burst of
applause. Dr. Grant smiled like a proud father, then turned back to the microphone.
“So remember, the Enhanced are our friends. We all want the same things.” The children all
snapped to attention and then bowed, eliciting more applause. “If you see any sign of any
terrorist activity, just look for the Friends of Humanity uniform. Where there is one of us, then all
of us are united. We will stand together against the darkness.”
It was a nice speech, and the audience reacted appropriately excited. And it was
exciting. Somehow Dr. Grant had managed to turn what could have been another terrifying
disaster for us into a public relations success. Everyone was afraid but no one was trying to kill
us, and that was an unexpected relief after everything that had happened.
But of course we were all still wearing collars. They still had complete control over us.
And while they laughed and applauded the line of perfectly behaved children, there was still the
unspoken knowledge that if we did anything remotely out of line that the ‘Friends’ would
descend upon us without mercy.
My reaction to stressful situations has always been pretty consistent. Find boy. Have sex
with boy. Completely avoid dealing with stressful situation.
After Peter went rogue I couldn’t keep my hands off Jacob. I couldn’t go ten minutes
without him. After being deprived of men for so long, and wanting him so badly, he was like
oxygen to me.
It was about a week after Peter disappeared. Our black uniforms were crumpled on the
floor by the door. The rooms that we had been assigned were stark and almost empty, but the
beds were perfectly fine for our purposes.
Jacob stroked his hand along my side. His blue eyes flicked up and down my body, and
he smiled slightly. It felt so good that I gasped.
“You’re so good at focusing on the present Calvin.” His hand came to rest on my hips. “Even
after everything Peter’s said and done, you never seem to worry about the future. I envy that.”
“It’s not like I don’t worry.” My hands were busy under the sheets and it was Jacob’s turn to
gasp. “I just understand that worrying doesn’t change anything.”
“How are you so good at that?” Jacob’s voice was rough. Breathy.
“Years of practice.”
It felt good to be in control. We were naked except for our collars, the constant reminder
that nothing else was in our control at all. But in that moment I had what I wanted and no one
could stop me from taking it.
“Oh- God, why did it take me so long?” He reached for me and we came together, touching and
rubbing against each other. “How did I live without this?”
“Jacob.” His hands were all over me. I felt myself getting close to the edge of my control, but I
held on.
“I can feel it.” He opened his eyes and they were gold. The heat from his body was like a flame.
“Don’t fight it.” I rolled against him, moving my hand faster and faster. “Let it go.”
He shuddered. The heat flared and then was gone. His eyes fluttered open and they
were his usual perfect blue.
I leaned down and kissed him. He didn’t resist, pulling me into his body. His hands found
me again and I didn’t protest.
“I think I can almost do it.” I was close. Jacob had improved his technique significantly during
our time together. “Watching you, like this, I can almost forget.”
“Please.” The feeling was so intense that it blocked out everything. The world narrowed to the
feeling of his hands on me and the intense passion in his eyes.
“I think. I think I love you.”
I exploded. The words and the moment were so intense. So pure. It filled me up.
Everything came back in pieces. His arms around me. The chill on my skin after my
arousal dimmed.
“I love you too.” I whispered.
After Peter attacked the courthouse, he completely vanished. His internet vids, however,
did not vanish. Shortly after the attack a mysterious new video appeared.
The tone of these videos were different. For one, Peter was obviously no longer in his
room in our house. Instead he sat in front of a black backdrop, with no identifying objects that
might possible give clues to his location.
And now he wasn’t alone. In the background there were always a handful of his lackies. I
recognized them from Quarantine. Obviously the kid he rescued from the courthouse was
among them.
“Hello everyone.” Peter laced his fingers in front of him. “By now you’ve probably heard some
nasty rumors about me and my supporters. Today I am here to clarify a few things.”
A few clips played. They showed the bombings that had disrupted the campus protests.
Then Peter reappeared in the frame, shaking his head sadly.
“You may have heard that we were responsible for these attacks. That is false. These attacks
were instigated by the government, to cover up their own evil intentions. At the same moment
that these attacks occurred, I received the following message.” He picked up his pocket screen
and unfolded it until the text was visible in the frame. It read:
You should be careful. Accidents happen all the time. Just ask your friend Nick.
“A clear threat. And though I agree that I overreacted, I still don’t consider my actions to be
wrong.” He pulled the kid from the courthouse, Nick, close to him. “All of us are valuable. And
unlike Dr. Aaron Grant I actually mean that.”
An image of the Enhanced children in their black uniforms flashed. It was quickly
replaced by old footage of children in soldiers outfits. Then flashed to an image of a swastika.
“These so called ‘Friends of Humanity’ are not your friends. They have lied to you and they will
continue to lie.”
Another image appeared. This time it was us. Me, Jacob, Trisha. Even Thomas. The
camera zoomed in on us one by one and then faded to black.
“Who are these appointed saviors? The ones we are supposed to trust more than our own
eyes? Thankfully, I’ve spent time with them all and I know all their secrets.” He smiled wickedly.
“And soon I’m going to show you, and the world, just who the government wants you to put your
faith into.”
Jacob leaned his head against mine, and then pulled away. “We should get back. It will
be time for afternoon drills soon.”
“Wouldn’t want to miss another drill.” I sat up reluctantly, but couldn’t quite will myself to stand.
“I kind of like it.” Jacob paused in the middle of putting on his uniform and smiled. “It’s good to
feel like I’m helping.”
“I guess I like it better than classes.” I finally managed to get up and lazily picked my uniform off
the floor.
“Why do you hate our English professor so much?” Jacob seemed legitimately puzzled and I
laughed.
Despite moving into the facility we were still college students, and we were still taking
classes. Dr. Grant made arrangements for the professors to come to us, which wasn’t all that
different from the special sessions we’d had on campus anyway. But it meant that I had to
spend time with our English professor again.
Jacob had confessed that he cheated. Our professor grudgingly retracted the charges
against me. He even let Jacob retake the test. A test I noticed was significantly easier than the
one I’d taken.
But even though I was cleared of all wrongdoing our professor still took every
opportunity to harass me. I didn’t understand it. The guy acted like I had killed his dog or
something.
“I’m just glad we only have to meet with him once a week.” I shrugged my uniform on and the
nano seamlessly formed to my skin.
“He’ll probably be there tonight though. For the ceremony.”
“What?” I snapped out of my pleasant stupor. “I thought that was just a ‘Friends of Humanity’
thing?”
“No. They invited everyone’s families and all of our instructors. I guess it makes it more
attractive for the cameras.”
“We already have Dr. Grant and Tommy damn Timmens. Isn’t that enough?”
“I guess not.” Jacob pressed his palm to the wall and the door opened.
The accommodations were nice. Far nicer than Quarantine. But of course we weren’t
allowed to leave.
Not for the first time I reached up and ran my finger along my collar. No matter how
nicely you paint the cage with gold, a cage is a cage. We were still prisoners.
“Are you okay?” Jacob asked, when I didn’t follow him into the hallway.
“No. It’s fine.” I lied.
Something quivered at the edge of my vision, but when I looked it was gone.
“Hello!”
The smiling face of Dr. Grant greeted us as we entered the drill room. The usual
exercise equipment was absent. Instead a handful of Elites lounged around the walls or
sprawled in a few moldable chairs. I recognized Irene and Tommy.
“Uh. Hi.” I looked around and then back at Dr. Grant. “What’s going on?”
“This is a special briefing.” He motioned to the chairs with a friendly wave. “Have a seat. We’re
waiting for a few more and then we’ll begin.”
“I’ll stand, thanks.” I leaned against the wall near the doorway. Jacob glared at me and then sat
on one of the chairs near Irene. She glanced at him and then quickly looked away, blushing.
A kid with orangish red hair leaned over to me and whispered. “You know that Oracle
kid, Thomas, right?”
“Yeah. Why?” I was pretty sure that every room was heavily monitored, and therefore that
nothing I said could ever really be private, so I didn’t bother to whisper.
“What the hell is up with him.” The kid was still whispering for whatever reason. “I said hello to
him in the hallway the other day and he said something totally crazy.”
“Sounds like Thomas.” I commented.
“No, I mean, it was really messed up.” His urgent whispering was starting to annoy me. “He
said, ‘The darkness is coming. It will wash over you like a wave and you will be devoured over
and over for a million, million lifetimes.’ Do, do you think he’s talking about-”
“There we are!” Dr. Grant burst out cheerfully as Trisha and Thomas filed into the room, along
with a few others I didn’t recognize. “Now we can begin.”
“Calvin, what are you doing? We’re going to be late.”
I blinked. Jacob was standing in the doorway of my room. I didn’t remember how I had
gotten there or how long I’d been there.
“What-” I looked over at the wall screen at the scrolling time bar. It was late afternoon. “Is it time
for the ceremony?”
“I don’t know what’s up with you lately, but you better get dressed. We have to set up the
security detail. Don’t you remember what Dr. Grant said?”
“I-” My mind was blank. I couldn’t remember anything that had happened since Trisha and
Thomas entered that room.
“It doesn’t matter.” He sighed. “Just get dressed and I’ll show you what to do.”
He stepped back into the hallway and the door closed behind him. The scrolling wall
clock was the only light in the darkened room. I shivered, then quickly put my hand against the
wall screen.
The room immediately brightened and I relaxed. I hurried over to the printer and waited
while a new uniform processed. Then I hurriedly dressed and walked into the corridor.
“Good. I was worried you might forget again.” He smiled but I didn’t laugh. My memory lapses
were getting frequent enough that it worried me quite a bit.
“You are probably wondering what this is about.”
Dr. Grant gestured at the wall screen and it lit up. Peter’s face appeared behind him. I
recognized it and the black backdrop, from his last video.
The red haired kid was staring at me. I also had this uneasy feeling like I was forgetting
something. My memory was getting increasingly bad ever since the attack on the court house. I
shivered.
“We have information to suggest that Peter Johnson is planning to interfere with the ceremony
tonight.”
A map of Skirbeck appeared on the screen. There were multiple red dots strewn across
it. Dr. Grant reached out and pointed at one nearby.
“Abnormal nanite behavior was detected a few blocks away from us. Now that we know the
extent of Peter’s powers he leaves a fairly distinct trail. In this case the affected nanites were
telecommunications based. It’s probable that he intends to knock out our net connections and
isolate us, then attack.”
“Calvin. Calvin! Are you okay?” Jacob put his hand on my shoulder and shook gently.
The room was full of people. I recognized most of the ones in collars. There were many
older people milling around as well.
“I’m fine.” I lied. It was easier to lie than to have him look at me with pity and worry in his eyes.
“It’s almost time for Dr. Grant’s speech. Do you remember what you’re supposed to do?”
There was a large wall screen on the far side of the room. In front of it was a stage, and
the young children were starting to line up. The older Enhanced kids were standing around the
edge of the stage or near the walls.
“No.” There was no use lying when it would quickly become obvious I didn’t know.
He sighed. “We’re both supposed to be guarding the doors. No one gets in or out after
the speech starts. Are- are you going to be okay to do this?”
“It’s fine.” I turned and started walking towards the doors. “Just show me where I should stand.”
“It should be okay, I think.” Jacob followed me. “Irene and some others are outside. I think no
one will get past them. We probably won’t need to do anything.”
Just then I saw Thomas standing on the other side of the room. He looked up and his
eyes locked onto mine. Then he looked at the stage, and back at me, and smiled one of his
terrifying smiles.
People were starting to stand up and walk out of the room. I saw that Dr. Grant was no
longer standing near the wall screen, but was now talking with Irene. Jacob got up from his
adjacent seat and walked over to me.
“Are you okay? It looks like you’re having one of your episodes.”
“I’m fine.” I shook my head. “I think I need to go back to my room and rest for a little while.”
“Okay. Just make sure you wake up in time for the ceremony. You heard Dr. Grant. We all have
to follow the plan to keep everyone safe.”
“Right.” I nodded, then turned and walked out of the room.
My memory problems had never been this bad before. I felt like I was being torn in half.
Nothing seemed to make sense.
I stopped and rested my head against the wall. Some students filtered past me. A few
looked back at me but they all continued on their way.
“You See it. The possibilities coming together.”
I turned and Thomas was standing there.
“What do you want?”
“I want what you want. For it to stop.”
Then he walked past me without looking back.
Heat. I felt this tremendous heat. I was standing in the hallway with my back against the
wall. Shaking.
People were running past me, screaming. I looked up and didn’t recognize their faces.
Something terrible had happened and I didn’t remember anything. I couldn’t remember
what had happened at all.
“This is all your fault!”
This time it was my English professor standing next to me. People were still running past
but he didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were focused on me angrily.
“What?”
“You did this. With all your indecent behavior. After what we saw in the video-”
“The video?”
Suddenly the heat flared. Someone in a collar backed slowly out of the room.
“We can’t hold him much longer. You have to go.”
“We’re all gathered here today to celebrate our newfound partnership.”
The screen behind Dr. Grant was focused on the crowd. It panned to a large group of
smiling Mundanes. They waved at the camera.
“The Enhanced are just like us. They have friends, families. Communities that they are part of.
And it is through these communities that we will move forward past the horrible tragedies of the
past few weeks.”
Ignoring Dr. Grant I turned to Jacob. “I-I think we’re going to be attacked.”
“What?” He seemed annoyed to be distracted from Dr. Grant’s speech.
“I saw something. A fire. In this room. I think Peter is going to attack us.”
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.” I shook my head. “It’s all kind of jumbled up.”
“We should go tell the others. They could-”
Just then the room went completely dark. Everyone gasped. I felt Jacob reach out for me
and I took his hand.
“Calvin-”
Jacob was interrupted by the wall screen flaring suddenly to life. Peter’s face stared
down at us. The background was the same, but the room looked subtly different than his last
video.
“The video.” I turned to Jacob. “Something terrible is going to happen. We have to leave.”
An outcry came from the back of the room. People were pounding the walls futilely,
trying to make the doors appear. But nothing happened.
“I think we’re trapped.”
“Ladies and Gentlemen, and all net viewers of this broadcast. Hello and Welcome.” Peter’s
voice boomed out over the crowd. “Those of you who joined me for this ceremony, don’t bother
trying to escape. I’ve disabled all the locking mechanisms. We’re going to have a nice, long
chat.”
I was in a small dark room. When I put my hand against the wall to try and turn the lights
and nothing happened. Hyperventilating, I jumped out of the bed and started pounding the
walls.
“Let me out! Let me out!”
Panic vibrated through my body. I was shaking. Something terrible was happening. Had
happened. Would happen.
Tears began rolling down my face and I collapsed on the floor. My stomach felt like a
nest of angry hornets had taken residence inside. The darkness was everywhere and I could do
nothing.
“Please. Please! Someone. Please.” My voice was a pathetic whisper.
One of the walls turned transparent and light flooded into the room. Thomas was
standing there. He looked down at me, inspecting me like I was an interesting insect.
“Do you know why you’re here?” He asked.
“No. What’s going on?”
“You’ll remember soon.” He leaned against the wall.
“What are you doing?” I pawed at the wall, as if somehow I could reach him if only I tried hard
enough.
“Waiting.” He said simply.
“There are many things I want to tell you. But first things first. I promised you that I would
expose the lies the government has been telling you one by one. And I’m going to start with the
leaders of the so called ‘Friends of Humanity’”
A photo flashed on the screen. It was all of us standing on the stage the day after the
courthouse incident. Thomas, Trisha, Jacob and myself.
“Thomas Crespi. You will be shocked to learn that there are no records of a Thomas Crespi.
Seemingly he appeared one day, at the age of fifteen, in downtown Skirbeck. He was soon
reported for harassment and arrested. In police custody he was deemed mentally unstable, but
harmless, and released.”
“A week later a woman was found dead in her apartment. After talking with her friends it soon
became clear that Thomas was the last one to talk to her before she died. When apprehended,
he confessed, claiming that he had done it ‘to prevent the impending apocalypse’. As a juvenile
he was never prosecuted, but was committed for several years, and was only very recently
released.”
People were still pounding on the walls and shouting. It should have been hard to hear
Peter, but it was like his voice was everywhere. Coming out of the walls. The ground. Possibly
even the air around us.
“Patricia Alden. The famous daughter of scientist and inventor Steve Alden. All of us are familiar
with the famous car accident that killed her mother, Mary, and nearly killed Patricia as well.”
A picture of Trisha crying after the accident appeared. Then it slowly morphed into an
older version of Trisha. An older version in a black mask.
“Patricia Alden, also known as the Spectral Lady. She used her powers to steal over a million
dollars from the national bank. The government, which claims now to support her, has offered
ten thousand dollars for information leading to her capture. I’m sure some of you out there will
find that offer tempting.”
My heart pounded. Peter was denouncing us one by one. What was I guilty of? What
was so terrible that it lead to what I had seen?
“Jacob Walker. Every known use of his power has been destructive. He burned down Aaron
Paige’s house in his senior year of high school. Then, after coming to Skirbeck, he is suspected
of burning down his English classroom and is known to have burnt down the house he was
living in only a week ago. Certainly not exactly trustworthy.”
Jacob flashed hot next to me. His eyes flickered with gold. I could tell he was getting
close to the breaking point.
“Jacob, don’t-” I tried to comfort him, but Peter’s voice washed over mine like a wave.
“And then there’s Calvin Harrison. Tall, dark and mysterious. Certainly well known in Skirbeck
for always having a new romantic interest every day.”
“So what is so special about Calvin? Why do men find him so irresistible?”
The picture shifted. I vaguely recognized the boy on the screen as the one who had
been with me the day Jacob set fire to the English building. The look in his eyes made my
stomach churn.
“He got inside my head. I couldn’t stop myself.”
The screen shifted again. A different boy this time. One I only barely remembered.
“The next thing I knew we were in bed. It’s like he hypnotized me. I didn’t remember until later
what had happened.”
It shifted again. And again. And again.
“-I didn’t want-”
“He made me-”
“It was rape. Plain and simple.”
Jacob turned and looked at me. It was a look of pure pain. I felt it like a punch in the
stomach. The gold in his eyes seemed to ignite, and he started to burn hotter and hotter.
“No. No.” I was repeating it over and over, but I couldn’t even hear myself. Peter was
everywhere.
“So there you are, Ladies and Gentlemen. A murderer, a thief, an arsonist and a rapist. These
are your heroes. And this is only the beginning. I will show you-”
I felt the surge of heat next to me, and I tried to reach out for Jacob. But it was too late.
Far too late.
I was standing outside the building. It was all on fire. Impossibly, completely on fire. The
heat was tremendous.
“Stay back.”
A line of kids in black collars was waving people away from the flames. People were
weeping and crying out for their loved ones. From the grim look on the kids’ faces and the wall
of flames it was clear they were never coming out.
“Jacob.” I whispered his name. He was still in there. And this time I wasn’t there to save him.
“You did this. You did this!” My English professor was there again. Screaming in my face.
Pushing me.
“Why can’t you leave me alone?!” I rushed him, shoving him backwards. “Tell me! Why?!”
“You’re in my head.” He just looked at me, all emotion drained out of his face. “I can’t stop
thinking of you. You make me think of you. Make me love you.”
“No. You’re lying. Stop it! Stop!”
He froze, looking like a puppet whose strings had been cut. I gasped for breath. The
night was pushing in on me, wrapping me in darkness.
“No, no, no! You’re lying! You have to be lying.” I pushed him again. He didn’t resist. I grabbed
him and started shaking.
“It can’t be true. It can’t be true.” I sobbed into his shirt. “Please. Stop it. Leave me alone. Stop it
and leave me alone!”
He looked at me. There was this fear and hatred in his eyes for a moment. I’ll never
forget it.
Then he turned and ran into the flames.
I was back in the cell. Thomas looked at me, then pushed away from the wall.
“Do you remember why you’re here now?”
Flames flickered behind my eyes. Then my English professor’s face. I moaned. “They’re
all dead.”
“Do you remember why you’re here?” He kneeled down, staring intently.
“I killed him. I made him kill himself.” I looked down at my hands, which were shaking
spasmodically. “I’m a monster.”
“Good. You remember.” He smiled. “Then let’s begin.”
“Begin?” I croaked. “Begin what?”
A screen behind Thomas flickered. There were explosions. Gunfire. And in the
background, some familiar faces.
“Waiting.” He said simply.