“I would walk on hot coals for you!” a voice resembling Rod’s said in the back of his mind to a phantom of that woman Rod was so crazy for.

No sooner had Jam left the drawing room and entered the white hall, had he assumed the twisted countenance of a jealous lover intent on murdering the man who supplanted him. Now, despite having honed the air of a right and judicious, principled man, the appearance of which he had mastered after forcing himself to discard his old self, in which only the likes of Rod and Aleku and other degenerate creatures could appreciate, and manufacturing a new one like the master technician that he was, it was by no means easy for him to suppress for that long the feeling of doubt that pervades even the most depraved of villains when it comes to the very life of their arch nemesis. Except for the abundance of memories Jam had of Rod, and of all the good and merry things that the man had done for him over the years since the inception of their friendship at the beginning of highschool, and of his recollection of his old self, and which might reemerge to take ownership of his body and mind at the most critical of moments unexpectedly, Jam was an excited and pleased man as any could be; for he was a very rich man, holding a very powerful station at such a young age relative to his peers. He had way more experience than Rod in the ways of love and companionship. He was more loved by people than him by all accounts. In addition, he could get any woman that he wanted, for he was very adept at masking his true feelings and intentions to conform, having trained extensively in the dark arts of manipulation. It was thanks to Rod that he perfected his technique in exploiting weaknesses in people, after all. Now, for any other man this would be satisfaction enough, but for Jam it was not because he desperately craved more power. Although he could gain full control of a typical person through his technical charisma, he truly wanted the ability to control an entire nation. He had reached the very heights a man from his background could reach in the government, and he wanted more. It was often a wonder even to himself why he could possibly want more riches and power when he had so much in abundance, but he reasoned that it was because with absolute power he could enact absolute justice without anything, or anyone, holding him back. For too long he had spent his life being pushed around by kids bigger than him and having to suck it up just to get by, having to pretend that he enjoyed it when in reality he was angry that his boundaries were being violated. However, these considerations were not conscious to Jam, and if anyone would have pointed them out to him, he would have denied them vehemently and honestly. However, something in the back of his mind compelled him to think about the reasons why he felt and thought the way that he did about Rod.

What was it about Rod that consumed his entire mind? What was it about himself which made him so occupied by the utter failure?

At the entrance of the white hall he almost tripped over the young woman from before, from his dream, who was crouched against the wall with her face buried in her hands. The sight of this pretty young woman snapped Jam out of his ruminations; he forced a smile, motivated as by the reasons outlined before, and said, running his usual pickup routine, “What ails you, my darling? You speak to a man who has been bestowed with great power and responsibility: I am he who has in his command the complete authority of the Crown Prosecution Service. If you believe that there has been a crime committed, that there is a criminal on the loose, that you are in danger in any way, shape or form, I am the one to speak to, for it is my sole duty and honour to uphold the full force of the law from beginning to end, whether online or offline. I am he who as the ultimate power over life and death, over freedom and imprisonment, over body autonomy and slavery. Oh, my pretty little darling, there is nothing on this earth which I have no the authority to prosecute. All men are equal under the eyes of the law.”

The woman looked up, her eyes glistening with tears. “That’s a lie. Sick men get away with all sorts if it benefits the government.”

Jam raised his hand and clenched it slowly into a fist with a smirk, and said, “I do not know why you are crying, but the very fact that you are crying signals to me that you need my help.”

“How chauvinistic,” muttered Bailey, rolling her eyes.

Jam frowned. “Why, yes it precisely is. How rude of me. You know, I do not usually talk like this to my other friends, haha,” Jam said, his cheeks turning red from intense embarrassment. He started to sweat and muttered out loud his thoughts accidentally, “Damn it, that fool has rubbed off on me. His illness must be contagious.”

“Who are you speaking about?” asked the young woman, wiping her cheeks.

“Oh, no one,” said Jam quickly.

Bailey turned her head away from the strange man, her knees tucked into her chin and her arms folded across them, covering her mouth and nose so that only her blue eyes could be seen beneath her fringe, and said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to be on my own if that’s alright.”

“Ah,” said Jam smugly, making a show of checking his fingernails, “I have extensively read several books on the topic of interpersonal relationships, and I can correctly deduce that you are asserting your boundaries. Is that correct?”

The young woman turned and gave him a strange look. “... I suppose.”

“Good,” Jam said with a pleased expression. “It is good for a woman to assert their boundaries in this patriarchal world.” He said this bombastically as though he was saying it ironically; however, it must be stated that this man was saying this to establish trust within the recipient of his charm. His mechanical method, the technique to which he had honed and crafted over the several years away from Rod’s dark and depressing influence, involved in its first step the creation of trust. Jam was a smart man, so he knew that this was a crucial and necessary step in the attainment of his plan. “Before you came back here, where were you?”

“I was in Canda,” replied the young woman.

“Why?”

“Because I have a job there,” she said. Then, gazing into the corner of the room, she added, “Because I’d rather be somewhere where my father can’t get to me.”

“But he can get to you anywhere. How will being in Canada stop him?”

“It won’t, I know that; but Canada is one of the few places where he hasn’t completely bought out the government.”

“Interesting,” said Jam, rubbing his chin.

“Ha, why?” she said sarcastically.

“You hate your father that much?”

She was silent for a moment, appearing to think, and then said, “I do not hate anyone: I just prefer to be outside his influence.”

“Why?”

“Because my father is not the man that he portrays himself to be. He is a vindictive man intent on exploiting everyone and everything for personal gain. He is a liar and a thief. He is a conman. I was raised to believe that he was the centre of the universe, the way that he designed our living situation and schooling. He brainwashed us thoroughly. It wasn’t until I went to university and read books that weren’t selectively picked by his hateful hand that I learned the truth,” she said, her face twisted with determination, as though holding back more that could be said.

“This does not make sense. This description of the man you call your father is not at all how I would describe such a man, for the man that I have just encountered is the most benevolent man who acts selflessly even though it would hurt his bottom line.”

“You are brainwashed,” she muttered, looking down at the floor.

Jam did not like to be wrong. “Not true, sweetie,” he began with a spiteful undertone lurking beneath such words, “I just spend half an hour trying to convince him out of the most craziest of ideas.”

“Really? That sounds odd because he is always going for crazy ideas. It’s me who has to usually talk him out of it.”

“Lena? You mean your sister?”

Bailey did not say anything, instead appearing disinterested in talking further to the stranger.

“You said before that they are not your sisters. What did you mean by that?”

“I meant exactly what I said. I am not related to them; in fact, none of them are related.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Why would Aleku call them his daughters if they are not really his daughters?”

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

At this moment, Bailey became very silent and pale in the face.

“Because he is an egomaniac,” spluttered Bailey, red in the face from anger. She took a huge breath and explained, “Aleku likes to be in control. In exchange for supporting certain,” and she emphasised the word certain, “governmental parties in certain countries, he is allowed to take children from these countries. The little I know is that he has taken thousands of children over the years since-”

“Why has he been taking children?” interjected Jam shaking his head in disbelief.

Bailey looked at him as though he was stupid. “To train the System, duh,” she said with a roll of her eyes.

“So where are these children now?”

“I don’t know,” said Bailey dejectedly. “But sixteen of them are here, including me.”

“You all were used to train the System? But why?”

“The little that was explained to us was that Aleku needed the NPC’s of his world to be utterly realistic; and to do that he needed to train the AI on real children.”

“Why didn’t he just do this by the book and through the proper channels, I mean-”

“Don’t you get it? There are no proper channels. To get his System through the door as quickly as possible he needed to do this. And I believed him for so long that he was right. I defended him, I helped him indoctrinate all our ‘sisters’ to cooperate with the machine!” she burst into tears suddenly, her face swelling red, “I am so awful! I am a bad human being; a bad sister! That is why I do not call them my sisters – because I let them down!”

“Ah, my gorgeous, that is where you are wrong!” cried Jam, feeling in his heart an overwhelming sensation of romanticism that he could not ignore, “Ah, if I was a younger man I would be doomed by the emotional overload that I am feeling now; but fear not, for I am a stupendously rational man, the most rational man in the whole of Britain!” he exclaimed triumphantly, carried away by the utter force of his attraction to the distressed daughter of his best friend. “I will be honest with you; it is rare for a man like myself to be taken in by emotions. My natural inclination is to suppress them, to run away from them, to hide from them, but with you, I somehow have the courage to face them head on. Oh, Bailey, you do not know what you have just done. I will, upon my honour, make it up to you – all the horrors that you have experienced, the utter invalidation of your experience growing up; I too have grown up similar. Now, what is to be done in your opinion? Must we destroy the system together?” He proclaimed all this sentiment with a certain falsity of character, however, for he had trained himself through the study of psychology, most notably the dark triad, to act in such a way as to activate certain primordial systems in the human creature. Behind his mask, there was a sinister being at play.

“Oh,” said Bailey, trusting the handsome, romantic rogue. She suddenly saw him in a new light and appreciated his chiseled features. “I am flattered,” she said, blushing. “But what can you do against a man of Aleku’s size? And ontop of that he is your best friend? Oh, I could not take away the best friend of even the evillest of people because everyone deserves friendship.”

__

“They do?” asked Jam rhetorically, raising his eyebrows in surprise.

“Oh, yes, everyone, no matter what they have done, deserves at least one friend.”

At once a dark shadow came over the man. Jam, as we have stated several times, was the crown prosecutor, his chief duty to prosecute criminal cases after they had been investigated by the police and other investigative organisations in the whole country; he was therefore properly upper middle class. Rod, on the other hand, was a failed student, even though they both came from similar backgrounds (albeit Jam was born with slightly more advantages than the former), and thus when he heard that everyone should have at least one friend, he felt immediately repulsed at such a notion. This was because, after having worked himself up from his humble beginnings to become one of the most powerful and envied government officials in the country, he could look down from his vantage point and see the worthlessness of all those below him. It wasn’t a matter of hard work – he was self-aware to know that – but it was the fact that ever since he abandoned Rod to make new friends in university, and shed his old self, he realised that the world view he held was the ‘wrong’ one, and in an effort to prevent his own natural inclination to adopt it again, he ruthlessly revolted against any mental faculty from groping for it with its fleshy extremities and desire to question everything. Because of this, he knew that in order to shut out a type of people from existence, they must be starved of social contact completely. In addition to all of this, of course, as we have explained over and over again in the previous chapters, Jam desired Rod’s death, and as a result of that the notion that such a repulsive creature should be granted a friendship was in itself repulsive.

“I think you are mistaken,” said Jam with a frown, his eyes suddenly becoming cold with malice. “You might not be aware, since you are so young and naive, that there are men out there who deserve nothing but the contempt of every person on the planet. Even the most intelligent, handsome and charismatic men can be the most repulsive creatures deserving of a gruesome death. Don’t you agree?”

The crown prosecutor said these words with theatrical emphasis, as though he was giving a soliloquy, while his dark eyes pierced that who, without knowing it, thought about the same person but in a completely different way, trying to justify he who, in his own opinion, must be condemned to death. Bailey reddened at such a proclamation, feeling the effects of such deep-seated resentment radiate outwardly from the man like a furnace.

“I think that you like this man, actually,” said Bailey after a moment of contemplation.

“What?” cried the crown prosecutor.

“Yes, you must definitely like him...maybe even love him.”

“Ha!” wheezed Jam, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets, “You must be mad!”

“Mad? No, it is you that is not thinking straight. You talk just like Just when she fancies someone.”

“Shut up!” cried Jam, bright red in the face and sweating profusely. “I will have you know that I am very liked by women,” he coughed.

Bailey rolled her eyes and let her head fall into her lap. “Aren’t you going to arrest him?”

“Arrest who? Ah, yes, well there is no evidence against him unfortunately because the man’s crime is that of a psychological nature.”

“Huh?” Bailey said, looking at him blankly.

“His mere existence is a crime at this point, my lady. Unfortunately, the extent of English Law cannot reach such a man.”

“Oh, we’re talking about your friend.”

“He is not my friend,” replied Jam, crossing his eyebrows.

“If he hasn’t committed a crime then is he even a criminal?”

The crown prosecutor smiled wickedly at the young woman. “Ah, ah,” he murmured, “this man is worse than a criminal because at least with a criminal one can see clearly that they have committed a crime, but with him... he is the crime. Every step that he makes is like a stomp upon my heart. Every breath he makes is air out of my lungs. Every second he lives is a second taken away from me, and from all the rest of humanity. He is a danger to society, a danger to natural life.”

“Well, good luck, I guess,” said Bailey, rising from her crouched position. She had grown uncomfortable from the man’s obsession about another man and wondered if he was actually talking about himself. She felt somewhat sorry for him as well, considering that a man must hate himself so much to hate another so venomously and passionately as this man did another. She was so put off by all his rhetoric that she wished for a slight second to be back in that room with her father, for at least she knew him well. This man...This man gave her the creeps. She patted herself down and started towards the other end of the white hall, making sure to keep her head down.

“It was nice speaking to you, but I am going to go see how my sisters are doing,” she said in a rehearsed tone. She felt slightly ashamed for feelings of discomfort, but she had learned from her new friends in Canada that she had the right to assert her boundaries.

As she had now collected herself and traversed the white hall into the adjacent green drawing room, which was itself draped lavishly in green Persian silks and ornaments from the East, wherein hung a sparkling emerald curtain which seeped through the tiniest of cracks the emerging orange sun, she entered with a more determined air than previously assumed than when confronting her father earlier, and resisting the weariness which compelled her to sleep, but yet attracted to the light which wanted to burst out of the window so badly, she strolled over to it. The window overlooked the row of trees on the front beside the landing strip, and to her left she could see all four of her sisters huddled together, though only their heads were visible; in the midst of these floating heads, lay a large, ragged man, rolling on the ground like a beetle struggling to get back on its front legs. She couldn’t hear anything over the sound of her own quiet breathing, and over the thumping of her own heart.

“Who is that man?” she wondered, placing a hand on her heart. Then she frowned, remembering how she had just spoken to Jam, “Who was he speaking about? Is it the same man dad was talking about? Why do I get the feeling that I know him?”

Rapid as she had begun to reflect on the events prior and her relation to them, she felt the room suddenly grow colder. She had not felt this feeling before, except for when she was on the phone at the call centre, and only then with a particular man. It was a feeling of doubt which pervaded the air and into her stomach, making her feel uneasy, so much so that she crossed her arms. However, the sense was so overwhelming, the goosebumps so distressing that she could not take it anymore; she spun around, her heart in her throat and her eyes wide with gasping terror. It was the man from the other room, Jam, the crown prosecutor, the stranger who had volunteered his help. She had recognised, however, something terribly different about him than before. Had he changed in those few moments so drastically? His high olive cheekbones were still high, yes, but they were grotesquely high. His eyes, sharp and naturally inquisitive, were now disturbingly penetrating to such a degree that she felt exposed and judged, inadequate and a stranger in this world; it was though everything that was not sanctioned, that was not in line with his world view was deserving of punishment, of humiliation, of disease and torture. His brows were crooked, and his nose pointed like a fishhook. Bailey’s first impression of his man earlier was that he was an impartial, authoritarian figure, a man of principle, an astute man; her second in the white hall was that he was a tumultuous, dark, and disturbed fellow with good intentions; but the third, the third was being written over and over again with every blink and every breath she took while he was standing by the entrance, staring at her underneath his dark furrowed brows and starving, maddening eyes. But she was not one to trust first, second or even third impressions when they were unfavourable, but instead chose to give even the most basest of men, the most weirdest of men, the most problematic of men the benefit of the doubt. This is in spite of so many repeated warnings from her friends to distrust all men who act a certain way, to listen to her first impulses, and mistrust her second ones. She stiffened, and stifled as a result all her feelings of compassion that were so in abundance within her.