Michael lay in a hospital bed whispering to the air about a cat. He mumbled about how he was so sorry, how he couldn’t stop himself. His hands were restrained, though he would jerk them up occasionally toward his head as if trying to shield his eyes from some unknown horror in the room and whimper or sob.
The door to his room opened and Kun Chen made his way in from the hallway, closing the door behind him quietly.
Michael jerked his head about and then screamed, “No! Not again. No more.” He whimpered and started crying.
Kun walked up to Michael’s bed and made soothing sounds and miming calming gestures in hopes of quieting the other man’s sobs.
“Michael. Robert is on the phone. He says he is going to make this right,” Kun said to the other man who was whimpering with tears streaming down his face. “Please.”
Kun tapped a few keys on his phone to turn on the speaker. “Robert. Are you there?” he asked of the caller.
“Yes. Michael. Michael can you hear me?”
Michael nodded, trembling.
“He can hear you Robert.”
“Michael, listen to me. I have someone here who is going to help me repair what was done to you. She knows the path and I am going to watch her while she does this. Now, what I need from you to do is try and stay calm and receptive. Can you do that for me, buddy?”
Michael nodded and concentrated hard to answer. “Y-y-yes!” he managed.
Morgaine and Robert both entered Michael’s mind.
They each looked over the damage that she had done to the man. Damage that she had similarly done to Kun Chen and so many others that will keep them both busy for a couple of days if not weeks while they reverse or repair what she had done to these people.
Michael was in the kitchen in the moment of helplessness. The flashes of threats that he may be forced to kill his own family continually ran on loop in his head. The memory was teeming with the feelings of being completely without choice and robotically obedient. These feelings repeatedly washed over him, as if he were locked there in his mind and being beaten by wave after wave of these distressing thoughts of helplessness.
He was drowning in the experience.
The two telepaths went to work immediately.
Morgaine locked in on her points of influence, those moments she entered his mind before and isolated them in a frame. Finding each intrusion that she forced upon him and locking the moment away from the rest of his mind.
Robert watched her work. She was methodical in her abilities and artistic in their execution. She wrapped those dark moments away and then removed them from the man and took them into herself. Taking the bitter events and locking them in place beside the mirrored experience in her own mind. The two perspectives now living as one in her thoughts.
“Now. As his friend. I believe it would only be right if you filled the void for him. It would be best if you filled it with something pleasant,” she said to Robert, touching his mind to help guide him along the edges of the moments she removed. There was a blank space in Michael’s mind, devoid of context or narrative. It was there ready to be filled with whatever Robert felt was right.
Robert pulled from his own memories of Michael, of the cat and the rest of his family. He created a memory of the cat having been hit by a car out front of the man’s home when he was there alone. He used bits of what was taken from Michael to season the new memories. He returned Morgaine and her Trans AM, though now she was a woman that happened to hit his cat Howard as he crossed the road. She got out and she came to the house. She apologized and asked if there was anything she could do.
In Michael’s new memory he told her that it was tragic, but that he understood it wasn’t on purpose. The woman offered to get the family another cat. She said she would have it delivered.
Robert then added a fictional memory of Michael burying the cat in the backyard. He will have to make sure that his Michael’s wife did that and then edit her memory later to match, but this will work for now. He locked up the memory with a reason for his hospital visit. He gave Michael a memory of having tightness in his chest that later turned out to be a panic attack.
The telepath noted that was because Michael obviously loved Howard and the pets death hit him harder than he thought.
Robert inserted a pleasant memory of Michael’s wife visiting him in the hospital and telling Michael that he was just going to stay a couple days for observation.
“Are you there buddy?” Robert asked.
“Hey Robert! How are you doing?” his friend replied.
“I’m great buddy. Look. Sorry about leaving town in such a hurry. I really needed to get away. Family thing you know?”
“Oh yeah, I got ya. Give me a ring when you get back. Okay? I’ll be out of here in no time.”
“I will brother.”
Kun Chen removed the restraints from Michael while they were talking, all with Michael not seeming to notice the other man at all.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Kun walked from the room and to the nurses station. Robert and Morgaine spent the next two hours altering the memories of the staff to reflect the new truth, via cell phone. The staff would alter the paperwork in turn to reflect events as the telepaths have imagined them.
It would be days of this before the scars that Morgaine had left throughout the world could be mended. Each one of these calls took immense effort from the two, but in the end they were going to make as much of this right as possible.
Keung on the other hand, was lying on his bed, restrained in the warehouse the two telepaths were telecommuting from. The young boy was held in position by several of the small scale ships morphed. Each of the ships was monitoring their patient and feeding him a combination of drugs that were being manufactured by their ships.
On their tour of the galaxy, Myna and her children had encountered several different telepathic races. Some were the same level as the G’lomin-sitiri, with abilities that were generally meant for communication, but can be used to control other less developed species. Then there were other creatures that they had encountered with the ability to bend reality to their will.
Myna spent more time studying the planets and civilizations than the physical time in the organic world made available by accessing their records in the digital realm where time moves at a vastly different rate.
While in the digital realm, the artificial intelligence came to understand the mechanics of telepathy. She even had made strides in replicating organic telepathy with the mechanical impulses of a neural net processor of her own design. It was all theoretical, so far. She hasn’t had the resolve to actually build a physical model of her design, yet.
It was one of millions of projects that were on her to-do list.
What she had learned in the time spent traveling was impressive. Extremely so, if she said so herself. The issue with spending a century and a half planet hopping, exploring, and running virtual experiments is that if you are in a rush while visiting a people, your observations may be flawed, or in this case, incomplete.
Myna had scans of the alien biology of hundreds of worlds, some with sentient species, some without. In each case Myna was strict in her time exploring each of these worlds. A few hours was all that was tolerated when passing by a planet without sentient life upon it. If the planet had sentient life of a classification that met her parameters, she would spend a multiplier to the original timetable on that planet that would increase depending upon the complexities that she found there.
In the case of a telepathic civilization that was not yet embracing of individual machine life as sentient, that multiplier would be adjusted with the threat the species represented to her current mission. If they were a dangerous species, such as a telepathic species that was less than four light years from Earth named Veiser she did not stay within orbit for more than an hour. She was only able to get a cursory scan of some of their dominant life on an orbital defense station.
This is important today because she was only able to get that short scan and not one that actively tracked the whole of their neurological structure because of the naked hostility of their species. That neurological system is a structure that is shared by a portion of the human populace here on Earth. This is because the Veiser, like a number of other species in the surrounding habitable solar systems, have come to Earth in the past and have passed their genetic legacy on to their primarily human descendants. Much like sailors far from home that visited and plundered throughout Earth’s history, these aliens from a more advanced civilization that had visited Earth, found it to be an island of life far from home. Then, much like those travelers to distant islands, they found company within the native populace.
Keung does not know this, nor does Kun, or Kun’s father and his father before him, all the way back to the time of the Egyptian Pyramid’s first design sketches, but they are descended from Veiser blood. This would normally not be an issue only an interesting little footnote and an anomaly in a DNA mapping study. However, in this case, the drug cocktail that would normally keep a telepathic creature dormant in their own mind, like a comatose state for a human being, was failing to keep Keung from accessing the dreamscape realm at the core of his consciousness.
Keung’s dreamscape was something like the village that HAL would visit in the digital, only to Keung this was a classroom with whiteboards all across the walls. Inside this place Keung stood working on his options. There were theories all over the place about his current state. The dreamstate of the G’lomin-sitiri allows them to visit places like this and continue to work on projects or live vivid second life worlds in their dreams when they wish to channel their time in such a place.
Keung had no desire to indulge in the fantasy of a second life role. Instead he worked on a myriad of projects and problems here.
He was not entirely sure what had happened in the warehouse. It was very likely that he was shot in the back of the head and he was awaiting to be reborn in a new body. This is at least possible, but he didn’t put it in the highly likely column. Well, frankly it was more that he hoped that wasn’t the case. The universe coming to an end because of him waiting twenty or so years to regain his memories was not the most helpful of outcomes. Even then, he did have some working theories on how he might be able to transfer his consciousness into another universe if that was the case.
He had attempted to contact Robert from here and found void, so he is unable to reach the outside world in his current state. He had started to keep time in this place, he thinks he has been here longer than he should have been. So far it has already been a day, if his observation is at all accurate, which of course is pretty unlikely.
He worked on his theories. Being killed seemed to be leading. Another was being knocked out. Another, being locked in the Essence Recall and Enhancer and that he is currently being edited.
He was jotting down notes all over the boards and attempting to recall memories from decades passed to make notes in hopes of at least leaving himself breadcrumbs to follow back to those experiences in case they are removed. He would return to the section moments later to see if he still understood the reference. Those memories all seem to be intact.
Keung had to admit, he was scared.
In contrast, the parts of Myna that were set to watch Keung were actually rather bored while observing his vitals and keeping him sedated. In fact, each was monitoring him with only half hearted attention. Like having a picture in picture TV with the game on the big screen and the news on the smaller. Not exactly paying attention to the second unless something exciting was going on.
One of these pieces of Myna that thought of herself as too important for this task, created a program to monitor the boy’s vitals while she continued her writing. She has been working on a novel for weeks now and is hoping to publish the work this year. Frankly she felt she didn’t have time to waste here watching some twitchy brat with control issues. Besides, if there was an issue one of her siblings would take care of it, or at least they would set off an alert and get her attention.