Katya listened quietly as she was escorted through the lab complex.
"As you're probably aware, research into the human psionic potential was being conducted long before the formation of our precious Confederacy. Individual nation-state governments used to dabble in funding for what they called 'parapsychology' in the hopes of uncovering some fantastical military applications," the man grinned. "The Americans, in particular," he added, with a particular, flaunting flourish on the forbidden word.
His name was Dr. Gelemen. Revner had met this man once. Katya had found a scribbled note, barely legible in the margin of his official, classified report; just a summation: "genius, but... erratic".
Revner, she thought.
"Not surprisingly, without any understanding of or thought given to the actual biomechanical impulses that generate psionic effects -- what we now call 'mentalics' -- all their experiments were inevitably failures," he shrugged, as if to show how obvious that should have been. "I apologize, by the way, for the broad-level summary, but, I imagine this is as much as you will understand, anyway."
Katya nodded flatly as they pressed on through another hallway.
Why have you been withholding information from me? The Oak Hill and Mansfield incidents, this unreported psionic research program (even though the G.C.N. was a party to the international ban), and even the fact that there had been other telepaths in Pikevale -- victims, too.
"What we now know about human psionic capabilities is that it is almost entirely rooted in our ability to empathize, of all things," he lifted a brow and rolled one of his eyes. "Thus, the notion of the 'telekinetic psyker' that moves objects with his mind and creates explosions out of thin air must remain relegated to the movies.
"Palm the pad again. Security is, as you can imagine, a priority here."
She did so, and then waited for him to stride through the sliding glass door before she followed in step.
You told me that I couldn't find the survivor.
He continued, "However, the stereotype of the mind-reading telepath is, actually, not so far off. Although, I doubt that anybody realizes that they indeed exist, or that there is at least one active government program to train and deploy them. But then again, that's the point I suppose. They wouldn't be much use if they weren't able to hide in plain sight." Swiveling without letting up on his pace, he turned to her, "You weren't aware of their existence before, either, were you?"
"That's classified," she replied, dryly, without clarifying whether she was referring to what informations she had access to or to the subject matter itself.
You told me that I wasn't becoming a monster.
Without skipping a beat, perhaps without even hearing her answer, he proceeded, "Where the stereotype falls short, however, is the assumption that telepaths have total control over whose minds to read and whose to ignore, as if they can simply dash in and out of internal monologues like a little bumblebee between flowers. Once you understand the mentalics involved, it becomes obvious that that isn't how it would work at all." He paused, this was his favorite part, "Do you know how it does work?"
She said no.
I don't know why you no longer want to help me, why you wanted me suspended indefinitely, or why it was someone else who had to tell me that. I'm sorry that I had to go behind your back, but it seems like you don't trust me to handle hearing the truth anymore.
You told me that I have sacrificed too much already. What does that mean? Don't you know I can't stop now? I’m an Agent. I am the scalpel of the Confederacy. You made me this way; this is all I know.
So even if it means that I have to avoid you and go behind you, even if it means that I have to forfeit your trust, even if it means that I become a monster....
He smiled condescendingly, "Of course not. As I said earlier, telepathy is simply an amplified form of empathy. Imagine thinking about someone so much that you begin to see yourself in their shoes. Not so hard, we can all do that much. But imagine if you weren't seeing their shoes from your perspective, imagine if you could blot out your ego so entirely that you would view their shoes entirely from their perspective. Of course, you can't imagine this, because your mind won't let you. The ordinary human mind is incapable of emptying itself so entirely as to void its own sense of self.
"But, that was the critical insight. That was the mentalic key that we had to unlock, to circumvent the mind's natural protective mechanisms and override the preservation of its own ego. Once we -- once I identified that insight -- we just had to go find it, and once we did -- once I did -- we just turned it off."
His grin had broadened to stretch from ear to ear now, so widely and so grotesquely that she thought she could see the scars they carved into his cheeks when they stretched his lips across his face.
I... I have a duty to the G.C.N. to finish this -- to complete my mission, at any and all cost.
"Each psychic can form a single mental link with one other individual. From then on, they share everything! Every memory, every experience, every sense and every perception. Of course, we train them to make sure the information flow is unidirectional. Obviously, there's no point in having a telepath that bleeds all of his information back into the target.”
Just as you said, I am... the perfect Agent.
"We're now experimenting with using them as a communication node -- pairing them up with on-the-ground targets who would serve as field sensors. We could keep our psychics safely back home then -- no more messes like Pikevale -- safely plugged in to their targets from a secure location, like an entangled quantum particle. Could you imagine that? A networked, psionic sensor array."
He stopped walking. His speech had sped up as he had finished his last thought, and now another smile was coming to his lips.
"Obvious--" he laughed again as he shook his head, "--so obvious. Sometimes you just need to hear yourself say these things out loud."
Katya frowned in disgust, but did not say anything. Avanti, who had of course heard it all, reassured her that they were almost there.
---
She knew that they had reached their destination. For some time now, she had been hearing a faint, but rhythmic whisper. It grew stronger with each step she took.
No longer in the Fringelands and off the G.C.N. power grid, this time, Katya's omni-device was broadcasting back environmental sensory input at full power. Avanti's voice piped into Katya's ear, "Do you hear that now?"
Avanti knew better than to expect her to answer. Agents were trained to never vocalize to their Operators in the presence of others. If they needed to respond, they could do so subvocally, and even then only rarely and when they were sure they would not be noticed.
But Avanti knew this and she had worded her phrase more as a prompt than as a question. She had, of course, identified the sound long before, but she was thoughtful about waiting for the perfect time to bring any particular environmental phenomena to Katya's attention. It would make no sense to highlight the sound before Katya could reasonably be expected to hear it.
But now, she did. It was a man's voice. And it was chanting, "Three. Five. Five. Three. Five. Five. Three. Five. Five."
When they arrived at the observation room, it was obvious that the words were being recited from inside the enormous glass cube where patient A32 was being held.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
"Why is he saying that?" Katya asked.
"How should we know?" the guard said. "He hasn't shut up for days now."
She could see a nascent insanity creeping within the man's eyes as the patient's plaintive refrain broadcast and reverberated over and over in the small, hollow room.
"Let me in," she said.
"Agent Tursyn, the patient is in a very fragile state and under close monitoring. Your presence could seriously disrupt his health," Gelemen protested. "I'm sure I could answer any questions you may have."
"If that were true, I wouldn't be here right now," she responded icily.
Gelemen's eyes darkened as he curled his lips. He turned and, slowly, nodded to the guards by the door.
For a moment, Katya hesitated. Something was odd. No, not that. Something else.
"It's fine," Avanti said, "Hollow steel door with honeycomb core. Dual key authorization system with three-hour auto-shutdown. Standard grade-three security fare."
"Why is the patient under such heavy lockdown?" Katya asked aloud.
Gelemen tried to hide a sneer, "I thought the Agent understood everything." But there was more than just contempt in his voice, there was another thing, although she couldn't tell what.
"If a psychic empties himself of his ego when he forms a mind-link, what happens if the mind-link is broken?" she asked.
"When it's broken, the psychic's mind will have nothing more to fill itself with," Gelemen replied.
"What does that mean? What about his original ego?"
"It fills the void, to a limited extent, but once obliterated it can never truly come back in the way the rest of us normally experience it."
"So what is he experiencing then?"
Gelemen shrugged. "A dream-like catatonia, perhaps? He is incapable of distinguishing between active experiences in the present and memories of experiences he -- or his target -- may have previously had."
"May have?"
"Maybe the experiences really did happen. Maybe they were simply dreams of experiences, or imagined fantasies. His perception of reality is quite permanently altered, without a foundation to ground it to."
Katya shifted her feet uncomfortably, "When did this happen? How?"
Gelemen smiled again, "A few days ago? A week? Maybe the target fell into a coma? Maybe death? This is a new program, Agent Tursyn. We have not had to deal with this type of situation very often before. Each case is a new experiment; it's what makes this so exciting." He walked up to the glass and, leaning forward, placed his hands on the railing beneath it.
"So why keep him like this? He’s not dangerous anymore. Why keep a permanently disfigured mental amputee in a glass box?”
This time, Gelemen could no longer hide his disdain.
"Not dangerous? Your intuition is stronger than your reasoning, Agent. Not bursting in as you had been preparing to do was the smartest decision I’ve seen you make. We have trained this psychic to develop his mind into one of pure, concentrated potency. And now, he has no more ego -- his own or anybody else's -- to keep it in any way contained!
"Isn't it obvious? The shackles are off, Agent Tursyn! His mind is an unfettered beacon now, an uncontrollable psionic dirty bomb that blasts raw psychic radiation with every beat of his pulse. Do you know how we came to learn that the mind-link had been broken? Because we found the monitoring staff unconscious around his bed, blood seeping out of their eye sockets like freshly picked scabs.
"That's why we erected the cell around him, and that's why we have these," he pulled out a small, wiry halo from somewhere in his lab coat and waved it mockingly in front of her.
She recognized it: a mentalic dampener. And then she knew now what she had noticed in his expression earlier. It hadn't just been contempt; it had also been cruelty.
She opened her hand.
“You can’t go in there,” Gelemen said.
“Give me the band.”
“It’s too late. There’s nothing intelligible in that cage anymore, Agent Tursyn. This is the end of the show.”
It was Avanti who was most aware of what was about to happen. Even more so than Katya, for whom the actions that came next simply arrived naturally.
“Don’t—” Avanti started.
But for Katya, the decision had already been made. The choice – if indeed she had had one – had been decided before she’d even arrived. Before she’d begun to dig. Before she’d gone dark and turned her considerable investigative skills upon her very own Agency, following the breadcrumbs that Revner had tried so hard not to leave for her.
But he knew. He knew the die that he had cast. Just as Avanti did when she agreed, with zero hesitation, to answer Katya’s call when she did resurface – with a new set of coordinates.
Just as she knew now.
“Katya, don’t—” she pleaded, but Katya’s hands had already come up. In a single motion, she shoved Gelemen’s far shoulder, blading him so that the hand that held the dampener would still be there for her to sever, which she did with the thin, almost translucent wire in her other hand.
As the wire sliced through the air, slipping in between the atoms that had connected Geleman’s hand to his forearm, separating them as if they were simply magnets reversing polarity, she followed through with the motion, which had started from her hip, and now turning her body and twisting her wrist as she did, she spun, extending her hand towards the still unaware guard standing on the right side of the room and releasing the wire dagger at the moment of full extension. The wire tensed as it approached the guard’s neck, forming into a straight, nearly invisible needle as it pierced his left carotid.
Katya was already on the floor when the first bullets were fired. She dove, rolling towards the man who now reflexively reached for his throat, unsure of why he’d suddenly felt a prick in his neck and what it was that was pinning him to the wall behind him.
She stood up, shielding herself with his body as it convulsed under the hail of bullets that now shredded his armor. She tore the man away from the wall, leaving the needle wire still stuck behind to be showered in the mist of blood that erupted from the sudden lateral tearing of his carotid artery.
The two guards that had let her into the room had now come through. The needle, obeying some hidden command of hers, fell limp from the wall, floating into her palm as she shoved the torpid body shield in front of her, willing him – it – to take two final steps – to buy her one extra second – before it – he – collapsed to the ground.
She closed the distance on the newly entered guards with lightening speed. Appearing above their waistline only when she was already in front of them, spinning, whipping the wire knife across their throats at just enough of a distance that she could sever the soft tissue without the wire getting stuck wrapped around any meddling vertebrae in the back. She completed her spin, ducking in between them as the final guard emptied his magazine.
For him, the final one, the one with the birthmark just behind his chin strap. The one who had been standing at attention on her left when she’d begun her lethal dance. It was not his fault that he was the last one standing. It was not his fault that she was curious now.
That she wanted to know.
For him, she would have more time.
Despite the auto-alarms now blaring at full blast throughout the compound, set off by the ricochet of bullets in the cleanroom outside of patient A32’s cell, Katya knew that her Operator had already secured the doors behind her, slowing down the rush of guards that had all been suddenly alerted to what was now going on.
Like a phantom, she emerged in front of him, kicking him, burying her foot into his midsection, not hard enough to incapacitate him, but just enough to double him over. As his head whipped forward, she met his nose with the palm of one hand while ripping his helmet off with the other. Clinching him behind the neck, she redirected his skull into the wall behind him, and then propelled his disoriented and stumbling body towards the glass door separating them from patient A32.
By now, she knew the lock had already been disabled. Without even bothering to look at the whimpering, cowed face of Dr. Gelemen, still slumped in shock against the wall beside the door, she reached down and picked up the recently severed hand -- still warm as the capillaries slowly leaked out -- and the dampener that had fallen out of its clutches.
She put the thin, metal ring over her head, resting it over her ears, before pressing the palm of his now disembodied appendage against the security panel beside the door.
As it opened, she shoved the still dazed guard inside, and then quickly closed it behind him. In just that brief instant, a hint of the pressurized psychic energy inside the room burst out and flooded her senses.
If she was capable of feeling remorse, this would have been the time where it should have hit her. But remorse was not a useful emotion for an Agent to have. The Agency did not need remorse. It did not like it. In training, it excised it. It needed decisions, and it needed action. She had already decided. She had already acted. Remorse was always late, and in the Agency’s interest, never useful.
She knew already what was about to happen. But all she could do now was observe.
Clarity suddenly washed over the guard as he realized where he was. He turned back to the door, pounding on it and shouting silently to her, his eyes now clear and filled with panic. She watched him, curiously at first, and then morbidly, as his fist slammed repeatedly against the glass – until it began to bleed -- and then his forehead – until it did too.
On one such headbutt, the guard’s head slipped, so that the side of his face hit the glass instead of the dome. But like a child hitting a new piano note, the guard repeated it. Over and over, until his orbital began to fracture and his eye began to bulge out of its socket.
He was getting tired now. He was mouthing less now. His eyes began to roll into the back of his head, a curtain of blood closing the stage over his eye sockets as the birthmark on his chin slid down the side of the glass, until finally, he collapsed at the foot of the wall. There, he continued to twitch, like a degloved frog leg sprinkled with salt, the electrical impulses stored in his muscles still randomly firing and discharging until there were no more.
Without turning her head, she whispered to the man still unmoving by her feet. She wanted to tell him that he was a cruel and evil individual – to do what he had done, so consciously, so recklessly with his patients’ lives. To treat them as nothing more than data points, test subjects, observable fact structures.
She whispered, as she removed the dampener from behind his ear, as she crushed it in her hands and as she prepared to open the door once again. As the maelstrom of psychic energy lashed out into the cleanroom, before the irony could stop her, she whispered to herself: You, too, are a monster.