Intimacy.
It’s a word most frequently employed as a euphemism for sex, to the point where they’re often treated as synonymous. They’re not, though. Intimacy is more about perception, and about being in a place or state where it’s impossible to hide instances of vulnerability. It’s about having no distractions from another person, so that when they let down their defenses, it’s impossible to miss. It’s about knowing someone. When it’s consensual, it can be sensuous, it can be affirming, it can be fulfilling. But when you find yourself in an intimate situation with someone you’d rather not be there with, at best, it’s uncomfortable. At worst, it’s crude, vulgar, or even traumatic.
Connecting to another person’s mind is about as intimate as it gets. There’s no hiding, no deception, no artifice. People can't actually lie to themselves, despite how the saying goes. They might be wrong, they might be delusional, they might be professing something despite harboring serious doubts, but ultimately it's impossible to actually fool yourself—or anyone looking inside. Everybody is at their most vulnerable inside their own head.
It had been two years since I had touched someone’s mind, heard another person’s thoughts or felt their emotions. Now, I know that your immediate reaction is that I just lied to you—I’ve talked about feeling peoples’ emotions several times since prom night. In reality, no, I haven’t. What I’m referring to in those instances is more akin to feeling heat from a fire. I’m feeling the radiant energy caused by someone’s emotions.
Or, to put it in a way that more accurately conveys how I feel about it, emotions are like sewage, and most of the time, I’m just smelling the stink other people are putting off.
Really feeling someone’s emotions is much more intense, much more disgusting, sort of like plunging your face into a septic tank.
I didn’t want to do it. I would rather have jumped into an actual septic tank.
But it was a choice between doing something that disgusted me and becoming something that disgusted me. If you ever have that choice, remember—you can always take a shower.
Of course making the choice to do something and actually doing it are completely separate issues.
Grey had clearly had mental defense training, while I had only once willingly initiated a telepathic connection. Granted, Judith had been an actual psion and I had pierced her defenses easily enough.
Grey was made of tougher stuff than Judith had been, though, and a solid mental defense didn’t require any real psionic ability. It was about focus. Grey, for example, was about as focused as a person could be. She was reciting her rank and some kind of serial number over and over in her head with absolutely no deviation. What she recited meant nothing—she could have listed the Presidents of the United States of America in order, or all the names of the members of the band The Presidents of the United States of America. What mattered was that she kept it up, and didn’t falter, didn’t drift away.
She was going to be a tough nut to crack. I could conceivably do just that—break her shell and dig through what’s inside—but that was kind of like trying to eat a watermelon with a sledgehammer. Sure, you could get inside the watermelon, but you were going to make a mess and there might not be much left that was edible by the end of it. I’d have to get very lucky not to destroy the information I was looking for in the attempt, and on that note, what was left of Grey’s mind when I was done would probably end up looking a lot like that metaphorical smashed watermelon.
Just ask Judith.
Without brute force, though, my options were almost nonexistent. I know now there are multitudes of options to break past someone's defenses, but then, my only choice was to go with my gut.
Hatred.
For all human beings supposedly recognize hatred as a destructive and negative force, they sure do indulge quite liberally. Part of it, I think, is just how useful it is. The word “animus” literally means both hatred and motivation, and we’re probably all well aware of just how inhumanly motivated hate groups can be. Hatred feels proactive, it feels invigorating, it feels like an affirmation of the self. No matter how low somebody sinks, hatred is there to remind them that at least they are not That Other Thing.
Hatred feels powerful.
But it isn’t.
It’s a weakness. It’s a psychological sinkhole.
I thought about Grey’s eyes when they were white all around, and I knew my route of attack.
Why? I thought at her. What made you like this, Grey?
She didn’t rise to that bait, her mantra continuing uninterrupted in her head, but I felt something rumble beneath it, something deep and seismic in scope.
I don’t get it, I continued. You know you’re never going to win. You know that you’re setting yourself against people more powerful than you could ever be, and smart enough not to be like you. Are you that jealous? You wear your stupid cowboy outfit like a bad parody of a superhero. Did you cut off your own arms just to pretend to be metahum—
“FUCK YOU!” Grey roared from the table, straining in vain against the cuffs and my grip on her cranium.
And that’s how easy it was.
Her mantra faltered, and I poured myself into the gap and ripped it wide open.
She tried to fight it, but it was like trying to get out of a jujitsu joint lock that was already cinched in. She had already lost her leverage and now getting the upper hand again was basically impossible.
Her mind was bare to me.
It was beautiful.
It stretched out before me, around me, too vast to comprehend, billions of clusters of bright memories twinkling against the relative darkness of faded recollections. Trails of misty thoughts and emotions cast pulsing filaments between the bright clusters, connecting everything in a twinkling web of being, a universe of the mind. There was a music to it all, a melodic cacophony that should have been chaotic and overwhelming, but instead drifted to me as a choral hum. And at the very center of it all, a swirling mass of light that I instinctively recognized as Grey’s soul, or spirit, or whatever you wanted to call the central nexus of consciousness that we knew as the self. I felt her thoughts, felt her rage, felt her fear, felt her terror. They didn’t come to me in sentences—people don’t actually think in neatly arranged paragraphs, go figure—but as impulses, impressions, the basic building blocks that make up thought, pulsing in time with the filaments that ran between the memory clusters, hitting me like a wind from the central nexus of it all.
Now here’s something fun about minds. They don’t have a search bar.
There are plenty of ways to find information once you’re actually in someone’s head, but I didn’t really know any of them. I had no practice, no training, no anything. As usual, I only had the brute force option.
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I absorbed it all.
Here is the story of Gabriella Grey.
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She was born Gabriella Larson on an honest-to-God cattle ranch outside of a town called Plainview, Texas. Her father, the owner of the farm, told her later in life that he hadn’t taken her mom to the hospital because they didn’t trust doctors. Unbeknownst to even Gabriella, this single nugget of information would go on to be the most influential thing he ever said to her.
She was raised not just by her family, but by the variety of workers and hands her father employed. She knew how to ride a full-grown horse at four years old. She could help deliver calves by five. At seven years old, she was a fully-functional cowgirl and junior rodeo champion.
At eight, the technophage hit.
Plainview was struggling even before that, but afterwards, it became a veritable ghost town. The rollout of mass-manufactured TomorrowCorp ultratech mainly centered around urban areas, cities, prioritizing bringing them back up to a twenty-first century standard of living. Small towns were almost completely ignored, resulting in a mass exodus of population from rural areas and a swelling of city centers, which deprioritized the countryside even further. The effects of this are still felt today.
Her family lost their ranch. With the technophage obliterating their modern machinery, the area they lived in rapidly falling into decay and poverty, and big conglomerates able to afford ultratech alternatives far outpacing them, there was no chance they could maintain their ability to operate at any level. The advent of ultratech-assisted vat-grown beef alternatives was their death knell. They sold the their farm for pennies compared to what it had once been worth and moved north to Amarillo.
Gabriella’s father fell victim to alcoholism and, eventually, depression, eating the barrel of his gun when she was twelve. Her mother died a few years later, taken by tuberculosis, which would have been easily treatable before the technophage. Gabriella was moved into foster care, and while she’s not my favorite person in the world, I won’t go into detail about the things that happened to her in this period. You don’t need to know and I didn’t really want to.
At age seventeen, with the consent of her latest guardian, she joined the Army. At age twenty-one, she became the first woman to lead Green Berets in the field on a combat mission. At age twenty-two, the Blackhawk helicopter she was riding in was taken down by a hostile metahuman, killing everyone in her squad except her.
That was how she lost her right arm.
She was subsequently honorably discharged from the military and decided to move back to her hometown of Plainview.
She came to the town with dreams of restarting her family’s cattle ranch, but on a smaller scale, something able to serve the needs of the community. However, the going was tough, money was tight, and the only reason the town still existed at all was because it had cannibalized the populations of even smaller communities in the area. There were other issues too. Actual, no-shit banditry had become a thing again, with the sudden urbanization of the country and lack of reliable mass communication creating a fertile ground for lawlessness in wide-open areas and ghost towns superheroes never bothered to visit. Worse still, the Fog seemed to be shifting, and while it didn’t spread into Texas, the creatures it mutated still had a habit of rampaging southward. Worse still, it pushed a whole host of creatures before it, some natural, some paranatural, and few able to coexist peacefully with humans.
One day, a wandering stranger stopped by her small ranch, his old dusty coat travel-worn, his face leathery from the sun and trail. Gabriella took him in and fed him, despite his general strangeness. As payment, he offered her a revolver, an old Colt Peacemaker he claimed was once the property of Doc Holliday, companion of famous lawman Wyatt Earp. The gun, he said, was like its former owner, a doctor. Before she could ask what that meant, he vanished, somehow slipping away as she examined the firearm.
Given the quality of its make and the technophage causing her to favor older technology, she wore it on her hip from then on, and it was very soon that she discovered what he meant. Later that week, she came across a calf from her herd that had been attacked and mutilated. The poor creature was still alive, and Gabriella quickly unholstered her pistol to put it out of its misery.
To her surprise, after she shot it in the head, the calf jumped to its feet, fully healed, and pranced back to its mother. Given that she had already killed several coyotes with it, she was confused as to what had happened. She took it to town and had it examined by an old mystic she knew, once dismissed as a kook, now widely accepted as the town’s main protection against paranatural threats.
The mystic told her that her gun contained a great spirit of light, and that she could choose to smite the wicked or heal the injured and infirm. Before she really understood what that meant, the town’s alarm sounded—bandits had come to clean them out.
Gabriella made her way to the town center, where the sheriff and his deputies were already mostly dying or dead. Not knowing if it was going to work, she took aim and shot them—and they sprang back to their feet, confused, but alive. Together they fought the bandits off, who were no mere bandits, but in fact vampire cattle rustlers. The sheriff’s crew found that their guns had extreme difficulty putting the vampires down for good, but Gabriella could dispatch them in a single shot, which she did very quickly, even shooting with her off hand. She also found that she didn’t need to reload, as the gun seemed to generate its own ammo.
Afterward, the incredulous sheriff, Compton Grey, offered her a job on the spot. Six months later, he offered her a ring.
They built a happy, fruitful life. They had many wacky western adventures together. They found friends and allies to aid them against the threats of the new frontier, a wild and diverse cast of characters that wouldn’t be out of place in some kind of serial TV show. They slowly made their town a beacon of hope and safety against the chaos of the post-technophage world.
And then the Horror happened.
In the Collapse that came afterwards, which very nearly resulted in a civil war and very definitely cut off many small communities even further, it was like someone had sounded a dinner bell for every dark force and ancient evil the the West. Gabriella and her little group fought them all valiantly—
—until Laughing Jack Lazarus came to town.
Superpowers aren’t fair, and Jack Lazarus coming to their small town was like napalm coming to an ant colony. Gabriella’s Peacemaker was a perfect solution for the largely paranatural threats that plagued their town. It did little to Jack, the shapeshifting, biomass-absorbing mass murderer who reveled in not just violence, but took particular delight in cruelty, in despair, in agony, much like his compatriots in Legion, much like his old master, Revenant. Jack didn’t just slaughter the population of Plainview. He violated them. He profaned them. He made sure that each of them didn’t just die, but died slowly, weeping for their loved ones.
He took particular delight in tormenting Gabriella, the only person who had been able to inflict any pain on him at all. He gathered her, her husband, and their companions on her ranch and, painstakingly, tortured them to the point of death, before allowing her to heal them, and then repeating the cycle. He told her that he would quit either when a superhero showed up, or when she gave up and allowed them to die.
She held out for a week. One week of watching her found family die over and over, hoping against hope for a hero.
Nobody came to help. In the aftermath of the Horror, nobody even noticed.
She gave up.
Jack, delighted, ripped her remaining arm off her torso, ate it, and then shot her with her own gun, healing her, stopping the bleeding. Then he shot her in the stomach, but not to heal this time, and left her to die slowly. Gabriella, at this point, welcomed it. She drifted into darkness.
The next day, she woke up in a SCAR medical facility.
SCAR, needing recruits and finding few better than former Green Beret Gabriella Grey, took her in, offered to make her a test subject for their cybernetics experiments, giving her arms back to her and a purpose in life. Giving her an outlet for the hate she felt. Eventually, she was put in charge of the TDF, the Tartarus Detention Facility—here—which came part in parcel with control of the SEF, the SCIP Enforcement Force. Her goal was to confine as many metahumans to the Skip as she could until—
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She fought me suddenly, tooth and nail, with every fiber of her being, and in her mind, gave me the activation code for the telegate as she did, all while shouting, “Swordfish! The password is swordfish! Take it and go! Please, go!”
I jerked my hands away from her temples and staggered backwards, breaking the connection abruptly. I didn’t doubt that she was telling me the truth. I wasn’t even a little tempted to go back in and see what she was hiding.
Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Mine too. I breathed heavily as she sobbed. I knew what she felt. I knew exactly what she felt. Real emotions were so intense.
“What are you?” she asked, weeping, all traces of poise and affected authoritative zeal gone.
“Sorry,” I said. And I meant it. There was no point in lying.
“Oh god help me,” she said, her voice rising to a wail. “Why did you make me see it all again? Why?”
I backed out of the room, leaving her cuffed to the table, and her broken sobs followed me as I fled down the hallway towards the telegate.
Intimacy.
I wasn’t a fan.