by Page Turner
“Alright,” Viv said. “So Amarynth?”
“Yeah?”
“You said Neia confessed to the crime. Have the truth evaluators been by?” Viv said. It was standard procedure to deploy a team every time a suspect confessed. This team was made up of tueys that specialized in detecting active deception, and that was pretty much it. A simple binary: Deception detected versus no deception detected. Nothing like the loud cacophony of emotions that Karen experienced every time she used her powers. Or more accurately, every time her powers used her, because that’s always how it felt to her during a feel.
“They have,” Amarynth said. “And they detected no deception. She clearly believes what she’s saying.”
Viv nodded. “Well, we all know that doesn’t mean shit. And you know… Karen read her emotions at the scene, and well, let’s just say it wasn’t pretty.”
“Really?” Amarynth said. “Wasn’t pretty how?” She looked directly at Karen. “What did you feel from her?”
“She was…” Karen said, “I don’t know how to describe it.” She paused for a moment before adding, “She was completely deranged.”
“Well, working at a prison can be a high-stress job,” Penny said. “Maybe there’s something to it, maybe it has to do with her job. Occupational stress. That kind of thing.”
“Maybe,” Amarynth said. “Well, not maybe. I know there’s something to it. Just not sure what. Not yet. But if you go there, you should get a head start on things. The prison is important. The fact that she worked as a guard. That they both did.”
“Right,” Viv said. “We’ll get right on it.”
“Oh!” Amarynth said. “One more thing. I almost forgot to tell you the most important part.”
The team waited while Amarynth fished a notepad out of the leaning tower of objects on her desk, steadying it with one hand like a person braces a Jenga game.
The tower shimmied disconcertingly but didn’t topple over.
“Both of the victims are, or were, tueys. Demotivators, actually,” Amarynth.
“Well holy shit,” Viv said. “How the hell did someone kill and maim a demotivator like that with another one close by? Deranged or not. How is that even possible?”
Demotivators
Demotivators are a very specialized type of intuitive. Their main power is the ability to make everyone around them extremely lazy.
As a power, demotivation can be quite subtle, and many demotivators are not fully cognizant of their power until well into young adulthood, when the tendencies are detected by a routine precollege intuitive aptitude battery.
Part of this delay in detection might be because demotivators are found primarily in underachieving families who live in underperforming school districts. While they don’t possess any special scholastic abilities themselves and are quite average performers, as children they will excel at virtually every task relative to everyone who surrounds them, who simply will not try or apply themselves.
In adulthood, many demotivators find work as guards in prisons or mental institutions, anywhere that their powers of pacification will be advantageous in preventing riots or escape attempts. But their abilities aren’t simply useful in this one particular context.
Perhaps the most famous demotivator of all is the world renown mononymous demotivational speaker Mallow, author of Why Worry?, and many high-end spas and resorts will employ at least one demotivator to help their clients to relax and more quickly go on “island time.”
from Insecta Psychica: Towards an Intuitive Taxonomy by Cloche Macomber
A Very Important Prisoner
Viv sighed as they filled out the visitor’s forms. “Of all the prisons in the world, why did they have to work at this one?” she wondered aloud grimly.
Prisons in general weren’t exactly user friendly for visitors, but East Watson Correctional Center was a paragon of bureaucracy. And to enter, you basically had to sign your life away not once, not twice, but in triplicate.
The intake worker scowled. “You try getting steady work as a demotivator,” she said. “You work where you can.”
“Oh,” Karen said, “Are you….?”
The worker shook her head. “No, I’m not a tuey. But I’ve been friendly with a lot of demotivators. They hire a lot of them in this facility. Good for keeping high-profile prisoners in line. Our escape rate is statistically insignificant. Essentially zero.”
“Essentially?” Viv asked.
The worker frowned and didn’t answer.
Karen tried a change of topic. “And you knew Neia and Stephanie, didn’t you?”
“Sure,” the worker said. “Not that I worked with them much. They work their own beat. Demotivators are usually paired with each other. Being too close to them isn’t good for morale, you know. But over the years, you do spend a bit of time with them, especially on breaks. Super relaxing breaks.” She said the last bit wistfully, looking off into space, before catching herself and returning to a professional, unemotional posture.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Penny said.
“Sure you are,” the worker said. She handed them another stack of forms.
“She is,” Karen said. “We all are.”
“Look, I know it’s what you’re supposed to say. But you’re here today because you’re doing your job. Just like I’m doing mine. You’re homicide detectives. Without a stack of dead bodies, you can’t pay your rent.”
“Well, I’m sorry you knew someone in our stack then,” Viv said.
The worker looked Viv in the eyes, considered her face briefly. “Thanks,” she said. “I appreciate that.”
Viv had learned long ago that there are certain people in this world who aren’t used to kindness. Especially big gestures or grandiose general purpose statements of comfort. Such things always rang hollow to people like that, who were accustomed to a difficult life and being kicked on their ass. It was easy for them to tell themselves you didn’t mean it, that it was something you said to everyone, that you were placating or flattering them.
Sometimes you could still get to them though, if you made the kindness small enough, specific enough. Only when you’d broken the kindness down into its smallest components could you reach them. Tiny particles that worked their way through the giant barriers they constructed to keep others out.
“Sorry you knew someone in our stack” did the trick this time. The worker loosened up considerably. She relaxed, shuffling the parade of increasingly more specific, pessimistic, and downright morbid forms over the desk.
As the detectives initialed boxes to indicate to the prison that they wouldn’t sue if they were electrocuted, disemboweled, or flung into an alternate dimension (that last one was just a rumor, but prison officials weren’t taking any chances with litigation, the damages could be astronomical — literally), the worker actually smiled a few times. And even more tellingly she laughed at a few of Penny’s stupid jokes.
“Neia and Stephanie worked deep in the prison,” the worker explained once the forms were filled out, leading them through a series of corridors that even to Viv, with her keen visual powers, looked nearly identical.
Even the overhead lights seemed to blink in a similar pattern. Like they all had loose connections. “Prison disco balls,” their guide joked in the first corridor.
“Staying alive,” she remarked in the second. It was clear though to them that this was a rehearsed joke. Something she had said many times to many groups of visitors before them.
There was a slight visual variant in the third corridor. Viv noted a quarter second delay between overhead light blinks as they headed through the area. She concentrated on this difference, making a mental note, not sure if it were important.
“Aaaaand disco inferno,” their guide said in the third hallway standing underneath that blinking light, before opening a locked door that spilled out into an op
en area.
A conspicuously empty and silent open area. There was another desk, where a few guards sat deeply engrossed at their computers. One was typing furiously on their keyboard. The other looked much more relaxed as they smiled and clicked their mouse every few seconds.
On the back wall were a series of doors that appeared to lead to janitor’s closets.
“This isn’t your normal cellblock,” Penny thought aloud.
“Of course not,” the worker said. “This is where we keep VIPs. Very important prisoners.” She gestured to the janitor closets. “Those are actually cells, but we wanted them to look as non-descript as possible. It’s possible to clear out this entire room in 10 minutes if you need to. Make it look like an empty room.”
“Why would you need to?” Karen asked.
Their guide didn’t answer the question.
“Who’s staying here now?” Viv asked, trying a different tack.
They walked towards the desk together as a group. As they came closer to it, Viv suddenly felt tired.
She wasn’t the only one. “Do you have chairs?” Penny asked their guide.
Their guide frowned. “We do.” She gestured over to a stack of folding chairs leaning against one of the walls.
“I saw those,” Karen said. “But they’re over there. Do you have any that are closer?”
Their guide shook her head no.
Viv abruptly sat down on the floor.
“You can’t sit on the floor,” their guide said. “It’s against prison regulations.”
Viv vaguely remembered that rule being somewhere in the stack of papers she’d signed but wasn’t exactly sure. Thinking hurt her head. She could do with a nap. “Then bring me a chair,” Viv replied.
“But they’re way over there,” the worker said.
“Penny. Karen,” Viv said, making the most menacing eye contact with the worker that she could.
Penny and Karen sighed. They were suddenly exhausted, too, but knew better than to challenge Viv when she was at the end of her rope. And judging by her expression, she was. Together Penny and Karen made the arduous 12-foot journey to the folding chairs.
This is waaaay harder than it should be, Karen thought. I feel like I’m blazing the Oregon Trail.
Karen, always looking for a way to impress Viv, grabbed two chairs. Penny picked up just one for her.
“Hey, what about me? Where am I supposed to sit?” their guide asked Penny, upon seeing this.
Penny sighed and grabbed a second one, not wanting to anger their guide and risk getting kicked out of the prison.
Groaning from exertion, Penny and Karen set up the folding chairs so that all four of them could sit down. Viv insisted on getting a boost from their guide up off where she was sitting on the floor because standing up from a seated position was so difficult. It was the least the guide could do, Viv argued, after Penny had gone all that way and gotten a seat for her.
“Glad we didn’t have much further to go,” their guide remarked. “I might have had to give you all piggyback rides.”
“So which one of you is the demotivator?” Viv asked the two guards behind the desk, raising her voice and waving her hand in their direction. Because she sure as heck wasn’t about to get up and get their attention in a more conventional way. Too much effort.
“The one who isn’t sitting there playing computer games instead of you know… actually working,” one guard replied.
“I’m working as hard as I can, given the circumstances,” the other replied.
“Sure you are,” the demotivator guard replied.
It must be difficult spending your whole life killing other people’s work ethic just by existing, Karen realized in that instant. Everywhere you went, you’d be followed by the curse of competence. Surrounded by lazy people. Left to do everything on your own.
Forget being part of a team. Unless you happened to be in the company of other demotivators.
You’d be condemned to an existence where no matter where you went, you’d be set up to have to do more than your fair share.
That had to be depressing.
“Whatever,” the second guard said.
“This is why they usually station us in pairs,” the demotivator explained. “But we’ve been shorthanded ever since… the incident. A bunch of us are working solo.”
“You are not working solo,” the second guard said, clearly offended.
“Okay,” the demotivator said. “Well, we’re not working with other demotivators. We’re paired with normals. Or different kinds of tueys. But as you can see, we aren’t actually working very efficiently.”
“It’s fine,” Viv said. “We know what you mean.”
“Do you have any idea why anyone would have wanted to hurt Neia and Stephanie?” Penny asked the demotivator.
“Other than the obvious, no,” the demotivator replied.
“The obvious?” Karen asked.
“Well, prisoners want to get out. Demotivators make that nearly impossible. Kill or derange a demotivator, you upset the natural balance of things. Our staffing situation is a mess at the moment. Maybe you can escape during a time like this. Or if you can’t escape, maybe you can use the short staffing to pull some strings. Get paroled. Early release. Easier to convince a prison that’s shorthanded to let people out. Especially if you have friends in high places,” the demotivator said.
“Friends in high places?” Viv said. “Anybody come to mind?”
The demotivator rose from her desk, bringing a clipboard to the circle where they sat in their folding chairs.
“Here’s a list of our current high-profile inmates,” the demotivator said, handing it to Viv.
One name leapt out instantly to her. “Oh my God,” Viv said. “You have Bronson Eck locked up here?”
The demotivator nodded.
“An Eck?” Karen said. “How is this not all over the news?”
“Beats me,” the demotivator. “When you have enough friends and enough money, I guess news stories don’t have to happen.”
The Ecks were one of the Four Noble Families who made things run. The Families that everyone knew and no one dared to cross. Their earliest members were researchers that had been responsible for a great many important scientific discoveries, something they would never let society forget.
Each of the Four Families had given their names to many institutions and important places. Notably, the Skinners had founded the city of Skinner, the epicenter for intuitive activity in the world, also known as the Psychic City. B.F. Skinner had been their patriarch, the father of operant conditioning. He was responsible for showing how people’s responses could be shaped and strengthened based on training.
While no one knew exactly how the intuitives came to be and certainly couldn’t trace their existence to any one founding event, many did suspect that Skinner was somehow involved in the sudden emergence of psychic activity. There was no evidence of this, but it frankly seemed like something he would do. He liked playing God.
The very building they were sitting in was named for another one of the Families: The Watsons.
Skinner’s sister city of Watson also bore the researcher’s name. Together the two cities and their exhaustive networks of suburbs encompassed an impressive swath of urban — and suburban sprawl. Although only one part of the larger Psychic State, Skinner-Watson itself was the size of a small state all on its own.
John Watson had been a behaviorist who had insisted that a child could be shaped to follow any particular path depending on their nurture, regardless of nature.
Some people suspected Watson of creating the intuitives. But people largely agreed that if it had been Watson who created the intuitives, it would have had to have been by accident. He just wasn’t like that, they argued, wasn’t someone that would have wanted to unleash such a major experiment wit
hout safeguards in place. Although he was prone to accidents, so one had to admit it was possible that he slipped up somewhere and had done something that led to a bunch of people having psychic powers.
Maybe he’d done it and didn’t even realize what he’d done. Accidentally changed society forever. Stranger things had happened… and were still happening.
The final two Noble Families, the Ecks and the Macombers, had originally been part of the same Noble Family (they were all called Ecks then), a research team devoted to charting and cataloguing personality and how it changes over the course of one’s lifespan, but they had been cleft left apart a generation ago by a particularly nasty divorce and the family feud that followed, demonstrating an important truism: We reserve our most violent hatred not for those who are completely different than us but for those who are nearly identical to us and only diverge from us in tiny ways.
What unfolded between the two Families was spectacular tabloid fodder. Following the divorce, the Ecks publicly announced that they were glad to be rid of the Macombers, an eclectic crew who seemed obsessed with alchemy and other vaguely magical pursuits like Neo-Freudianism. But privately and through their actions, the Ecks seemed to remain fixated on the Family that was once a part of theirs, even if that fixation often looked like hate and violence.
The Ecks were pioneers in the research surrounding decision-making, game theory, and economics. The older generation had become very wealthy due to this work, but the Family’s younger members kept getting into trouble. It was as if the very qualities that drove them to succeed as a Family in the first place — a seeming inability to ever be satisfied, a tendency to take risks others wouldn’t, a very weak moral compass, and a tireless desire to amass as much wealth as possible, no matter the means — had come back to haunt them, particularly as the bloodline thinned.
They had begun to focus more overtly on amassing power, on building up a superior reputation… and strangely, on appearing on reality TV programs. But lately even that hadn’t seemed to be enough. There were whisperings all around the Eck Family that they were being consumed by vices. Further, a socially sadistic stripe was seen throughout the younger members; they didn’t just want to control others but to humiliate them. This sadism, too, was a form of addiction, just as potentially dangerous to their longevity as a clan as other more conventional bad habits.
