Soul Hunter

by Drew Briney

  In reality, dreamcasting can be much like spontaneously writing, producing, and presenting a holo-video all at once. Whenever possible, I try to do the writing and preparing ahead of time but life rarely works out so neatly and even when it does, I have to be careful not to inadvertently toss in my own thoughts or ideas into the dreamcast while I’m projecting it onto someone else. If I make a mistake, it’s like throwing an ad into a documentary that says, “You’re watching propoganda. Swallow with caution.” Even dumb people don’t miss glitches like that. Okay, some do, but I’m not trying to gloat over those wins right now. Contrasting exceptional brilliance with doltish lemmings … well, it’s ineffective.

  I increase the temperature of the shower, turn around, and lean my head back until the hot water rains over my face. I’ve already rinsed the shampoo. I’m just relaxing. I’ve learned to allow my bodies little luxuries like this. They handle stressful situations better when I do. Besides, this shower is especially well crafted. The stonework is modern from top to bottom, all while retaining the antique flavor and history of this castle. Although roughly rectangular in shape, it’s crafted to look more like roughly hewn rocks in the dungeons than the boxish walls found throughout the rest of the castle. Pipes delivering the water are nearly invisible a good two feet above me and they pour water like a small waterfall.

  And here I am, distracted again. I swear, nearly growl at my struggle to maintain a linear thought order. I suppose this process is faster than being cloned and growing up with memories slowly implanted into your brain but that doesn’t offer much consolation to me in this moment. I despise jumbled thoughts, jumbled memories. I resent needing to take the time to review memories. I take a deep breath, resolve myself to be more patient and then laugh.

  I’ve gone through three bodies working on my latest goal. That seems excruciatingly patient. I should be worshipped for such feats of patient resolve and yet I'm still tempted to disfigure someone every time I have to endure this tedious task of reviewing a memory just to retain my identity in this body.

  I comfort myself knowing that I only have one more memory I deem crucial from my first body so I suffer no terrible tragedy if I lose everything after that. Truth is, my AI chip preserves copies for emergency transfer to a new body.

  Losing memories for an entire lifetime is a nuisance, to be sure, but it doesn’t irreparably damage my identity so I shouldn’t complain. It’s a small price for immortality.

  Still, I’m compulsive about efficiency so I avoid any possible setbacks and this last memory is crucial to understanding my lives’ path so I try to make it at least this far reviewing memories whenever I enter new bodies. Everything else, as they say, is icing. I confess, reviewing neuroscience is particularly helpful as well, but that squarely lands on a more pragmatic level than metaphysical questions of identity.

  Water freely flowing all over my face and body, I cover my mouth with my hands in cupping shape so I can safely take a breath without choking and focus on relaxing more deeply. Onward I plow.

  For some reason I don’t recall, I was in a really foul mood and looking for an explanation about something that had been haunting me, something nefarious. I wish I could wrestle down and identify the flitting memory that reminds me of some profound purpose behind my mood but it remains irreparably vague. What I do remember is being unreasonably upset and wanting blood - metaphorically speaking. I wasn’t a killer yet.

  The house was a wreck. With no oversight, I wasn’t exactly prioritizing keeping things neat and tidy how mom preferred. She was gone, after all, and I had no motivation to fulfill her outdated desires. To say I was disturbed over her absence would be calling a seascape a pocket of spittle. Looking back, I’m still clueless as to why she abandoned me. Given the evidence, the most plausible reason is that she really didn’t care about me and she was glad for the opportunity to break ties. I don’t judge her for that, not anymore, but that said, I’d respect her more if she’d accomplished something remotely commensurate with my sacrifice.

  Rummaging through an antique vanity stained in traditional cherrywood, I found more of my mother’s notes. Some of the drawer edges bore evidence of long use, sporting nearly no polish and worn through to an original, slightly yellowish wood. The notes were in one of these drawers but they were written on the same type of old paper as the ones I’d found before. That was the first clue the notes were related. I don’t know how I’d missed it the first time but clearly, there were numbers on the bottom corners of the pages. These new notes were numbered with single digit numbers or lowercase Roman numerals. That was the second clue and that’s when I first began to feel anxiety over my discovery. It worsened as I started reading.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to my dear friend Eileen for supporting my lifelong dream. My stories never would have breathed life without your ideas, critique, and inspiration. I hope they offer some modicum of justice to your horrific experiences and I hope my artistic license doesn’t detract from your deeply admirable escape from abuse. Thank you also for encouraging me to pull from my own experiences to give my novel a more personal touch. I hope to emulate your courage until the end of my days.

  There were two copies of this on the same page, but the first was largely crossed out and contained edits that didn’t really change anything apart from rhythm and commas and stuff.

  I nearly puked.

  I still identify with that response. Overly sappy, poorly written, overstated emotional appeals. It’s everything I hate about humanity. But, that of course is not why I almost lost my last meal when I first read this. That’s just my reaction now.

  Those first notes that landed me in a tailspin were a poor draft of my mother’s novel, a novel she’d never published, never spoken about, never hinted about. I could have concluded a great many things reading this but only one thing mattered.

  My dad had never been abusive, he’d never used his computer thing for mind control, and my memories of him were a reality, not some contrived psionic influence. I’d dishonored him by not attending his funeral and I’d disgraced his legacy by tailspinning into a life of petty crime as I mentioned earlier. One simple misunderstanding completely altered my life and there was nothing I could do to make it right. And it wasn’t like what I’d done had been in private. Somehow, everyone seemed to know I’d been involved with bad crowds and bad habits.

  In retrospect, the whole thing didn’t make good medical sense from the beginning but I was just a kid so how was I supposed to have known? Worse, rumors I’d killed someone were growing. The cops questioned me and released me without any further trouble and to be honest, I wasn’t certain anything had been my fault but none of that changes other people’s perceptions or their reality of who you are. That realization is what kept me from turning back to the devout Christian I’d been raised to become.

  Sure, I’d heard god and people at church would forgive me but I doubted the latter was true. They’d smile. They’d say nice things and try to be welcoming. However, with my growing powers, I’d be stuck knowing what they really thought about me and I’d have to pretend I didn’t know. Single women would be wary of me and parents would helicopter over their children whenever I was around. Sure, I could go to another church and pretend nothing happened, hope nobody would find out about my past but I’m not into running from challenges. Neither do I like to pretend everything is normal when it isn’t.

  Regardless, I couldn’t handle that, not at that time. I couldn’t forgive myself. Consumed with guilt and self-loathing, I couldn’t begin to accept the possibility that I could ever feel good about myself again, that somehow, I could make anything better even by living some stellar, exemplary life worthy of adulation. It seemed nothing short of living an unforgettable redemption story would allow me to make amends for what I’d done. There was no turning back and for a very long time, I hated myself every minute of every day for that.

  My new body is responding to this memory. I fend off the impulse to cr
y, grit my teeth. I turn off the water only to find myself shivering as soon as the cascading waterfall slows to a drip. I can’t tell if I’m shivering from the environment or from some primeval emotional response. I sigh heavily as I slide open the shower door.

  Climbing out, I grab a towel to dry off as I stand on a 3D printed self-cleaning, shark skin mat. My reflection in the mirror is far enough away not to be fogged up but close enough that I can see what I’m looking for as I walk toward it.

  I have mixed emotions. I miss my last body. She was hot - lightening blue eyes with raven hair and bronze skin only tipped the iceberg. I reveled seeing her reflection in the mirror. It made me smile no matter how many times I saw it. What can I say? I enjoy beauty. It’s a negligible vice.

  Despite the disappointment of not seeing my last body, I’m pleased when I look in the mirror and see Ji Anna’s reforming body. Well, my body, I suppose. I don’t intuitively identify with it yet. That takes time and, to be honest, something intangible I’ve never identified. I instruct my AI to tag any previous memories of when I’ve made this observation in previous bodies so I can review them later. I’m sure it’s not the first time I’ve noticed this - not because of some intuitive feeling, but because it seems too obvious to have missed given my vast experience with these things. It probably doesn’t matter but I can be insatiably curious over trivial details.

  My legs and obliques are more tone. I twist to see if my hips are thinning. Not much. Ji Anna was never overweight. Not really. She just wasn’t athletic. She didn’t need to be. She only needed to look decent in a dress. I need decent musculature and cardio. I resolve to work my hips and glutes harder. There isn’t much improvement in my arms but that’s not a huge surprise. Strong feminine arms often lack that definition men naturally get. I feel stronger. That’s what matters there. My face appears slightly less round, less pudgy. Hurray. A few more months of this and I may actually look decent.

  My amber eyes are still my most flattering feature. At least there’s something nice to see in my reflection regardless of my progress. My bob cut has grown a bit longer than I like but it’s still short, which suits my preference right now. Brushing long hair can be a terrible bore, though it’s not quite as painful as the intolerable exercise of putting on makeup. I refuse to do it out of principle and—

  I roll my eyes, snarl, and shake my head. Too easily distracted, I refocus my thoughts. Mom’s book. Dad’s legacy. My failures. No redemption. I’m back on track.

  In contrast to my moral conundrums, I couldn’t deny that I was enjoying my newfound powers, even when I used them in ways I knew my father would disapprove. The whole experience had been profoundly liberating and it had shown me a side of myself I could no longer deny. I loved my wild side. I loved dreamcasting. I loved manipulating, controlling people. I quickly grew addicted to getting whatever I wanted, no matter how whimsical or distasteful. I explored every dark corner of my heart without suffering the least bit of judgment. Well, at least not from my new crowd of associates.

  Still I couldn't reconcile that side of me with mounds of moral teachings that defined my upbringing. In a word, I hated myself, loathed how what I could do was changing me. Worst of all, I began hating my father for bestowing upon me (albeit inadvertently) with all of these powers, these moral challenges before I was ready to tackle them with the maturity necessary to remain a devout, respectable, believer. In other words, I was morally bitter and angry toward my father while secretly gloating over every inch of ground I conquered learning the intricate art of psionics.

  That’s entirely illogical. Trust me, I’m well aware of that. And believe me, I’ve run through these thoughts plenty of times to be aware of better, more logical ways to pinpoint blame for my life’s experience up to that point. That doesn’t change the truth though, and since I have a rule that I have to be honest with myself, I have to pass judgment on reasoning failings I exhibited at that time.

  Of course, I’m far past all of that now but those feelings … those thoughts … those were the things that directed my course of action. As I grew in confidence and as I practiced putting ideas into other people’s minds, I lost all fear. Until you experience that, you don’t truly understand how much we’re motivated by fear, even by little things like “what will other people think?” or “how will that make me look?” I stopped worrying about those things because I could always tell people what to think - if it really mattered. It no longer crushed my feelings when a woman found me unattractive. I simply willed it otherwise and she would comply. When I wanted money, I would brush someone’s mind and wait for them to donate to my cause. Life grew brilliantly simple.

  Soon, I found myself holding onto a life I believed was wrong because that was all I had, all I believed I could become and because, well, to call a spade a spade, I reveled in it.

  Sure, one grows bored of dreamcasting and manipulation. I knew that would come. I’d read every story about Kilgrave and similar miscreants of literature, villains overrun by petty emotions. They led me to realize that I needed some higher purpose to keep myself entertained, restrained from becoming a self-absorbed monster. That’s when I got into politics.

  At this point, my thoughts completely derail. As I don a few small vestiges of worn clothing, I begin reviewing tons of memories I’m supposed to be covering later. My plans, my aspirations, my scheming and plotting surrounding my latest efforts that Vaya Sage and his peers have been fighting against so heavily. Inadvertently, I review memories from my last body when I altered his memories, implanted other memories, and tried to get him to kill the body I’m currently inhabiting. He really made a mess of things.

  I’m again tempted to wipe his memory clean and move on, modify my plans to something less dramatic and more predictable. There are just too many things keeping me from doing that - his resources and talents are only a few. If I’m being honest with myself, I’m feeling too lazy to deal with adopting a new plan instead of revitalizing what I’m already working on and a certain macabre part of me enjoys the riskiness of this plan. I’m easily bored. That’s a weakness of mine. Besides, surprises keep your brain active and senses attentive.

  My vivant alert goes off. From the information it feeds me, I’ve been distracted for well over two hours and I haven’t even finished rereading the notes from my memories. While the result might be the same without those details, I don’t like missing stuff so I’m more than a little frustrated at my lack of discipline.

  There’s something more to my vivant alert but I barely notice. I’m trying to get back on track. Book, mom, dad, guilt, pleasure, new lifestyle. Okay, I’m ready to move on.

  Vaya Sage barges into my room, unannounced and without knocking. I quickly realize that I should have paid more attention to my vivant alert. It wasn’t reeling me in to review memories, it was warning me that Vaya Sage is hotter than a glowing branding iron.

  6 || Something's Jumbled

  SOMETHING’S JUMBLED

  Abundant Error Codes are a Common Side Effect.

  I’m completely surprised. I thought Vaya Sage’s appointment would take much longer than this. Even with the best technology taking mere minutes to run a scan, there’s still travel time, consultation, and advisory downtime. As I quickly calculate all of that, he apparently had zero waiting time or he didn’t bother with the consultation or downtime or some or all of the above. I’m betting on the latter.

  He’s not outwardly fuming but I can read his subtle body language quite well. Clenched, yet restrained jaw. Slightly flushed cheeks, but no furrowed brow. His deliberate breathing tells me he’s trying to act casual, nonchalant. For someone like me, all of that reads like a flashing neon hologram spitting out sparkly fireworks.

  I’d expect more discretion from him but this is a common side effect from brain scans so I cut him some slack. Non-blackmarket scans require sedation and client naps afterward. Of course, Vaya Sage wouldn’t risk a legal scan or sedation so his choice naturally influenced him to make the poor
decision of leaving without standard precautions. I’m certain they advised him against flying home, especially given the abundant error codes that must have surfaced but as a blackmarket operation, medical policy enforcement would be as tight as noodle knots.

  I’m laying on my bed dressed in nothing but the skimpiest, worn-thin shorts and T-shirt Ji Anna had to her name when I first took over her body. I slowly pull a sheet up to cover one of my legs as if I’m feeling compromised by my exposure. Of course, I leave most of one leg uncovered and the sheet pulls my shorts a little higher. Lots of women are oblivious about details like that so it’s a believable mistake. I watch his eyes briefly wander. He’s upset but neither is he beyond distractions. That’s helpful to know.

  My hair is disheveled. I never bothered to dry or brush it or otherwise prepare to leave the castle. I wanted to look as raw and unassuming as I could when he arrived. I’m genuinely surprised so I don’t have to feign that like I rehearsed. I want him to bear no suspicion that I knew he’d be upset over whatever he learned from the brain scan.

  In a word, I’m milking his attraction to this body for everything it’s worth without being over-the-top about it, all while pretending to be nothing but innocent. I know his brain is tender, possibly beyond repair so I’m playing to his more primeval instincts, creating a sympathetic foundation while preparing to twist his understandings a little more. I have a plan.

  First, I need to know what he’s thinking and what he’s learned so I offer a cautious smile, one of those smiles that shows you’re happy to see someone while simultaneously recognizing something’s not quite right. “Hey, how—”

  “Is it true you can’t trade bodies for a few months without losing some of your memories?”