Alphabet Soup for the Tormented Soul

by Tobias Wade

  “Now,” Damien says quietly as he approaches me. “Let’s see if there’s anything we can’t take from that big, beautiful…” here he caresses my right breast, running his thumb up and down the blouse, painfully on top of my nipple, “brain of yours.” He smiles. He’s happy.

  My world is different. I’m too numb to cry. “You killed my son,” I whisper.

  “Hmm? Oh, no. At least not yet. He’ll keep breathing for about twelve hours. Did I mention that we have the antidote?” he asks casually. My eyes perk up in desperation. “Oh yes. I think I forgot about that bit. If we can synthesize the venom, then surely we can create the cure, yes? If administered in a timely fashion, there can even be recovery with no permanent damage.”

  I grab his arm and cling to it. My knuckles are white again. “Please,” I say, sure that I’m going to tear the skin off from underneath his shirt. He winces only slightly.

  “Well of course, Veronica, I’d be happy to help you and your son. We can go pick it up after you’re done helping me, since I asked first.”

  I shake my head. “We only have twelve hours. Help him first.” I pause. I tremble. “Please.”

  He shakes his head, and he shakes my world. “That won’t happen. The cure is still at West Bale Path.”

  My hand flies to my mouth. “That’s two thousand miles from here,” I whisper.

  “One thousand, nine hundred and thirteen miles, actually. We have very precise needs, and very precise understandings, Veronica. That’s why we need you to be so precise. For us. For your son.”

  My body trembles, and my head shakes. “It’s too late. It’s too late. We’ll never get there in time. It’s too late.”

  Damien raises his eyebrows at me. “Veronica, I can have you and Robby there within three hours of snapping my fingers,” he explains curtly. “All things are possible with the proper motivation.”

  And I’m calm, and the world drifts away. Damien, the road at night, even Robby. Everything.

  Everything seems white.

  And I know is that there is only one thing in my life: complete this task. If I do, Robby will live. If I do not, Robby will die. So there is only success possible. Nothing else. Nothing.

  And I reach into the whiteness and at first I see nothing. But that will not do, so I reach further, and again nothing. And I will reach forever if I need to, and stretch across it all, and snap my mind in half without batting an eye, because there is no regret in pursuing this success, there’s nothing worth saving if I fail. I let all sense of ‘self’ go. I drop it away entirely, discarded like dried skin. I reach.

  I see it.

  I open my eyes.

  “Dunsmuir. Twenty miles from here. A mobile home. Leave the flash drive on her doorstep. She will see it, she will run, and then you can follow her.”

  Damien’s eyes light up like a child’s on Christmas morning. “And what if someone takes-”

  “That won’t happen.” I slam the trunk. “Get into the fucking car, Damien. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Then you’ll put us on a plane.”

  “Well-”

  “No. Now.” I get into the driver’s side and start the car. He piles quickly into the passenger seat.

  I pull onto the road and drive into the night. It looks like this journey is almost over. But I don’t know for sure.

  I am, after all, driving into darkness.

  W is for West Bale Path

  P. F. McGrail

  Would you indulge me for a moment?

  Please don’t recall your most shameful memory.

  Were you successful? Or did some shadow of that memory peek its head out from one of the corners in your mind?

  Eliciting thoughts in unsuspecting people is actually much easier than those unsuspecting people realize.

  But don’t worry too much about it.

  Because if we had any reason to believe that your memories were worth knowing, it’s been too late to keep us out for quite some time.

  ***

  Walking to work was a pain in the ass.

  We couldn’t drive cars up to the front door, for obvious reasons.

  I suppose you could blame me for making the walk even harder as I lit up my third cigarette of the morning. I suppose you could blame me for a lot of things. By the end, I’m sure you will.

  But you don’t know the whole story. No one ever can. Even when you hear the whole part of the story, you won’t understand. You’ll still probably judge me, because you won’t get what’s really happening.

  And yes, deep down, I know how guilty I am.

  There’s just something so delightfully defiant about taking that deep, full-lung drag. Like so many other things in our lives, I know that I shouldn’t be doing it.

  But fuck all, I’m lighting up anyway. There’s nothing else to do on this forlorn walk to work.

  So I’ll thank you to leave your condemnation at the door. Only God can judge me.

  I’m quite serious about that last part.

  I’ve got stage four lung cancer. There is beyond nothing that the doctors can do.

  In no more than six months, I will permanently be room temperature.

  ***

  The dirt road would always turn to pools of sludge as soon as the sky even considered raining, which I simply hated having to dodge in my newly-shined shoes. That’s reason number 1,913 why I despise this backwater Midwestern shithole.

  I would have looked odd had there been anyone there to see me. The early-morning barren hayfields were just unbefitting of a fresh-pressed Armani suit. But as I turned the corner from one minor dirt road onto another forgotten dirt road, past the rusted-over sign so bent at weird angles and dented (pathetically impossible to read it or even tell what color it was supposed to be), it seemed only the hay felt it was necessary to share the moment.

  West Bale Path. That pretty much sums it up. Some Podunk farmer must have been tasked with the role of pulling his dick out of his sister long enough to name the strip of dirt that another farmer had probably made with a tractor and two inbred cousins. Since it was a path used to reach the hay bales, it became “East Bale Path” in one direction, and the dimwitted farmer simply couldn’t think of anything better when he looked to the left.

  And since that moment, nothing significant had ever happened on this land.

  I stepped off of the sludge track and made for a rather tall, but otherwise innocuous-looking haystack. A glance down at my tablet confirmed that there were no living humans on the surface for 2.6 kilometers in any direction. Good.

  I pressed the face of the tablet, then cleared my mind. I always hated this part.

  When we fall sleep, dreams float to the forefront before we’re completely gone, and thoughts that we cannot control trod and dance upon the soft, yielding gray matter that determines our souls.

  It’s like that every morning at the front door.

  Ah, well. Safety first.

  The thoughts pulled back from my mind and a hissing sound emerged from inside the hay. I plunged my hand deep within, pushed the door open, and disappeared inside the headquarters of the Moirai Initiative.

  Nothing important ever happens on this land.

  Underneath it, however, is where this story begins.

  ***

  Our mortality makes us alive. You will refuse to believe that sentence until you are dying. At that point, you will be unable to stop thinking about it.

  I stepped inside the gaping maw of the elevator before me. Seven buttons ran down a column, pointing straight into the earth.

  Yes, it was an odd place for an elevator. But when an underground nuclear missile silo gets decommissioned, the structure does not simply disappear.

  No, the sins of our past leave lasting scars. Life is simply a process of dealing with that fact.

  I pressed the top button, the one with the letter “G” on it, and the door closed with a cheery “ding!”

  ***

  Th
e doors opened and I stepped into the lobby. At least, I stepped into the round, windowless underground room that served as a lobby.

  “Good morning, Mr. W!” Janine said peppily. She stood up, revealing that goddamned blue shirt and white pant combo that I had to wear in my first few years here. I pulled my coat tight with one hand, and gripped my briefcase tighter with the other.

  “’Morning, Janine. I believe you have something for me?” She couldn’t tell my smile was fake. No one ever could. I was very good at that.

  “That would be me,” a man said as he sprang up from his chair. On the wall above his head was the logo that always reminded me of a pizza sliced into eighths. I was momentarily hungry before the man extended his hand and put an immediate end to those feelings. “Seth Lang. Charmed, I’m sure.”

  His greasy smile made me uneasy, but I shook his hand firmly nonetheless. I cringed internally as my fingers brushed across his gold pinky ring with blue inlay.

  Really, now – what person who expects to be taken seriously wears a pinky ring?

  “I suppose we should get going, Mr…?”

  “W,” I responded with an unfaltering smile.

  The corners of his lips wavered. “Well, yes, but… we’re going to be on more friendly terms, right?” He laid his hand on the small of my back, sending well-controlled shivers down my spine.

  “My name is ‘W.’ Please, Seth, we need to get moving,” I replied with the most disarming smile I could muster.

  He had an air about him that said he was – not respected, per se – but used to getting his way. Nobody could sport that balding quaff he somehow saw as ‘hair’ without embarrassment unless he was used to people smooching his taint and calling it pudding.

  I barely concealed the second shudder. “We’ve got a lot to cover. As you probably know, things have been… difficult ever since those fucking junkies had their status adjusted to ‘unavailable.’” He looked at me as I took a glorious, deep-lunged drag from my cigarette while Janine glowered. I breathed the smoke out slowly before turning back to face the elevator. “Of course, that’s why I said we never should have trusted Annie and Darren in the first place. You can’t pick up shit without getting your hands dirty.” I shook my head and pressed the button to the elevator as Seth stared at me wide-eyed. “Sure, the junkies delivered perfect subjects. Comatose, homeless, the works. But see where it got us in the end.” I turned to look at him ominously. “Now everyone’s hands are dirty.”

  The cheerful “ding!” rang across the lobby, and Seth followed me inside.

  Yes, we did terrible things.

  Yes, we’re doing terrible things.

  For the first time, though, I’m finally going to do something about it.

  And yes, it will undoubtedly be the last thing I do at all.

  ***

  I reached out and pressed the button marked “A.” It took us to the second level, which was a large, circular, innocuous room.

  “So that’s why the Pipeline was so important then?” Seth asked sleekly. “We were getting you the subjects that your local vendors weren’t able to provide?”

  I stared at him. “The Pipeline is exactly why Pine Grove was so important, Mr. Lang.”

  He nodded eagerly and walked ahead.

  “And why the closure of our Pine Grove location has proven so problematic.”

  I don’t think he heard me. Instead, he was looking back and forth at the opposite ends of the room. “Tell me, Mr. W, what am I seeing? Did Moirai build these after the First Landing?”

  I walked quickly to where he had been advancing with the concern of a parent following a toddler. “Yes, Seth,” I said, falling in step alongside him. “We were able to… develop a lot here.” I took a deep breath, and reminded myself to tell him anything he wanted.

  It’s okay.

  He’s guilty too.

  The emotional pang hit me again, and for the briefest of moments I felt like crying. I shook it off and pointed in front of him. “The first thing that we understood from Half-Sphere 1991 was that it told us of time and space. ‘And’ – such a loaded word, isn’t it? Think about this, Seth,” I said. He wheeled around and looked at me stupidly. “If the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and we live for about eighty-” here my stomach turned - “then aren’t we lucky that time has landed, for the briefest of moments, on our lives?” I breathed the last of my cigarette, pinched it out, and tossed it into a trashcan. “Or is time – and space along with it - subject to our experience? What do you think, Mr. Lang?”

  His stupid, silent expression did not change. I sighed and lit up another cigarette. “Anyway. What Half-Sphere 1991 told us was how to manipulate time and space, rather than let it manipulate us.”

  Seth jumped in terror as a thump rattled the wall next to him. He turned, slack-jawed, and stared at the full-length mirror that dominated one side of the room.

  Except it wasn’t a mirror. Not really. Instead of reflecting our room back at us, another place altogether was revealed. It was entirely bright yellow, with only a blue blanket on a mattress to disrupt the hue. Bizarrely, a snow-globe on a pedestal was filled with white power on our side of the mirror, yet its image was entirely clear on the other. But the most disturbing thing was Seth’s reflection.

  It wasn’t Seth at all. The man looking back at him, mere inches away, looked nothing like him and was moving of his own accord. In fact, it seemed to be another person entirely. The man was skinny, aged, and sported a wild mustache and beard. He looked like he had been a prisoner for decades.

  The wall thumped again as the prisoner pounded against the glass from his end. Seth jumped back in fear, then stared in shock as he watched the man scream silently.

  “Space, Mr. Lang, is not as linear as we’d like to think. In fact, some of our earliest experiments with manipulating space caused loops, holes, and even horseshoe bends that we could not seem to fix. It took some time for us to learn the finer points of manipulating space. There were some casualties.” I took another drag from the cigarette and looked at the screaming man with a sort of academic detachment, as I had done so many times before.

  Again, the guilt bubbled. Again, I told myself that I was finally doing something to right the wrong, even if it was only a little nudge.

  Even if it came at the paltry cost of just one life.

  “Come over here, Mr. Lang, and see the other half of our inevitable exploration.” I put an arm around his shoulders, and he jumped at the touch. “Walk with me to the other side of the room.”

  We approached a set of wide-open metal doors. He seemed hesitant, even fearful, after what he had just seen. I smiled to myself.

  It wasn’t until we came into full view of the room inside the metal doors that Seth.

  Two tiny skeletons were propped up on steel bars in the center. One looked like it was kneeling, while the other was nearly standing upright. Wide-eyed, Seth took a tentative step forward.

  I immediately stopped him with an outstretched arm. “Ah-ah-ah, Mr. Lang,” I said, the smoke from my outstretched fingers forming a cloud above his head. “We don’t go inside the machine.”

  “Sometimes, Mr. Lang, the greatest truth that we uncover is the realization that we should never look any further,” I said with a grin. “Now, let’s go downstairs.”

  ***

  I pressed the “S” that would take the elevator to the third floor. When the doors opened, they revealed quite a sight.

  White walls surrounded an office environment that would have been mundane in any big city.

  Seth stepped forward in confusion as the office continued to buzz around him. “What’s all this?” he asked, baffled, as the workers continued to ignore our presence.

  I smiled as I brought the cigarette to my lips. “Why, it’s Moirai’s finest!” I exclaimed. “These lovely folks come here every day and work an honest nine-to-five for us, day in and day out, without fail.” I nodded approvingly. “If only they k
new it.”

  Seth turned and gave me that woefully stupid look once again.

  “You see, Seth, the problem we were facing is that time and space mean nothing without the third key. Can you describe the nature of time and space before you were born? Of course not, Mr. Lang. That is because neither means anything without consciousness.” I blew smoke. “The most important lesson taken from Half Sphere 1991 was that we could manipulate things that did not inhabit the physical world as we perceive it, but exist as an abstract of themselves. We could get inside the mind.”

  Seth’s incredulous jaw fell.

  “These people don’t know they’re here. Or rather, they don’t know where here really is. They come to work every day, they perform the same job, but they all think that they’re in some boring office building in a vague mid-sized Midwestern city. When asked about the particulars of their jobs, they are overcome with the desire to quickly change the subject.”

  For the first time, I really thought about what it was that we were doing to these people. I had dismissed it so frequently, but could no longer deny what it was: a pestilence of thought.

  “Malicious Mind Control,” Seth breathed hoarsely. “I’ve heard about this room.”

  I frowned. He was enjoying this far too much. I wondered if others saw me the same way. “Yes,” I continued. “The mind, once reached, can be influenced. It took a great many years before we developed our understanding enough to administer an entire office,” I noted. Seth nodded eagerly. “My – our – first attempts to reach other minds were… interesting endeavors.”

  Seth rubbed his hands. “Go on. Please.”

  I shuddered, then forced myself to remember: right now, Seth Lang gets to know any secret that he wants.

  “I was one of the first people to control the technique, back in 1991,” I sighed. “I was young, eager, and thought I could change the world. As I grew older, I became distraught as I realized the awful truth: I was right.”

  Seth looked at me in confusion, as I came to the horrible realization that I had let my internal thought accidentally slip out.