by Ryan Schow
I feel him starting to stir, an uncomfortable heat fanning out like oxygenized embers through his nerve lines, like fire or insanity, or fear. It’s good to know I can still disturb him if I try hard enough.
“We are two peas in a pod,” he says tersely.
I take a step towards him; he takes one step back. “The hell we are.”
“Say what you might, my dear, but I made you.”
“The doctor from Dulce, he made me, too. Turned something on inside of me I still don’t trust or understand. That makes me better than you. Stronger. More lethal.”
He spits out a huff and says, “Must you always be the turd in the punch bowl?”
“Whatever you accomplished in your year and a half at Auschwitz, the hundreds of thousands of innocents you gassed, shot and burned, it is nothing compared to what I could do in a half an hour. You didn’t do that for me. He did that. That thing from Dulce. Because of him, I can lay waste to an entire country with a single, focused thought. It took you a whole eighteen months to kill just less than half a million starved, beaten slaves. It’s a travesty, you being so gosh damn inefficient.”
His entire body shifts into something darkly animated. Like he’s finally found something in this conversation he enjoys. “That’s cute,” he says. “You comparing your pretend body count to my actual body count.”
“Shut up, Mengele. We’re not the same. You and I, we’re neither comrades nor friends. We’re barely co-workers. You’re say you’re a necessary evil? Saying you’re evil sounds mundane. Maniacal, insane, unbearably cruel—these are more fitting descriptors. But even they fail to capture your true, vile essence. What you are is wrong, and odious. You are the true abomination here. A monster of the most disgusting sort. You, you’re…”
He straightens up, takes a step toward me. I can feel him in the air, the intent, that awful need to punish me, to murder me. This is his baseline need.
“I’m what, you ungrateful shit?” he challenges.
“You’re the motherf*cking devil.”
Now he settles into a knowing smile, almost like the assertion subdued him. “Look at you, all complimentary. That’s ripe. You saying this to me after what she did,” he says, pointing to the future version of me.
“I’m not her.”
“Bullshit!”
“You can’t make me you,” I say, the chords standing out in my neck.
“I’m sorry I compared you to me, for I see the error in my judgment. You’re merely a child, and your sense of morality boils my innards. Perhaps this more pleasing version of you”—he says, nodding in the direction of my future self—“deserves my interminable praise. She is the killer I long dreamt you would become. And perhaps the restraints, and that’s what they are, perhaps she deserved them because she embraced what she is. What you are destined to be.”
“She killed Presidents—”
“Ah,” he muses, “so the future you will have some redeeming qualities after all.”
“You cheer, Holland, but you haven’t seen what I’ve seen.”
“So what!” he shouts, his voice echoing off the bare walls and cold floor. “You don’t know shit because you’re still a stupid teenager. A misguided intellectual. You saw her life as a movie. She lived it! She knows what terrible is. Not you. You wouldn’t know terrible if it fist-fucked your face!”
“One day you can tell me what ‘terrible’ truly is, or maybe I’ll just crawl through that sewage pit of memories,” I growl, nodding at his cranium, “and see for myself.”
“You have my permission!”
Why is arguing with him so freaking exhausting? For heaven’s sake, I can’t take it anymore! “Just go, please.”
“One day, you will be beautiful Raven de’ Medici. You do not see it now, but cruelty is an enchanting medium you will most definitely embrace.”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Look at her,” he says. I look. “She is you because of the things she did. All you have to do is know how you came to be in this shape, and by virtue of knowing, you can avoid the errors that cost you your leg, your arm, your eye and your sanity. Then you might continue your reign of terror. Or justice.”
“I’m not going to change her past to not lose my limbs. That thing on the table is repulsive, and it’s lost. She knows this. I know this.”
“So what are you going to do?”
The question stops me. I’ve though about it a dozen times, but I’ve come to no conclusions. “I have to say, honestly, I don’t know. What I can say for sure, though, is I’m done with the killing.”
He shakes his head, like he’s disappointed, like I’ve disappointed him. And then he leaves me with my future self to figure out what, if anything, to do next.
Long Distance Life
1
Soon, in the years ahead, time travel will be proven a real and viable means of travel. As guided by the Euclidean Space Perspective, space in this universe will be dissected into three dimensions while time itself will be defined as the fourth dimension. By combining space and time into layers, or manifolds (three layers of space and one layer of time), scientists will use the construct known as Minkowski Space to create and develop methods of time travel, and eventually the linking of one mind to one body despite opposing layers of time.
To the people of 2015, this is the not-too-distant future. To The Operator, this is so far in the past, it might as well be the age of the dinosaurs.
The Operator, before he rode down the wormhole back into 2015 to inhabit the body and become The Assassin, he was merely a gathering of energy in The Nest. A permanent resident. Twenty-one grams of existence. A conscious soul unhindered by a body, or by the limitations of the purely physical, human experience. Such a long-distance life capable of time travel was made possible using a universal space/time construct created hundreds of years ago (from his time, not this time). Souls came and went from his time and this universe—almost at their leisure—but here, on earth, he remained.
The idea of being a voyeur on earth and using time travel as a means of enriching the quality of his earth-bound existence constituted a compulsion. He was a being without judgment, though. The Operator, he preferred to think of his experiences as hobbies he wasn’t quite ready to part with. In this frame of mind, he was content.
Balanced.
Only in the twenty-ninth century were the most evolved souls able to keep their soul rooted in one time while allowing control of a body to take place in another time. It’s what allowed The Operator to live countless lives hundreds and sometimes thousands of years in the past while still being present in The Nest in this time.
Souls like him—those honored by The Patriarch (Supreme Being of The Hive)—were allowed certain advantages others were not: the freedom of unrestricted time travel; permission to be anyone in any time in history; the ability to go through the process of aging and dying, to be born and raised, to be Presidents or actors, saints or humanitarians, dictators or assassins.
As one of the chosen few, all The Operator needed was the energetic nod from The Patriarch and any life he wanted was his. He must gain permission, however, lest he be jousted from this universe and pitched into the body of something…less evolved.
The Operator, having reached an exemplary status eons ago, stopped asking The Patriarch for certain permissions. Not out of worry The Patriarch would reject him. He craved risk. He ached for a high stakes existence. In this time, however, in The Nest, a part of The Hive blessed by The Patriarch, he was drained of any excitement, save for that he could create for himself.
So he created.
With great risk came hyper-irresponsibility. The worst case scenario for The Operator was he would be expelled from this universe. There were tens of billions of other universes, countless horizons to cross; to exist in this time, in this universe, allowed for a certain visceral experience; other universes, other solar systems, they all offered something different, a non-human life-experience unlike anything on earth.
He didn’t want to be banished, but he’d been here a long time, too. Not too long, but certainly long enough. If he were ejected from The Hive, made to relinquish The Nest, he would embark upon new worlds, new horizons with an open mind, so to speak. But not until he took down the most ruthless human being this existence has known for a thousand years—a girl who started out worthless and meek, an ugly girl with a flimsy spine and not a scrap of self-confidence.
The girl was once imprisoned, yes, pulled dead from space and brought to The Patriarch before being sent back to the twenty-fourth century for long-term summary torture and eventual soul-scalping. Her soul was not scalped, though. No one could pry those twenty-one grams from her body. Which was impossible until now. The girl, the once spineless child, she refused every effort heaped upon her by time’s foremost experts.
Even her maker, the elusive reptilian from Dulce, he could not pry her soul-from-shell to save his life, and he was one of the most proficient of his kind. He didn’t even come close. The one they called The Doctor, he was one of those powerful, cave dwelling reptoids from the Sirius system brought here thousands of years before Christ to evolve humanity on a genetic level.
Yet he gave up.
When he finally left, Raven’s captors simply let her rot for decades, kept her dying all the time. All that was ever taken from her was a leg, an arm, an eye. After decades of abuse and neglect, after decades of capture, she was rescued by a girl. Taken from that time back to 2015. This was where he wanted to go; this was where he had gone. And he would succeed where everyone else had failed.
If it was the last thing he did in this universe, he would drag Raven’s soul kicking and screaming from her body. He need only to find her. After disappearing several law enforcement officers from the fabric of time, after commandeering a police cruiser from the Nevada desert and driving into the ground state of California, The Operator, now The Assassin, made his way to Palo Alto where he knew Raven was once Abigail Swann and she was friends with a skinny little blonde girl named Anetka.
Netty.
He’d start with her first.
Me Stuffed into You
1
The screwy thing about life is I had it in my mind that who I’d become—the future murderous me—she became something so abysmal I couldn’t go back to her. To me. I would try to explain how this feels, but honestly I don’t have the words. I just really…can’t be me.
Not ever.
So I return to Cameron instead. With so many other potential distractions from the truth about who I become, the only reason I chose to go to Cameron is because I did to her something worse than she did to everyone else. What I did, it’s something future me would do. She would dole out the kind of punishment that would last a lifetime.
Or she’d just kill you.
I take the elevator to Cameron’s floor, passing a few students in the hallways (who take a wide berth around me), then stand outside Cameron’s room for a moment and use my mind to crawl the space beyond the door.
She’s inside. Curled in her sheets and blankets. The very essence of her ripped so free from her soul, she reeks of permanent defeat.
I can’t say I’m too upset, but I sort of am.
It’s one thing to punish a person; it is another thing to maim them. Is this how the future version of me begins? By torturing Cameron?
Perhaps this is my start.
Or this is simply me being anxious to mete out vengeance. It’s the only explanation for why the future me does all the startling things she does. Oh how I’ve come to fear and loathe the future me! I’m still feeling yucky, soiled from my journey through her memories. I think about who I have become—a murderous fiend masquerading on the principles of freedom and justice—and I think, turning into her is not something that happens later, it starts with this moment.
Right now.
Then again, Holland might be right. Could I be looking for reasons to kill? Justifications to rid the earth of its deviants? Maybe. It’s not out of the question.
And apparently I’m good at it.
Standing outside her door, my mind divided and spinning, I think, f*ck it, I’m going in. I think, she deserved exactly what she got, the sour little twat. But did she deserve it to such a degree? I pause. Don’t go in just yet. Jesus, I don’t know what I’m thinking! Wow. Shit. I hate second guessing my decisions, especially when there’s violence involved.
I slide into Cameron’s shoes. Think about her. Over the last few days, after leaving her room with a bread blasted face and soup in my hair, I’ve been trolling her mind, seeing what she’s seeing, feeling what she’s feeling. This voyeuristic part of me, she’s not proud of herself. The invasion of privacy is paramount. What I wanted, though, was to see where she landed when the shock of what I did wore off. The problem for her is, the shock isn’t wearing off. She’s still reeling. Still lost. Not only that, she’s becoming more and more agitated. If there was but an ounce of good in her, it was lost to everything rotten and ugly inside.
Go in her room, I tell myself. It’s okay.
Using telekinesis, I unlock the door, walk inside. She’s turned away from me in bed, her baldish scalp a mess of little scabs and stubbled hair. She looks like a cancer patient who shaved her head with a cheese grater. She’s awake. She’s pretending to be asleep, but I know she’s awake. I can feel it. It’s the surge of absolute terror flooding through her like icy hot poison.
I just stand there, saying nothing.
“Go away,” she says in a voice so choked with fear and decay it actually stings to know that I’ve inspired this. How could I rouse such things in others? In her? For a second, this reminds me of when I was sitting in the bathtub and Gerhard’s war model—that seven foot scab eating giant— strolled into my bathroom and was just standing over me. Dropping bloody scabs in my water.
Cameron is now me, and I’m him. The prey is now the hunter. The victim now the bully.
“I’m concerned about you,” I say, trying to sound tender even though I know she is not a girl accustomed to sympathy.
“I’m not gobbling down entire bottles of pills if that’s what you’re wondering.” These starbursts of trepidation popping inside Cameron’s head, the desolation weaving cobwebs inside her, isolating her, pulling her under, they shrink beneath power surges of enmity. The heat of her anger is stifling.
“You don’t have it in you,” I say. “Your hostility towards me and towards yourself fails to equal the solidarity one needs to take their own life. In other words, you haven’t got the balls.”
She rolls over in a fit, like a monster from the sick ward. “Don’t pretend you know me!” she snaps. I don’t say a word, which pisses her off. Eyes burning, she wants a target. Someone to fight. Me. But all these mixed emotions, they’re turning to muddy water, to sludge. Which is sucking the energy right out of her.
“When I think about you killing yourself, I think the suicided version of you is probably the best version of you. Then again, maybe you have some light in you now that some of the darkness has been vanquished. At least, that’s my hope. That has always been my hope.”
Her features are so pumped full of venom they bend right before my eyes. “You didn’t alleviate the darkness,” she hisses, “you stirred it up.”
“You being who you are, I didn’t really believe you’d learn from this. I prayed I was wrong, but you tell me I’m not. Which is why I’m here.”
“You need to go the fuck away,” she snarls, her hands becoming fists. Her face has this manic, malnourished quality about it, her features no longer beautiful as they twist and scowl under the burden of her every tortured emotion.
I close the distance between us, use my mind to hold her in place, then lay my right palm on her head and open a connection between us. A link. She wants to scratch and bite me, but she can’t. I’m too powerful. Her mouth wiggles, and tightens. I keep it slammed shut. All she has are her eyes, and they’re like fiery marbles in her skull. They roll up to watch my hand, t
hen plunk down because there’s a ton of power being shoved into her skull. Shaky, and by her will alone, they fight and rise once more to meet my feral gaze. There is a helplessness to her expression that screams of sadness, of desperation, of defeat.
I’m not sure this will help, but she needs to see what I see. She needs perspective.
2
When the psychic/physical connection between us is made, when my mind successfully syncs with hers, I shove a fistful of borrowed memories into her head. My mind burns brighter than a thousand suns with the memories I drew from those who loved Patricia Hardy and Kristen Whales most. Now her mind has these same memories. They’re the rawest, densest, most painful memories I extracted from friends and family, those people who grieved and suffered most when Cameron bullied the two girls to death.
Saturating Cameron’s head and heart with every last bit of sorrow, I drive, cram and stuff these emotions deep into her psyche. Something in my mind says back off. I don’t listen to that voice.
I can’t.
It’s one thing to tell Cameron how she destroyed Patricia and Kristen; it’s an entirely different thing to make her feel the feelings of those people Patricia and Kristen left behind. I want her to suffer her mistakes the same way I went into future Raven’s mind and suffered mine. Then, for the smallest moment, I wonder, oh God, is this me lashing out at her for what I learned about myself?
It’s possible.
Seeing my future self’s life path horrified me. Am I trying to horrify Cameron with her past the same way future Raven horrified me with my future?
Cameron’s body bucks against the emotional data dump. This fuels something in me. I wasn’t sure I could do this—make such a transfer of others’ emotions—but I realize I can and it’s invigorating. The memories slam into her so hard and so fast, her eyes actually roll back in her head.
Eventually I release her. Break the connection.
