Fly shook his head before he continued. “Forget it. Forget it. Whatever. What’s done is done. Not our fault. We’re not omniscient. It’s not like we’re Maestros or masterminds. We just know what we were taught and do what we were told. Guess we’ll have to start the music early, that’s all.”
“What about this guy?”
Another shrug from Fly. “No sense letting good material go to waste.”
The skinny mage knelt down next to Robby and looked him over.
“Oh, damn, man, are you still alive? Wow. Well, you’ve got to be fading fast with all this blood coming out of you. Let’s hope so, anyway, for your sake. Can’t imagine what it must feel like for the Trick to work on you while you’re still breathing.”
He leaned over Robby’s face and put a hand tightly over Robby’s nose and mouth, sealing them shut. Even as weak as Robby was, as soon as his air was cut off, he reflexively began to struggle, to fight with everything he had for one more ragged breath.
It was pointless, as wounded as he was, and Fly began to shake his head as he held Robby down and smothered him.
“Shhh, come on now, let it go, brother,” he said in a surprisingly kind tone. “Let it all go. You don’t want to be in there for what’s coming next. Trust me. What’s coming down on this prison… you’re getting off easy. Just fade out now. Just fade.”
Robby’s feeble struggles reached a crescendo, and then darkness clouded the edges of his vision, moving quickly inwards and swallowing the light as he finally faded away lying on the cold stone floor.
Mickey
I’m starting to hate this job.
It seemed like a good idea at the time; steady paycheck, get some help with these ridiculous student loans, build up the resume, something something adult stuff, you know? I mean, you can only take so many gap years after college before you can’t use youthful wanderlust as an excuse to avoid launching a career any longer.
And really, Quality Assurance Officer sounds so, well, impressive, doesn’t it? It did to me. I was actually pretty shocked that they wanted me for this job; I mean, there I was, no experience, not long out of school, nothing really to suggest that I’d have something to offer to a corporation as big and splashy as Revival Technologies.
It didn’t take me long to figure out why they wanted me. Nobody in their right mind would want this stupid job. And considering how few people have my “particular skillset”, as my idiot supervisor likes to refer to it, it was no wonder that the position was vacant for so long that Revival Tech got desperate enough to hire me.
What’s so awful about working here? For starters, how about the fact that absolutely zero people give a solitary shit about what I report? That’s what we’re supposed to be doing in my department: ensuring the safety and viability of “our product”, but the reality is, nobody cares.
Smoke and mirrors and misdirection, that’s what my job title should be. They hired a young woman with no experience and barely any qualifications not because of my “particular skillset”, but because they never had any intention of using a single word I wrote.
I do my job, I write my reports, and they get filed in some vast wasteland of nothingness, never to see the light of day. Nobody cares. Corporations as big as Revival Technologies are never going to be truly reeled in and controlled by fanciful notions like safety or effectiveness. There’s too much money at stake.
They don’t even need to bribe people in the classic sense when something does go inevitably wrong and “their product” ends up driving somebody into homicidal insanity. They just offer the right people stock options or speaking fees or find some sort of mutual business interests to align and whoever’s in authority practically lines up to roll over for them.
Pretty disgusting, right? I guess everybody finds out something awful about their industry once they start working in it and get a peek behind the curtain. We all grow up thinking that the institutions around us are run by smart, competent, qualified people, and that illusion remains stubbornly persistent even after we get into the workplace and realize that the world is run by idiots and yes men and the corrupt.
God. Even I know that I’m too young to be this jaded already. Most of my friends are still bartending on the weekends and obsessing over their next vacation or which dating app has the hottest guys and I’m all grayed out over my glimpse behind the curtain of how the world really works.
So I do my job and try not to get too caught up in it. Assess the “subjects”, try to anticipate if they’re going to go haywire… well, more like when they were going to go haywire… pass on my reports, and pray to God somebody higher up was actually working on a fix for the issue.
This time around, though, things were going to be a little different. Okay, a lot different. Like night and day different.
As soon as I got off the elevator to my floor, I knew it was going to be a bad day. Mark from Data Analytics was there, as if he were waiting for me. He had this look on his face like he’d heard a lot of heads were going to roll.
“What did you do?” he whispered to me, walking along with me towards my cubicle.
I stopped. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” he said, “Dr. Adjani is in Santos’s office, and the word is that he’s here to see you.”
Oh, great. Dr. Adjani? Not just a serious big wig… Adjani was like, way up there on the corporate ladder, up high enough that I wasn’t even sure exactly what he did for the company, only that everybody got really quiet and tried to look extra busy on the rare occasions when he was around.
The word “serious” doesn’t sufficiently describe him. He might have smiled once in his life, sometime back around when he was eight years old and dissecting a frog for the first time. Never again since then.
I took Mark by the arm and led him over to my cubicle so it wasn’t obvious that we were gossiping. “What’s he doing in Joh… in Santos’s office?”
I’d almost slipped and used my Internal Monologue name for my supervisor, Johnny Dead Head. Santos wasn’t that bad to work for, I guess, he just… he was that kind of gray, formless, middle management type that didn’t seem to serve much real purpose. He had that look about him of someone who spent all day long trying to justify his existence.
Since a big part of my job was assessing the brain activity of the “subjects”, as they were labelled here, after I had a couple of weeks on the job and had gotten a sense of John Santos and his general uselessness, I used my “particular skillset” and checked out his mind for brain activity.
It, um, wasn’t very active. What I mean is, compared to the average person, he just had a dull brain. So I started thinking of him as “Johnny Dead Head”.
Oh, I guess I should explain. I’m a Mentalist.
I suppose it must sound cool, to be able to use magic to read and shape thoughts. I know that’s what I thought, when I scored highly enough on my aptitude tests to qualify for some of the programs. And my teachers and parents and everybody else kept saying what a great honor it was, what an opportunity, all that sort of thing, so I pushed through and did it without really thinking it through.
And now, frankly, it sucks. Not in the way they play it up in movies or TV, with the whole “burden of knowing people’s thoughts all the time” and that garbage. First off, it doesn’t work that way.
It’s not exactly easy to read people’s thoughts; in fact, it’s actually pretty hard. You have to focus in and even then, it starts with more of a vague, swirling feeling, like you’re getting the general gist of the thought but not the actual internal monologue. Then, if you’re good, you can focus in and start to clear out the noise and chatter of all of the other stimuli swarming into a person’s mind and pick up the actual thoughts.
What kind of chatter? Think of all of the massive amount of data piling into a person’s brain in any particular moment. The human brain takes in something on the order of twenty gigabytes of data a day.
A. Day. Every day.
That’s all of t
he visual stimuli you see, audio stimuli you hear, all of the tactile sensations coming in through your skin… pressure, temperature, pain… postural sensations, emotional states… and then there’s the various higher-order cognitions, which we think of as our “thoughts”, but all that other lower-order physical stuff is still rattling around in there. If you’re trying to focus in on those higher-order thoughts, you have to screen out all that other noise.
Shaping thoughts, or influencing them, is even harder. It’s so hard that full on “mind control” is really, really rare, even in a relatively rare specialty like mine. Actually, what I end up doing, in the extremely unusual events when I do it, is more like nudging someone’s thoughts or emotions in one direction or another. “Pushing”, I call it.
But it’s hardly ever done. No, really. I know everybody thinks that Mentalists are all these creepers who are bending countless victims’ minds to their will, but it’s really not like that.
For starters, shaping thoughts… even a little tiny push… is super illegal. Like instantly lose your license and get thrown in prison kinds of illegal. It happens, of course, but if you ever push someone and get caught, you’d better lawyer up and have a damn good reason like self-defense to explain yourself. It’s like shooting someone…it’s that serious.
And with all the other bullshit that goes with being a Mentalist… the licenses, the scrutiny, the constant oversight evaluations by your peers, the fact that pretty much nobody trusts you or wants to be in the same room as you because they’re terrified you’re going to somehow accidentally overhear one of their deepest darkest secrets (which, to be honest, does sometimes happen)… well, trying to forcibly push a person’s mind in an obvious way simply isn’t worth the risk. Trust me, they keep us on lockdown.
The phone on my desk rang. It was Johnny Dead Head.
“Michelle, step into my office, please.”
Great. Michelle. Everybody calls me Mickey. The use of “Michelle” historically has meant that I was in some sort of trouble.
I walked to his office like a Death Row convict going down those last few steps to the gas chamber. That’s exactly what stepping into Johnny Dead Head’s office felt like; like I was walking into a room with no oxygen and no way to sustain life.
And there they were, my idiot supervisor and the Darth Vader of corporate officers. Adjani was seated at Santos’s desk, with Santos standing behind him looking like a puppy who was simultaneously eager to please and also terrified of its master.
“Come in…” Santos began, but Adjani interrupted him.
“We have a special assignment for you.”
His expression never changed. It was like a monitor lizard was looking at me and deciding whether or not it wanted to eat me.
“Okay, I mean, uh, yeah, of course,” I said, stammering like a nitwit.
What can I say? I suck under pressure.
“You are to assess two subjects held at Trubuilt 187,” Adjani said. “Assess and report what you find.”
“Trubuilt 187,” I said, nodding like I knew what I was talking about, not phrasing it as a question in order to hide my ignorance.
Adjani’s cold eyes never left me. “The prison. In the middle of the city?”
Oh, right. Nice work looking like an absolute genius in front of the boss, Mickey. “Right, yes. The prison. The one where they keep the mages and the really violent offenders. I’m… going to that prison?”
“Well, they’re not going to go to the trouble of sending the prisoners over here, obviously,” Santos said, looking over at Adjani to try to share a little moment at my expense.
Adjani never gave him a glance. “Considering the subjects’ history with our company, it would obviously be best if you went to them. We have already had their physiological markers assessed at the prison infirmary. We now need you to go over and do your assessment.”
Santos felt the need to chime in, to state the obvious. “You have authorization to look… inside. To look inside their heads, I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” I said.
“Your oversight has been advised, so at your next assessment, there’s no worries about improper conduct charges or anything like that.”
People do have rights. You can’t just pry into their minds and forcibly yank out their thoughts. Give that a try; you’ll have about a million ACLU lawyers up your ass in no time flat. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, the Fourth requires due process for search and seizure, and then the government finally got around to addressing the issue with the 28th Amendment guaranteeing freedom of thought and protection from illegal mind probes. Of course, the government could always get a warrant, but Revival Tech wasn’t the government… not quite.
“The files have been sent to your work tablet,” he explained. “You’ll be able to access what you’ll need with your password, but the remainder of the file will be locked out. Only Dr. Adjani and myself have access to that.”
He sounded very pleased with himself. I had to really struggle to not roll my eyes at him. So eager to puff himself up in front of the boss.
Not to mention that I already knew his password, the big dummy.
Okay, okay, I know I just made a big deal about how much we’re all on lockdown, us Mentalists, and we all have to answer to our oversight officer, but here’s the thing. We’re all human. We sometimes take a little peek… not a full on mind probe, just a harmless little peek… often to make sure that we aren’t about to step into something dangerous.
Wouldn’t you? Say you go out to a bar, and some guy starts hitting on you. I’m not exactly a big girl… kind of small, actually… and your average man is a real physical threat to me. So it benefits a girl to have a little peek inside that seemingly nice man’s head to see if there’s any violent intentions lurking in there.
And your typical oversight officer understands that. They do it too. So as long as you can explain it away, there are little things that you can get away with. Plus, I have a really good working relationship with my oversight, so when I told him that I peeked inside of Johnny Dead Head’s mind after a couple of weeks of working for the company… mostly to see if he was harboring a secret crush and was going to try to sexually harass me… and I ended up getting his password by mistake; well, my oversight understood.
Plus, his freakin’ password was SantosRocks69$. I mean, so cheesy. So very, very cheesy. My oversight and I ended up just giggling at Johnny Dead Head’s adolescent choice of passwords and we moved on.
That day with Adjani, Santos still seemed to feel the need to state more of the obvious, so he continued, “Federal law dictates that you disclose to the subject that you are a Mentalist before you began the examination.”
Yeah, no shit, Sherlock, that’s pretty much Mentalist 101, I thought, but I put on a serious face and gave Johnny Dead Head a concerned, serious nod to show how much I respected his dipshit opinion.
“Bring your results straight to me,” Adjani said.
Johnny Dead Head didn’t seem to like that. I had to resist a perverse desire to peek inside of his head in order to hear his internal blustering at being kept out of the loop. I really didn’t need to. It was written all over his face.
It got very quiet in the office… almost stifling, really… and I realized that was my cue.
“Okay, um, I guess I’ll just go to the prison, then. Now,” I said, backing away and trying hard to make it look like I wasn’t fleeing the office; which, of course, I was.
I read over the file summaries quickly on the way back to my car, and groaned once I realized who they were sending me to go assess. Pretty much Public Enemy Number One and Two. They’d been splashed all over the news a few months earlier. Of course it would have to be them.
So, now I had to go back out into the pouring rain to drive to what was apparently the oldest, most over-crowded, dangerous prison on the planet, all so I could interview two so-called “terrorists”. And, I’m supposed to figure out which of them is going to be
the more reasonable one to start with: the tactical genius with a mean streak a mile wide, or the giant of a man who could probably snap me in two with one hand.
Hey, only thirty-nine and a half more years until retirement. Hurray.
***
“Park here?” Mickey shouted across the sidewalk, straining her voice to be heard over the rain.
“No, no, no,” the guard at the front gate shouted back, shaking his head. “Visitor parking is…”
Mickey cut him off with a wave. “I’m here on business.”
“Yeah, still. We’ve got like, no staff parking. Street parking only. Two blocks up there’s a lot you can use.”
“Great,” Mickey muttered, checking her blind spot before pulling back into traffic. It had been raining like crazy all week, and she had been hoping to avoid starting off the day with a soaking wet walk to the old prison.
She pulled into the lot two blocks down, got her ticket, and parked. Her umbrella didn’t seem like it felt quite up to the task of keeping the rain off her, and by the time she’d walked back to the gate, her pants were soaked from the thighs down.
Mickey glanced up at the huge stone walls marking the boundary of the old prison, thirty feet high, with guard towers on the corners and at the gate. The entire prison stood out in bizarre contrast to the city around it; cars and neon signs and four story residential buildings all around, with what looked like a medieval castle stuck right smack dab in the middle of it.
What a ridiculous place to stick a prison, she thought. We’ve got tons of violent offenders and criminal mages, where should we put them? Oh, I know… right in the middle of a major city.
A sudden blast of cold, dirty water shook Mickey out of her thoughts, courtesy of a passing car hitting a huge puddle as it went by. She clenched her fists in impotent fury, slowly turning to stare daggers at the culprit as they sped off and out of sight.
“Asshole!” she said, shaking her hands and arms, fruitlessly trying to shake herself dry. “I should…”
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 20
