You're sick of all the imaginings and visions, because this is not a nightmare and it's not hell either. This is a laboratory, and so it ought to act like one. No visions, no made-up things, no dots and swirls behind your eyes or shadows for things that aren't there. Laboratories are for science. Not magic.
You have a partner. Not Teliko, bright and a little overeager but still tough and intelligent and always hiding away somewhere beside you. There's something else that isn't her lurking like a cloud on the horizon, and you've started thinking of it as a partner, because that makes it not so entirely wrong.
He whispers and tells you things – watch out, enemy up ahead, take him out, quickly, hurry, well done – and sometimes he doesn't tell you anything, and that's somehow worse. Sometimes, when Teliko isn't watching, you call back to him – who the hell are you? – and you always get the same answer back – I'm you.
But he's not you. If he were you, he wouldn't be here next to you. If he were you, you wouldn't still have your own thoughts in your head. He's not you, and you refuse to believe that he's another you or some psychodrama crap like that, because you're not crazy. He's not a curse, because there's no such thing. And yet he's not real either, because although he sometimes touches you – snags his fingers against your hair, your face, the loose ends of your bandanna – and although he sometimes fights alongside you – whispers things, directions, instructions, holds the end of your gun every time you aim it and directs it at your enemy's heart – you can't strike out at him and return the favour, no matter how much his mirror-clone face drives you insane.
His thoughts are too much like those of a scientist in the movies, the really amoral kind. They're too organised, clean, too sterile of emotion and yet so wrought with intelligence and ideas and concepts, flashing and burning and churning, like the little dots that arise behind your eyes from time to time in this damn laboratory. And yet, beneath all of that, he's sad, lonely, childless, and so obsessed with his own mortality it's like staring into a big black pit. His legacy will not continue. There is no-one to pass the torch to, and he feels alone.
You know all this because he lets you into his mind sometimes. It's like metal. Cold, precise, hard, sharp, unalive. It screams of artifice and fakeness, and yet solidarity and immobility.
He is your mirror, your ghost. You can turn corners in corridors and find him leaning into you, staring into you, symmetry in motion, copying your every movement just to see what you would do. That's because he's a scientist, not a soldier, and he knows that experimentation is the only way to prove things. Soldiers like you were taught that experiment on the battlefield only ever leads to disaster. No matter how many times you lunge at him, he is always just beyond your reach, mocking you.
I have to keep myself alive, he says, a lot. We are the ultimate set of genes. We must live.
Of course he can't be you. If he were you, that would make him the little voice in your head which tells you to destroy. And if you had one of those, that would mean that you were insane. And you're not. And that makes him your partner.
He never leaves your side, the loyal best friend to an onlooker, but onlookers can't see him, only you. And you'd think that meant that you'd made him up, or your head had made him up, or something like that, but that's not true. It's just that you stay far too out of sight for an onlooker to see you both.
His memories, when he lets you see them, are made of metal too. The smell of the metal room where the Ritual took place, the feel of the metal gun he liked to arm himself with in case one of the children's minds struck back, the looming, omniscient presence of it, Metal Gear, like a great false god of destruction. His mind is red with steel corrosion, like bloodspots on his thoughts. He is a lost ghost, but he doesn't exist, because ghosts aren't real.
This is a laboratory. This is a playground for a scientist, not a soldier. He owns this battlefield, he knows it, and he owns you along with it. He always talks about how you and him are one and the same, that he is the real, true you that you've buried under heroic dreams and shellshock. He was the true one, he was the original, and he created you. Even Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde weren't as screwed up as you two. You fight him off, but he is winning – his metal thoughts keep rising up in your own mind, like bubbles of mercury. He wants your mind back.
But he can't have it back, because he's not you. He was never you. He's something else, he's your partner. Ghosts don't exist, and there's no such thing as demons, and you're as sure as hell not crazy. So, if there's no explanation, that means he's nothing.
This is a laboratory, for God's sake. Not Pandora's Box.