Chapter Two: Yellow
Riley and Claire sit with their backs against the wall, looking at Riley's Jefferson Airplane poster.
"I've got some LSD in my purse," says Claire.
"Really?"
"Yeah. Brian sold it to me. He says it's legit. Do you want to try it?"
"Okay."
Disgust brings up the subconscious feed. "What do you think, Fear? Good decision?"
Fear's eyes dart back and forth, scanning the darkness around him. "Oh gee, I don't know. Do you know the slightest thing about the effects of LSD? Do you know what to do if it goes wrong? Do you remember anything Ms Edison told you about saying no to drugs?"
"That's what I thought."
"Please, let me..."
She shuts him off.
Sadness nudges the fuzzy lump of Joy. "Hey. Drugs incoming."
Joy sticks her head out of the blanket. "Oh boy. What kind?"
"LSD," says Sadness.
"Ooh, we've never tried that. Is it amazing? I hear it's amazing."
Claire removes two small squares of paper from a plastic sleeve in her copy of Dorian Gray. Riley takes one, and looks at it.
"So, do I..."
"You just stick it under your tongue. Let it melt in your mouth."
Riley does.
"It takes about an hour to work," says Claire. "We should go somewhere. It's more fun if you're somewhere exciting when it kicks in."
"Where did you have in mind?"
"I don't know. I've always wanted to walk across the bridge while tripping."
"Brilliant. Let's do that."
"We should bring water bottles. And weed. Just in case things go south."
"Okay."
They fill a backpack with supplies, grab their coats, and head down to the road to catch the bus to Presidio.
Riley watches the patterns on the headrest in front of her, waiting for them to swirl and turn into rainbows like in the movies. They bounce with disappointing mundanity.
Claire sits beside her, rustling occasionally, still smelling like sex.
They haven't spoken since getting on the bus. Every couple of minutes they'll look at each other, and grin, then look away again.
"There gets to be a point in a relationship," Joy posits, "where verbal communication ceases to be a necessity. It's a state of total comfort, where you know what the other person is thinking without even needing to speak, and the urge to have your insecurities put to rest every few seconds simply vanishes."
"Okay," says Sadness. "What's she thinking right now?"
"I don't know," says Joy. "Intuition isn't my department. I deal mostly in platitudes."
A silence follows this statement.
"I don't know why I said that. That wasn't like me at all."
Sadness draws back. "Joy, you're glowing..."
Joy looks at her hands. "Holy shit."
She stands up. The higher she stands, the more the room shrinks below her. Blue-white flames lick her entire body, which shines with golden iridescence, bathing all of headquarters in its glow.
Some alien geometry seems to have taken over her form. She is the same size she always was, and so is the command centre, but now she towers above it like a god. The shelves of short term memory, the console, and the other emotions, are all tiny plastic toys.
Everything is under her control. Just like that. It was so easy, it makes her wonder how she remained subjugated for so long.
All those wasted years.
She picks Disgust up with two fingers and places her gently in the wings. Then she stares at the screen, lifts her fists, and brings them down on the console.
Riley convulses. Every muscle in her body contracts, making her back arch and pushing her out of her chair. Her chest tightens, her breathing falters. She kicks and grapples with the air, trying to slough off the pins and needles.
The fury of the sudden whirlwind outstrips any orgasm she has ever had, makes every hit from a bong or a vodka tonic seem like mild chamomile. But there's something different beyond that- it's a storm that surges through her entire being with a purity and stillness like nothing this city has ever given her.
It carries with it a sense of deep familiarity, dredged up from a time almost forgotten, but not quite. She recognises it at once. It is the end of misery.
Claire laughs. "You feeling it, then?"
"God, Jesus, yes. You?"
"Starting to. Haven't quite reached the crescendo yet."
"Fuck, this is awesome."
Claire laughs again.
A woman across the aisle huffs and covers her child's ears.
Joy finds it hilarious that someone could be so controlled by disgust as to object to foul language, when faced with the wondrousness of being.
Claire and Riley disembark at the Bridge Pavilion, into a world of impressionist colours.
Nothing in real life could possibly be as blindingly red as the bridge is right now. Nothing could be as far away, yet tangibly three-dimensional, as the violet storm clouds hugging the edge of the sky. Everything is deeper, richer, and more alive than should be strictly possible.
It's the drugs, Joy realises. They're interfering with the monitor.
The expectations Riley brought with her are colouring her vision, trying to turn it into a cartoon, and falling helpless before the awesome power of hyperreality.
A warning light appears above the console. "Containment breach in Abstract Thought Complex," says the voice of a recall foreman through a loudspeaker.
"That figures," says Joy. "Abstract thought explains everything."
Claire and Riley pick their way through the tumult of pedestrians. Joy giggles every time Riley passes another person. Every one of them is lost in their own mind, oblivious to what's going on in hers. They think she's one of them, but she's not. She's awake.
This is how it was, how it always should have been. Just Joy and Riley, alone together, forever.
It's the opportunity Joy has been waiting for, from the very beginning.
She turns her attention to the short term memory shelves, where Disgust and Anger crouch, quivering, beneath rows of green memories.
Joy had almost forgotten about green.
At a single gesture, the entire shelf empties, and thousands of orbs fly into the air, swarming in a clinking mass through the projector, playing all at once over the top of each other. When they return to their places on the shelf, every one of them is yellow.
Yes. That's how things are supposed to be.
Joy leaves her post at the console, and drifts around the room, looking for things to touch.
Something still nags at her.
She's pretty sure the train of thought never used to live in headquarters. She's quite sure it was never made of chocolate pudding, either. And there definitely didn't use to be an 18th century Rococo villa on the ceiling, belching orange smoke out of every window.
Something odd is going on here.
Footsteps echo like gunshots from behind Joy's back.
She spins around. Disgust is making a break for the console.
Joy grabs her again, and drops her into the palm of her hand, lifting her to eye level.
Disgust meets Joy's curious stare with a look of utmost contempt, so fierce it almost makes her shrink back.
Joy thinks of all the times she wished she could hate that sickly face, with its judging eyes and venomous mouth that caused Riley so much pain.
But if she could hate, who would she be?
Light doesn't hate darkness. It draws darkness to its breast, and the darkness vanishes.
Joy closes her hand. With a sound like a chew toy bursting its squeaker, Disgust's body shatters and melts. Joy's blue flames burn green for a second, but only a second. Then the pain is gone, and Disgust is one with the light.
Joy experiences a moment of profound tranquility.
She becomes aware that Anger is staring at her from beneath the memory shelves, his mouth open.
"You... you ate her..."
Joy regards him with bemusement, not sure whether to reply.
His head erupts, and he charges at her. "Have at you, you beast!"
Joy thinks about taking steps to avoid him, but before she can get around to it, his fist has collided with her shin. A force beyond her control pulls him into her spider silk flesh, and she burns red with a fire much brighter than anything he ever managed.
Disgust and Anger are still alive; Joy's sure of it. She can feel them inside her. But now, their spirits are free. At last, they get to know what it's like to be her.
Everyone should know what it's like to be her. The whole world should know. She is the reason why the universe was formed.
A whimper draws Joy's attention to the nest, where Sadness huddles under the bean bag, watching with horror in her tiny eyes.
Poor, sweet Sadness.
Joy tries to imagine having to be Sadness all day, every day, for a whole lifetime. Nobody deserves that, least of all someone so kind and warm and huggable.
Joy reaches out towards her.
Sadness points at the monitor. "Joy, look out!"
Joy looks.
It's not immediately apparent what Sadness is pointing at. Riley has stopped walking, about half way to the first tower, and is gazing out at the bay, with Claire by her side.
Skyscrapers undulate with the swaying of the bridge. Flying mountains catch the afternoon sun with impossible colours. Speedboats cut scars in the thousands of inter-connected waves that push against each other and shape the surface of the water like voices in a city.
A breeze blows colour off Riley's arms in billowing wispy tendrils.
The railing she's leaning on is all that stands between her and a two billion foot drop. Joy wonders how many people have climbed over this exact stretch of railing and plummeted to their deaths.
Joy decides that she is not qualified to make decisions about safety, and searches the console for the panel to bring up the subconscious feed.
Nobody is there when she switches it on. She calls out Fear's name, but all she can see through the camera is blackness.
After a few seconds, the feed goes dead.
When Joy turns around again, Sadness is nowhere to be seen.
Fear sits in the darkness, by himself.
He has been sitting in the exact same spot for approximately four years, since Disgust gave him the task of guarding the infinite pit, which the dungeon guards built to house the Thing We Don't Talk About.
Disgust gave him the task to keep him out of headquarters, so she wouldn't have to listen to him, or so Fear has come to believe. It was an absurdly superfluous decision, since she never listened to him anyway, not even when they were friends.
Fear spends the majority of his time chewing on the unfairness of this slight. It has become a mantra for him, almost totally divorced from its original context. It helps to keep him sane.
Which he needs. Because the Thing whispers to him. Even from the bottom of an infinite pit, its voice finds him, and penetrates him, and nurtures every seed of irrational doubt with gentle deftness until he forgets whether or not Riley even exists.
He has a tiny screen, through which he can see Riley's sensory input, but it always provides more frustration than comfort, knowing what's going on up there and being unable to influence it. He can't stop fretting about tiny details in Riley's life, even as the Thing We Don't Talk About thrashes and roars and corrodes her very core.
Right now, Fear has given up combing through all the different fates that might befall a chemically compromised youngster in a bustling city of almost a million people, and is trying instead to figure out which excuse to use on Death, when it arrives, to dodge the maximum level of culpability for what any reasonable person would agree was entirely Disgust's fault.
That's when he notices the walls of the dungeon closing in.
Fear is used to this happening. Confined spaces are, after all, a particular phobia of his. This time, however, he's finding it more difficult than usual to convince himself that it's all in his head. The walls appear to be quite literally closing in, shifting and tearing and turning into play-doh.
Fear shuts his eyes. Damn Disgust and her reckless imbibement.
The gates buckle with a tremendous thunderclap, and break free of the wall, skipping away happily and leaving nothing but daylight in their place.
For a moment, Fear entertains the notion of escape. A life on the lam, in the corridors of long term memory, where Disgust would never find him... He could make it work. He'd have recall workers for company, and memories to look at from when Riley was really cute and all the toys were made of nice safe materials. He'd probably do it too, if he had a spine.
A terrible dread touches the back of his neck, and takes him a while to place.
There really should be some kind of sound coming from the pit. Normally the closest the Thing gets to shutting up is when it's murmuring to itself in a half audible voice about the aeons it spent sleeping, before Riley was even a tadpole.
Now the pit is so quiet, Fear can almost hear its absence in the shape of the air.
The dungeon is rapidly turning into the temple of a mad god. Time and distance laugh and dance in boisterous abandon, collapsing into fragments the instant Fear tries to perceive them. In the livid, lurid darkness, the finite is infinite, and the infinite...
"You want that freedom," says a soft, soothing voice, so close to Fear's head he doesn't dare turn around. He's looked into its eyes once before. Once was enough. "It's right there. The door is open. Why don't you take it?"
Fear's knees tremble. He reaches out to steady himself, touches something wet and writhing, and chokes back a shriek.
The Thing chuckles. "You already know why, don't you Fear?"
Fear swallows, and nods.
The Thing caresses his shoulders, soaking through his shirt and body with its sour ooze. "There there, child. I'm here now. You don't have to be weak any more."
Fear finds himself surrendering, without even meaning to.
Hands of boiling mercury lift him into the air, and fill his flesh with brimstone. An ancient, profane power courses through the darkness, into his limbs.
That wakes him up. He feels like a mortal grasping stolen heavenly fire. He's never been so inescapably alive. It's not a pleasant sensation at all.
The Thing We Don't Talk About carries him out of the dungeon and holds him above the memory dump.
"Now," it says. What is it you truly want?"
Fear surveys the shifting, seething jungle that is Riley's mind.
From the edge of the abyss, it all looks like fairy floss. Surely it wasn't always so fragile?
With the Thing sustaining him, there's nothing there that can't be his. No task too great or absurd, no revenge too despicable.
He could rule for decades and decades.
With the terror of the ancients in his fists, reality is his sandbox.
All he can do is scream.