F.E.A.R: Origins
By Genoscythe
Chapter 4: In Five Minds
"Okay, I understand this Jankowski wasn't prepared to combat Fettel and his clone soldiers, but what about the tactical officer?" The reporter pressed on. One of the cameramen sighed and moved his camera over to the right.
"You mean Jin?"
"Yes. She sounds…less than stable."
"That depends. Before the meds, or after? 'Cause she's been great for the last month or so – "
"I – I mean before. Why did she have such an irrational fear of sexual contact?"
Betters Sr. eased back in his chair, chewing thoughtfully on a pencil. "You know what? I'll bet it was the MPD."
"Multiple personality disorder?" The reporter asked, just to make sure they were talking about the same MPD.
"That's it. See, she had it coming into the group. But I didn't think it was a big deal. You know why?" Betters suddenly leaned in dramatically.
"I hope I'm going to find out."
Betters grinned, accidentally snapping the pencil in his mouth. "Because all five of her personalities were exactly the same! Ow."
Betters Jr. started laughing, and it took a nudge from a cameraman to make him stop. "I don't believe this."
"But you believed me about the goddamn water heater."
"I'm reserving judgment until I see the records. But you have no way to prove this…how can you even tell?"
"Whenever she talks about herself, she uses plural shit, like we and us."
"Is she British?" One brazen cameraman asked. They thought the interview was getting so weird that if the crew started asking questions it wouldn't make a difference.
"Are you kidding? British and Korean mixed? No, she's a full-blooded American," Betters confirmed. Betters Jr. decided not to delve too deeply into that sentence.
"Did you at least get a professional to examine her?" The reporter continued.
"Yeah, after the exorcism. But that wasn't too long ago. We just knew."
"So…what does this have to do with her fear of sexual harassment?"
Betters spit out wood bits and leaned back again. "Right. See, because there's five Jins in there, when all five of 'em agree real strongly on one thing, it drives her a little crazy. Our point man before Jankowski was a guy named Hank Johnson. He wasn't even a soldier. Hell, I think he was a mechanic."
The reporter looked at him dubiously. "So why did you pick him?"
"Because he wanted to be in the military, but he couldn't pass the physical. Some kinda hereditary problem, I dunno."
"I take it you don't have any prerequisites at all for joining F.E.A.R?"
"Only that you know about appliances or blowing shit up. Now, can I continue?"
Jin Sun-Kwon hadn't been a F.E.A.R. operative for very long, but she had been there long enough to know the ropes. Respond to a call, locate the supernatural disturbance, drop a grenade or shoot it until it stops being supernatural. This was mostly the job of Hank Johnson, her superior by about two weeks. Rank and experience in F.E.A.R. were measured mostly by time spent in the force, because it wasn't individual actions that defined you so much as a steely resolve and unwavering mental stability.
She had joined because it paid better than being a Naval flight coordinator, and it was supposedly a lot easier. So far, all she had done was watch Hank blow up an in-sink-erator and finish a pile of crossword puzzles.
I think it's doughnut, Jin 5 mused as Physical Jin tapped a pencil against her clipboard.
It's probably doughnut, Jin 4 pondered.
There's no reason why it shouldn't be doughnut, Jin 3 decided.
The answer is doughnut! Jin 2 declared.
I'll carve it into the goddamn table! Jin 1 roared, etching in an eight-lettered word that was a 'round pastry with a hole in the middle'. Having already completed the other word on the crossword puzzle, she tossed it amidst the others.
Stretching out on the ping-pong table, Physical Jin reached for another crossword puzzle, only to find thin air and the surface of a ping-pong table.
"Hey, Hank!" she called. Within moments, a strawberry beard growing out of a baseball hat appeared in the doorway.
"Yeah?" Hank Johnson asked.
"We're out of crossword puzzles. Think you can make up some more?" Now that the reporter knew Jin spoke in plural, his mental image adjusted accordingly.
"What, already?"
"Find us something else to do, and we might not finish 'em so fast."
Hank probed her words to see if they contained any hint of a proverbial starter's pistol. Unfortunately for Hank, her sentence seemed all too innocent.
"There's not a whole lot you can do with two people trapped underground together." He tried anyway.
"Oh yeah? We've got something for you to do," Jin began. Hank's expectations curved steadily upward. "Take out the trash. Oscar's growling."
Hank's expectations lowered again, sheepishly.
It wasn't that they needed to take the trash out very often. Four people (including Betters and Rick the Pilot) didn't create much trash, especially since three of them were healthy military-trained athletes. Even though Betters generated enough potato chip bags and candy bar wrappers for the four of them, F.E.A.R. headquarters was designed to accommodate an entire task force.
The only real reason Hank had to take out the trash was because their gigantic, highly-advanced waste disposal system was possessed, in an amazing display of irony. Occasionally, it got hungry. This presented a difficult situation for F.E.A.R., for while they had plenty of trash cans and useless rooms to dump waste in, they would eventually need to use the garbage disposal. Blowing it up was out of the question, and it was way too expensive to replace.
Since nobody in F.E.A.R. actually knew how to perform an exorcism – or if it would work – they created a sort of symbiotic relationship with the entity, whom they named Oscar. They fed him their garbage, and he resisted the urge to eat the entire base as a token of gratitude.
Hank Johnson was able to fill a whole trash bag by simply picking bits off the floor in Betters's office, and soon he was off to see Oscar. Located even further underground, at the bottom of a winding staircase the wide garbage disposal chamber gaped for Hank. In front of him, a row of conveyor belts trundled exhaustively into the mouth of a giant metal edifice.
It used to be the master computer for F.E.A.R.'s waste removal system, but after Oscar possessed it, he changed it into a bushy-eyebrowed face. One could tell they were bushy because of how big the slabs of metal were.
"Hey there, Oscar…" Hank greeted uncertainly.
"Feed me, Hank!" Oscar replied testily. Hastily, Hank threw his trash bag onto a conveyor belt and it fed into the receptacle at the base of the column. Oscar's headlight eyes narrowed. "More!"
"That's it. Four people don't make a lot of trash," Hank explained. Without warning, a tongue made of garbage lashed out of Oscar's mouth and wrapped around Hank. "Hey, we had a deal!" He managed to get out before Oscar pulled him into the waste receptacle.
None of the Jins had heard from Hank in at least five minutes. Five plus five plus five plus five plus five equaled twenty five, so when the Jins finished adding up the time they leapt off the ping-pong table. Rushing to Betters's office, they knocked the door open.
"Hey, have you seen Hank?" she asked the man himself, spinning idly in his computer chair. "He's been gone for twenty five minutes."
"That's impossible," Betters murmured. "He was picking shit off my floor about five minutes ago."
"Then what was he doing before?"
"I don't know! Get the fuck out of here, I'm busy."
"No, you aren't," the Jins pointed out matter-of-factly.
"Check with Oscar, he might know what happened."
"That's what we're afraid of," they muttered. Hurriedly, Jin traversed the stairs and ground to a halt before the giant metal column. "Oscar, where's Hank?"
"Hold on…" Oscar spoke reassuringly. "There." In a burst of motion and the gooier types of garbage, something flew out of Oscar's mouth and straight into Jin. As she fell back against the stairs, it coughed a banana peel into her face. "I get food, you get life. Deal is deal."
Jin finally realized that that something was Hank, and he was stark naked. Hank realized this too.
"Jin?" He murmured, because it's hard to form longer words after having your clothes carefully eaten off of you by a possessed trash compactor. The moment sparked something in him, and he could feel his expectations rising exponentially. However, as all five of the Jins began to take stock of the situation, he wanted nothing more than for his expectations to disappear completely for awhile.
Oh my god, Oscar ate his clothes, Jin 5 gaped.
He's naked and he's on top of us! Jin 4 cried.
Is he copping a feel? Jin 3 wondered.
He's groping us and he's got a hard-on! Jin 2 shrieked.
"RAPE!"Jin 1 screamed aloud.
"What?" Hank murmured hazily as he received a kick in the stomach. Rolling off of Jin, he hadn't even gotten his bearings before a broom lanced down from the heavens and cracked over his head.
"We're being attacked!" The Jins wailed as they jabbed Hank in the ribs.
"Hey, stop it!" Hank yelled, scrabbling to his feet and adjusting his baseball hat. Oscar could have sworn he ate it, but it had somehow reappeared on the stocky man's head.
"Hank, we thought you were better than this!" they breathed, waving the broom to get some distance between them. "How long have you been planning to make a move?"
"Well, I – " Hank was cut off by a scream from Jin, who threw away the broom and dashed up the stairs. The point man sighed, but he soon found something to celebrate about: he hadn't taken a hit to the happy sack. It was almost inevitable in a situation like that, but it hadn't happened.
Despite being naked and covered in trash and probably facing sexual assault charges, Hank leapt in the air and clicked his heels. Subsequently, Oscar spit out a waffle iron that scored a bull's-eye.
"It had to happen," Oscar explained as Hank dropped to his knees. "I seen it on comedy shows all the time."
Three weeks later, F.E.A.R. received the call that would change Hank Johnson's life forever. Location: Auburn. Objective: Demonically-charged toaster oven. Threat level: Not that high.
Jin had grown up a lot since the incident with Oscar. They still refused to talk to Hank, and they were still pushing for a sexual harassment lawsuit, but they did their duty anyway. He admired them for that, right up until they pushed him into the toaster oven.
It was night, as it usually was during a possession. The building was located in the slums, and the owners of the toaster oven prized all their superfluous gadgets. They didn't want it destroyed. Hank even explained to them the number of bagels that a possessed toaster oven could potentially burn, but that didn't matter. An appliance you didn't need was a status symbol in the slums.
"What will the neighbors think?" The frazzled wife bleated.
"They'll thank you for getting rid of the noise," Hank rejoined as the toaster oven trays started rattling again. Jin was inspecting it closely.
"So what's really wrong with it? We can just take it to a hardware store," the equally fatigued husband grunted.
"No. I'm sorry. This is police business."
"What makes it police business?"
"Well, you called and told us that your toaster oven was spouting obscenities. Is that correct?" Hank had watched a lot of cop shows in the hopes that, one day, he would be able to imitate them. He was one of the few F.E.A.R. operatives who actually enjoyed his job, because it was the closest thing he could get to being a hero.
"Yes sir, it is. But it's just a toaster – "
"Where were you when you first discovered the oven was capable of speech?" He rattled off the list of Good Police Questions in his head. "Were you alone? What was the weather like?"
"Now how is that relevant?"
Hank blinked, and realized that he had never heard that one on Cops before. "It's not. Nevermind. Let me talk with my partner." He turned and strode to Jin, who pretended not to see him. "What kind of spirit are we dealing with, Jin?"
Jin replied by staying motionless.
"Have you tried to make contact?"
Jin cocked their head, apparently studying the toaster oven. Hank sighed, laying a hand on her shoulder. He had been cooking this one up for a long time.
"Listen. I think we should try to patch things up, between the two of us. We can't work like this. People need machines to make their lives easier, and we're the only ones who know what's happening to them. They're using appliances to get to us, these spirits. I think they've got something planned…like a hostile takeover of the living realm." Hank particularly liked this idea, whether there was evidence to support it or not. It just made it a little easier to believe that he was doing humanity a big favor.
"Now, the people we're saving, they may not know what we're doing for them. They may not know that we're the only thing standing between them and a demonic invasion. They may not even know our names, but damn it, we've got a job to do. Are you with me, Jin?"
Unfortunately, while Hank made his moving speech, the Jins were too busy discussing the situation of his hand on their shoulder to pay attention. In the end, they decided it was rape again.
Jin slipped under Hank's arm, kicking him in the back as she went. The F.E.A.R. operative stumbled forward, grabbing for support and finding the edges of a toaster oven. The room was still for a moment, discounting Jin as she cracked her head against a cupboard. And the curtains, those were moving too. Getting technical, all four of the humans in the apartment were moving at least slightly.
Then, something that shouldn't have broken the stillness did. The toaster oven's door popped open, and it made a ding as if food was ready. The door swung up and down as it began to laugh.
Hank tried to jerk free, but the laughing machine had him hypnotized. Such a human motion in such an inhuman device…
"Jackpot!" The toaster oven cried, and he finally broke free. But it was too little too late. A thin bolt of light, like an electric shock, snapped from the toaster oven to Hank's temple. The rest of the footage from Hank's camera, according to Betters, was obscured by static.
"So?" The reporter sputtered.
"So what?" Betters replied evenly.
"His camera 'got all staticky' and…then what happened?"
"He went batshit crazy. Lots of possessed people do."
"What did you do with him?"
"I set him up at a nice mental home. Don't remember which one, but it doesn't matter. You wouldn't be able to interview the guy."
"Jin doesn't know, does she?" The reporter prodded, and soon after realized how strange it was to be asking personal questions about someone he'd never met. From all of Betters's stories, it almost felt like he knew her by now.
"No. Matter of fact, I think that cupboard knocked a few Jins loose. Ever since then, she hadn't been taking as long to make decisions. She definitely didn't freak out as much."
"So she just thinks he disappeared."
"I never asked," Betters chuckled. "I don't give a shit what she thinks." The reporter bit back the urge to reprimand him, and instead tried a new angle.
"How did Mr. Johnson know all that about a demonic invasion?"
"Hell, I don't know. You could try asking him now, but like I said, you won't get far."
Betters Jr. sighed, slumping forward in his seat. "So you don't know anything that would be good for a news report."
"No."
"That's fine – it'll go well with everything else you told me so far."
End