Thanks for all the reviews again! Ahhhh, so much homework! I haven't forgotten about this thing, I still like it!
Disclaimer: I disclaim.
It's time for some boring philosophy lectures!
Riley
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Man, I hated waking up. Unless it was in a little shack in the tropics next to a beautiful beach full of babes, I didn't want any part in it. Leave my nice warm bed to do what, work? Hack? Haha. Right. Where was my alarm clock, I had to turn it off…
No alarm clock, it wasn't warm, there wasn't a bed. I shot upright and was hit with a red-hot poker, inserted neatly into my eye socket. The pain was excruciating and it was cold and I was shivering, elbow! What the hell was going on? I hung on to my forehead as if it would fly away if I removed my hands, felt dizzy. Where was I? Why couldn't I see anything, what was wrong with my head, my chest, my elbow, my face? Was the room really whirling around me?
Was that a door I heard, swiffing open to my left and slamming? Pain, my elbow, ow. I was being lifted up but I didn't know where the floor was so I stumbled, into a pillar of warm, solid body. Who the hell?
"Stand up straight, pansy." That was familiar. But stand up straight? I laughed out loud. That wasn't going to happen. The body disappeared from my side and I was thrown bodily and violently onto my right side, more pain – agony in my elbow that rivaled that in my head. Not the voice but the way the body acted reminded me who it was, and along with the knowledge of what the presence meant came everything else, where I was, what was going on, what had happened.
Why couldn't this just be a really bad dream? Please? I could deal with a dream. Just don't let this be real, anything but real. Please. With each stab of the imaginary poker, pushing further and further into my eye socket and scorching the nerves to fried strings of dead matter, I prayed, please, please, please, please, and he kicked the small of my back.
"Up, pansy." I couldn't do it. Was he going to kill me? Was it even worth it to try and explain that I couldn't get up? Would he really kill me? Would I care if he did?
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Chinese Man
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Riley got cluster headaches. That was his big secret. It hadn't been that hard for me to pull up his medical records and read about what a sick kid he'd been – I'm no hacker, but medical records were everyone's specialty here. He'd had arrhythmias all his life, first discovered when he was five. The prescribed medication had given him bradycardias so they'd stopped using it after two months and he'd taken nothing for it since. He'd had aggressive night terrors starting at age 3. Nothing was done to try to remedy this problem, although there was a note about anxiety being a possible factor, no specification as to what the anxiety could have been from, but it did say that the parents of Mr. Poole seemed unwilling to discuss that option. Broken left forearm when he was ten; upon examination it was discovered that it had been broken some weeks earlier and the bones had fused back together wrong. It was re-broken, set, and put in a cast. When he was fourteen he'd made several visits to various clinics, hospitals, and youth specialists before they diagnosed him with mild chronic fatigue syndrome a year later.
They prescribed atomoxitine.
Sixteen saw him suffering from his first cluster headache.
So he was a victim. There were a lot of victims out there – our reach was far and deep. He was one of those latent victims, one of those surprises we hadn't meant to happen. A side-effect of attempted murder.
After researching the condition a bit I felt I had enough of a grasp on it, not that I needed any kind of grasp at all. It really shouldn't matter. The only way it changed things was the fact that it made me feel even more guilty about doing this to him. We'd caused his headaches, captured him, were torturing him, forcing him to-
Shuttup. It did no good to dwell on such things. I'd been trying so hard to push our hopefully future hacker from my mind, but no, I'd pulled up his medical records. What had I been thinking? Now that I knew he suffered one of the most painful human conditions out there because of us, that was supposed to make me feel cold towards him?
My mind started wandering in a direction I absolutely didn't want it to go, but it was like the early morning, waking up. Get out of bed, stand there in the cold and stare at the warm pile of covers you just crawled out of. Where was the self-control? Not there yet. Crawl back in. I couldn't, I couldn't reign in my mind, I couldn't stop it from going there.
Riley couldn't concentrate on what Tomas was doing or saying when he was having a headache.
Cursing, pulling at my hair, berating myself. There, I'd said it. I'd mentally voiced my excuse to give the kid some relief. I knew what it really meant, it meant I was soft and a terrible leader and that my beliefs weren't as strong as I'd believed they were. Oh, to be Jeremy or Tomas, I thought to myself, slumping into the chair, trying to melt into the fabric. Yes. I just wanted an excuse to tell Tomas to back off, at least when Riley was having a headache. Could I risk it? What would Tomas think of me? Would he suspect what I meant when I said that, suspect I was… feeling dangerously protective? I was. Cringing. If he suspected, would he leave, or did he have the iron will to take my place? What did I want? Someone to just take over for me so I didn't have to feel so damned responsible?
This wasn't supposed to happen like this. I'd always thought my thoughts were made of unshakable belief. Then what the hell was that little pathetic geek doing? How? Was it even possible? Not even King Jr, not even Gandhi, not the thought of the dwindling population of bushmen in Africa who were just trying to survive out there, not the countless children hoping to grow up and change the world for the better could shake my beliefs.
What did I want? Was Riley right, were there things about humans that made their existence worth it, music, art?
No. I stood by what I'd said about that. Music is the best thing humans have fashioned, but then again, it had no purpose if there was no human.
Well, wait.
Hadn't music been the first thing in existence? Hadn't Gitchi Manitou set everything into motion according to the first thing that ever occupied the darkness, that daywaygun, that eternal drumbeat, that rhythm? Wasn't that beat what made everything happen, made the world spin, the heavens expand, the moon rise and fall, the seasons change, life and death, the beat of a heart?
That hadn't really been a drum, had it? It was just a sound out of nothing. A drum is what we humans used to represent the sound.
Was the beat of a lone drum really music, or was it just a sound? And if I asked that, what, exactly, constituted music?
Manmade noises? Surely the best music, if music at all, came from nature. The wind and the ocean, a cardinal and rain falling on vast forests. Music was a man-made word. There were no words. There just was. What we called technical music was the auditory expression of human emotion, and we didn't need human emotion.
Of course, if I was going to draw from the realm of Gitchi Manitou, wouldn't I be implying that humans were meant to be? Well they were. They just weren't supposed to spread and destroy like cancer. They resided on the fourth level of creation, were supposed to depend on the physical world, the plants, the animals. If industrialization had never occurred everything would be ok. The Native Americans had had it right. They had been doing it how it was meant to be done before the whites had come along.
No, no, no, no, no. Humans were bad. No amount or type of human was good.
But my train of thought had led me to a logical conclusion.
Had I just told myself that there was a possibility of accepting a type of humanity into my heart?
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Riley
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I was going to die.
With each kick that landed on me, each fist that fell on my skin, I felt myself inching closer and closer to death. There was so much pain and so much frustration. The question 'why' kept going through my head, why me, why now, why do this, why don't they let me rest, why, why, why, and I never came up with any answers because it hurt too much. He was speaking, I knew, but about what I didn't know. Lots of curses floated into my ear cannels but they didn't get much further. Just kind of sat there like a swarm of wasps that didn't know what they were doing there but couldn't quite find the way back out. How annoying. They were going to starve and die and then I'd have a bunch of dead bugs rattling around in my ears.
The poker was pushed so far into my brain now, I doubted it could get any further in. It hurt so much. My hands were stuck to my head and I wondered if I'd accidentally gauged out my eye. It was wet enough. Was it blood or tears? Couldn't move my fingers to feel if there was a crater where my eye had been. Maybe there would actually be a fire poker there this time, wrought-iron twisted into my flesh and through my skull, destroying everything it contacted.
Was that me? Shamefully, I admitted that yes, that screaming, moaning noise was me. Why, again? What good was it doing?
The cold poked at every cell in my body, prickling my skin, all I wanted was to be warm and comfortable! Couldn't that happen? Couldn't someone come and save me, anybody? I felt like a pathetic animal, cowering in a corner, wishing only for comfort and warmth, basic needs, right? Why was this even happening, I didn't remember. Did he want something from me? Was there something I could say? I felt like my middle was caught in a monstrous bear trap, rusty spikes severing my body. Parts of me felt like they were going numb with pain, were my nerves finally fed up with this and just quitting? I should do that too. What a plan.
There were hands on my shoulders now. Hot meat breath in my face. Language was being spoken. Was I being saved?
"Huh?" I asked. Maybe if I asked nicely, my ears would work. They started ringing and buzzing, wasps waking up.
"I said this could all end right now if you agree."
"Ok." I'd agree. I liked to agree. It sounded warm and comfortable.
"If you're lying, it'll be worse than this." I think I may have laughed at that, either because I thought the prospect of me lying was funny or I didn't think it could get any worse than it was at the moment. Maybe I was giddy with the prospect of this ending.
"Anything," I mumbled. The poker was twisting around now, melting with the heat it was emitting and starting to slide down my spinal cord. What was this? This had never happened. I screamed again, lowered my head to the ground, tried to keep the liquid metal from slipping down my neck. It didn't work. Delirium? Yes, thank you. What was going on now? What was I doing here? Whose hands were on my shoulders and why was I so sure they were hands?
The creeping pain surged into my neck. It spread its fingers and encircled both of my temples in its grasp. No longer a poker. A parasite.
Exploding - the pain turned into bunches of firecrackers shoved into my nervous system, bursting a million times along my spinal cord, in my head, in my eyes, between my shoulders. I was no longer in a room, I was in a state of mind and I was trapped. Warmth and comfort could do nothing for me now. Me. Who was I? Did I even exist? Where was Riley Poole, and why did I know that name?
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The Chinese Man
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I rolled with my mind. I could no longer control my thoughts, they raged around inside like a lightning storm. There was no organization and I wasn't about to attempt that filing job. Let them rage. I was going to have nothing to do with them.
Walking to the basement now. Why? I was following what my mind said to do. My mind said to go check on Riley. I wasn't allowed to ask why.
My surroundings passed by in a haze. My eyes weren't working. I stared ahead at my path, trying to receive as little thought stimulus as possible. Maybe this panic and uncertainty would blow over.
Was I there already? I pushed open the door to the basement, felt for the glasses, put them on. Before I could see anything I heard a noise and my first thought was that I was hearing that rhythm that existed before the first vision. I wiped a hand across my forehead – my arm was shaking. Sight came as I realized the sound wasn't a regular beat at all, was instead the nearly unmistakable rasp of someone who had been screaming trying to catch their breath. I'd never heard that sound before but I was certain that this is what it sounded like.
The freezer door was open, Tomas was dragging Riley out of the black void by an elbow. Both of Riley's hands were clenched at the side of his head, muscles must have been rigid as ironwood for Tomas to drag him around like that. His whole body looked like a statue, no part of him relented in its frozen state as he was hauled out of there.
I closed my eyes.
Part of me wanted to wonder curiously what it had been that had caused him to be in such a state, if it was ok, if it was an acceptable part of the process. Another part of me wanted to start raging madly, leap upon Tomas, lock him in the freezer, cry over Riley's body, wonder what I'd done.
I couldn't move. Inner turmoil fumed and fought and I felt like I couldn't possibly bear to take one more step, accept one more factor, one more thing demanding my attention. Tomas, his back to me, threw Riley to the ground a ways from the freezer. The young man's body unfurled a bit as if it had thawed slightly. Onto his side. Wasn't he supposed to be less blue and more orange? No,no. Everything's normal. Deal with your previous predicament.
This was my previous predicament. This was it.
A hideous thought crawled through my head, sticky and crumbling, mumbling about just killing the kid and solving the problem. Where had that come from? My humanity, I suppose, selfishness. I pushed it away. How much of this issue had to do with selfishness? Was selflessness even possible? What if the little mind monster was right? Why did I feel like it wasn't, I thought I wanted everybody to be dead?
"Tomas!" My voice echoed through the chamber. Tomas whirled around, startled. Riley actually flipped over and stared in my direction, hiss of breath escaping through his teeth. Tomas what? Tomas go away? Tomas you're fired? Tomas thank you for your good work, come back in approximately fifteen minutes?
"Stop." I was walking towards them. I actually wanted to do that. It was voluntary this time. I arrived at Tomas's side and stared down at Riley. He was sobbing and screaming and whimpering and moaning all at the same time, exhaustedly, as if he'd been doing it for hours and was running out of energy. I could see it on his face, the misery and fatigued desperation. He wasn't moving now, lying shaking and not entirely prone at Tomas's feet.
"What?" said Tomas. What indeed.
"He can't understand you when he's having a cluster headache." Really?
"Really," I answered myself.
"He said he agreed, though." Careful, I told myself. He was already getting worked up.
"Agreed to what?"
"Help get us the authorizations!"
"Riley!" I exclaimed, wondering if I'd get any reaction from him. I didn't.
"Leave, Tomas. I'm going to ask him again once his headache goes away. I'll tell you what he says." Tomas blinked at me before lunging away. He was angry. I was doubting his techniques. I was grateful that nothing terribly offensive had slipped out of my mouth, grateful I'd remained calm. Tomas's red flame of an image slipped through the door in the back, which shut with a decisive slam.
The dam I'd erected between what I should feel and what I did feel broke and I didn't bother to start repairing it. Yet.
I set myself on the ground next to Riley, lay my hand gently on his shoulder. The reaction startled me more than my hand startled him – he curled into my arm, turning onto his side and clasping my hand to his chest, and I felt how cold he was. It was like holding hands with a dead person. The supposed warmest part of his body, what I could feel beneath the front of his shirt, even felt too cold.
I had never had a child but I had assumed I knew what the parental instinct was and felt like. No. Before that I had had no idea. Nothing even close to knowing. He was freezing and in pain, and I imagined that all he wanted was to be warm. I was warm. If I were any kind of parent I would have pulled him to my body and hugged him.
The thought manifested itself metaphorically in my mind as jumping off a cliff. An inappropriate metaphor, perhaps, but the one that I saw.
I withdrew my arm, scrambled backwards, watched as he curled into himself. Sobbing, I spun around and darted halfway to the door. Turned around, stared at the cold thing on the floor.
I left.
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Oh no, more angst. I don't know how much more of this I can take. I also haven't forgotten about Ben. It may seem like that, but I have a plot waiting for him as well. Bork.