Vox Mentis

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Ahh, yeah, unfortunately I neglected my research on butler heirarchy. Ten Poet Points™ to anyone who can come up with a good justification for the butler swarm.

there is a butler from each represented language group

also oh my goodness i just caught up and ur story is amazing! ty!

+10 Poet Points!

Thanks for reading! :)

Let's be honest about what's really going on here.

Thoreau had to yell your words over and over again while going directly after emotional weak points. There's no way Lee is remotely on Thoreau's level. Despite his confidence, he can't compromise you, not on any reasonable timeframe at least.

He's a pawn. He's here to unsettle you through your personal connection. There isn't the slightest chance he'll persuade you, not after what you've already been through - but Thoreau, the sick bastard, wants you to remember what happened in that restroom back when you were sixteen.

And why is Thoreau doing this? Because he's afraid. Because he's not ready for a rematch, not after how close you came. Lee is here for one reason and one reason only - to soften you up emotionally so Thoreau stands a chance.

How pathetic. Destroy him.

Slowly. Make him your slave.

Okay you have this pretty sharp plastic shard which probably would work as severe physical stress so let's test his theory?

kill him

Make him suck his own dick.

Definitely.

Kill him with his own dick.

~

Two large men come in, wearing white uniforms that you recognize from Labs. They approach you with their hands out like claws. By this time, you're in a pretty crazy place, screaming and waving the bucket-knife around, spattered with blood from head to toe. Lee is lying on the floor, quietly pumping out his life through his throat and his crotch, severed genitalia in his mouth. You swipe at one of the orderlies, shrieking semi-random words, but he catches your wrist and wraps his arms around you. They twist your hands and force the bucket-knife from your fingers and hold you down for what feels like hours. Some other people take Lee away. That's the last time anyone visits you who isn’t Thoreau.

~

You pick Lee’s blood off you flake by flake. It dried hard, so this way you are able to clean yourself one piece at a time. Maybe clean is the wrong word. It's pretty disgusting, but you keep at it, because the alternative is worse. Every flake of Lee that you remove makes you feel better.

Days pass. It feels like days. You become extremely thirsty. After enough of that, you develop a tremble that won’t go away. Your bowels and bladder shut down. You can feel them inside you like stones. You're being tortured, you assume. Your physical needs are being deliberately left unmet.

You think about Eliot. About whether he knows you're here. You figure no, because if he did, he would have shown up. You just have that feeling. Of course, you had left him facedown in a ditch in Broken Hill, and it would make complete sense if Eliot hates you with a fiery passion. But you have the idea that the kind of relationship you have with him allows for mistakes, even big ones. And that when this door next opens, it won’t be Thoreau but Eliot, and his eyes will be full of reproach but there will also be forgiveness and hope.

You consider removing your underwear, which are spattered with dark brown Lee spots and make you feel permanently stained. It might even be intimidating to Thoreau. Nothing here but Elise, pal. But you don’t do it. You aren’t that badass. You make yourself climb off the bed every now and again and jump on the spot, or at least bounce up and down. So you aren’t just lying there. The light never goes off. You can’t tell how much time is passing. Your thoughts go around and around. Sometimes you catch yourself singing.

~

You swing the car into the school driveway and crawl up to the house. It's late, most of the windows dark, but not Austen’s. You sit in the car for a few moments. Then you climb out and go inside.

The corridors are empty. It's been a while since you were last here and the place feels unfamiliar, although nothing is different. You enter the East Wing and pass a boy with a white ribbon tied around his wrist and dark bruises beneath his eyes, reciting something in Latin. The boy sees you and breaks off, then looks pained. You do not stop.

You knock on Austen’s door. She calls for you to enter in the imperious voice she adopts for students and you step inside. She is behind her desk, surrounded by papers, her hair pinned up but threatening escape. She sets down a pen and leans back in her chair. “What fortuitous timing. I was about to start grading papers.” She gestures. “Will you sit?”

“I’m going to Syria.”

“Oh,” she says. “When?”

“Now. Tonight.”

She nods. “You should try to visit the museum in Damascus. They have a tablet with the world’s oldest recorded linear alphabet. It’s quite humbling.”

“I want you to come with me.”

She becomes very still. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

You look around the room. “Do you remember the watch I had? The digital one, to wake me so that I could get back to my room before dawn. I was terrified of it failing. Or sleeping through it.”

“Eliot. Please.”

“Atwood knew,” you say. “She told me as much, many years later.”

“Please,” says Austen.

“We thought we were being clever. Carrying on under their noses. And when... when we had to stop, we thought we did that in secret, too. We did it because we were terrified of being discovered. But they knew.”

Her eyes glimmer. “Why are you saying these things? Are you here to compromise me?”

“No,” you say. “God, no.”

“Then stop talking.”

“They persuaded us. Without saying a word.”

“There was no alternative, Eliot.”

“I don’t believe that anymore. I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“It’s the truth.”

“I have this idea that it would have been a girl,” you say. “I don’t know why. But I’ve thought that for a while. I find it hard to shake.”

Austen puts her face in her hands. “Stop talking.”

“She’d be grown now. A young woman.”

“Stop!”

“I’m sorry.” You catch yourself. “I’m sorry.”

“I want you to leave.”

You nod. You hesitate, almost apologize again, then move to the door. Before you close it, you glance back, in case she’s looked up from her hands. But she hasn’t.

~

You land in Damascus. Heat envelops you the instant you step over the threshold of the airplane, a taste of Australia with a different scent. You make your way across the tarmac to the airport proper and submit yourself to the impatient eyes of various mustachioed officials. Your papers are impeccable and so you are soon released into the main hall, which is large, framed with high, latticed keyhole-shaped windows, and even vaguely air-conditioned. A short man in a tight suit stands gripping a sign that reads:

السيد إليوت

“I’m Eliot,” you say. “You are Hossein?”

The man nods, extending his hand in the Western manner.

“علياتز حش عم نت,” you say. The man’s hand drops. His face relaxes. “My plane is delayed,” you say. “It is due in ten hours. You will wait here for it and that is what you will believe.” You can see the exit. There is no shortage of drivers on the pavement outside. “And when Thoreau asks you what happened,” you say, “tell him I retired.”

~

Someone enters the room. You squeeze shut your eyes as soon as you realize, so are left with only the briefest impression: a square man in a dark suit, silver hair.

“Hello, Elise,” Thoreau says.

You sit up. Your brain feels soft. Lee was right: It's harder to marshal mental defenses while under physiological stress. You need to think clearly but all you want is a sandwich.

“Lee is dead. You assumed, perhaps. But in case you were wondering about the possibility of last-minute medical heroics... no. He died. Another for your collection.”

“I’ll stop at one more.”

“No,” Thoreau says. “You won’t. I think we both understand this. You are infected with a murderous impulse. You’ve managed to ameliorate this so far by plotting my demise. If you actually succeeded... well, that would be a problem, wouldn’t it? Since you would inevitably begin to, well, kill everyone. I think you must realize this. You must plan to kill me. But you must not do it. Quite the conundrum.”

You wonder how quickly you can get off the bed and get your hands around Thoreau’s throat. Probably not very fast. Probably to no great effect, even if you do. You need to be smarter. This is your chance; you will not get him alone again. You need your head to stop pounding.

“Was this a suicide mission? I don’t think so. It goes against your character. I think you came here with a plan to kill me and the vaguest hope that you would somehow be redeemed. For you are such an immediate girl. You live from opportunity to opportunity. Does that sound right?”

Maybe, you think. You don’t know. You're hungry. You wonder where Eliot is.

“I’m founding a religion,” says Thoreau. “I use the term religion loosely. But then, so does everyone. It’s rather a lot of work, even with the bareword, and once it’s done, that’s only the first step. So I won’t waste any further time. Here’s what’s going to happen. You will open your eyes. You will look at the bareword. I will say, Forever serve my interests.” He looms closer, a shape you can’t quite bring into focus. “I see from your expression that this is unexpected. You thought you would be killed. A natural assumption. But what I realized, Elise, is that you have made yourself useful. You are skilled, resourceful, adaptable, and you have a kill order in your head that will be triggered in the event of my death. You are, in fact, the perfect bodyguard.”

“No. I won’t do that.”

“Of course you will. You have no way of stopping it.”

You bare your teeth, trying to rise from the bed. He's right. You are alone in a cell. You don’t even have a bucket. But there has to be something. There has always been something before.

“As many people as I’ve enthralled, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone who hates me quite this much. Which makes this rather fascinating, Elise, since, the brain being what it is, your mind will invent a series of rationalizations to justify why you’re choosing to serve me. How far will you bend in order to reach that place? That’s what raises my curiosity. I wonder whether the end result will still be able to be accurately called you.”

“I will kill you.”

“Well,” he says, “you’ll want to.”

“Stay back.” You think you hear him approaching, and throw out your arms. “Stay back, you motherfucker!”

“I’m not going to grapple with you, Elise. You will open your eyes of your own volition. You will do this because you see there is no alternative.”

“Eliot,” you say. “I want to see Eliot.”

“I’m afraid Eliot is in Syria. He flew out last night.”

“Tell him I’m here.”

“Oh, Elise,” says Thoreau. “He already knows.”

You don’t want to believe him. But you can’t find falsehood in his voice. Eliot, you think. Eliot, you were my last hope.

“Open your eyes, please,” Thoreau says, and you begin to shake very badly, because you are going to do it.

~

“So you left her,” Danny says.

You rub your forehead. Your throat is sore; you've been talking for some time. It's taxing, because you're recovering from a near-death experience and outside the window forces are gathering to kill you. “That’s what you get from that story? That I left?” Danny doesn’t respond. “Yes. I left. There was no alternative.”

“There’s always an alternative.”

“Well,” you say. You feel tired. “It didn’t feel like it.”

“What then?”

“Thoreau sent her after me. I had this crazy idea that I’d be left alone if I went far enough away. That I could start a new life. But she came after me and systematically murdered everyone who was in the way.”

“She’s probably compromised.”

“You think that makes a difference?”

“Yes,” says Danny, “because I can un-compromise her, with the bareword.”

“Can’t be done.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t erase an instruction. Not even with that. You would only create conflicting instructions.”

“Which means what?”

“It’s unpredictable.”

“Well, that’s fucking something.”

“The original instruction won’t go anywhere. It could reassert itself at any moment, based on situational factors, such as where she is, how she’s feeling. Do you want to take that chance when one of the instructions is kill everyone?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you fucking can’t.”

A low thrumming begins outside. Danny peers out the window at the sky. “I love her.”

You shake your head. “You’re misremembering.”

“I remember that.”

“Listen to me carefully,” you say, “because over the last twelve months, I have been highly motivated to figure out exactly what happened in Broken Hill, and as a result I know for a fact that your movements diverged from hers shortly after she left me facedown in a ditch. What I pieced together from this was that when she went to you and asked you to leave with her, you said no. This is how I first began to suspect your existence as an exception. And it’s how I know you didn’t love her.”

“You said people are defined by what they want. That it’s the most important thing about them. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Then I know who I am.”

You look out the window. “Well, terrific. That’s terrific, Nick. I’m so glad you could find your emotional core, before your ex-girlfriend murders us. Imagine what would happen if she got her hands on a bareword again. Imagine that.”

“I’ll keep it from her.”

“Okay,” you say, “well, now we’re entering a magical fantasy land, because with all due respect to your newly regained assertiveness, you don’t have a hope in hell of keeping her from anything she wants. What’s that noise?”

“Choppers.”

“More than one? What do they look like?”

“Why would she do anything to help this guy Thoreau? She must be compromised. He’s making her chase us and you say she has to die for it.”

“You think I like it?”

“Yes. I do. Because of Jane.”

You look at the ceiling. “Well,” you say. “Maybe you’re right.”

“So?”

“So it doesn’t matter. Is it Woolf’s choice? Maybe not, but she is what she is. You, right now, are shooting at people for the crime of being compromised. Why is Woolf different? Also, may I add, she wasn’t made this way out of nowhere. Thoreau sowed that seed in fertile ground.”

Danny raises his voice over the din of the choppers. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning she wiped out Broken Hill!”

“Maybe she was compromised then!”

“You’re choosing what you want to believe! Christ! I would love to believe that I didn’t let eighteen thousand people die because I couldn’t see her for what she was. But I can’t. The truth is she was always like this and I refused to see it.”

“I tell you what, how about we kill Thoreau?”

“Sure, we’ll ask Woolf to stand aside for a minute. Don’t look at me like that’s a realistic possibility. She’ll defend him to the death. And even if she could be circumvented somehow, Thoreau being alive is what keeps Woolf in check. Remove him and she’s left with an instruction to kill everyone.”

Danny is watching out the window. The loudness of the choppers seems to have leveled.

“You want a nightmare scenario? Thoreau goes down, Woolf takes the bareword. Thoreau cannot die. Not before Woolf.” Danny doesn’t react. “What’s happening out there?”

“Guys coming out of choppers.”

“What kind of guys?”

“Military. Big black helmets with goggles. Can’t see their faces.”

“Ah,” you say. “So we are completely fucked, then.”

Danny looks at you.

“Environmentally Quarantined Personnel. They see the world through filters, to protect them against compromise.”

“Should I shoot them?”

“Sure,” you say. “Why not?”

Danny raises the rifle. A part of the window frame near his head explodes. He ducks against the wall. “Shit.”

“Yes,” you say.

Danny moves to the other window, checks outside. “They’re encircling us.”

“I would imagine they’re landing on the roof, too,” you say. “Rappelling down from the choppers, perhaps.” You close your eyes. “Any final questions for me before we die?”