In the world James had splintered me into, Steve was desperately groping through a dark tangle of underbrush. Someone was chasing him. Suddenly a flash of metal tore into him, and he screamed, terrified, as his attacker stabbed him again and again. His blaze of pain coursed through my system like rain soothing a parched desert plain.
“Not just pain,” explained James, “but through the careful research of our friend Dr. Granger we can recognize the direct nerve imprints of fear, hopelessness, guilt—hundreds of layers of desperate emotions—and mix these into a symphony of sorrow.”
He was on his feet now, surrounded by our minions, holding a claret jug of dark red wine in one hand and a large crystal goblet in the other.
“Ah, the sweet melody of loneliness,” he sang out, and another splinter called up Olympia Onassis, wandering desperately. Her loneliness resonated through my auditory channels, merging into a gentle, fearful caress across my skin.
“The taste of heartache,” James added, and an image of Cindy Strong filled another splinter as she stood over the grave of Little Ricky. I could taste her misery filling my mouth, an aching sweetness tinged with hints of regret.
“And the soft caress of hopelessness and despair,” he laughed. Dr. Granger hung in a metaworld between us, sitting with a doctor and looking down at a medical diagnosis of some painful, terminal disease, his fear of the world forgetting him coursing into our veins like a melody.
“And pain, of course pain,” said James.
A hundred other worlds splintered into my sensory system, gorging it with terror and hurt and searing pain, as I watched people burning and butchered in their own private hells. I gasped, my body wracking itself in pleasure as I looked up at James, wiping tears from my eyes.
One by one, I could see how James had captured each one of these souls, ferreting out their needs until they voluntarily ceded control to him, to us. At the apex of it all was Susie, all of the pain and suffering channeled through her neural system. She had borne the pain of the world, and now she would bear this pain for our world.
“We give people what they want,” James said, his yellow fangs creeping at the edges of his smile. “And, well, they give us what we want in return. It’s a fair bargain, no?”
I nodded, understanding, my body and mind singing with energy.
“With root control, we have access to all their memories, know their every hope and darkest fear, and we can synthesize worlds to play all these out, to suit our whims, our needs.”
Music played, and the creatures around us began to sway and dance, slowly working themselves into a frenzy. The music quickened with my mind, and I soaked in the sensation of my body connecting into the hundreds of metaworlds holding our trapped subjects, their terror coursing through me. James offered me a glass of wine, and I took it, in my excitement splashing my ADF Whites with bright, bloody splotches.
“Pain and fear cleanse the mind, Jimmy,” said James, taking back the empty glass, “and we need your mind as clear as possible for what is to come.”
34
Identity: Patricia Killiam
“I think the clinical diagnosis would be sadistic sociopath with dissociative identity disorder,” said Marie.
I looked up from my desk at her and nodded. We’d managed to piece together what was happening, and it was terrifying.
“It’s not what I think you need to think about now,” she added. “I’ll pass this onto Bob.”
Images of Shiva, the great destroyer and creator, floated into my mind. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Jimmy was good at hiding his tracks. We had only the one incident at Nancy’s birthday party as a window into his mind, and even that was fleeting. Fleeting, but infinitely disturbing, and I’d made things worse.
Like a tick in a bear’s fur, he’d burrowed his way into the deepest reaches of the program. He’d pushed all my buttons to get what he wanted, even as a child. More of the problem was that even then, it didn’t all add up.
“Do you think he was really responsible for the disappearances of Susie and Cynthia?” I asked Marie. It was obvious now that he was behind what had happened to Cindy Strong and Olympia Onassis, but in those cases he had a strategic goal. In most of the other disappearances, we didn’t understand what there was to gain. “Why would he attract attention to himself like that? With people so close to him?”
“Perhaps he’s unaware of the other parts of himself,” Marie speculated. “It’s the only way he could have passed all our psych tests, but it’s hard to say. Having pssi installed in the developing brain of an unstable sociopathic mind has created something… new, I guess.”
Deception was a cognitively demanding activity that left telltale signatures no matter how good the liar. By truly deceiving yourself, on the other hand, you could escape detection by others, but with the risk of falling out of touch with reality yourself—this was something we’d compounded with pssi.
The bigger the neocortex and the higher the intelligence, the more an organism tended to lie to itself and others, and Jimmy was as smart an organism as I’d ever come across. I wasn’t sure it was accurate to say he was even human anymore.
Whatever he’d become, he was now the master of deception.
“We don’t have any evidence that his parents ever did anything to him. Just rumors that seem to originate with him,” said Marie. “I think he constructed a fantasy world about his own abuse to justify his behavior.”
“Dissociative personality disorder is almost always the result of abuse as a child. If his parents didn’t abuse him, then who did?”
Marie stared at me and shook her head.
“If he’s managed to fool himself,” I sighed, “then he’s certainly managed to fool us.”
I wondered about all the ways I’d been fooling myself to arrive at this point.
In my decades of research developing synthetic intelligence, I’d developed statistical models of past human civilizations that had revealed a strong correlation between the self-deceptive characteristics of a people and the worst atrocities that group would commit. Pssi had heightened human capacity in many ways, but it had increased the ability to fool ourselves the most—and we were about to unleash it on humanity under the guise of its savior.
The road to hell really was paved with the best of intentions.
All the careful planning to cover every base, to push the future to converge on one stable outcome, it was all slipping away. Then again, control was always an illusion, just another self-deception.
I should have known better.
Which is worse? Allowing billions of people to die, or saving them to live lives of perpetual suffering under the control of a monster?
My monster.
Perhaps it would have been impossible for me to see what was happening, no matter what controls I put in place. He had used my own blind spot, my latent desire for a child, as my life began to slip away from me. I could feel my love for him burn in me, even as I understood the beast I may have created.
I wanted to believe there was something to save.
“Can we remove him from the board somehow? At least get him off the Security Council?” I pondered aloud.
Marie said what I was already thinking. “He’s already aligned himself with powerful supporters. And he’s become a celebrity in the world media. I’m sure he’d have some nasty surprises up his sleeve if we tried confronting him in the open.”