The Human Experience

Seven-Quarter P, day 5, 3412.

The idea of hatred fascinates me. It’s a consuming emotion, yet people cling to it even as they wither away in its clutches. What can be worth overcoming one’s instincts of self-preservation like that? At least love has a biological function – propagation of the species and all that. But hatred? What purpose does it serve?

There was this old Dothian duke I killed two turns ago. He’d been hunting me for a long time, since I killed his Infected brother. He finally began posing enough problems on the Star-King’s council that Serasta labelled him a threat and gave Orcadis the order to take him out. It was difficult – a hit on him couldn’t be sanctioned unless he was Infected, and Orcadis didn’t want to give the impression that Serasta thought he was above his own laws.

So I staged an accident. Cornered him on one of his mountain-climbing trips in Van-Tillis. A little slip on the rocks, a broken neck – it happens. But as I held him suspended by the shirtfront over a precipice, my curiosity got the better of me.

What’s it feel like? I asked. Hatred. Why would you throw your life away for it?

Throw my life away? No, idiot boy, the old man said. It’s what’s kept me alive so long.

And he bit my fingers so hard I dropped him, and I watched his anger snuff out with his life on the rocky ground below.

Del tried to stay as far out of his sensing radius as wouldn’t appear suspicious. Her thoughts were in turmoil. She clutched them to her as best she could, but when Orcadis strayed within a few paces of her she could feel his enquiry.

They came to a wide stair branching left and right at the next level, separated by a lacquered oak handrail down the middle. Orcadis motioned for her to climb first. She swerved to the left of the rail and couldn’t help smiling when he appeared on the right.

Somebody else might have thought him courteous. Del knew it was only his obsessive-compulsive need for symmetry. He let others make their move and then based his own off of what would ‘balance out the room,’ he once told her. One person on the right of the rail, one on the left. Turns ago, an earthquake had collapsed the ceiling over the left side of the stairs in the main hall. The entire side had been blocked off while the ceiling was repaired. Without explanation, Orcadis had blocked off the right side as well, leaving his Helms to take lengthy detours through side-corridors to reach the next landing.

Stars, what was this stupidity! She shook the nostalgia away, taking the stairs two at a time to reach her destination faster. Orcadis unlocked the rounded doors of the memory-altering chamber and she stepped inside.

He hesitated before swinging the doors shut. When the clanging echo had died away, he said, “Care to tell me what we’re really doing here, Neria?”

Del’s hand slipped into the pocket of her robes. Her thumb brushed the little remote she’d carried, waiting for the opportune moment, since arriving at the Keep. She shrugged. “What, it’s not believable that I could just want those stupid memories gone? At least if I could use them to ruin you, they’d be useful, but it’s not like I have proof of what I saw.”

“No,” Orcadis said, “indeed it is not believable. Knowledge was always your power and your weakness. You’d never willingly give it up, no matter how miserable it made you. It’s why you nosed around the Keep so much. Feeling was never enough for you. It didn’t matter if you felt in your soul that I was a good man. You always had to know.”

“And wasn’t I right? Or should I have believed your lies forever?”

“Feelings are not lies. Even when they do not align with what we know.”

She turned away. For some reason her fingers seemed to have frozen in her pocket. No fucking way she was losing her nerve now! Hadn’t she dreamt of such an opportunity for turns? The power, the vengeance? The control?

Orcadis sighed. “Alright, I’ll play along.” He got to work setting up the memory-altering machine. It looked like a massive console spanning the back wall, all dials and blinking lights and symbols flashing across its screens. Two high-backed seats fed into the console, facing outward with walls of wire and steel on all sides. Above each head cushion hovered a metal claw with pincers just waiting to latch to a vulnerable mind. The claws connected to the massive computer behind them.

“Do you remember teaching me how to alter memories?” she asked, stepping to the chair on the left – the one with the keyboard in front of it. “This is the director’s chair, the person’s who shapes the new memories. The keyboard navigates through them temporally.” She brushed the keys that were responsible for sifting back and forward in time through the memories. “And, uh,” she chanced a glance at him, “I can’t recall exactly how new memories were created.”

He smiled his tight smile. “What does it matter? You’ll never be a Helm now, my dear; best not trouble yourself with it.”

“You yourself said it: I like knowledge.” She prayed that excuse would do.

The machine hummed to life as Orcadis powered it up. “It’s simple, really. The memories are brought to the forefront of consciousness. Only then can they be altered or removed. The subject must be made to re-experience them. When they are relived, they are plastic again, vulnerable to interpretation. They can be tweaked and reconsolidated. It’s like wetting the paint on a canvas to make it flow again, so the picture may be moulded into something new.”

“How poetic,” she sneered.

“If this is really what you want, please, sit.”

Del walked with a heavy heart to the subject’s chair. The shackles on the arm-rests made her throat close. She flicked her eyes to Orcadis. “Since I’m not going to remember any of this information anyways, why did you plan to assassinate Star-King Serasta?”

His lips thinned. “Nice try. Neria, I know you well, but if I’m to be honest, I never could understand your thoughts. Why are you really doing this? What are you thinking?”

That I’m weak. That I can’t go through with what I’ve been dreaming about for turns.

That I need to get a goddamned life and finally be free of you.

She sighed. “I spent most of my life with strange thoughts in my head – thoughts that never belonged to me. Hallucinations, delusions...hell, I can barely make sense of my real thoughts. I just don’t know. I don’t know what I’m fighting for anymore.”

Oops. Word vomit. Damn Orcadis! He was still so easy to talk to. He still gazed at you with those smouldering brown eyes like he really gave a damn what was going on inside you. He was the second-richest man in Vangarde after the king, but he attended to the feelings of every lost soul to come limping through his doors. Gods be damned, would this torture never end?

“Fight for yourself. Fight to forgive me and Lykus. Not for us, but for you.”

Del resisted the words. Anger had defined her for so long. What else was there to her?

“You know,” Orcadis said with an air of thoughtfulness, “when I was a teenager I found a baby hawk, cast out from its nest, squawking up a storm in a field. Hideous little critter it was, bald and with huge, bulging eyes, a sort of permanent smile on its beak even though it was miserable. I took the bird in. I cared for it until it was a majestic beast I could no longer keep in the house.”

Del thought of the kitten with the puss-crusted eyes. She stared in wonder at Orcadis, unable to imagine him a huge, muscular teenager cuddling a baby bird to his breast. Without meaning it, she snorted a laugh.

Orcadis permitted a tiny grin before continuing. “My mother used to tell me wild animals couldn’t be domesticated.” He tugged down the sleek chainmail holding the panels of his tunic together, exposing three white scars running from the base of his neck down his chest – where three talons had slashed across his body. “I got what I deserved. I realized my mother had been right. Even so, I never stopped taking in society’s outcasts.”

“Why?” She heard the plea in her voice and felt sickened to realize she was silently asking him to give her a reason not to do this.

“Because everybody deserves a second chance. I gave you one. Why won’t you give me one?”

Del almost swayed with the question. Why? There had never been a ‘why.’ The possibility of forgiveness had simply never breached the walls of her hate-hardened heart. Something deep and primal and embedded within her hadn’t recognized that too-human possibility...

Because you’re right: wild animals really can’t be domesticated.

Her finger came down on the button deep in the pocket of her robes. Orcadis twitched, slapped the back of his neck with a frown. “Did you feel any biting flies in here?”

Del looked away, her stomach in knots. They stood in silence for only a few moments before he swayed and staggered, grabbing the console to steady himself.

“Here, sit down,” she said, helping him lower himself into the subject’s chair.

Orcadis’s corded muscles gradually relaxed and his limbs went lax even as his eyes darted from his unresponsive body to her face. “What...happening...can’t...speak!” His words squeezed through lips that wouldn’t move. The creases left his brow as the paralysis swept through his facial muscles, locking them in place, and finally his head fell back against the headrest. He was a golden statue of some ancient Akkútian sun-God, chiseled and tranquil and with eyes blazing fire.

Del tried to look unaffected as she came over and fastened the chair’s leather straps around his midsection to keep him from sliding down. She didn’t look at him as she worked. It took all her concentration to keep her hands from shaking while she fumbled with the fastenings. “The day I stabbed you with a tranquilizer dart, I realized something,” she said. “I could never have done that if it had been planned. You’d have sensed it. That wasn’t going to happen again, and I couldn’t waste the opportunity. So when you were unconscious I planted an immobilizing chip at the back of your head. At the asylum we used them on unpredictable patients, the ones who couldn’t be approached with a tranquilizer gun when they got worked up. The mentalists would stand at a distance and release the muscle inhibitors via remote. I thought that would be good to use on you. My first plan was to strap you to the memory machine to figure out where you kept Lykus’s remote, but don’t worry, I’m not going to do that anymore.”

She bound the metal clamp about his right wrist and moved to the left with cold-numbed hands. There was no need to explain that she’d doubled the normal inhibitor dosage to make sure he wouldn’t ‘think’ himself healthy like last time.

Firm fingers locked around her wrist so tightly she gasped. He dragged her toward him until their noses almost touched. Triple it next time, warned the energy that punched into her mind.

Del tried to yank back, but his grip tightened. She felt her wrist joint grinding beneath his fingers. Tears of pain clouded her vision, yet she couldn’t look away from him, because the warmth had stolen out of his eyes and been replaced by a rage she often recognized in the mirror.

Then the fingers like molten gold solidified and stiffened, and Del uncurled them from her wrist, staggering away from him. Wrist throbbing, she strapped herself into the director’s chair and pulled the keyboard toward her to study the keys. She recalled the first step from her training.

The metal claws lowered with a whirr, prongs extended, locking like icy fingers onto their heads.

You don’t know how to do this, Orcadis said in short, staccato energy-waves.

“You’ll tell me. Or else only you’ll have to suffer.” Her forefinger hovered over a large red button that vaguely stirred her memory.

Not that one! Stars help me, don’t you press that one! Or do you want to give me a lobotomy?

Del shivered, moved over the keyboard to another button, waited for his reaction.

Have you ever thought about asking me what it is you want to know? Isn’t that easier than potentially destroying my mind?

Del closed her mind to him. Orcadis could be frighteningly persuasive, and her resolve was paper-thin already. She couldn’t let him talk her out of this. Freeing Star-King Serasta was essential, not just to save Vangarde from Orcadis and Enver, but to obtain the information about the Voices that had made Orcadis overthrow Serasta in the first place.

Del dug into her memories until they clicked into place. “Oh! I remember!” She pressed the succession of keys. The claws vibrated against her temples, sucked the colour from her eyes until everything darkened and she left her body. Images, feelings, sounds and smells flashed across her mind.

She was floundering in sensations that passed too quickly to unravel. Her fingers fumbled on the keyboard until she found the button that slowed the experiences to normal time.

She was a teenage boy, working the fields in a sweat-lined undershirt, her long honey-coloured hair dangling into her eyes. The overseers were yelling at her for being slow. She was always slow. The strongest, most diligent worker in the bunch, but the slowest.

She resented them. Perfection couldn’t be rushed. Corn couldn’t be brutally yanked from its stalk and the oxen couldn’t be left to walk in a crooked line as the plows behind them churned the earth. Was it her fault nobody could do anything right except for her?

Her sickle slipped from calloused fingers as a young woman came to speak with the overseers. She was the most splendid thing this earth could produce. Her sleek hair, the colour of burnished chestnuts, streamed in the wind like ribbons, and her eyes caught the fading light like emeralds. Del quailed at the sight of her. When the older girl turned and waved, she stooped to retrieve her sickle, resuming hacking the crop in a frenzy.

Del slammed the keyboard until the memory passed and the vomit-your-guts-out butterfly sensation passed with it. Orcadis’s remembered feelings drained from her and her own rushed in to fill the void. Irritation, primarily. Was that really what Kead’s mother had looked like? That perfect doll-faced thing? Del had always hated perfect girls. It damned well figured that Orcadis would go for one of those. The hypocrite. ‘You’re not defective, Neria – you’re unique, and that’s beautiful.’ Right. Beautiful my ass.

But it didn’t matter. She batted the thoughts away and let herself be swept back into the current of memories.

‘Warning: subject uncooperative. Insert keywords to narrow your search,’ a robotic voice suggested.

So Orcadis was struggling against re-living the memories. So be it. He’d have to be worked harder.

Serasta. Enver. Betrayal, she typed.

She was a young man, her research with Vangarde’s best scientists having propelled her all the way to the Imperial Court to make the acquaintance of King Ferreus the Second and his two princes. The youngsters were splendid in velvet robes and fur-trimmed capes, jacinth buttons winking on their vests. She felt coarse, stupid. King Ferreus descended his dais and motioned for her and her escorts to rise. He raved about her reputation and how it had preceded her from the east. He came toward her with outstretched arms.

And clasped the shoulders of the servant to her right. Mortification spiked through her. The servant flicked his eyes to her, corrected the king in the tiniest voice.

“What, that?” King Ferreus hooted, making dread grip her heart in a fist. “Why, he doesn’t look like he has enough brains to fill a teacup! Rough-edged fellow, isn’t he?”

A hush fell over the court. She trembled before them, not daring to use her pitiable store of Vangardian and prove herself the barbarian they thought her.

Then a laugh sounded from the dais. It was one of the princes – the one with gold thread glittering through the fibres of his garments and an emblazoned pendant round his neck. “We know first impressions can be deceiving. Based off of those, I’m afraid most would say my father’s tact and your brains could share the same teacup.”

She couldn’t believe the teenager’s audacity. Would she be blamed for it? But King Ferreus turned to his son and they laughed conspiratorially, both draining their goblets. The crown prince grinned at her and she mustered the courage to smile back...

Delia tore herself from the memory. She refined the search. Assassination. Anthuriums. Painting.

...She was laughing over flagons of ale with Serasta and Enver, listening to Enver fume over everyone’s preference for his brother, watching the younger twin grow cold and jealous as the bond between Serasta and Orcadis strengthened...

Then Serasta got Infected. Del felt as immersed in the narrative as if she really had lived the pain of a beloved friend’s deterioration. The emotions racked her until she had to take a break. She’d forgotten – memories didn’t just involve the senses.

Serasta changed after that. His Voice gouged a cleft between them. It convinced him that Orcadis, with all his scientific experimentation, had created the Voices. It said the only solution was to destroy the Helms – every single human exposed to the silver stone’s radiation.

And as Star-King of Vangarde, he was in a position to do it.

Fear and fury had made Orcadis plot Serasta’s downfall alongside Enver, but Enver bailed in the last second, throwing Serasta to safety and getting caught himself in the bomb they’d planted. Had that day’s earthquake really been a manifestation of the prophecy that warned against twin murdering twin? Orcadis didn’t believe such rubbish, but still he hid Serasta in the secret passage in which they’d all used to stash wine as teenagers.

Del slowed the memories down here. Enver was writhing on the floor, flames devouring him, his cries drowned by the earthquake’s thundering. Smoke kept her from seeing the walls’ stone blocks shifting and grinding atop one another as the floor jolted. Cracks ran through the marble, opening wide ridges. She held a bloody chunk of rubble, and Serasta lay sprawled at her feet.

Gathering her wits, she swung off her cloak and used it to smother the flames eating Enver. Amid the blackened, cracked skin of the once handsome face, Enver’s remaining eye bulged open, red-veined and lidless. “Don’t let him die!”

She hoisted Serasta up under the armpits, her mind numb. Everyone had long evacuated the palace now; she met nobody as she dragged the king down the hall into his quarters, swivelled the painting, and scanned his iris for admission.

That was it! Del now had everything she needed to enter the passage. She reached to terminate the flow of memories when something made her hesitate.

What if...?

Oh, might as well. Keywords: Neria. Memory. Erase.

The sensations filtered through her again. Everything that passed she remembered from her own point of view, until...

She slammed the keyboard with a yelp. When the inner-world of the memory was gone and the claw had retracted from her head, she jumped out of her chair and spun to gape at Orcadis. “Really? Really? That’s why you erased my memory? A stupid kiss?”

The poison kept his face stony, but the conflict in his thoughts came through. You don’t understand. Control...I couldn’t come to terms with the lack of control, the lack of discipline I’d shown. If my actions had gotten out, my reputation...besides, I saw the look in your eyes. I didn’t want to give you illusions.

“Maybe you were just a horrible kisser.” Del cringed at herself. Come on! Lame jokes, even now? She shook her head. This changed everything, and she had to consider it carefully. A few deep breaths later, the reality of the situation solidified before her with stark clarity. The anger, the hatred – they went up in smoke even as she clutched them desperately to her, begging them to give her meaning. She was empty, suddenly. She was new.

Del gave a weak chuckle. “Well, that settles it. I only wish I hadn’t spent good turns wasting anger over that lost memory, because frankly, Orcadis, that’s not angering – it’s just sad. You’re a sad, sad man. And I feel sorry for you.”

His eyes seemed to dull with recognition. Come now, Neria, let’s get on with it. I sense your thoughts – you know I won’t remain paralyzed for long. I’ve felt the memories you made me re-experience. You plan to free Serasta. You know I’ll come after you the moment I can. What are you waiting for? Take my memories of this evening and enact the revenge you’ve dreamt of for so long.

The thoughts rang with steady bravery, but Del saw the vein pulsing in his neck. Forget physical incapacitation. Being mentally at someone’s mercy? She couldn’t imagine something that would more terrify Greathelm Orcadis Durant.

Slowly, Delia shook her head. Pity poked its tentative head into the heart anger had left vacant. “I’m not scared like you. Not anymore. Thank you, Orcadis. I’m free.”

She scanned his iris with the camera on her phone and left, breathing lighter than she ever could remember breathing. Hate no longer weighed her down.