The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Eight Read online

  Both assumptions were complete garbage. People are wildly different, and react wildly differently to the same stimulus. Unless you develop a detailed understanding of the person you are attempting to control, and tune the approach to the person’s psychology, you will generate varying and unpredictable results. Assuming you do manage to control someone by controlling his environment, unless you offer some significant psychological benefit, when the environment changes, he will shift right back. Brainwashing is far more an art than a science, and while brainwashing is very useful for groups of people in a controlled environment, such as cults, the practice is far less useful for making permanent changes to independent individuals.

  Unless you were an Arm, and cheated. I decided to start with these ideas and take them farther, working into them what I had learned about psychology from my work preparing for the Rogue Focus conflict, and what I had learned about systems analysis from my work in putting together my Transform Sickness research crew and the failsafes on them.

  My plan was to use those techniques to break through his defenses, and force him to change to work for me. I would give him a cause and a job and a reason to live. My bet was that if I satisfied the basic need that was killing him, the satisfaction would be enough to hold him to me afterwards.

  A bet with no guarantees. Nevertheless, I thought I had a chance. The human mind will do what’s necessary to avoid intolerable pain, especially when someone offers an escape. I had something real to offer him, and I thought my offer would be enough.

  First, though, I had to break through his defenses and will.

  I started when I was two days past kill, because I wanted to be at my best for this.

  “Tom Delacort,” I said, with a faint smile. “Congratulations. You’re about to be exposed to an opportunity.”

  “What the fuck is going on here? And who the hell are you?” he said, before Fred interrupted him with a brutal punch to the kidneys. He collapsed back on the floor, gasping for air.

  He was nude and bound in the cinderblock cell. His situation was degrading and meant to be. The cell was in a warehouse I had set up for this purpose. Expensive, yes, but I planned to do this right. Tom was my first. There would be others.

  The art of remaking a person’s mind involves three basic parts: unfreezing, change, and refreezing. Unfreezing is the first, and is the destruction of the person’s defenses. You use physical and psychological stress to leverage access to the mind, and then rip loose all the moorings keeping him grounded. There would be pain involved, but not as much as you might think. The more subtle stresses were more effective: hunger, sleep deprivation, fear, loneliness and shame.

  “You were not invited to speak,” I said, patient and cold. I sat on a wooden chair and loomed over Tom as he glared at me. Fred and Ricky stood guard behind him, each well coached on their expected roles. Fred greeted the task with an evil smile of delight, and Ricky with his usual professional chill.

  Tom glared at me, but he didn’t try to speak again. Learning already. He wasn’t bad looking for a man of his age and race. He kept himself in good condition, and his medium brown body was hard and solid. He had a nasty scar high on his left thigh that looked years old, and several smaller scars around his hands and knuckles. Lines marked his face from squinting into the sun and from the weathering of years. His eyes were a cold brown, and they were hard and angry.

  “You are a fortunate man,” I said. Tom was afraid, as any sane man would be, but his fear didn’t rule him. “Humanity is changing and you’re being recruited to help. You’re going to work for me. In a little while, I’ll teach you why, but right now, you’re merely an ignorant human.”

  I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and gave him the full force of my personality. “They call the change Transform Sickness.” He found himself drawing forward to hear my whispers, in spite of himself. “This isn’t a sickness at all. This so-called disease happened before; signs litter our myths. When Transform Sickness showed up in the past, it caused bursts of evolution in the afflicted tribes. With modern transportation, we’re all one tribe now, and Transform Sickness has spread worldwide. Transform Sickness is the future of humanity, and we have no choice.” I had long realized Lori’s myth theory would be a wonderful basis for a cult, and its near-legitimacy made the myth theory a more powerful tool. Tom would be my first cult member.

  “You’re going to be working for the future of humanity, Tom Delacort. Humanity is moving beyond what you are, but you’re going to help with the birth. This is an honor and a privilege, and a flawed normal like yourself doesn’t remotely deserve this, but you’ve been lucky.”

  Tom, angry, thought he was among madmen. I knelt on the floor next to him and put my hand on his shoulder and my face right in front of his. Too close, and unwelcome physical contact. He tried to pull away from me, but I didn’t let him. Heat rose between my thighs and added to a hot flush of rising arousal. I loved this sort of thing.

  “You’re a failure,” I said, my breath hot on his face. “You’ve screwed up your life, you’ve screwed up your family, and you can’t even do a decent job as a school teacher. You need to be under orders because you can’t live life on your own. You aren’t going to find what you need by following something merely human, because nothing human is going to be able to handle a fucked up mess like you. But you’ve gotten lucky. I’m far more than human. Just maybe, if you can qualify, you might be a soldier in the army of the future of humanity.”

  I stroked from his shoulder down the length of his arm, and the lust in me rose to an ache of need. I hadn’t done something this arousing in a long time, even with the extensive recruiting I had been doing since I moved to Houston. I smiled at him, and the sexual heat I concealed behind my smile made it even more unnerving. Even Ricky looked unsettled. Fred smiled his own smile of rising lust, but his was a smaller thing than mine. This type of cruelty was too subtle for him.

  Tom looked at me with a growing uneasiness, and the fear he kept firmly leashed was growing stronger.

  “You’re crazy,” he told me in a hoarse whisper. “I don’t know what the hell you are, but you are fucking crazy.”

  Fred followed my unvoiced signal and silenced him with a kick right on the kidneys. I let my smile fade and watched Tom as he gasped and sweated and brought the pain under control. When he looked back at me, all he saw in my eyes was ice.

  “You need to know who you’re working for, human.” I spoke in a low, cold, inflectionless voice. “My name is Carol Hancock.” I ran my hand over his cropped, sponge-like hair and waited.

  A beat, another beat, and his mind made the connection. I knew when he figured out I was an Arm by the pallor on his face. My reputation wasn’t a good one, from my days as the California Spree Killer, to the CDC massacre, to Keaton’s bank robbery spree while disguised as me, and my recent occasional trips to the Carolinas to harass the FBI and make them think my territory was somewhere along the southeast Atlantic coast. I had become a national legend, back from the dead and nastier than ever.

  I ran my hand over him once more and then left him, to learn some important lessons from his guards. Life would become much more difficult for him by the next time I visited. The thought sent a flash of heat through me and I had a sudden overwhelming urge to screw Tom Delacort on the spot. Instead, I left the room, with no one the wiser.

  I’ve already said I have a good selection of some nasty sadistic urges rattling around in my head. Mostly, I tried to keep them under some amount of control. I picked them up during those months with Keaton right after I made my transformation, when she was breaking my mind and remaking me in her image. They were something more than the easy cruelty of the predator, and I suspected they were some twisted distortion of what should have been my natural predatory instincts. The lingering corrupt remnants of my own madness.

  I didn’t give those urges free reign. Neither did I deny them completely. They were far too powerful. Besides, I enjoyed them too much. Therefore, I
exercised some control over myself and restrained my actions. Over the urges themselves, I had no control at all.

  The urges were black and ugly things, the dark underside of an unhealthy mind. Power and cruelty and destruction and lust mixed into a vicious stew. Cruelty aroused me and the rush of power and lust as I hurt and killed gripped me at a level far deeper than my conscious mind.

  However, mine wasn’t an undiscriminating taste, and some kinds of cruelty touched me much more than others. I never developed a taste for hurting children, and the destruction of property did little for me. Of all the different cruelties possible, the destruction of the mind aroused me the most. To take a strong and independent mind, and shatter and twist it and make it my own. I didn’t want the body, just the mind. Slow sadistic destruction. Sex, power and cruelty.

  My urges were nasty, dangerous and unhealthy, to me as well as to my victims. I couldn’t explain this to my unconscious, though, and really, I didn’t want to. In short, of all the things that I might be doing, I couldn’t imagine anything more arousing than what I did to Tom Delacort. The heat rose in me just thinking about it, and him, as he lay in his makeshift cell, starting the long, slow destruction that would make him mine.

  I kept control while I was with him, but I wasn’t able to control my urges afterwards.

  “Get Darryl to my house,” I said. Ricky jumped to obey.

  All of my robbery team spent time in my bed when I wanted them to. This was both a privilege and a price. I made my bed extremely pleasant for them, but I was too intense for a man to take in more than small doses. I got too far under their defenses when I spent time in bed with them.

  Such was the theory. In practice, I found I enjoyed some of the men more than others and spent far more time with those. I treated each one differently depending on their personality. What I did to Fred might be called pleasure only by a mind as twisted as his, and I had never slept with Darryl at all. Always before, I wanted a white man.

  Not today. Today, I thought of Tom Delacort and I wanted a brown body in my bed. I smiled my tight, hot smile, and knew Darryl was going to have the shock of his life.

  It was the dead of night before I shook free of Darryl and my other responsibilities and got back to my masterpiece. Tom’s cell was a three-sided thing, and a reinforced chain link fence formed the fourth side. There was a hallway outside, and I had set up a one-way window across the hallway, carefully lit to allow me to watch him invisibly.

  I watched him for hours, as the unceasing bright light shone down on him, and he tried to sleep and failed. Every half hour or so, his guards rattled by and harassed him. Soon, his body would lose all sense of day and night.

  I shivered with anticipation and dreamed dreams of what I would do with him. So carefully, so precise. To tear through his defenses just enough to let me in, and allow me to remake him. No more damage than necessary, because he was going to be mine.

  Tom Delacort was going to be my masterpiece. My actions would be surgical and exact. In the coming days, I would spend every spare moment watching Tom, when I wasn’t having my discussions with him. This wouldn’t be a fast process, but would go far faster than in the hands of some normal. As the days passed, I planned to tune my actions and my guard’s behavior to the task.

  To do the job right I would have to live and breathe Tom Delacort, to the point where he occupied my thoughts when I worked and my fantasies when I was in bed.

  I studied.

  I went to see Keaton a little more than a week in with Tom. The days had been hell for him. After twenty years in the Army, he knew what I was doing to him. He didn’t understand how he could be falling apart so fast, however. He couldn’t understand how I could feel his weaknesses through my skin, hear them in his heartbeat, and taste them in his sweat. As the days went by and I endlessly watched him, I knew him the same way I knew myself. I knew when each crack formed and I was there, prying the crack wider. His mind unraveled underneath him, and he couldn’t stop the process.

  Obsessed, I was.

  I spent long hours with Tom. I ran him through confession sessions, where we would delve into the deep places of his mind and bring his flaws and failures into the light of day. We discussed his every weakness and mistake, in depth and in detail, repeatedly. I made the sessions all the more painful and effective by the inhuman accuracy I used to read his thoughts.

  I never let Tom see even a hint of my raging emotions, because never, in no circumstance, was I going to screw this up. Darryl saw a lot of me during this period, and as the days passed he became so stressed and unhinged I had to take him off guard duty. He loved the attention, but in the way a person loves a drug as it kills him. I told myself that I shouldn’t use him like this, but when the heat was on me, he was the only one who would satisfy. I hoped he would last until I finished recruiting Tom.

  One day about two and a half weeks in, when hunger and sleep deprivation had worn him too far down to oppose my digging, I remembered those days in Keaton’s warehouse back in Philadelphia, when she would do the same to me. When she ripped my defenses apart in tiny sadistic bites. I felt a chill, but I ignored it. I had business here, and I would not fail with Tom.

  I took Tom down through a spiral of decay. Little things like sleep deprivation, hunger or pain forced him into little accommodations. Obvious, logical, intelligent accommodations, like obeying orders when the alternative was a boot in the kidneys. Or tiny weaknesses brought on by normal human reactions like fear or exhaustion. But those accommodations did a little damage to his will and his self-respect, and so gave me leverage for the next time, just a little lower, just a little farther down, all the while the constant misery and mockery and cruelty of his guards wore at his defenses like a file on wood. He grew to need those long conversations with me as his only connection to human sanity.

  He knew what I was doing. How I destroyed everything he had, and how I left him only one way out. My way. To believe the dream I offered him. He tried to fight me, but of course, all he had was his conscious mind to work with. I held his unconscious, his emotions and all those vast depths of the human mind beyond his control. Therefore, he fought, and lost, and hated himself for his failure, and his weakness, and the desperate animal he became.

  The last tiny supports in Tom’s mind collapsed three weeks in, leaving him adrift in a sea of madness. He no longer believed anything good about himself. Nothing of his previous beliefs made sense; he had lost trust in everything he had once known. He couldn’t even convince himself he was human any more.

  The human mind cannot stand such stress. Just as a drowning man will grab hold of any hand that presents itself, so too will the drowning mind.

  I drank his agony down like the finest wine. Ambrosia and the tantalizing sips of passion. This wasn’t the hot quickie of the swift recruitment, over in a few hours, which I did nearly every day, following Keaton’s orders. This was long and slow, obsessive foreplay, stretching out for weeks. Tom became the measure of my life, the entire power of an Arm working on a focused purpose. Little tendrils of pleasure and need wove their way through the cracks of my soul like roots of some deadly ivy through fractured rock. Thoughts of him ruled me as much as thoughts of me ruled him.

  Folly. I stood by, helpless and enthralled as the ivy wound its way deeper, until I wasn’t able to remove these changes without destroying myself.

  I dove into his recruitment willingly, allowing Tom to drown out the pain in the rest of my life. Lori still refused to talk to me. Gilgamesh hadn’t returned from Boston, trying and still failing to talk Lori around. I had tried to entice Sky to Houston, but he still hadn’t perfected his metasense shielding, which we badly needed for so many reasons. Hank fought paperwork and organizational duties and lost, unable to squeeze more than a few short hours of research into each week, all spent on me.

  Tom became my life.

  In the end I extended my hand to Tom. He reached out and took it. The truth I offered, he believed. The path to approval and se
lf-respect I offered, he took that, too. If serving me would please me, then he would do so gladly, and salve the terrible pain in his soul with my approval.

  I was gentle with him after his acceptance, and sent Fred off to trouble some other part of reality. I told Tom exactly what he needed to do, and he did so eagerly, desperately, fleeing the insanity snarling at his heels. We talked philosophy; this time he soaked up the philosophy like a sponge, listening, thinking and analyzing. He fleshed out the gaps I left, creatively building a philosophy to believe in. He ripped apart his failures from his old life and was eager to start anew. He believed me when I said he belonged under orders. We talked about honor, and duty, and the importance of being committed to a cause greater than yourself. I gave him whole books on Transform Sickness, as well as reams of information from Zielinski. He devoured them.

  I let a little of my emotions show through and he began to understand my pleasure.

  On the 24th of September of 1968, after a month of my efforts, Tom Delacort knelt at my feet, surrounded by my men. He swore fealty to me, the ceremony cribbed straight out of an old medieval history book. A knight swearing loyalty to his lord, and he meant every word. He formally committed himself to me, and took my tag. The juice moved. As with Zielinski, Tom was mine down to the uttermost depths of his soul. I took his oath and as I stared down at him, just as with Zielinski, I realized I loved him.

  Finally, though it seemed like years, we came to my house and I brought him to my bedroom in this night I owned.

  I lay in my bed, letting the late summer air conditioning noises fill my mind. Tom slept in my arms, exhausted and peaceful. I laid my hand on his brown, weathered cheek and shivered. What idiocy had possessed me to rip open my heart? What utterly fucked up thing in my head drove me to take chances like this? Or rip off the comfortable scar shielding me from the dangerous emotions?