Tonight was my third date with Susie, and for this one, I’d received an invitation to meet in her own private world—a sensual, mystical place where the sun was eternally setting. She wanted to go for a walk outside her enclave, to chat, and I found myself strolling through a valley of knotted oaks and blossoming cherry trees that offered hidden glimpses of fantastical canyon walls beyond them. Waterfalls spilled into clouds of mist from high, craggy cliffs, and everything twinkled in shades of silver and gold.
As we walked, she stepped through a patch of yellow orchids as tenderly as if they had been children at play. The woody atmosphere was perfectly synthetically warm under an indistinct vanilla sky.
Her long, flaxen hair spilled down her back, held in place by a garland of white flowers above a flowing translucent gown. The breeze swept waves of glittering cherry blossoms and silvery oak leaves around us like a snowstorm, and fireflies sparkled in our wake as we walked through the perpetually gathering dusk.
“How’s Patricia?” she asked. It was common knowledge we were close.
“She’ll be fine. The doctors say she’ll be back tomorrow or the next day.”
“Good.” She smiled warmly, but it soon vanished in a cloud of worry. “And these storms, we’re not in any danger are we? I guess it can’t be that serious if you’re here.” Her smile returned, a ray of sunshine.
“Don’t worry about the storms,” I reassured her. “I wouldn’t advise going topside when they get here, but we’ll be fine.”
“Double good,” she laughed, then flinched, her side going into spasm.
It was an event out in the world, some disaster that had triggered her nervous system. She had such an exquisitely tuned neural pain network—it was what attracted me to her.
I waited, and in a few moments the spasm subsided.
“It’s nothing, I have this—”
“I know,” I interrupted. “No need to explain.”
I reached down to hold her hand and she smiled.
“So, Mr. Jimmy Scadden, my friend Willy speaks very highly of you.”
I was wearing my ADF Whites and walking stiffly, a stark contrast to her flower-child projection. She spun in front of me, reaching up to snatch a blossom out of the air, and then stopped to curtsy, offering me the blossom.
“So what would an ADF officer want with me?” she laughed.
“I need your help. It’s hard to explain.”
“Need my help?” she giggled. “I thought this was a date?” She pouted playfully.
“It is.” I looked down and away, trying to appear embarrassed. “I mean, I feel like you’re someone who could be really special to me.”
She danced away from me, trailing her hands through the flowers.
“I looked you up, Mr. Jimmy.” She laughed, but then stopped and looked at me seriously. “That incident with the bugs, that was a bit odd, don’t you think?”
I winced. “I was just a kid, finding a way to deal with my pain,” I tried to explain. “You wouldn’t understand. How could you? You grew up with such love.”
She considered me for a moment. “What do you mean, Jimmy?”
I said nothing and sat down on a tree stump.
“Jimmy?” she asked again, more softly this time.
I cued my facial projection to reflect soulful pain. “My friends call me James.”
She nodded. “Okay then, what is it, James?”
“I’ve never shared this with anyone, and I don’t know why I feel like I can share it with you. Can we make this private?”
“Of course.”
I pulled a glittering golden security blanket around us and took a deep breath.
“My mother, she…,” I said unsteadily, but stopped as I let a tear glisten in my eye.
Susie sat beside me. She put her hand on mine and squeezed it, waiting.
I looked into her eyes. “It would be easier if I showed you.”
She nodded and released her subjective control to me.
In an instant, Susie and I we were sitting in a corner of the Misbehave world my mother had created to punish me in. We were reliving a rendering of my inVerse from when I was barely two, and in front of us, sitting on a chair in the middle of an empty concrete room, was Mother, suspending my tiny two-year-old body in the air by one arm.
“It’s all your fault!” Mother spat in my tiny face, the veins in her forehead swelling.
She fumbled with the pssi controls and then reached inside my body to dig her synthetic nails deep into my nervous system, scraping them down the length of the neural pain receptors in my body. I screamed in agony.
“Shut up, you little bastard. Nobody can hear you in here. Just shut up!” she yelled. I screamed, and screamed, my little face contorted purple in agony.
Susie wrapped her arms around me, horrified, tears welling up in her eyes. “Turn it off, James, please!”
And then, just as quickly, we were back in the forest with the cherry blossoms settling around us, sitting on the tree stump amid the deep grass and swaying flowers.
Susie held me tightly and cried. “I’m so sorry, James. I’ll do anything to help.”
I sat impassively, leaning to kiss the top of her head.
“It wasn’t just my mother,” I said after a moment, letting my voice crack a little.
“What do you mean?”
I looked away.
“Show me.”
Nodding, I grabbed her primary subjective and took us back into another silently screaming night in my small sweaty body, the prison of my childhood world. My dad and I had just returned from fishing with the dolphins, and Mother was off in another one of her never-ending soapstim fantasies. With a security blanket settled around the house for the evening, my dad tucked me into bed and then crawled in beside me to cuddle.
“You had a good time with Samantha and the dolphins today?” he asked, holding me tightly and brushing back a few golden locks of hair from my pale face.
I nodded, my little heart beating faster with creeping terror.
“It’s okay if Daddy holds you, right, Jimmy?” he asked pleadingly. “Daddy gets lonely sometimes, too.”
I nodded, trembling, feeling his hands on me, his hands on places that felt wrong. I loved my dad, and I could sense he needed something from me. He’d been nice with me that day, bringing some joy into my dark and constricted little life.
So I let him touch me while I disappeared down my rabbit hole into the recesses of the pssi system. He touched me all over with his real hands, his phantom hands, enveloping my body while pleasuring himself.
I cowered in the depths with my make-believe friends.
“Don’t tell anybody about these times with Daddy. It’s a secret. If you can do that, I’ll make sure to take you out to play with Samantha, okay?”
And so I hid inside and waited for the bright days of rocketing through the foam and spray.
I snapped us back into real-space where Susie was crying again. I was, too.
She looked into my eyes. “We can tell people, we can punish them. You poor soul.…”
“That won’t change anything.”
She kissed me between her tears.
“But you can help me.”
“How, James? I’ll do anything to help.”
“I just need you to do something for me.”