As a kid, I’d secretly thought of Bob as my big brother, and in another twist of fate, that’s what he’d become when his family had adopted me at Patricia’s suggestion.
I always had a hard time fitting in. The easy way the other pssi-kids socialized and made friends always elluded me. Bob was the only one who’d tried to be there for me, doing his best to help me when the others ignored me.
My special pssi skills had brought me to the attention of the Solomon House Research Center at a young age. Academically, my life had taken off early, but my interpersonal skills had foundered hopelessly.
As I got older and gained in pssi power, I finally managed to escape from the oppression of my parents. I learned to slip past their every attempt to corner me, and as I blossomed into a teenager, I was finally beginning to taste my own freedom—but Nancy Killiam’s thirteenth birthday party was the disaster that defined the rest of my life.
My own thirteenth birthday had been just around the corner. I was worried that nobody would come to my party, most especially Cynthia, the girl I’d developed my first crush on.
While girls my age generally ignored me, one day Cynthia had magically taken an interest in me, asking about my research work at the Solomon House. I had no idea how to react or what to do, so I went to the only person I knew to talk to.
“Look,” said Bob back then, “you just gotta stop acting so weird.”
He squinted into the slanting sunshine and raised one hand to shade his eyes. We were walking across the beach toward the circus tent where Nancy’s party was being held. Waves broke softly in the background, and the air was filled with the smell of cotton candy and the sounds of children at play.
I shrugged. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. All that snooping around, hiding where you’re not supposed to be.” He looked me square in the eyes.
My face flushed red. The other pssi-kids had already begun their tentative sexual explorations of each other, not just rag dolling or flitter-switching, but taking a real interest in their blooming, newly adolescent bodies.
I watched it all happening, awkwardly, hanging in the shadows. Sometimes, unknown to them, I would slip in between and into them as they kissed, sharing sensations and stimswitching with each other. Pain was my childhood specialty, but these new emotions and sensations intrigued me.
“Everyone’s talking about you, you know,” Bob continued, scratching his head as we passed into the shadow of the tent and moved toward the entrance.
My dad had come ahead of me, the only one dragging a real gift under his arm, which I found embarrassing. I saw him standing off to the side under a glade of palms talking with some other adults, patting his prize affectionately.
More kids and parents were quickly arriving in ones and twos through portals near the entrance: here a furry, argumentative little minotaur being dragged by his mother, and there two screaming pink teddies trailing fluorescent balloons. Everyone’s reality skins fused and melted together as they entered, producing a confusing kaleidoscopic mash-up around the entrance as they stopped and looked around before fanning out inside. Some parents were arguing with their kids to merge their realities with everyone else properly, arguments that were erupting into tantrums from both sides.
Bob looked around for somewhere quiet to talk.
Organ grinder music started up, and little monkeys dressed in evening suits appeared, scuttling between the assembled guests, handing out information packs for the evening. Drinks and snacks floated and bobbed in refreshment islets. Bob took my arm and led me to a bench off to one side, under the shade of some saw palmettos.
“I know you don’t have many friends,” said Bob in a hushed voice, “and I know it can’t be easy for you.” He paused, searching for words. “First thing, quit with the splatter skins, those were funny when we were kids, but it’s a bit odd when—”
The head of one of the nearest adults shattered in a gory explosion of brains and skull fragments, as if hit by high-caliber rifle fire. The headless, bloody victim casually picked up a drink that floated by, pouring this into his gaping neck wound.
Bob glanced at this and looked back at me, shaking his head reproachfully.
I smiled awkwardly and switched it off.
“I know you’re the king of the rag doll, but nobody wants to play that anymore, get it? And stop asking people if they want to come inside your body with you, it’s starting to get weird.”
I nodded. I knew these things, but I couldn’t help it. I promised myself, right there, that I’d stop.
“We all know you’re this specialist at finding cracks in the pssi system,” he continued, “but you gotta stop sneaking around. We’re adults now and adults don’t sneak.”
Of course we weren’t, and, of course they did. I nodded again, regardless.
“You’ll quit sneaking into people’s bodies when they’re not looking?” He waited for me to nod, and then added, “Why don’t you come surfing with me, whaddya say?”
“Sure, Bob, you’re right. I mean, yes, of course, I’d like that,” I mumbled, anxious but grateful.
Bob had always been nice, but this was the first time he, or anyone, had a heart-to-heart with me. It was both scary and exciting.
“So you’ll come surfing?” Bob smiled toothily.
I grinned back. “I will.”
He gave me a little punch in the arm—we were buddies now, I guess.
“So about Cynthia…she’s a girl, and girls want you to open up, be sensitive.” He laughed, looking into my puppy-dog face. “Okay, you already have the sensitive part down.”
“She said she wanted to see something fun,” I suggested helpfully.
He considered this. “Yeah, girls like cool stuff. Perfect! Just open up to her a little. Why don’t you show her some of the stuff you’ve been working on at Solomon House? That should impress her. Girls like smart guys.”
“You really think so?”
I had some new neural interface models I was testing with Dr. Granger. He’d taken a keen interest in my abilities. I kept the models in my personal workspace and hadn’t let anyone in there before.
My private worlds were very private.
After learning ways of keeping my mother and father out of my special worlds, I didn’t really let anyone near me, emotionally or physically, and I spent most of my time alone with my proxxi Samson and our simulated friends.
“Open up a little, she’ll love that.” Bob laughed, winking at me, and then raised his eyebrows, giving me a little poke with one of his phantoms to indicate something behind me.
With a shake of his head, he stopped me from looking around. Instead, I snuck a peek behind me without turning my head, overlaying part of my visual channel with a local wikiworld view, and saw Cynthia coming up behind us. She noticed my ghost checking her out anyway.
“Go get ’em, Tiger,” Bob said encouragingly as he got up to leave. “I’ve gotta go catch my own sweetheart.”
Bob and Nancy had been intertwined almost since birth and had grown into the pssi-kid power couple. He walked back to the gathering crowd, leaving Cynthia and me alone.
“Hey, Cynthia,” said Bob as he walked past her, looking back to wink at me again. Cynthia smiled at him and turned her gaze toward me. I began to sweat profusely.
“Hi Jimmy, what’s up?” came Cynthia’s singsong voice. She skipped the last few steps up to me.
“Not…much, how…how are you?” I stammered, my mind going blank. After a few seconds of agonizing silence, I cried out, “Cynthia!”
“I’m great!” she replied brightly, smiling shyly. “How’s your research going?”
“Uh, yeah, good.…” I thought of what Bob had said. “I could show you some of the stuff I’m doing at Solomon House if you like.”
“Really? Cool!” Her eyes and smile widened. “Can we go now?”
I nodded. Why not?
“Mom!” she yelled, and her mother’s face floated up between the two of us.
“Yes, Cynthia? You don’t need to yell, you know,” her mother admonished.
Cynthia continued unfazed. “I’m going to flit out with Jimmy for a bit. He’s going to show me some of the stuff he’s working on at Solomon House.”
Cynthia’s mother looked suitably impressed.
“Work at the Solomon House? But you’re just a baby,” she remarked, looking my way and furrowing her brow. “Sure, go ahead, but I’m pinging you back the second Nancy gets here.”
Cynthia grabbed my hand and squealed, “Let’s go!”
Feeling her hand on mine sparked an electric shock that spread like wildfire through my body, settling hotly in my crotch. An erection immediately sprang to life. Cynthia sensed something going on from my embarrassed, flushed cheeks. She looked at me mischievously.
“Come on, Jimmy, let’s go!”
I pulled her back and away, and we dropped out from our bodies and into my private workspace. I’d never brought anyone there before and I felt naked.
In one layer of my visual field I could see Samson inhabiting my body back at the beach, holding hands with Cynthia’s proxxi near one side of the blue-and-yellow tent. They were watched carefully by Cynthia’s mother’s proxxi as they went off to get some cotton candy. I smiled.
Cynthia and I were standing together in a white laboratory with gleaming floors and walls. We looked out at a view through smoky windows onto Atopia below, the same view as from the real Solomon House atop the farming complex.
Above stainless steel tables floated a variety of working models of mirror neuron interfaces that Dr. Granger and I were studying. He shared my interest in the physiological bases of emotion and the ability to use it to direct the hive mind, but where he was more interested in happiness, I had taken more of an interest in fear—something the other researchers had mostly passed by.
While we walked, I keyed through some parameters with my phantoms to wash away the tables and structures, replacing them with my current project. A model of the neuron appeared, looking like some kind of deep-sea monster, slowly rotating and floating in space in front of us.
I was keenly aware of Cynthia’s grip on my sweaty hand.
“Cool,” she said, watching my model light up, demonstrating a visually enhanced synaptic firing sequence. It was a working prototype.
“This isn’t just a model,” I explained. “This is actually happening inside me right now!”
After some testing, I’d installed them in my own developing wetware to see how they would respond. I started explaining how it worked, the way this enhanced mirror neuron provided a more reliable pathway to empathy. Empathy was something I was working on. I didn’t understand it, or rather, I understood it, but I just didn’t feel it. This model was my path forward.
As I explained the details, Cynthia wandered off, exploring the rest of my workspace. I wanted to show her something really special, and engrossed myself in my model, burrowing through the cell walls, trying to change some protein pathways.
“What’s in here?” she asked, opening a door.
“Oh, ah, nothing!” I cried out, but it was already too late.
As soon as the portal opened a crack, she dropped into the world beyond. I’d never let anyone in here, so I’d been lax with the security protocols of the worlds it was connected to. I quickly abandoned my model and shot off into that world after her.
Instantly, I was standing beside her in semidarkness. Shafts of light bore down from blackness above, illuminating a writhing mass of insects and worms and other creatures that were pinned painfully to the walls of my labyrinthine private universe.
An image of my mother’s face hung in space above us, twisted in hate.
“Who’s my little stinker?” she repeated over and over again, her face contorting and distorting.
I came here to heal myself, to reconnect and re-stimulate some of the sensory pain I’d felt as a child. The process seemed to allow me to refocus my mind. I would pick out some particularly nasty memories and then work through them bit by bit, simultaneously bathing my sensory system in the pain from the thousands of little creatures I had pinned to the walls.
I didn’t understand why, but it helped.
Cynthia shivered and looked around with wide eyes, scared but excited.
“This is so creepy,” she whispered, staring at the half-illuminated animals scraping and clawing futilely, never dying, never free, always trapped and in pain.
Looking at the hopeless little creatures, tears welled up in her eyes. “I can feel them,” she squeaked, her emotional networks starting to connect into this world’s. “This is horrible!”
Then, she was gone, flitting back to the birthday party.
Shocked, I stood still, the blood draining from my face. I wasn’t sure what to do. I closed down the image of my mother, and the space went dark and quiet, apart from the soft wriggling of the creatures on the walls.
I hadn’t remembered that there was a portal to this place from my workspace. At the time, I was too flustered to think clearly. I began quietly swearing at myself, but then I felt Samson grabbing me, pulling me back to reality.
I snapped back into my body with a sudden sense of vertigo. There was laughter, but I wasn’t back at the party. Somehow, I was in my private space again. The bugs were squirming on the walls as before, but now all the party guests were standing in the middle of it, and the bugs were magnified, giant monsters vainly trying to pull their bodies from the pushpins stuck through them.
Above it all, my mother was venting down on us, “Who’s my little stinker?”
Cynthia had stolen a copy of my world and projected it out here in public. I shrank in horror. All the kids were laughing, with Cynthia in the middle, pointing at me and screeching, “Who’s my stinky Jimmy!”
The adults were dumbfounded as to what was going on. It happened too quickly for them, but someone regained control of the situation, and the big-top tent reappeared with the balloons and monkeys. Everyone turned and looked at me, the kids laughing and giggling, the adults staring without comprehension.
“Why did you do that?” I screamed at Cynthia.
An intense, burning anger beyond my searing humiliation filled me. All the years of containing my fear, my frustration, my hiding and cowering, it all boiled over the edges of my psyche. I could kill her, right now. The world turned a bloody red in front of my eyes, and demons shifted somewhere deep inside me.
Cynthia shrank back into the protective knot of her friends, all of them still laughing.
Gathering myself, I focused on her, channeling my voice through the pssionics and amplifying it beyond deafening.
“Why did you do that?!” I bellowed, my body growing into a grotesque, monstrous caricature.
A shockwave of pure hatred burst from me, almost knocking over the assembled guests. I felt as if I were about to physically explode when I caught myself and stopped. My anger imploded back into me, and the bottle corked back up.
The laughter stopped. In fact, it was deathly quiet, except for whimpers from some of the smaller children. Shocked faces turned toward me, watching me warily.
Someone started crying.
It was Cynthia.
At that moment, Nancy Killiam opened the portal door and announced, “I’m heeeere!”
I began to run, tears streaming down my face, shoving my way past Bob.
“Jimmy, hey Jimmy…,” he tried to say as I ran past him, almost knocking down Nancy.
I ran and ran, trying to escape the blinding glare of their judgment. By that point, I was already gone, detached, and it was Samson taking over my body to hide it somewhere safe.
I was already back in my private world and it was burning. Great flames were consuming the walls and rooms and corridors, all the nooks and crannies of my childhood. The countless little creatures trapped there squealed in a high, keening agony as the blaze devoured them.
I watched impassively as the inferno consumed itself and flamed out.
Never again, I promised myself, never again.
They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. On that day, I felt myself shatter and schism. But then I began to reform, to heal and grow, becoming an adult perhaps, but certainly becoming something different.
The developing child inside me, my personality until then free-floating, coalesced and hardened. Invisible things fell into place, the pain stopped, and the shell finally finished closing around me, opaque, and powerful.
Impenetrable.