The Complete Atopia Chronicles

32





Identity: Jimmy Jones



AS I WALKED away from Bob and into the dark underbrush, I became aware of someone walking beside me, someone new and yet someone intimately familiar.

“Why did you do that?” asked the apparition.

“Do what?” I replied. Curiously, I didn’t even think to ask who had appeared beside me.

“Warn off Bob,” it responded. “I think we need to have a talk, you and I.”

The undergrowth around me gave way to a voluminous, brightly lit corridor. No, it was more than a corridor, it was a long set of huge rooms connected by large square archways, and I was sitting in the middle room, the rest stretching off to both sides in the distance. I was perched on a white wooden chair.

Intricate, sky-blue frescos of angels and cherubs adorned the twenty foot ceilings, bordered by elaborate gold carvings. Ornate, richly decorated furniture was strewn about topsy-turvy and littered with broken bottles, golden goblets, and inert bodies.

Darkly framed oil paintings of men in uniforms, on horses directing battles, hung across one set of walls, while the other wall featured floor-to-ceiling lead glass windows that looked out onto an endless, manicured garden beyond. The garden centered around a long reflecting pool. Sunlight streamed in through the windows between heavy purple velvet drapes that were tied back with gold sashes.

The place stank of urine, and as if on cue, one of the inert bodies came to life, stumbling to its feet as it shuffled towards the nearest corner and began pissing across one of the other bodies.

“Sorry for the mess,” said my apparition, now taken solid form and stretched out before me on a chaise longue. “We had a bit of a party here today.”

He adjusted the frilly white cuffs of his tunic, and then the blond wig whose hair fell in tight curls to frame his painted white face and bright red painted lips. Leaning forward, he smoothed out a wrinkle in his tight black britches and looked up to smile at me self-consciously.

His heavy eye liner had smudged, so he looked slightly comical in a threatening sort of way, and his eyes shone brightly—my eyes.

I sat there, looking at myself.

“Come now, this isn’t that much of a surprise is it?”

I felt uneasy, wondering if this was some splinter or sub-proxxi gone wrong. The party guest that had arisen to relieve itself had finished pissing and turned towards us, blearily rubbing its eyes which then widened.

“The dauphin!” it said, barely audible. It was clearly excited, looking at me.

“What do you want?” I asked. This was all more familiar than I cared to admit.

“Ahh,” said my doppelganger, “it is not what I want, brother, but rather what we want. You and I, Jimmy. And by the way, call me James.”

He affected a tiny bow for my benefit. Several of the party guests had begun to rouse themselves now, encouraged by the first who was whispering urgently at them. The air filled hollowly with the sounds of clinking bottles and bodies coming awake.

“Come now Jimmy,” scolded James, his brow furrowing, “do you really think your rise through the ranks to a position of such power so quickly was all just happy coincidence?”

He smiled widely as he finished saying this, revealing a mouthful of yellowing teeth and large, sharp canines below his glittering black eyes. The waxy makeup on his face cracked as he smiled and he cocked his head playfully.

“The time for hiding is finished now,” he continued, shaking his head and sighing. “We are not children anymore. The world needs us now.”

Several of the guests were now sitting and watching us hungrily from nearby. Samson was here now too, watching me from a corner in the distance.

I began to recognize some of the faces around me, my childhood playmates I had invented to keep me safe, to keep me company, hidden away in my secret spaces when I was a child.

“You always knew I was in here Jimmy,” he said, looking towards Samson who acknowledged him with a small nod. “Most people with our, ah, condition, don’t get to meet their other selves—just one more of the wonders of pssi.”

He smiled again.

“We have been protecting you a long time now,” James added as he extended a hand to sweep past the assembled misshapen guests, who were all wide awake and encircling us ever closer. “Your children await.”

They were close now, and James reached out to touch one of them who sat down next to him, affectionately placing a hand on its head.

“Has your mind been clear lately?” questioned James, smiling as he ruffled the hair of his favorite before looking back to me expectantly, waiting for an answer.

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” I had to admit, feeling the hot breath of the creatures behind me. “The past few years, my mind has been gaining a clarity that…” I was at a loss for words.

“That what?” questioned James. “That escaped you before? The mind is cleansed with pain, isn’t that right, Jimmy?”

As he said this the eyes of the assembled flashed darkly as they leaned closer towards us. James splintered us off into a sensory imprint of the private world I had burned so long ago, feeding the pain of the writhing creatures pinned to the walls into my pleasure centers. I shivered and gasped slightly.

“Nice isn’t it?” said James smiling. “But we aren’t children anymore.”

Another splinter overlaid a new scene, a man we once knew growing up, Steve, who’d worked in the aquaponics group with my dad, the both of them playing privately together with proxxids after work. He was groping through a dark tangle of underbrush, desperate, someone was chasing him. Suddenly a flash of metal tore into him and he screamed, terrified, and 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 now have the ability to recognize the direct nerve imprints of fear, hopelessness, guilt, hundreds of layers of desperate emotions, and mix these into a symphony of the senses.”

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 yet another splinter called up Olympia Onassis, wandering desperately. Her loneliness resonated in my auditory channels and then merged into a gentle, fearful caress across my skin.

“The taste of heartache,” James added while an image of Cindy Strong filled another splinter as she stood over the grave of Little Ricky. I could taste her heartache filling my mouth, an aching sweetness tinged with the hints of regret.

“And the soft caress of hopelessness and despair,” he laughed, and an image of Hal Granger hung 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 sweet 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 just 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, their darkest fear, and we can synthesize worlds to play all these out, to suit our whims, our needs. They are sinners, Jimmy, they must be cleansed of their sins through their own pain.”

Music had begun to play, a mad litany filled with notes of terror and fear, and the creatures around us began to sway and dance.

“Pain and fear cleanse the mind, Jimmy,” said James as he poured me a glass of wine, “and we need your mind as clear as possible for what is to come.”

He offered me the wine.

“My own special reserve I have been working on just for you,” he said as I took the offered glass. I swilled the contents and leaned in to smell it. “A nice base of pain, with hints of rejection, notes of keen terror…try it.”

The music quickened with my mind, soaking in the sensory orgy of my body connecting into the hundreds of metaworlds holding our trapped sinners, their terror and pain coursing through me. The creatures around us were whipping themselves into a frenzy as the music climaxed, and I leaned my head back to drink in the wine. As I greedily gorged on it, it spilled down and around my face, drenching my ADF Whites in bright, bloody splashes.

James crossed the final inches to embrace me, and I threw my arms skywards, reunited at last with my one true brother. Nobody would ever hurt us again, and together, we would cleanse the world of its sins.