Beng Beng Revolution

by Lu Huiyi

  His power was of a destructive capacity. When correctly used, he could take things apart, pulverise even large objects to dust, break bones and crush bricks and leave damage and death in his wake. They tested the capacity of his inner power to heal, to build, or to defend, only to find that it was single-minded in its quest to demolish and destroy.

  He worked very hard to harness it. They trained him in hand-to-hand combat and in weaponry, and in how to negotiate and handle hostage situations and to tail people or to shake off anyone who might be tailing him. Even without the Power, he would have been a competent soldier or fighter, but the Power, he knew, was what truly made him something to be feared. A lot of time was given towards honing his grasp and fine control of the Power, till with a single swipe of his fingers he could slice a target into two, and a clench of his fists could crush metal and powder wood.

  The Power was always there, in the corner of his vision. It acted on command now, but Beng felt like it was always waiting to take over. He didn’t trust it, and because of that he didn’t trust himself anymore.

  “Are you sure about this?” asked Elder Francis. It was an odd role reversal. Usually the man was trying to get Beng to try out new things, and it was surreal to find himself the gung-ho one, pushing for new risks and experiments. “It’s really not necessary. The lab techs just said it was an option, so you don’t have to take it if you aren’t sure.”

  “I want it,” said Beng. “In fact, I specifically asked for it. So don’t get all mother-hen on me now. I can take it.”

  “That remains to be seen,” said Elder Francis forebodingly. He passed over the little glass vial of powder anyway, and Beng mixed its contents promptly into the glass of water in front of him. It was invisible once dissolved. He picked it up before he could lose his nerve, and downed it before Elder Francis could say anymore.

  “They’ve got an antidote,” Beng said, more to reassure himself than anyone else. “This is just the working prototype—it lasts for twelve hours only. I’m going to bed now.”

  Already his vision was flickering at the edges, dark tendrils obscuring all else, pushing the Power nearer and nearer to him. The drug worked very quickly. He walked briskly into the sleeping quarters, feigning a sureness he didn’t quite feel. He thought the Elder might be following, but he didn’t look back. It didn’t matter.

  He was on his bedroll before his vision blacked out completely. No need for a blindfold; the drug blinded him from within. It felt safe, safe because he knew he had left no room for doubt anymore. He closed his eyes and waited for sleep to come.

  When he opened his eyes, it was night. He could see perfectly, and because of that he knew at once he was dreaming.

  He went through the usual reality checks, but they were perfunctory this time. He could differentiate between when he was awake and when he was asleep so much more easily, now that he had begun taking the vision reduction drug right before bed. Sight came with dreaming. Reality came in the dark.

  “This is good,” he said aloud. And then, to the room at large— “Why don’t you come forward now.”

  The Power walked out of the shadows with his fists clenched at his sides, his body language unwilling in the extreme. He wasn’t blindfolded this time, and his eyes were dark and hollow, but Beng knew he could see Beng just as well as Beng could see him. The Power sat cross-legged before Beng, but didn’t speak.

  “Now we can meet properly,” said Beng. “Tell me, where did you come from?”

  The Power looked up at him. Close up, his expression looked less menacing, and a lot more like a petulant teenager, which was somewhat disarming.

  “Why do you want to know?” the Power said, churlishly.

  “Why don’t you want to tell me?”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to tell you.”

  “So where did you come from?”

  “What will you give me if I tell you?”

  A pause.

  “Come on, man,” said Beng. “We’re supposed to be, like, two halves of a whole, y’know? It wasn’t meant to be a transaction.”

  “I didn’t get the memo on that,” said the Power. “This isn’t Jekyll and Hyde.”

  “Sassy,” said Beng. “I didn’t see that coming.”

  “I get to be whatever I like,” said the Power, tilting its chin upwards in defiance. “I’m not just your weapon; I’m more than you are.”

  “If you say so, I guess,” said Beng. “Though that’s not the most convincing, especially given that I’ve only really seen the part where you help me to smash things to bits. Now will you tell me where you’re from?”

  “I was always here,” said the Power. “I’ve been here just about as long as you have.”

  “Huh?”

  “You mean you’ve never known?”

  “Is this like the thing where one twin eats another in the womb?”

  The Power frowned.

  “Okay, firstly, I am not your twin,” he said, speaking slowly and clearly, as though he thought Beng somewhat stupid. “And secondly, they don’t actually eat each other. You’re not very bright.”

  “You sound like my brother,” Beng told him.

  “Is he a twin?”

  “No.”

  “Can I kill him?”

  “No. So where did you come from?”

  “Fine,” said the Power, finally yielding. “It figures that you guys don’t get it. Humankind has always depended on energy outside of them, see. Food, fuel, stuff like that. But there is energy that they can tap on within them, if they’re lucky. You’re one of the lucky ones. You have power. Me. Congrats.”

  “Um.”

  “You still don’t get it? You’re like a self-recharging battery. What part of that isn’t easy to understand?”

  “No, no, I get it. I’m not dumb,” snapped Beng. “I just didn’t expect—this. But why did you only show up now? Why not earlier?”

  “We couldn’t,” said the Power simply. “There wasn’t a need for us. But in a world without energy, we can’t sleep anymore.”

  “We? So there are more of you?” Beng asked, and the Power nodded. “If we have all that energy—we could fix the world. We could get back to the past. We could have the internet again. I can go back to school.”

  The Power blinked at him.

  “Probably doesn’t work like that,” he said. “There aren’t nearly enough of us. And anyway, we’re function-specific. I was built to destroy. I don’t think I’m going to fit into your mission to save the world.”

  “Ah,” said Beng. And then, “You said I was like a self-recharging battery. So—you’re the fuel.”

  “For you, yes.” The Power paused, as if considering whether to continue. Then, like a child unable to keep a secret, he added, “And you, too—you do the same for me.”

  “I—what?”

  “It’s not a one-way thing,” said the Power, smiling, almost friendly. “You keep me going, and I’ll keep you strong. It’s like a feedback loop. Of infinite power. You should be very grateful.”

  A long pause. The Power looked at him with the kind of idle curiosity that in itself was benign, but could turn cruel or manipulative given the right incentive.

  “Why did you come and talk to me?” he asked. “What do you want? I did everything you wanted.”

  “You’ve been staring,” said Beng. “I thought there might be something you wanted.”

  The Power laughed. His strained rasp of a voice, while laboured and at times jagged, had always been reasonably innocuous. But his laughter was unpleasant, sly and a little evil.

  “There’re a lot of things I want,” he said. “Control. Dominance. The freedom to raze everything to the ground. Isn’t that why you learnt to control your dreams, so that you could use me, but also hold me back? I would love to break the loop, Beng, if I could. You want me to be useful to you, Beng. You don’t care what I want.”

  Beng looked up, alarmed and about to speak, but the Power was already on its feet and retreating.
Beng tried to stand too, but the world seemed to tilt and leave him moving drunkenly and in weak, abortive little struggles.

  He opened his eyes to darkness, back in the waking world.

  “I want to be very, very sure,” Beng said, a month later.

  “This might be a little excessive,” said Elder Francis.

  “You know I’ve spoken to him,” said Beng. “More than once, in fact. He will never stop trying to be free of me, Elder. You know that. You told me that I always had to be in absolute control. I can’t be, if I don’t know when I’m in the real world and when I’m just dreaming. You know that.”

  “This is an irreversible step, Beng.”

  “I can fight and move and do anything, just the same, when I’ve got the blindfold on,” Beng argued. “In fact, some might even say that I’ve been trained to do it better than when I let myself see.”

  “The medicine already takes away your sight every night,” Elder Francis argued.

  “It’s not permanent,” said Beng. “Until it’s permanent, I wouldn’t be absolutely sure.”

  “Well, yes, but it’s going to make things a lot more difficult for you, in other aspects. We didn’t bring you into the Gentlemen to hurt you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “The minute we let the Power see, the minute we triggered his abilities, we knew things would be more difficult,” Beng cut in. “It’s not that I’m dying to do it. But it has to be done.”

  Elder Francis was quiet, but Beng could hear him breathing slowly, could sense the way he was staring and shifting in his seat, considering. He waited, tense. Slowly, Elder Francis reached out for the blindfold that Beng wore all the time now—Beng sensed the movement before feeling the actual touch—and tugged it off.

  Beng had pretty much been living almost completely blind for a while now—when the drug wasn’t in effect, he kept his eyes shielded, and this sudden restoration of sight threw him off for a few moments. Beng blinked at the lights and colours and the too-much that assaulted him right away. And again, he could see it, that faint lurking presence of the Power in the distance. It was unsettling.

  “Are you sure you want to give all this up?” Elder Francis asked, looking him straight in the eyes.

  “You can’t change the world without giving up a few things,” Beng replied.

  Elder Francis smiled, in spite of the worry creasing his brow. Beng knew he had made him proud, but there was something strained about the man’s smile, as though Elder Francis had not bargained on Beng sustaining such costs on his account, in his care. But Beng knew it was not worth worrying about. He was ready.

  He opened his eyes, and it was dark.

  He was lying down. There was a faint warmth on his face, and he thought it might be mid-morning. There were footsteps around him, brisk but not quick enough to suggest panic or danger. He remembered flashes of agony earlier, but barely. They couldn’t put him to sleep during the surgery, but they had given him enough of the good stuff to get him high out of his mind.

  Someone was touching his face—changing bandages—light and clinical. He pushed himself into a sitting position, and the hands fell away.

  “It worked,” he said.

  “You may feel a slight stinging in your eyes for a few weeks,” said a foreign voice, probably the doctor’s. “It’s a residual effect from the chemical drips we used. We’ll have to bathe your eyes daily, but you’ll be up and about very soon.”

  “It’s not too bad.”

  Someone took his right hand and helped him to wrap his fingers around a cup of water. He sipped it slowly, getting himself into the flow of processing each sensation and movement about him.

  “You feeling okay?” the doctor asked.

  Beng finished his drink. He raised the glass a little aimlessly.

  “On your left,” the Power rasped in his ear. Beng obligingly shifted the glass, found a side-table on his left, and casually placed it there.

  He felt very certain of his bearings now, ten times more certain than before they had taken his sight away. He could discern between the pitch-dark gravity of reality and the inconsequential visual richness of his dreams now, with complete confidence and ease. The Power could no longer lurk in the corners of his eyes, waiting to confuse or overpower him. And having lost the hope of leaving Beng adrift, the Power could only yield to the binary sureness of Beng’s mind, and serve his needs in the waking world like an assistant or a familiar. They were perfectly aligned now.

  That was how it should have been from the start. Beng knew that he could do things, could change things now.

  He raised a hand, palm up, and slowly curled his fingers upwards—gently, gently, they were just playing, he didn’t want to do too much damage. There was a faint crunch in the distance, as the paint on the wall before him peeled off and crumbled and fell in a thinly-powdered mist onto the ground. Beng felt the satisfaction of such fine control, and recognised the concurrent pleasure of the Power at the damage done.

  “Beng?” The doctor, again, obviously trying very hard to maintain his composure.

  Beng turned in the direction of the voice, smiling with a freedom he hadn’t felt since before the Deprivation.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “We’re feeling just fine.”

  The final test came a few months later. Beng hadn’t even known it was coming.

  It was made known to him that Huat had been allowed to visit at last. Beng should really have been a little more suspicious at that. They’d cancelled some of his more strenuous training sessions that week, citing his good progress as a reason for the reward. Having a visit in the same week did seem like too much good fortune to be coincidental, but all Beng could think about was that he hadn’t seen any of his family in a year, and that he could use a good conversation with his brother, to banter and catch up and talk things over, the way they used to. So Beng entered the room with haste and very little concern, figuring out his seat through a mixture of touch and murmured guidance from the Power.

  “It’s been a while,” he told his brother.

  “They said you asked for the operation—to blind yourself,” said Huat. His voice was a little rough and strained. There was a slight tapping on the table; Beng realised that Huat’s hands must be shaking, fingers rattling against the tabletop.

  “Calm down,” Beng said. It occurred to him that while the procedure had been completed almost half a year ago, it might be relatively fresh news to his brother. “It had to be done. I couldn’t get the Power under control if I couldn’t even be sure whether anything was real or not. He would’ve used it against me.”

  “I would have,” the Power agreed sotto voce, but Huat couldn’t hear him.

  “You—you can’t see anymore,” Huat got out. “You didn’t have to do that. The Gentlemen is a strict place, and they were pushing you to train—but they’re—we’re not, well not a—”

  “A cult?” Beng finished politely. “Don’t be so dramatic, Huat. I can do so many things now. Sight was the surest way of verification. I had to be sure.”

  “They say you’re nearly ready to end your training.”

  “Am I? I want to go home. I miss Ma and Pa and Grandfather.”

  Huat paused. His hands were still shaking. Beng thought Huat might be holding something, but he wasn’t sure.

  “There’s one final test,” he said. “You pass it, and I can take you back.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “You will. Don’t be silly. It’s going to be all right. It’ll be all right.”

  “It’s funny that you always say that, but you sound less and less convinced every time you do.” Beng settled into his seat and took a deep breath to calm himself. “Okay. What is it?”

  “For the Gentlemen to be able to put you on official duty, they need to get the tracker out. But they don’t have the technology to do it—and you are the one with the power to destroy. They need you to try and get it out.”

  “Do they think I can do it?” Beng asked, running a finger
along his arm. The device under his skin seemed to tingle in warning, but he could never be sure if he was imagining it. He remembered the sting and the explosive reaction that had come with his last attempt, the searing pain and the stench of charred skin.

  “I believe you can do it,” said Huat, deliberately evasive and obviously lying through his teeth.

  Beng placed both hands flat on the table before him, and felt the Power come to the forefront of his consciousness.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” he said. He raised his right hand and angled it over his left arm. Slowly, he repeated the action he’d done earlier, running a finger across his skin, but this time with purpose. The Power sliced through his skin like butter, applying just enough pressure to prevent an errant spray of blood. It hurt. He gritted his teeth and carried on. He heard Huat exclaim something, but ignored him. He couldn’t afford to break focus now.

  The wound was deep enough that the hard edges of the small tracking device were visible; the Power told him so. Exposed to the air, the tracker spat little sparks now and then, enough to sting a little but not enough to do any real harm. Like a warning.

  “Don’t touch it!” Huat gasped out.

  “I’m not touching it,” Beng said, lifting his bloodied fingers, and willing the Power to move fast, faster than the tracker could react. The Power, with bony fingers, grasped the device and ground it with vicious energy. At the same time, Beng flicked his free hand to an unoccupied corner of the room swiftly and violently, so that the semi-pulverized remains of the device, and the bits of skin and flesh that had been torn out with it were sent flying away at great speed from Huat and himself. It was not a moment too soon—the mess of matter exploded even before it hit the wall, a messy burst of red and heat, and then nothing.

  There was a long silence. The tang of blood lingered in the air.

  “Whew,” said Beng. “I guess that went as well as it could.”