Isolation

by Kevin Hardman

  “Okay, I have to ask,” I stated. “What’s so funny?”

  “The fact that you called me infected,” Mouse replied with a grin.

  I scratched my temple. “What’s so funny about that?”

  “Because,” Mouse explained. “I’m not infected – you are!”

  Chapter 57

  “They’re called the Busuigno,” Mouse explained. “They’re mid-dimensional beings.”

  “Mid-dimensional?” I repeated.

  “They exist in a space between dimensions,” Mouse said.

  “You mean like this place?” I asked, making an all-encompassing gesture.

  We were currently in a room about two hundred square feet in size, and which was set up like a smaller version of Mouse’s lab, with a number of worktables, computers, monitors, and other devices.

  “Not quite like this,” Mouse said. “This room is an interdimensional product – it actually exists in another dimension outside our own. I set it up, along with several others like it, as a kind of safe house I could get to quickly.”

  I nodded. “I understand now how you just seemed to vanish during your recent skirmishes with the League. You opened a dimensional doorway and stepped through.”

  “Pretty much,” Mouse admitted, although my statement wasn’t really a theory or guess. It was how Mouse had brought us to our current locus after telling me I was infected.

  “Anyway, we were talking about the Busuigno,” Mouse continued. “They’re a symbiotic race – they attach themselves to other beings and take over their hosts, mind and body.”

  As he spoke, Mouse brought up an image on one of the monitors near us – specifically, a pic of me in his lab just before he showed up. The color appeared washed out, but I knew that was because the image had been captured with a special camera. Other than that, there wasn’t anything unusual about the pic – unless you counted the dark mass that looked like an ugly, crumpled cowl draped over my head and shoulders.

  “That’s a Busuigno?” I asked, pointing at the cowl.

  “Yeah,” Mouse answered.

  “And it’s on me now?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “So…it’s controlling me in some way?”

  “Actually, it isn’t,” Mouse said. “I don’t doubt that it’s trying, but you seem to have some type of immunity – probably a result of your singular genetic structure.”

  I gave him a curious look. “So you knew that I was immune? That’s why you left me hints on how to track you down?”

  “Well, I didn’t know,” he admitted. “But I had a hint in that direction.”

  “What kind of hint?”

  Mouse seemed to reflect for a moment. “I know someone who has experience with the Busuigno. He suggested that certain people might be immune to their effects and you seemed to have the proper characteristics.”

  “Oh – the future me,” I surmised. He had mentioned how everything that was happening was part of his past, which essentially made him the only person experienced with this situation.

  Mouse looked startled. “You met him?”

  I nodded. “We had a chat.”

  Mouse shook his head in disbelief. “That idiot. I told him not to talk to anybody.”

  “Well, technically, he only talked to himself, so…”

  “Really?” Mouse shot back as I trailed off. “That’s the argument you want to go with?”

  “Okay, I agree that he probably should have heeded your advice, but it’s not like he simply revealed himself,” I stated. I then gave a brief explanation of how Myshtal’s power had brought Older Jim to my attention. “And I’m sure he knew – just like you – that there was no way I was going to ignore the possibility of another Jim being around.”

  Mouse simply nodded as I spoke. My statement referred to the fact that I’d had to deal with a dangerous clone of myself in the not-too-distant past, so the notion of a second Jim would have been something I might have prioritized even above locating my mentor.

  “All right,” Mouse finally said. “In that light, revealing himself may not have been as terrible as it appeared at first blush.”

  “I’m sure the future me will appreciate that,” I noted. “So what exactly did he say about me being immune?”

  “I basically told him I had an unusual object coming in and that he might want to go elsewhere while I studied it.”

  “The Tristan Construct,” I concluded.

  “Yeah,” Mouse affirmed. “It’s not rooted in our reality – our space-time continuum – so I wasn’t sure if it would affect him in some way due to his ‘problem.’”

  “What was his response?”

  “He said he’d stay put – that stuff like that had never affected him.”

  “So that was your hint that it might not affect me.”

  “Correct.”

  “That’s why you called me and asked for my help. You figured that if anything went sideways, I would come through unscathed.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “So how exactly does the Construct fit into all this anyway?”

  “Believe it or not, it’s actually a prison.”

  “What?!” I exclaimed.

  “Yeah,” Mouse continued with a nod.

  I spent a moment contemplating. The Construct hadn’t seemed very large. It could certainly hold one person – possibly two, depending on their size. Not many more than that, I was sure.

  “Who’s in it?” I asked.

  “The Busuigno, of course,” Mouse replied. “Presumably, someone, somewhere got tired of being a marionette, so they locked them all in the Construct.”

  “So how many are in there?”

  “Billions, I’d guess. Possibly trillions. All except the ones that got out when I opened it.”

  I looked at him with a horrified expression. “Excuse me?”

  “Well, how do you think that one got on you?”

  “I don’t know!” I shot back. “You said they were interdimensional beings, so I just thought it came into our dimension and latched onto me. I didn’t realize you were running some kind of transdimensional parole board.”

  “Once again, they’re mid-dimensional beings,” Mouse corrected. “They typically exist in a space between dimensions. Not in our dimension, not in some other dimension, but in a space between them.”

  “Whatever,” I said dismissively. “Where are the other ones that got out?”

  “Can’t you guess?” he replied. “One’s on AP. Another’s on Luna. Buzz. Solar Surge. Smokey. Electra…”

  He rattled off more names, but in all honesty, I stopped listening after he mentioned Electra. Now I kind of understood her behavior to a certain extent; it wasn’t her who had been drugging me – it was the thing on her.

  “So basically,” I said when he finished, “you threw open the gates of a penitentiary and let a bunch of convicts out. Now the inmates are running the asylum.”

  “Well, in my defense,” he replied, “I didn’t know it was a prison at first. I realized that it wasn’t rooted in our reality, but beyond that, it was just kind of a lock-box puzzle.”

  “And you couldn’t resist opening it.”

  Mouse shrugged. “We all have our weaknesses. But I didn’t just open it without any thought to what could be inside. I knew it wasn’t inherently dangerous – no explosives, no bio-weapons, or anything along those lines. That said, as long as it was on this planet, we needed to have some notion of either what was inside or what it could do.”

  “Or we could have just tossed it back where we found it, or locked it away.”

  “You mean closed our eyes to the problem? The way you could have just ignored that there was another Jim in the lab?”

  “Point taken,” I conceded. “So what exactly happened when you opened that thing?”

  “To explain that, I need to give a little more background,” he noted. “As I said, the Busuigno exists between dimensions, but they can freely travel from one to another, which is how they find t
heir hosts. That being the case, it took a special type of prison to hold them.”

  “Some kind of mid-dimensional stockade,” I offered.

  “Exactly. Being mid-dimensional, the Busuigno – in their natural form – can pass through steel and stone like they aren’t there. So, any prison built to hold them can’t fully exist in our space-time continuum. It has to exist, to some extent, in their space.”

  “Okay,” I intoned. “I think I get that.”

  “Anyway, when I opened it, there was some kind of temporal distortion. It was like a sphere formed around me and the Construct, and inside it time moved normally. Outside of it, though, time appeared frozen.”

  What he was describing sounded remarkably like the time sheath Older Jim had created, but I didn’t think it wise to mention it at the moment. Instead, I simply asked, “What do you think caused it?”

  Mouse’s brow crinkled in thought. “I assume it was whoever built the prison. I think they tacked it on as some kind of safeguard, just in case the prison ever, uh, inadvertently opened. It would provide time to hopefully round up any escapees, toss them back inside, and bar the door before they could do any damage.”

  “How’d that work out?” I asked sarcastically.

  “I got the door closed, wise guy,” Mouse countered. “And only a limited number got out. Unfortunately, they’re controlling some of the most powerful people on the planet at the moment, and they’re dead set on releasing the rest of the Busuigno from lockup.”

  “Why didn’t they take over you?”

  “Believe me, they tried, but it didn’t work. I have certain safeguards against mind control techniques. Frankly speaking, it’s kind of what gave me a leg up. When one of them tried to control me, I got a glimpse inside his mind. Not a lot, but enough.”

  “And that’s how you know so much about what you’re dealing with.”

  “Correct. It’s funny – if they hadn’t tried to control me then I might not have known anything was going on because ordinarily human beings can’t perceive them. As it was, I discovered they were there and used the time in the temporal sphere to find out all I could about them and the Construct.”

  I frowned. “How long were you in there, subjectively?”

  “Just a few hours, but it was enough time to figure out what I was dealing with and formulate a rudimentary plan. Fortunately, I had my computer tablet with me.”

  “So in that time, you managed to lock the prison back up, come up with a way to leave me clues, and formulate a plan to capture the escaped Busuigno?”

  “Yeah,” he droned. “I admit it’s not my best work, but you have to use the tools available.”

  “And then,” I continued, “when the time bubble disappeared, you came out swinging.”

  “Not exactly,” Mouse stated. “I didn’t know if anyone else would be immune to the Busuigno, so I gave it a second.”

  “That’s not the way it comes across on the video,” I countered. “Looks like you just started blasting.”

  Mouse frowned for a second, then began tapping on his tablet. A few seconds later, he pointed at the monitor that had previously shown my pic, saying, “You mean this video?”

  It was the initial footage I’d seen of Mouse going on the offensive in his lab, only this time there was audio.

  “Get him,” I heard my father say just before Mouse blasted him.

  Next, Luna screamed “Die!” as she charged at my mentor.

  I turned to Mouse (who paused the video) and said, “There wasn’t audio on the clip they showed me.”

  “You think they wanted you to hear that?” he asked rhetorically. “But there was audio on the footage I left on the computer for you. Didn’t you hear it when you played that?”

  “Hmmm,” I droned. “I kinda didn’t check to see if the audio was on…or if the volume was turned up.”

  Mouse wiped his face with his hand, mumbling, “Why do I even try?”

  “Let’s just get back on task,” I suggested. Glancing back at the paused video, another question occurred to me. “AP said there was some kind of power surge from the Construct that took the camera offline for a second. He also said it was what unhinged you.”

  Mouse shook his head. “The time sphere was the only thing that seemed to emanate from the Construct. But if you’re talking about why they only have that one piece of footage at their disposal, that was my doing.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “When I was in the time sphere, the escaped Busuigno were in there with me. They could see what I was doing. Therefore, I couldn’t actually implement everything I wanted to because they’d know what I was up to. Still, I could lay a good bit of the groundwork, as long as I kept it somewhat obtuse.”

  “So they could see, maybe, that you were planning to reach out to someone, but they didn’t know how or when.”

  “Correct. With respect to the footage, after I escaped from the lab, it was second nature to me to cover my tracks.”

  “So you deleted the lab footage from the system.”

  “I started deleting it, but at the time, I saw that someone – presumably the Busuigno – were in the system as well, trying to download it. I was curious as to what they wanted it for, so I let them have the portion that they showed you.”

  I spent a moment reflecting on what my mentor had just said. “What do you think they wanted it for?”

  “They obviously used it for propaganda purposes – to get people who weren’t under their control to think I’d gone off the rails. But I think the real reason was the Construct.”

  “What’s the big deal about footage of that?” I asked.

  “They’ve been imprisoned in there for a long time – thousands of years, at the least. And during that time, they’ve been doing their best to get out.”

  “I get it,” I chimed in. “They wanted to see how you opened it.”

  “Exactly, and I think they got enough of an idea to form a plan.”

  “So how did I get on their radar? Did they see something related to me when you were in the temporal sphere?”

  Mouse shook his head. “I didn’t give any direct indication of who I was trying to recruit. However, Alpha Prime knew that I had called you, and I assume when the Busuigno took control of him, they saw that. More to the point, they saw what you could do and assumed they could use you. So at some point one of them attached itself to you, but – much to their dismay, I’m sure – you proved unsusceptible to their control.”

  As my mentor spoke, I suddenly remembered something that had happened around the time I was being recruited to hunt him down.

  “The conference room,” I muttered.

  Mouse raised an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

  “That first night they told me you’d gone rogue,” I explained. “I was in the conference room with Alpha Prime, and I felt this weird tingle at the back of my mind. At the same time, AP looked at me like he was expecting something. I think that’s when the Busuigno attached to me.”

  Mouse shrugged. “Probably. That’s similar to what it felt like when it tried to attach to me, but I was able to shake it off.”

  “So is it somehow reading my thoughts now?”

  “I don’t think so,” Mouse said. “I mean, typically they can access the thoughts and memories of their hosts, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with your symbiont. In fact, based on what I can tell, yours seems to be dying.”

  “What?!” I screeched. “Is that going to affect me?”

  “Unlikely,” Mouse stated. “The Busuigno feed, for lack of a better term, on the psychic and mental energy of their host. In your case, the inability to take control also means that the symbiont can’t feed.”

  “Then why doesn’t it just let go – move on?”

  “I’m not sure it can,” Mouse replied. “My guess is there’s some kind of psychic feedback or reaction that prevents it from releasing its grip on you.”

  “I think I understand,” I said. “The way a person
who grabs a live wire can’t let go because the electricity clenches their muscles, so they end up getting electrocuted.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Do the other Busuigno know the one on me is dying?”

  “Probably, but it’s unlikely they can do anything about it.”

  “So why have they been drugging me?”

  “Huh?” muttered Mouse.

  “They’ve been drugging me,” I repeated. I then gave him a quick overview of how Electra had been drugging my food. In fact, I brought him up to speed on everything that had happened thus far.

  “Well, I’m glad you figured it out,” Mouse stated. “My guess is that they drugged you so that I couldn’t contact you.”

  “That brings up another point,” I said. “Why didn’t you just come up to me or leave me a note or something?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Mouse asked. “You have a Busuigno on you. I didn’t know if you were still you or one of them.”

  “So you left the clues,” I concluded.

  “Yes,” Mouse admitted. “Although the Busuigno can access a person’s thoughts and memories, there are certain things that it can’t mimic. Your instincts, intuition, gut feeling… those are things that are unique to you and can’t be emulated.”

  “In short, you figured only the real Jim – as opposed to one with his strings being pulled – would figure out the hints you left.”

  “Exactly.”

  I frowned. “But you said you came up with the clues while still in the temporal bubble.”

  Mouse sighed. “I always assumed that at some point the Busuigno would try to control you. I didn’t know if you’d be unaffected, as the older Jim hinted, but I decided early on that it would be too risky to approach you directly. So no notes, no face-to-face, no nothing. Plus, based on what you said, they never left you alone. If you were awake, someone was always with you for the most part, and if you weren’t awake, you were drugged into complete unconsciousness.”

  I shook my head in disdain. “I can’t believe how long that went on.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Mouse said. “These were all people you trusted. You can’t be faulted for believing them.”