The New Assault

by Steven Spellman

  His showed his son life as seen through his own experiences, not like a movie flashing before his eyes but like a holographic picture that Sam could manipulate, one that he could turn and swivel and scrutinize from every angle. It was a very intimate exchange, like being stripped completely bare before another living human being, completely subject to their scrutiny. But the coin had another side. For, Sam was able to see that his father was riddled with flaws. They were failings native to mankind, but they were failings none the less. Of course, Sam knew well that he had his own flaws, but it was still a revelation to have another person’s, especially his own father’s, laid bare so completely before him. “That is the storm that is coming.” Geoffrey said to him as soon as these thoughts surfaced in his brain. “The alien civilization from which this telepathy sprung, as antagonistic as it was, could be trusted with a group intelligence…man can not. We are a race of individuals, with many individual flaws. To increase our ability in this way would be to compound our many flaws as well…”

  Such a giant and sudden increase in such a flawed species would be catastrophic. Will be catastrophic, Geoffrey promised, since that’s what was coming. But, why did it need to be that way? As far as Sam knew, his father was the only one alive who wielded this new power. The scientist that had taught Geoffrey had died long ago and … There was another person still alive that also knew of this ability. Dr. Ian Crangler, the famed synthesizer of the cure that had saved the world’s progeny and thus its future. The cure had come from Sam’s blood, but it had been made available to the public by The Good Doctor. That was what he was called now; The Good Doctor. He was a celebrity, not exactly on par with Sam but not far from it. In the early days he had helped administer the cure from packed hospitals with no electricity, no running water, and sometimes no roofs. The world had nearly been destroyed: It was a blessing to find a building that could hold so many people that was still intact at all. He set up stations wherever he could and gave his time and effort wherever the volunteers were short.

  He was just another face in the crowd back then, until he too began hearing voices in his head. He had spent plenty of time with Geoffrey and the scientist after the scientist’s accident with the fragment and he had not been unaffected. Dr. Crangler had been the first to see the inherent dangers in a group intelligence for a race such as mankind. Unfortunately, that did nothing to change the fact that he was already touched by it. He couldn’t volunteer after that, not with so many voices that were not his own clamoring for attention inside his brain. At first he hid himself away, just as Geoffrey had, but unlike Geoffrey who remained upon his mountain top, secluded from the world, Dr. Crangler returned to the populace and to his practice. He eventually learned to control his new telepathic abilities, to hone them. He discovered that there were benefits to being able to project ideas into another person’s mind. He could calm crowds and see that more people were being administered the cure more quickly, more efficiently. He could easily spot those amongst his group who had nefarious purposes. He could literally read people’s minds. He could know everything a person knew about their own medical history without having to ask a single question.

  He also began to notice the ugliness in people’s minds, the hidden creatures that lurked just behind their eyes. The human mind was more complex that he would’ve ever imagined. There were genuinely good people and genuinely bad ones, and not nearly as many solidly bad ones as he would’ve imagined. There were good, selfless motivations in the bad people, just as there were dark, selfish motives in the good. Only one thing both had in common, and that was a certain taint that lay upon the surface of everyone’s mind. Sin, flaw, the limits of humanity; whatever it was called, all Dr. Crangler knew was that it was there, like a thick biofilm of filth upon the surface of every mind. Men and women with selfless motivations had those intentions sullied by the film whenever they tried to act upon them, while the dark motives of supremely selfish people were made even more dangerous when they acted upon them. This taint—Dr. Crangler saw it as a disease like none other he’d ever seen—made it impossible for people to act exactly as they thought. It was like a constant obstacle to progress, a never-ending series of hurdles that everyone was forced to navigate just to follow their true intentions. And even then those pure intentions could never break through into action without being touched by the taint.

  The worst part was that The Good Doctor had to admit to himself that this ubiquitous film was present in his own mind as well. It affected his judgment, it blurred the line between good and evil, and right and wrong. It was like wearing sunglasses in the evening. Clear sight was still possible, just increasingly more difficult as time passed. And how much time in Dr. Crangler’s life had passed already with him burdened with this disease! Just as with everyone else, the taint had been with him his entire life but now that he could see it with his own eyes—sort of—it felt brutally depressing. How much of his potential had it sullied already! Dr. Crangler had always taken his professional position very seriously. He’d prided him on being logical, cool in his judgment. Free from ulterior motives. He’d worked extensively on and inside people’s bodies—their most intimate possessions—while they were unconscious or either too heavily drugged to be aware of it. Wasn’t it the duty of a person such as that to use sound judgment? But, now he was discovering that all his judgment, no matter the amount of effort he’d put into it, had always been tainted! Even if no one knew but he himself, he was not, nor had he ever been The Good Doctor.

  It caused him to question many things in his life, but none more than his belief in God. He was a doctor. He understood that he and men and women like himself were the first and final resort for people with diseased flesh. Logically, there must be a different kind of doctor for this different kind of disease, a diseased mind. Not a diseased brain, as Dr. Crangler found after lengthy testing that proved the taint was present in even otherwise physically healthy brains, but a diseased mind. Just as Dr. Crangler could now see firsthand that the mind was a different entity from the brain, though one seemed to be affected by the other, he had to consider that a person was a different entity from their body. It called into question many ideas he’d long held about the universe at large. If it were true, then he had only worked upon the maladies of people’s shells. Who, then, was fit to work on the person inside the shell, the person that existed without form, without muscle, without tendons, without heart or lungs to pump and oxygenate precious blood? That Doctor would necessarily have to command resources as much above, or at the very least, different, from any Dr. Crangler knew of. That Doctor would have to be a physician of spirits, a god. The God. It had been the jolt of that revelation that had driven Dr. Crangler away. He needed answers, answers he wasn’t going to get from the many voices in his head.

  SAM REALIZED there were others alive like his father.

  “No,” his father impressed upon his mind “not like me. The last time I was able to touch the doctor’s mind he could perceive thoughts, but he could not project his own thoughts into another’s mind. Perhaps much has changed since he disappeared, but if it hasn’t then he is only a telepath in reception. If it has, then he is much stronger.” Sam noticed that his father was careful not to imply whether that might be a good or a bad thing.

  Meanwhile, Sam and Geoffrey continued practicing upon a grueling schedule. At the end of every day, Sam was completely exhausted. His brain felt like powder in his skull and his body felt as if he had just run a marathon. Usually he fell sound sleep the moment his head touched the soft down of his pillow. Unfortunately, there was one thing that did plague him as he drifted into an otherwise blissful rest every night. It was a foreboding that inspired restlessness in his mind and a chill in his spine. It was a faceless fear that sometimes entered his dreams and turned them into nightmares that he could only barely remember the next morning. It was his dread of the storm that was to come.

  CHAPTER 4

  Months passed and still Geoffrey held his son to an extr
emely tight and demanding regimen. He allowed him a single day a week for rest but for the remaining six days he forced Sam down into the same chair, bright and early in the morning, until late into the evening. When he felt it was time to take things to the next level he had his son sleep during the day. That way he could hold their practices at night. For, at night the city lights far below were mere vague twinkles, like candles ready to extinguish at the first light breeze. The stars above as well were normally obscured by cloud cover, themselves no more than faint flashes on the other side of earth’s atmosphere. The change in regimen meant less distractions for Sam. During practice, as Geoffrey taught him to send and receive messages with his mind, he was also able to gaze out upon the horizon and enjoy the truly majestic sight of the landscape descending and rolling away from the mountain like ocean waters fleeing away to allow a great monster to rise above the surface.

  Now, at night, there were only the images, the sensations, the experiences, all of them utterly intense, that Geoffrey inspired inside his son’s mind. With nothing else to focus upon, Sam soon began to hear his father’s voice, to see bits and pieces of his past in his own mind long after daily practice ended. It wasn’t long until even his dreams were filled with his father’s memories. It was then that the nightmares began in earnest. Black hands, darker than the night sky outside, began to take form from the void of Sam’s sleeping mind. He stood upon a platform that he could not see, his entire world illumined only by a great round circle of light from an unseen source somewhere high and far away. In the glare of the great spot light, Sam could just see the hands emerging from the blackness in the distance. Forming, waiting. They did not lunge forward, as he would’ve feared, but only materialized with foreboding slowness, and waited. With every successive nightmare they emerged out from the blackness further. It wouldn’t be terribly long before they were in range, before they were close enough to do whatever it was that had summoned them from the blackness.

  That was the worst part, that Sam had no idea what the hands were for, what they’d come to do. It didn’t matter. He didn’t have much time to overthink it, what with the furious pace his father set for their practice sessions. Eight months had passed now. The days blended into each other, until one day stood out clearly amongst the rest. It was the day that Geoffrey announced that the practices were no longer necessary. It was a day of relief more than of celebration, and Sam was glad of the relief. At another time he might’ve slept in for three solid days following the announcement, but after so many months of practice, he’d learned that his mind was powerful enough to control the necessities of his body. To an extent. Even after so much work, his mind was alert, raring to discover yet broader extensions of his newly taught telepathic abilities. His mind raced so fast that it kept his body going beyond what should’ve been possible. Sam was learning the literal meaning of mind over matter. Still, he could feel within himself that his body needed rest. But how could he sleep at a time like this, with the nightmares vigilantly awaiting him, and a storm coming that he desperately needed to prepare for?

  He began to pace the house at all hours of the day and night. He was growing restless. After so much constant activity, for so long, the house seemed much larger, much emptier without it. Geoffrey noticed Sam’s restlessness. Eventually, he told Sam that it was time for him to get out of the house for a while. That was odd. Sam and Geoffrey rarely left their home these days. There had been a time when a mob would have been waiting constantly, every hour of the day and night, desperate for just a glimpse of a member of the Simmons’ family. Thankfully, that time had passed—mainly because after Delilah’s death both Sam and Geoffrey rarely visited the bottom of the mountain—but the time wasn’t so far passed that a mob couldn’t quickly assemble at the first word that one of the Simmons’ had been sighted. If a large enough mob caught such word, the armed guards posted at the bottom of the mountain would count for nothing. Of course, Geoffrey knew all this. So why was he willingly sending his son into the fray? Though Sam could read minds now he wasn’t nearly as proficient as his father. Even telepathically, his father knew how to conceal things. Sam could only assume that this was another test, a practice after the practice, perhaps.

  When the day came, Sam was surprised to find that he wasn’t nearly as apprehensive as he had been about visiting the city down below. He was still nervous, but he was excited too. He and his father were set apart, figuratively and literally, and as a young man only fresh out his teenage years it had been hard to not have other kids to grow up around. It was still hard as a young man. After so long with only his wheel chair bound father to interact with, he thought it might be nice to be in a crowd again, even if he was to be the heavily protected center of it. There was an excessively long wooden stair case set in a path that had been carved directly into the mountain, leading all the way to the Simmons’ front door. The entrance at the bottom was the most heavily guarded part of the mountain. Sam stood at the top of the staircase now, peering down. He was preparing to take the first step, the most important step. It felt as if he were about to commence upon a long and perilous journey. Presumably he was just supposed to go down there to enjoy a break from the confines of the house, but as he gazed down at the stair case vanishing into the distance like a forbidden path into oblivion, he felt as if any trip down there now would be so much more.

  He was a new man, now, matured beyond his years. He saw the world differently than he once had. He had to. The veil of human communication, the veil of human flesh, had been lifted. He had seen beyond it and not even Geoffrey could ever take back what he had seen. All of it had changed him, and he was changed. The answer of whether for good or ill waited at the bottom of the staircase, he felt. Shadows hidden in the darkness waited before him where the staircase vanished from his sight. Revelation lay only on the other side. An approaching storm waiting to ravish and carry him and what little he still held dear, away, in its violence, if he remained where he was. He steadied himself against the winds, swallowed hard, lifted a foot, and set it down lightly upon the first step. The journey had begun.

  Immediately, Sam’s mind was inundated with foreign voices. Like hundreds of people having conversations on the other side of a thick wall, Sam could hear more voices than he’d ever heard at any one time. That was saying something, since Sam was intimately familiar with noisy mobs. The confusion of voices was muted but it was still a distressing experience. Geoffrey had warned him about this, that the reality of so many conflicting voices in his head was something that he would have to learn to navigate in his own way. Geoffrey had performed his duty and taught him the language, but it was still completely his own choice how he responded to what he’d been taught. It might be the only choice left to him in the coming days, but it was his choice and his alone.

  Sam nearly missed the next step when the voices hit. He stopped and tried to steady his breathing. It was more difficult now that he was outside and exposed to the strong mountainous winds. At last he managed, and as he did so he found the voices became more tolerable, if not exactly comfortable. His father had also taught him that other people’s audible voices were theirs to command, but the voices in their heads, the real voices behind the fleshly facades, were beyond even their control. If Sam was ever to learn to tolerate their voices inside his own head, he would have to learn to control himself. Such was his burden now, that he would have to learn to do what was impossible for any normal man. All before he was a grown man himself.

  Geoffrey had endured a similar burden, back when telepathy had first been leveraged upon his shoulders. The reality of it had forced him up onto a mountaintop, not only as protection from the masses but also to protect the masses from him. He’d felt like a man armed with extremely powerful firearms in a time before anyone knew what firearms were. From the beginning he’d felt that telepathy was simply too much power for a single or even an entire race of men to be trusted with. He’d chosen isolation over what he saw as the cost of corruption. Living upon the
top of a mountain came with many inconveniences but Geoffrey never regretted his decision. But now, Sam possessed the seeds of that overwhelming power and he did have to go out into the world. Sam cringed to think of it; so, he would have to learn to do things that his own father had never learned to do! He could feel the weight of so much responsibility upon his young shoulders as he slowly took step after step, down the staircase. As he moved further and further down the weight only became more oppressive. He felt as if it would soon crush him right where he was, or at the very least, knock him off balance and crush him slowly as he tumbled endlessly toward the bottom. In his mind Sam envisioned his own body, irreparably mangled and broken, at the bottom of the staircase. All because he couldn’t bear the weight.

  He shook his head and took in another great gulp of mountain cooled air. He stopped himself cold upon the steps. “Do not be afraid, my son” Sam heard in his head. It was barely a whisper: he wasn’t sure if it were his father or perhaps nothing more than the wind speaking through the rocks. It didn’t matter; it helped. He felt better. A little. He looked around and was shocked to find that he was nearly half way down the mountain! He had never timed the trip, but it had always felt as if it took hours to walk down the staircase. Here he was, languishing in spirit over what might await him at the bottom and he was already half way there! He continued on, determined to resist the dark inevitabilities that seemed to surround him in every direction. For the rest of the climb down the staircase he focused on keeping the mental voices of the city’s populace below within a tolerable volume.