In order to test the idea he needed to close himself off from the rest of the Capital City, He wasn’t sure that he could do that. It had been simple enough, once, to close off the ears of his mind against the voices and experiences in other people’s heads, but it wasn’t so simple any more. Now, trying to shut himself off from the others was not only more difficult but painful. It no longer felt as if he were closing the ears of his mind but slicing them off. The long weeks of preparation for the great battle that the Doctor had insisted upon, had led the telepaths of Capital City to meld their consciousnesses together in a way that would be difficult to undo. But now Sam had to undo it. He struggled to withdraw from collective consciousness and every attempt felt as if he were trying to yank a limb out of its socket. For every inch of progress that he made he was given a mile of pain. He pressed on. He had to. These past years of training and now of joining a collective in a way that he never had before, had conditioned him to be a part of the whole, to experience what others experienced, to belong to something much larger than himself. Now that he was trying to break off from that Something Larger than Himself, the aloneness, the harsh abandon, the silence of the Individual crashed in upon him.
To have the mental presence of so many others inside his head, and he in theirs, everyone sharing everything, everyone instantly aware of everyone else, and now to suddenly break off from it all… It felt at once like ripping off a limb and then the next moment as if he were marooning himself on a desert island to bleed to death alone. The feeling of isolation was breathtaking. Still, he pressed on. Once he’d finally broken himself away he felt exhausted and discombobulated but his hope in his plan remained. He needed to search Julia’s mind. She was the only one who lived separated from the collective, and since all of Capital City’s wholeness had not fazed the alien intelligence, the answer must lie inside Julia. Unfortunately, Sam had no idea what exactly he was looking for, what miracle answer Julia’s existence might offer. He only knew that the answer must be there, somewhere inside of her. He also knew that he was reneging on a very important promise to never probe her memories again. He had kept that promise for a long time now and it only made it more difficult to have to break it. Then, there was the question of whether not he should discuss it with her first.
At last, Sam decided he must indeed do it whether she agreed to it or not. The survival of the planet may rely upon what he found inside of her. He also decided that to do it without her knowledge would be the lesser of the two evils. It was the right thing to do but Sam felt awful about it. It reminded him how he’d felt back when he’d first witnessed the Doctor’s influence. It had begun with those children, but Dr. Crangler had routinely taken greater liberties with people and had neither asked for permission nor forgiveness. The world had changed and right now Sam needed to act, not postulate. Once he managed to break himself off from the Capital City collective it took him two days to control the terrible sense of emptiness and aloneness that plagued him. He awoke early on the third morning he asked Julia to join him out on the porch. If she had any misgivings about what he planned to do she didn’t show them as she followed him to the porch.
Once she was there she sat down in her usual chair without a word. “I want to tell you a little about what’s going on out there.” Sam began, gesturing toward the hole in the very top of the tower.
“We’ve already discussed this, Sam.” Julia answered. “I don’t need to know what’s going on beyond Capital City.” As Julia spoke, her gaze flinched away from a particular arch lining the tower’s walls nearby. It was the same spot that had drawn her gaze every time she visited the front porch for any length of time. It was not the arch that drew her attention, it was the place the arch blocked. If the arch weren’t there, if the tower weren’t there, she would be able to see the city. More specifically, she would be able to see the place where her parents lived. Or, rather, the place where they had once lived—Sam knew what Julia didn’t, that they, like most of the city, were long dead by now. Even after all this time she still longed for them, it would seem, though she’d never once mentioned returning to the city. She’d never mentioned them at all in fact, no so much as a passing phrase or an anecdote to fill the gaps in a casual conversation. But she hadn’t forgotten about them by a long shot, as Sam was about to find out.
“Well,” Sam said, “we don’t discuss the past, and you’re not interested in hearing about the future. What are we supposed to talk about?”
“Lately we don’t really talk much at all.” Julia answered simply. She was right. Julia was the only person Sam spoke to verbally and he didn’t have much time to do that these days, not with open warfare upon their doorstep.
“Maybe we can start again now?” Sam offered weakly. It was the only thing he could think of.
“Sure. Let’s talk.” She said and sat silently.
“Okay.” Sam struggled to find a point of conversation that didn’t involve the war. “I know. You cook and clean around here, every day. I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to make it around here a week without you. How about you tell me exactly how your days have gone since this all started. I want to know every detail.”
Julia turned to look into Sam’s face. She looked skeptical. “Really?” she said, as if she didn’t believe Sam would be interested in her day to day routine. “You want to know what my day is like?”
“Every detail.” Sam answered. Julia beamed. It was clear that she did want to discuss her day with someone, even if that someone’s interest was only feigned. It stabbed again at Sam’s heart. As far as he was concerned, Julia was his best friend, and he hadn’t even been talking to her lately, not so much as to ask about her day. And now, he was finally talking with her, ready to hear all the mix of emotions that she must be experiencing solely so he could distract her long enough to break a serious promise he’d made to her. Maybe he wasn’t so different from Dr. Crangler after all. That hurt.
Julia began to recount her day slowly at first, as if she were testing Sam’s attention span but eventually she began to pick up tempo. She had no one to talk to, no one to be with, while Sam fought his all-important war and now that the bottle was finally uncorked, the words burst forth. It was surprisingly interesting what Julia did all day. She rarely left the house, but she did much more than simply cook and clean. Besides filling her brain with all types of new information from the pages of the many books in the home’s library, she had begun to write. According to her, she wasn’t ready to let Sam lay eyes upon any of the manuscripts she’d produced thus far, but she assured him they were there and perhaps one day, if he were a good boy, she might let him read her work. It was then that Sam recognized he had to do what he’d come to do or he’d never be able to.
He opened his mind once more and was immediately flooded with the same crushing silence. He quickly opened Julia’s mind and was immediately overwhelmed with another emotion, one not completely different than the loneliness. It was despair, deep, crushing, morbid despair. It was more potent than any emotion Sam had ever experienced, and it stole his breath away. He could only hope that Julia didn’t notice. He probed deeper and found that she was filled completely with this profound sadness. It was confusing to behold, the sadness inside Julia was like a fathomless abyss and she was trapped inside of it. Sam had no idea how she was able to function on a daily basis, much less fill her time with cooking, cleaning, reading, and writing. His heart broke for Julia, for the amazing grief that seemed to saturate her to her core. It ate away at her emotionally, like a cancer, and as far as Sam could tell she had been living with it for some time. He could barely wade through the hopeless bleakness of it and it was only his experience with the complete blackness of space, the complete blackness of his nightmares, that he wasn’t driven mad with it. He probed deeper until he found the root. He thought he knew what it was before he uncovered it. He was right. it was her parents.
Julia had never gotten over them. Sam would’ve known that long ago had he not refused to probe he
r mind. Her parents had not loved her, had not wanted her. They’d wanted a boy and they’d never forgiven Julia for being born. Sam’s parents had loved him dearly and most of the townspeople had loved their children, if sometimes not so dearly. Sam had no idea how he would’ve been able to face the kind of heartbreaking rejection that Julia lived with. He’d always been impressed with how well and how quickly she had gotten over it, only to discover now that she had not gotten over it. She’d buried it deep, but it there, as freshly agonizing as ever. It had festered within her, hidden, poisonous. Deadly. To know with absolute conviction that your parents never wanted you and beyond that that they resented you for being born; It was a dark, desperately depressing reality that no child should have had to grow up with. But Julia had grown up with it and now it was blacker and more merciless than the void of space inside of her. It was amazing that she had survived this long with it. It was a blight that had no parallel amongst the citizens and army of Capital City, who knew only the intimacy and togetherness of telepathy.
Sam had found his answer, a weapon potent enough to defeat the alien hive mind. Sam had found a weapon stronger than anything else Capital City could produce. If he were right the world would be saved. As he gazed on at Julia, however, he found it difficult to celebrate.
CHAPTER 27
Reintroducing himself back into the Capital City collective wasn’t nearly as difficult as leaving it had been for Sam. The city readily welcomed him back—to them he had never left—and he found that he welcomed the reunion as heartily as they did. It was like suddenly having air return to his lungs after nearly drowning in an ocean of isolation. He brought back with him what he was sure was the answer to the city’s dilemma. It was ingenious what Sam had done. He had introduced a completely new element into the war, one that the aliens would’ve never anticipated. Everyone in Capital City agreed that it was a uniquely appropriate weapon, a weapon born of a uniquely human experience. Emotional pain.
Before telepathy, despair and loneliness were just an unfortunate reality of the human condition. It was simply part of the human experience. Telepathy had changed things. In Capital City, everyone shared everyone else’s pain and sorrow. What suffering that existed was spread out so thinly amongst so many minds that it was impossible for any one person to be overwhelmed for very long. Before telepathy it was possible to feel completely alone in the middle of a crowd. More than possible, it was nearly as common amongst humans as breathing, but there was no such thing as solitude amongst telepaths. How could there be, when everyone else was as present in your mind as you were? Loneliness was a malady that Capital City had cured. To Dr. Crangler’s army it was a disease of a bygone era. If it were a disease, then Sam proposed to infect the alien army with it and hopefully assure their demise. Now was the time to test his plan.
Dr. Crangler called the city to regroup and prepare to move forward with this new offensive. His telepaths leapt at his beckon, but it wasn’t long before everyone discovered just how difficult and unpleasant the execution would prove to be. Sam opened his mind and shared with all of Capital City the awesome pain that was inside Julia. To the rest of the telepaths, just as with Sam himself, it was like being doused in freezing cold water and then flogged repeatedly before you had time to catch your breath. It affected the children of the city the most severely. Most of the adults had been trained into telepathy by Dr. Crangler, some of them only relatively recently, but all of the young children had been trained from birth by the Good Doctor. They had never for a single moment in their short lives known what it was to be secretly shunned by their parents, to not know with certainty that their parents loved them dearly. And now they were flooded with the reality of being resented, almost viciously hated by the people that they were supposed to be able to trust when the entire world was against them. It was more than their minds could absorb at once even with the rest of Capital City helping to bear the burden. It was nearly too much for the entire city combined.
It wasn’t enough. Dr. Crangler insisted that it would need to be worse if it were to provide a potent weapon against the aliens. Uncomfortable was not enough, painful was not enough. It had to be deadly. At the Good Doctor’s signal, everyone in Capital City steadied their minds as one—the telepathic equivalent to taking a long deep breath before an icy plunge—and spread the pain of isolation, the agony of abandonment amongst themselves. Then they amplified it. The adults added their own painful experiences, experiences they’d had before telepathy had rendered them obsolete. For many it was tougher than decades of telepathic training. The telepaths continued to amplify and add to the terrible experience until every person in Capital City began to buckle beneath the weight of it. When everyone was certain that they couldn’t bear any more, Dr. Crangler demanded just that. More. Their enemy was more powerful than they were. They needed to die and be reborn in the blistering fires of hell to stand a chance. Meanwhile, the static cube was closer than ever. Capital City had to meet the threat and now.
OUT IN THE RECESSES of space, the cube moved, but now the force as black as the void itself moved with it. Dr. Crangler’s army had arrived with a new, more powerful offensive, but apparently the alien intelligence had made a significant modification as well. The cube no longer bubbled with violent static. Now it appeared solid white throughout. The alien hive mind had somehow coalesced into a seemingly impenetrable mass with the queen itself carefully guarded at its center. A huge black hand as large as a planet reached forward from the void to test the new cube. The hand didn’t attack but only probed. The cube offered no retaliation. It didn’t need to—the black hand of Dr. Crangler’s army could not penetrate the cube’s surface. There was no scalding pain of contact as before but there was no penetration either, no weak spot that the hand could identify. The cube was impossibly smooth and perfect in its dimensions but beneath that perfection lay the end of the human world. It didn’t look as if Dr. Crangler’s army had an opening to test their new weapon. Had the telepaths suffered everything that they had for nothing? Dr. Crangler reminded them that, again, there was only one way to find out.
He commanded his army to unleash the amplified human misery they carried with them upon the cube. The void shook fiercely with the intensity of all the agony and suffering it held and watched as it slowly covered the cube on every side. For a long time nothing happened. The cube was completely hidden, covered in human misery that was more morbid than death, but it still could not find the tiniest opening into which to penetrate. All was lost! The ploy had failed and the army had no other tricks up its sleeve. Even with everything against them, everyone could read in Sam’s mind that there may be hope still. Julia had lived with the darkness for years, even as it changed her from the inside out. This alien intelligence might be able to resist for a while but surely it would fall eventually. It did not have Julia’s experience with this type of thing. It did not have the years of practice enduring such a weight of discomfort as she had and besides that, the army had lain upon it Julia’s darkness multiplied.
It wasn’t long before Sam’s theory was proven right. The greatest component of the army’s new weapon was the experience of parents that didn’t love their child, only from the child’s perspective. It was something that the hive mind had never experienced, thanks to their telepathic relationship to their queen and soon it produced something else the hive had never experienced, a single moment of hesitation between the queen’s orders and the hive’s obedience. The idea, even the suggestion that there was the possibility of the queen and her minions falling out of league with each other was enough to create the tiniest crack in the otherwise perfect cube. It was enough. The weapon slipped into that crack instantly and created a wedge that the queen, with all her power and control, could not immediately bridge. The army had infected the cube with the unique disease of human suffering and now all that was left was to drive it into the cube’s core where it could infect the entire system.
Immediately hands shot out from the blackness and massi
ve fingers darker than shadow dug into the crack and pulled with all the mental energy the army could muster. It was a strain beyond description but little by little, the crack grew. And grew. Slowly, the crack grew large enough for the weapon to seep through all the way to the queen at the center. The cube convulsed, it shook, it attempted to retreat, but the fingers only dug deeper and pulled with greater urgency. Sam and his fellow telepaths could see clearly the torment beginning to saturate the queen’s mind and so with it all the combined minds of her many minions. The cube cracked and groaned with a sound beyond the ability of terrestrial ears to hear until the queen’s mind was completely covered in the blackness of human suffering. Then, suddenly, all was still and the cube’s resistance was gone. It was done. Sam had expected a more spirited fight, but he thought that he understood. Mankind had been plagued with terrible diseases since their inception, but it had had time to acclimate and adapt. There was no room for adaption in the alien’s hive mind. There was only the orders of the queen, nothing more. Their strength had become their fatal flaw.
Sam and the rest of the army watched on as the cube began to disintegrate until only a small white square of it the size of a small city was left, and then nothing. Dr. Crangler wielded the power of his army to reach out mentally and observe the alien’s home world. Only desiccated husks remained upon the foreign planet. The alien intelligence had been destroyed to the last pod. There was still no time for celebration. The army was too exhausted, too spent from the battle to do anything besides struggle to recuperate. The shouts of joy would have to come later.
The New Assault Page 18