by Lucia Ashta
The King deliberated but only for a second. He waved his hand. The attendant moved to his side as quickly as he could while still retaining the composure that was required of him. The servant dipped his head in a bow. “How may I be of service, my Liege?”
“Summon the royal physicians here immediately. Tell them to bring whatever is needed for a brain merge.”
The attendant struggled between the appropriate measure of composure and alarm. Brain merges were rare for a reason. When a person chose to open his brain to another, he was at his mercy. The voyeur could look or take and even destroy. The King could do whatever he wanted with me. He could leave me a drooling puddle instead of the man I now was, and there would be nothing I could do to prevent it. During a brain merge, physical movements were disengaged so that the brain wasn’t distracted by anything other than its most essential bodily functions.
“Will that be all, Milord?”
“For now.”
The attendant bowed again and scooted elegantly back to his side of the room, where he waved a hand across the far end wall to reveal a communications panel.
Of course. My every step was being watched, guards likely perched at the ready to rush the room were I to advance on the King. The King hadn’t made as many allowances for my visit as I’d thought. He was protected even in his state of relative physical vulnerability. He’d just not wanted anyone close enough to listen to any conversation about the Princess of which he couldn’t predict the content beforehand.
Moments before the doors swept open, the King asked, “And why do you trust me?”
“Your Majesty, forgive my candor, but I don’t. However, I know of no other way to gain your trust. And it is only with your trust that I stand any chance of helping the woman I love. I’ve exhausted all other avenues. This is the only way I see to move forward.”
Now that I’d offered myself up to the greatest risk I could take, my shoulders relaxed, and the sweat stopped flowing. It was as if, now that the worst was done, there was nothing to worry about. Apprehension wouldn’t influence the King’s decision. Whatever else I did now, he would do as he wished with me.
The King would have access to all of my memories, not just those that contained his daughter. He would come out of the brain merge knowing precisely what kind of man I was and the kind of man I longed to be. He would know every one of my dark secrets if he chose to look for them.
“I see,” was all he had to say before the magnitude of my sacrifice.
The doors to the chamber slid open in near silence. Two men entered with a tray hovering behind them. I stepped to the side so that one man could approach the King. This physician was less fidgety than the other, trying to subdue his nerves. “Your Majesty, are you certain that you are strong enough to attempt a brain merge? Perhaps it might be advisable to wait a few more days until Milord has recovered more of his strength. The attack occurred only yesterday.”
“I’m well aware of when the attack occurred, Lord Broon. My faculties are in good order and your input, unnecessary.”
“Of course, Milord, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. Forgive me if I didn’t choose my words wisely.” Lord Broon was well schooled in how to deal with royalty. “I was merely concerned for his Majesty’s well-being.”
“The only assistance I require is for you to facilitate a brain merge between me and this man.”
Both physicians studied me just long enough to tuck away their surprise. As much as I tried to disassociate myself from my father, it was likely that they realized who I was.
“I do not wish to assume, your Majesty. Would you like the brain merge to go one way?”
“Of course.”
Of course. There was no way this lion of a king would allow me or anyone else into his thoughts. Undoubtedly, that full mane of shiny silver hair hid a great many dark and terrible secrets. He must trust Lord Broon. Once both parties were under a brain merge, only a person on the outside could interrupt it—and control it. Lord Broon could, theoretically, open the pathways so that I could review the King’s memories. But Lord Broon would never do that. Why should he want me possessed of such information? Besides, a man such as Lord Broon valued his life.
“Very well.” The physician motioned to his colleague to bring the tray closer. “You,” to the attendant, “have a table brought in.”
The King wanted this done now. I wanted this done now. Better to have it over and done with than to dread what would inevitably arrive. I couldn’t retract my offer.
I removed my jacket and laid it on the pristine floor, beneath a sky suddenly colored orange by a setting sun that would deliver only temporary darkness to the sky before the second sun rose.
Three
For such a significant procedure, the set-up was quick. There wasn’t enough time for me to come to terms fully with what I was about to do. Like a man who knew death was imminent, I felt as if I desperately wanted more time, although more time wouldn’t change anything.
I’d anticipated that it might come to this. My arms master, Dolpheus, and I had explored multiple scenarios, and more often than not, they ended in this. Yet it was one thing to discuss an action as a potential outcome. It was quite another suddenly to find oneself prone on a glass bed next to the mighty King Oderon, of whom myriad legends existed.
Lord Broon looked down at me with a clinical gaze that unnerved me further. The procedure hadn’t even begun and already I felt entirely too exposed and vulnerable. Every one of my muscles, trained for combat since I could first walk, clenched and released repeatedly in a useless cycle.
Where I had been hot just minutes before, now I was cold, as if my body were already dead and I were looking down at myself from above, watching Lord Broon examine me with clinical detachment. A quick shiver bolted through my shoulders before it was gone. Lord Broon noticed it but didn’t ask if I was cold.
He finished placing the last of the strands against my temple, and there was nothing left to be done. I wanted to turn my head from side to side, to see what I looked like with all these strands attached to my head, but I couldn’t. Any movement would pull them free of the clips that clung to my hair to hold the strands against my scalp. I’d already been warned. The strands were extremely delicate. Composed of crystal dust that held together through its own internal magnetics—each fragment of crystal was designed to join with its greater whole—any abrupt movement would cause the strands to disintegrate.
Despite their fragility, there was nothing better for mind merging. The King of Planet O had the best technology power could coerce or buy. The fragments of crystal were only barely solid, energy condensed into form, each speck linked to the next by nothing greater than its desire to do so. It was the perfect conduit for thought—a kind of energy.
Lord Broon informed the King—not me—that thought would travel across the lines between us fluidly. The monarch would be able to experience my memories as his own. There would be nothing that I could conceal. Nothing that I could explain away.
“Are you ready, my Liege?” Lord Broon asked.
“Yes. Proceed.”
I received no final warnings although I imagined the disclaimers attached to this procedure had risks worth mentioning. No more words were uttered. None for my benefit. No sympathy or encouragement offered to settle my nerves. No smiles that indicated that anyone admired the nerve it took to do this.
The process began without notice, and I was the one that started it. I hadn’t meant to begin just yet, but a part of me—the morbidly curious part, I supposed—rushed ahead and yanked me in. And now I couldn’t come out of it until the royal physician, a man I didn’t know, decided it was over.
I could feel—perhaps even hear—the crystal dust coming to life. The strands grew rigid, the specks holding onto one another eagerly, as if they were long-lost friends or lovers. The seven crystal strands that attached to my head, burrowing into my scalp now, fixed to my skin like suction cups, the clips pulling on my hair as the crystal strands adj
usted from their initial limp positioning. Once the energy of my thoughts began to run through the crystal particles, they responded, uniting into a rigid mass capable of transmitting thoughts at a speed as great as that of light.
The physician Broon hadn’t attached the other end of the crystal strands to the King’s head. Rather, he’d lain them atop his scalp, gently, and directed him to lay still. Once my thoughts sought to flow into his brain, the strands would harden and fix in their position, pointing all information inward, through the skin.
At the start of the mind merge, I felt the King’s body jolt next to mine, just once; perhaps he was as surprised as I was that the process had already begun. To commence, Physician Broon said that all I needed to do was to intend to run my thoughts through the crystal particles and into the King’s mind. (I found my presumption that a mind merge couldn’t be forced upon an unwilling participant—although violence always could be—comforting.) The crystal, used to some degree or another in all technology of Planet O, would respond. It would continue to transmit the energy in the direction I sent it until Lord Broon interrupted it.
That was the dangerous part, Broon had said, although to me it all seemed dangerous. The person to interrupt the flow of thought and energy had to know what he was doing. There were all sorts of things that could go wrong if the flow were interrupted abruptly. When two brains merged, a powerful link, albeit a temporary one, was formed between them. If the two brains were torn apart prematurely, both brains could be damaged, left believing they were incomplete and incapable of functioning without the other.
It wasn’t just my brain, but also the King’s, that could be harmed. This one fact was the only reassurance that allowed me to relax at all. Lord Broon would do everything he could to protect the King. Therefore, my chances of surviving this procedure increased monumentally.
Through my peripheral vision and a tangle of erect strands, I saw the King’s body visibly relax. And then there was nothing more. After that, I was incapable of keeping track of anything around me. The swirl of thoughts that encompassed an entire lifetime made it impossible to focus on the input my brain attempted to process from any of my other senses. I could still see, smell, hear, feel, and taste, but I had no idea what I was sensing.
It was an overwhelming jumble. Had I been a manmade system of operation, I would have crashed and refused to reboot ever again. Flashes of events in my life, of people that meant something to me, flew across my awareness so quickly that I couldn’t absorb what I saw. Events and people distorted into a wave of colors and sounds and emotions so consuming that I had to direct what little ability to focus that remained to me to keeping nausea from overpowering me. I couldn’t sit up to vomit. And if my movement tore the crystal strands from my head, throwing up all over myself would be the least of my problems.
I thought I closed my eyes in an attempt to shut out the stimuli, but I couldn’t be sure that I had. Regardless, it didn’t work. Nothing could push away the flood of private snippets of my life, the ones I’d hoped to reserve for myself. But I couldn’t resist sharing them, even though there was nothing sacred about lying on a cold glass table like a specimen for examination. It felt like the violation that it was; it didn’t matter that I’d volunteered for this.
I ground my teeth against the worst ride of my life. People complained that traveling to other worlds and galaxies was barely worth it because of the intensity of the trip. It made you feel like your insides were being torn from your body before being reinserted again. I’d done it before, and it did feel that bad.
This was worse. I clenched my hands into fists, ready to take on an opponent. But this was an invisible one that I’d brought on myself. I was facing a lion, and I felt infinitely smaller than a mouse. All that I was and ever hoped to be was divided into fragments so small as to be dust.
I’d entered the King’s chamber partially to prove myself a man worthy of loving his daughter. He’d crushed me into powder.
It went on for what seemed like forever. My eyes rolled into the back of my head. My nails cut into the skin of my palms. Every muscle in my body tensed until it readied to explode. Even my dick had grown hard. I couldn’t escape the skin that trapped me in this reality that had become too much.
I couldn’t breathe. I thought I’d die right then and be saved all the trouble of this King and even the Princess, of my father and everything else.
Then, after one more excruciating and terrible moment, it was over.
I hadn’t heard Lord Broon’s movements, the ones that carefully and very slowly detached one crystal strand at a time, beginning with those linked to the King’s head. I hadn’t realized that my thoughts no longer flowed into the brain of another person, because once Broon fully disconnected the King, my thoughts collected feverishly in what now seemed like too shallow a well for them. They had nowhere to go, so they swirled and concentrated like water in a clogged drain.
The exact second when I was certain that all crystal cables were free from my head, I popped. I bolted upright. Then I vomited all over my lap.
Four
As soon as I was capable of a modicum of thought, I considered it regrettable that I’d go through such a harrowing experience with no one that cared whether I lived or died aware of it. It’s not that I expected Lord Broon to rub my back as a mother would her child, yet it did seem unnecessarily callous not even to offer me something with which to clean up.
I was sitting in a pool of my own vomit. It collected in eddies around the sides of my body, made interesting by the otherwise pristine glass it swirled across. Even with as wealthy as my father had become in recent decades, I’d never seen so much glass in one room. The beds alone must have cost the kingdom a small fortune.
Although I wasn’t exactly having the most useful or directed of thoughts, coherence was beginning to show promise of its eventual return. I noticed that my boots needed shining. That the vomit had spread along the glass to my ass and was already soaking through my pants. I realized that I couldn’t smell the rancid scent that all vomit carried and wondered hazily if that meant that my sense of smell hadn’t yet returned.
I could see, but I looked at nothing in particular. I stared off into the open space of the room and the warm yellow glow that didn’t cast shadows in its diffuse glow. The attendant wasn’t at his station against the far wall anymore.
I considered if I should attempt to move since it seemed that no one was going to help me down from the table. I wondered if I was allowed to, now that the crystal dust strands were free of my head. But Physician Broon wasn’t in front of me, and I couldn’t swivel my head. My skull felt like it was being squeezed by a vise, and altogether too much screaming silence filled the space within it. I couldn’t remember when, or if, I’d ever heard such thick silence before.
I sat, slouched, defeated-looking and unaware of whether I was actually defeated or not. Eventually, my muscles fully relaxed. Then I was putty. With nothing and no one to lean on, I vaguely thought I might melt to join my stomach acids, then cool into the form of the glass bed, as if I’d filled a mold. I felt formless. A beating heart, a throbbing head, and the all-encompassing silence.
I thought I could sit there forever. Getting up on my own didn’t seem like an option. But then vomit soaked through the fibers of my pants to reach my balls. When I felt the liquid upon them like a cool slap, it became too much. I was feeling humiliated enough without vomit soaking my most private bits.
I’d revealed every piece of myself to a man I didn’t trust, to a man that already possessed more than most other humans alive, and I hadn’t wanted to be the one to give him even more. I’d opened myself up like a virgin maiden pressured into her first sexual encounter, and I hadn’t received even a thank you or a pat on the rump.
I decided to get up. Fuck everyone else in the room. They didn’t want to help me? Fine. They could just go ahead and be that way. I’d do my best to trail throw-up all the way to the exit.
I was firm in my re
solve. I’d get out of here before I had to look any of these assholes in the face. They thought it was no big deal to do a mind merge with the mighty King Oderon? To hell with them, even if hell didn’t exist.
After I was decided, it took me a lot longer to get my body to respond to my mind’s promptings. Come on. Get up. But it didn’t work. When I finally was able to move, I realized it was a bad idea even before my foot made it all the way to the floor. However, I couldn’t stop in time. My thoughts were moving as if through slop. I couldn’t intercept my earlier messages to my body.
Comprehending that standing wasn’t going to happen as I’d imagined didn’t stop my toe from reaching the pristine floor. It didn’t stop me from scooting to the edge of the bed and swinging my other leg over its side or from pressing off with my hands, launching myself into the seemingly inevitable course into which I was propelling myself. And it didn’t stop me from mopping the floor with the puddled mess that I was, crashing to the ground heavily as metal.
I lay there, unable to ponder the turn my existence had taken this morning, when I caught a flash of frenzied movement over by the King.
Then I closed my eyes for what I hoped would be forever.
Five
I don’t know how long I was out, but it must have been a while because when I woke my eyes were crusty and my mouth sour. I blinked a few times and took in a subtly lit room that wasn’t the royal infirmary. I shifted and every one of my muscles screamed in protest. At least they moved the way I wanted.
I looked down at myself. While I slept, my dignity had been restored. I was in fresh clothing that wasn’t my own. I was so relieved that I hadn’t been left on the floor, soiled and crumpled, that I didn’t much care who’d been given the task of undressing and cleaning me.
I heard the soft whoosh that signaled a door opening and attempted to sit up. I did more groaning than sitting, and suddenly Dolpheus was at my side helping me. “Take it easy, Milord,” my arms master said while he spread a strong arm behind my back to prop me up. “You’ve been through quite an ordeal.”