It started at work, the first week of January, she couldn’t remember the date exactly. She was at her station in the BMC lab, dicing a section of malignant intestine, and two of her colleagues, whose names were both Bree, were down at the end of the stainless steel table slicing some dead person’s brain like prosciutto while trying to remember the name of the actor who had played the handsome Security Specialist in some insanely popular Content series that Valentina had never heard of. They kept making reference to this actor’s CAR, and to the SPECIAL RADIO he was always using to JAM THE SIGNAL of the TERRORIST SUSPECTS he, or rather, his character, was after, who were using some sort of SECRET CODE. These FAITH-BASED ANTI-SOCIAL TERRORISTS were unaware that the handsome actor had broken their code and was LISTENING IN ON EVERY WORD THEY SAID OR THOUGHT. Valentina, who was hyperventilating, and experiencing sudden abdominal cramps, set down her scalpel, rose from her stool, peeled off and binned her surgical gloves, and calmly fled in a state of panic. She hurried into the alternatively-abled private restroom that was out in the hall, locked herself in and doubled over, silently screaming at her pink rubber clogs. Her panic peaked and gradually subsided. The cramps in her abdomen and chest did not. She could not breathe. She was tachycardic. She slapped herself in the face, which hurt, but not enough to stop the series of muscle contractions that were wracking her body. Finally, out of sheer desperation, or acting out of some primal instinct, she loosened the tie of her bright pink scrubs, dropped them, pulled her panties down, perched on the edge of the lid of the toilet, one hand braced on the chromium handrail, spread her legs, grabbed her vulva, hooked two fingers up into her vagina, found her G-spot, pressed into it, mashed the transverse metacarpal arch of the palm of her hand down against her clitoris, and masturbated for all she was worth. Her orgasm shot up her spine like a missile, detonating deep in the base of her brain, rolled her eyes up in their sockets, knocked her sidewise off the toilet, and most importantly, stopped her cramps. She lay there on the floor for a minute, scrubs around her ankles, laughing. She was laughing more out of relief than anything.
Then she got up and did it again .
Unfortunately, she found, in the days that followed, the relief provided by masturbation, although reliable, was only temporary. It lasted an hour ... two at best. After which time her delusions of reference and physical symptoms returned with a vengeance. And thus she began what soon became a vicious cycle of panic attacks, masturbation, more panic attacks, more masturbation, and so on like that. By the end of that week (the second of January), she was sneaking off to alternatively-abled private restrooms throughout the department to compulsively masturbate four times a day. By the end of the month she was up to six. Shortly thereafter the inevitable happened ... alternatively-abled histologists complained. Which was understandable and to be expected. These restrooms were for the alternatively-abled, not for traditionally-abled people who claimed to have some kind of urinary problem that caused them to lock themselves inside and compulsively masturbate eight times a day. Luckily, just as her supervisor, Doctor Klemmer, having reviewed these complaints, was on the verge of having a word with her, her unpaid maternity leave took effect. She smiled, in a somewhat unsettling manner, apologized profusely to one and all, coded out, and fled the scene.
Once back home on Marigold Lane and safe from the Brees and the alternatively-abled, her compulsive masturbation frequency spiraled totally out of control. As did her frequent panic attacks. And her aural and visual hallucinations. And all her other withdrawal symptoms. She threw herself into her spiritual practice ... yoga, breathwork, visualization, self-affirmation, the whole nine yards. She meditated for hours, fiercely, contemplating the epiphany she’d had, or rather (as Doctor Graell would have told her, had she ever actually told him the truth), reinforcing the structural logic of her psychopathological ideations, which seem to center on, or revolve around, some vast and nebulous cosmic antagonist that Valentina didn’t have a name for.
Which ideations went something like this ...
IT (i.e., her cosmic antagonist) was after Valentina. IT wanted to kill her ... or no, not kill her, possess her, own her, consume her body, her mind, and her soul. IT was ... well, she did not know. She could not describe IT. But she sensed what IT was. And what IT wanted ... IT wanted to use her, to use her body, and everyone’s bodies, to infinitely replicate and multiply ITself. This was the main objective of IT, this infinite replication of ITself, which insidious process IT had nearly completed. IT was everywhere. Everything. Everyone. Or not quite everyone, but almost everyone. Kyle was part of IT. Yes, he was. So was Susan Foster, probably. The way she kept asking, “are you all right, Val? You look like you’re walking a little bowlegged.” She kept stopping by with gluten-free scones, or to invite her out to lunch on Main Street ... but Valentina was onto her now. Once Susan got her out on Main Street, out in the open, with nowhere to run, she would sit there acting completely normal, slurping her BioMax Ginseng smoothies, plastic proboscis sucking orange blood like sludge through her bright green lips, skin pinned back behind her ear flaps ... as if she couldn’t see them coming ... YES ... CLEARS ... THE MINIONS OF IT ... watching ... listening ... smiling ... waiting ... sniffing at the air as they passed her table ... as if they could smell IT ... growing inside her ... THIS THING that belonged to THEM inside her ...
Now, obviously, what was going on in Valentina’s brain at this point was extremely disturbing, and not at all normal. And, OK, there were several theories on that, but only one of them really counted ... the one in the DSM XXXIII (which we’ll get to in just a couple of minutes). We don’t have time to review all these theories (the other theories that didn’t count), most of which were fairly complex, and were written in psychiatric-speak (and some of which were plain old silly), but let’s go ahead and take a look at one of them.
According to this theory (which was probably the best, or at least the most lucid, of the ones that didn’t count), what Valentina was undergoing was a process known within certain marginal and widely-dismissed psychiatric circles as Transmutation-Integration, a process during which the “repressive Subject” confronted and ultimately accepted its “Shadow,” integrating light and darkness, or good and evil, or health and sickness, or whatever dualistic terms one preferred. In the course of this process, the Subject’s “Identity” (constituted as it clearly was to repress the very act of repression upon which its dualistic integrity depended) disintegrated and ... well, basically, died. The Subject (theretofore exclusively identified with its constitution-repressing Identity, and often projecting its Shadow externally), faced with the dissolution of its Identity, appeared to devolve into paranoia, and often, in practice, actually did. However, in some exceptional cases, the Subject undergoing Transmutation was somehow able to perceive the death of its repressive Identity not as its death (i.e., the death of the identifying Subject) but merely as the death of an abstract construct, the death of which revealed the “Self” (or God, or whatever one wanted to call it), with which the Subject then attempted to identify, and almost invariably failed to do. **** During the early stages of this process, the Subject was rather abruptly confronted with its Shadow (i.e., the irrational matter the recently departed repressive Identity was originally constituted to repress), which it naturally mistook for the “Anti-Self” (or the Devil, or whatever one wanted to call it) and was either, as probably mentioned above, consumed, and its psyche smashed to little pieces, leaving the Subject in a catatonic state, or (and they weren’t quite sure how this happened, the proponents of this particular theory), in order to avoid this horrible fate, the Subject identified with the Shadow, which it forthwith imbued with the authenticity it had once ascribed to the repressive Identity, which for unknown reasons usually worked. This created a whole new array of challenges for the “Shadow-identified Subject” to work through (which it sometimes did and sometimes didn’t), which we don’t have time to explore right now ... the point here being, according to this theory, that the Subject w
as actually undergoing an admittedly radical and inarguably dangerous, but nevertheless potentially positive neo-Jungian transformation of its constitution, or spirit, or soul, or whatever the Subject was, exactly.
Applying all this to Valentina in her then current state (which no one did), one might have interpreted the rearrangements her psyche was making in a different light. Clearly, her repressive Identity was shattered. Pieces of it were lying all over. Just as clearly, her assumed Identity (i.e., Valentina, the Destroyer of Worlds) was a desperate but arguably courageous attempt to integrate her enormous Shadow and focus its savage, mindless rage on whatever was left of her repressive Identity (i.e., this adversary she had labeled IT), which she unconsciously sensed was trying to possess her, and ultimately destroy her ... which, of course, it was. Or that was one way of looking at it.
The other way of looking at it, the one in the DSM XXXIII, was that Valentina was Phase 2 psychotic, and in immediate need of serious sedation, and hospitalization, and four-point restraints, and there wasn’t anything neo-Jungian, or neo-anything, to debate or discuss. Her N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors were borderline functional and needed rebooting. Her mesolimbic pathways were flooded with dopamine. Her entire perceptual apparatus was a mess. Nothing she said or secretly thought was of the slightest etiological value. It was all just nonsense, disorganized thinking, the product of a brain in a state of crisis, desperately trying to make some sense of what, medically speaking, was pure neural chaos. What she needed, and never received, was pharmaceutical intervention. She needed her D2 receptors shut down. With Clozoprazoladine, probably, for starters. And if that didn’t work, there was ECT, plain old electro-convulsive therapy, and a number of other powerful tools that could turn her brain off and give it a rest.
Unfortunately, Valentina was tough. Bull-goose loony as she was by then, some part of her mind was still cogent enough to hold it together and hide her symptoms, or at least her most glaring and dispositive symptoms. Being not just a medical professional, but the daughter of someone currently receiving pharmaceutical intervention around-the-clock in a residential setting, she knew precisely what awaited her if she lost it completely, and started raving, and gave away her secret plan. What, you’re asking, was her secret plan? Valentina’s plan was simple ... insane, perhaps, but essentially simple.
Valentina’s secret plan was to find and contact the N.I.N., the most notorious and imminently-threatening Terrorist network on the face of the earth. She was going to find them, and approach them, and join them, the others like her, who had seen the light, or who’d been personally chosen by the One, as she had, the faith-based Anti-Social Terrorists, who were living in the so-called Recovering Areas, the badlands south of the 38th parallel, where the average temperature was 60 Celsius, and the scorching toxic skies of which were swarming with Anti-Terrorist drones.
Valentina had no illusions ... the life of a faith-based Anti-Social Terrorist was definitely not a party or anything. It was typically short, desperate and brutal, but there was a certain element of romance to it ... or so it seemed to Valentina in her current, deluded state of mind. The basic outlines of their bleak existence was common knowledge among the Normals, the subject being standard fare on the Terror and Anthropology channels, which Valentina had been studying, recently. According to the experts you saw on these channels, they (these faith-based Anti-Social Terrorists) slept by day in their underground tunnels, caves, cellars, and secret bunkers, and crept by night through the cremated waste of cities reduced to nothing but rubble, or overrun with impenetrable jungles of mutant formerly tropical plants whose putrid fruits all oozed this clotted yellow matter that stank like pus, foraging for anything vaguely edible, or convertible into deadly weapons, and conducting neo-primitive rituals, which typically involved some type of sacrifice to their bloodthirsty faith-based Terrorist god. Amazingly, in the course of all this, this creeping and foraging and ritual-conducting, they not only managed to somehow evade the inevasible orbiting network of state-of-the-art surveillance satellites and remotely-piloted aerial vehicles that bombarded their hives with white-phosphorus bombs and picked them off with laser-guided missiles the second they showed themselves above ground, but they also occasionally attempted attacks on innocent unsuspecting consumers, or at least they conspired to attempt such attacks, or planned to conspire to attempt such attacks, according to the various Terrorism experts. Valentina would live there among them, in those barren wastes and putrid jungles, naked, filthy, caked with crud, blood, semen, and other fluids, feeding on scraps of toxic garbage as she learned their neo-primitive rites. She would offer her foul and feculent body as a living altar for their psychotic rituals, which would certainly involve her being penetrated, over and over, by men in goat masks, as well as a lot of creepy chanting of pseudo-Egyptian-sounding names, all of which (along with the powerful psychedelic roots they would want to make her eat) would eventually purge her body and soul of every last living vestige of IT, transforming her from the wreck she was into what she knew she really was ... Valentina, Destroyer of Worlds.
All of which was, of course, ridiculous.
Take the N.I.N., for example, which Valentina was determined to join, assuming, that is, that it still existed, which officially it did, but probably didn’t.
Which, all right, here’s the story on that one ...
The N.I.N., or N.I.N.E., the Nihilist International Network, or “das Nihilistische International-Netzwerk der Erde,” allegedly founded on 18 September, 2016, in a bar in Berlin, had been one of the most prominent Terrorist networks active during the Age of Anarchy. Now (i.e., the time of our story ... not whenever you’re reading this), coming up on three centuries later, it posed the last remaining threat to the maintenance of peace, freedom, and prosperity throughout the United Territories. ***** According to the official story, inculcated into the Normals daily by an ever-expanding variety of media, in the final decades of the Age of Anarchy, facing assured annihilation at the hands of the corporate Security Services, elements of the N.I.N. had gone inactive, adopted covers, and blended back into Normal society. They had taken jobs as manual laborers, or baristas, or sometimes temporary help. They had rented and in some cases purchased apartments, presumably down in the “Center Cities,” and started little Terrorist families. Passing as Normals, their Terrorist descendents had survived the Age of Emergency Measures, and now, unimaginable as it seemed in the Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity, a network comprised of their distant offspring, though mostly dormant, still existed. From time to time official sources unearthed evidence of possible links between this N.I.N. sleeper network and the faith-based Anti-Social Terrorists living out in the Recovering Areas.
And this was really the crux of the threat (i.e., this last remaining threat to freedom), because whereas, within the United Territories, there hadn’t been a single incidence of violence, much less anything approaching Terrorism, for longer than anyone alive could remember (except for in the Quarantine Zones, among the A.S.P.s, which didn’t really count), regrettably, out in the Recovering Areas, as well as a handful of remote Northern regions, deserts and mountainous expanses mostly, in faraway lands, which no one ever visited, the aforementioned bands of faith-based Terrorists (in addition to foraging, evading missiles, and conducting macabre rituals, and so on) were relentlessly plotting and sometimes actually attempting devastating Terrorist attacks. Not that they could do much damage, totally isolated as they were. Still, the threat was always there, and assuming the official story was true, and the N.I.N. was still in business, and was somehow in league with these afflicted souls (and maybe even with the A.S.U., which was active within the Quarantine Zones) ... well, who knew what kind of schemes they were up to? Suicide missions, with deadly nerve gas, anthrax, cholera, smallpox, plague, or improvised thermonuclear devices, anything was possible after all ... assuming, that is, one actually believed a single word of any of this.
Valentina had no choice. She had to believe. So, she did. Her
only chance, insane as it was, of ridding her body and soul of IT was to locate and contact the N.I.N., announce her spiritual and political awakening, and beg them to take her in and train her, and use her for their sex-magick rituals, and so on. The way this would work (in Valentina’s fantasies) was they would meet her in some safehouse basement somewhere, and would listen intently as she explained her epiphany, or her nervous breakdown, or whatever it was, ****** and how she’d been personally chosen by the One to carry out some portentous mission that would set off a global wave of insurrection that would change the whole course of human history. Once she had done that (i.e., explained all this, not carried out the mission, of course), they would smuggle her out, terminate her pregnancy (they probably had access to MifegyneX, or some other progesterone receptor antagonist), give her a few days to recover, hopefully, and then start right in with their salacious rituals. Valentina Constance Briggs would disappear without a trace, never to be seen or heard from again, until such time as her dental records identified her as the suicide bomber that had brought down 6262 Lomax, or 212 Jobs, or 16 Murdoch, or some other gleaming symbol of IT, launching a wave of insurrection that would someday end the reign of IT over people’s minds and bodies and everything ... or some other grim scenario like that.
Late Winter Landscape (Morning) 40 had just rebooted and started over. Valentina stared out into a snow white world that was not there. The muted bells rang. The creeper crept. “Breckenridge Village – 45 seconds.” She prayed to the One to help her do this, to help her find the N.I.N., if they even existed, whoever they were ... the details didn’t really matter. All that really mattered now, now that the drugs were out of her system, was that Valentina was alive, awake, and seeing the world as it really was. It wasn’t peace. There was no peace. There was only this never-ending fight. This fight for survival ... for what one was. Valentina was ready for it. She was ready to do whatever it took. She would fight them all ... she would go down fighting them, all the insidious forces of IT. She would tear them out of her head and fight them. She’d fight them in her organs and cells. And out in the world, in the streets and malls, and the offices of Paxton, Wills & Huxley. She would fight them to the very ends of the earth, around the Horn and the Norway Maelstrom, and into perdition’s flames, if necessary, and spit her dying breath, and so on, whatever was called for, whatever it cost her ... but first she needed to visit her mother.
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