Isle of Noise

by Rachel Tonks Hill

  “It’s… I think… It’s like… I hear noises inside my mind that aren’t, that can’t be there. Sometimes I see things, like shadows or shapes, they’re there and then they aren’t again. And I forget how I got somewhere sometimes, and I forget why I’m somewhere, and it’s… disorientating.”

  The shrink didn’t look away from Scott as he spoke. He wondered why the shrink wasn’t noting anything down. In movies, the psychiatrists usually didn’t look away from their notepads. Then again, in movies, the psychiatrists were usually more messed up than their patients, so Scott decided it was probably a good thing that Dr Martyn didn’t conform to such tropes. Then he noticed the small earpiece that the shrink was wearing, and realised that some technology was dictating the conversation for him.

  “Okay, Scott, and when did this start?”

  “Two years ago. Roughly. Just before I graduated from college.”

  “I see. And tell me, did anything happen to trigger these events, Scott?”

  Since he’d booked the appointment, Scott had been dreading this question. He had dreaded it more than he had dreaded the bill for seeing a private psychiatrist, and that was saying something. Conflicted didn’t even begin to cover it. He had so many reasons to not want to share his experience. He’d lost his copy, but from what he could remember, the confidentiality contract was rather menacing. Then again, if he didn’t say anything, if he stayed silent, then he might never get better. He might get worse. He might start hearing voices in the prison in his mind, and they probably wouldn’t be nice voices, and they might growl horror at him and he might believe that their horror was real. They might start telling him to do things that he didn’t particularly want to do, and he might wake up one morning with Pete’s blood on his hands and a laughing in his mind.

  It was the idea of that, the concept of himself scuppering into somebody else, that motivated him to start talking.

  “It was… I signed up to take part in some experiments in my last year of college,” he started, his voice uncertain. “I needed the money, and it was one of those psychological ones that paid well. I thought it’d just be a series of tests or questionnaires or something, but… I got there for the first session and they strapped me into this chair, and they told me that they were going to guide me around my mind. It was like some sort of elaborated hypnotism, and I have no clue what they did to me. But it was like… Each session, they knocked me out, and I woke up on this island. They told me when I asked, about three weeks in, that the island was what my brain looked like inside. There was somebody, a member of their staff, guiding me around this island that they called my mind, and it was dark, sometimes. It was like somebody had taken my doubts and fears and flaws and laid them out in front of me, as creatures I had to kill or run from. And the first six sessions or so were spent exploring this island, and after that, it got, well, weirder. I showed up the next week and there was somebody else in the room. And he looked… And they told us that we were going to ‘combine our mind-scapes’, so we could know more about each other or something. And the next six weeks they did just that. My island was merged with his… It was a jungle. I liked to think that the trees represented his thoughts, all dense and tall, with meandering branches all over the place. And it got easier to merge them, and by the end of the last session we could almost read each other’s thoughts without being connected to the machines. And then I never saw him again, and a month or so later the noises started, and they haven’t stopped since.”

  The shrink stared at him for a minute, as if he was trying to mask some deeper emotion.

  “Well, Scott, I hope that I’ll be able to help you.”

  * * * *

  It was a month after she’d filed the report on Participant #729001 when Lena was summoned to Washington. Her instructions were brief - she would pack all she needed for a week, and the rest of her possessions would be shipped over at a later date. The ticket was already paid for, and the plane would leave with her on it on a Thursday afternoon. She had no choice in the matter.

  She was beginning to think that the Institute was even odder than it had first seemed.

  They had paid for her hotel room in Washington, and it was the fanciest hotel that she had ever been in in her life. The suite was voice controlled, like some of the rooms had been at CMC, but most people couldn’t afford to have such things installed in their homes. It took her a while to get used to telling the tap to switch on, or requesting specific shows from the TV.

  On Friday morning, a black car pulled up outside the hotel, and she was summoned by reception. An hour full of tinted windows and security guards later, she found herself sitting on an aged leather chair, waiting for somebody. From what she had been told (and what she had inferred), she was at the headquarters of the Initiative, and the man she was waiting to see was the boss. She knew that he had been mentioned at her initiation, but she couldn’t remember his name, and there was no sign by the door to aid her memory. After sitting there for fifteen minutes or so whilst the receptionist listened to some catchy pop tune on the small radio, the door opened, and she was summoned. The office was bare and modern, unlike the faux antique look of the waiting area, and again, it seemed that everything was voice operated. There was no name tag on the sheer white desk, and the man sitting behind it was wearing dark glasses, hiding his eyes.

  “Your report has been processed,” he began. “And it’s been decided that Participant #729001 has recovered completely and is suffering no long term side effects.”

  Lena frowned. “But what about-”

  “It is no worry of yours any more,” he said. “As part of your debriefing, we want to explain the procedure that Participant #729001 went through, and why you were chosen to observe them. The procedure, given the code name the Coffee Machine, attempted, and in all cases succeeded, to link two minds almost telepathically, so their behaviour and thought patterns would become increasingly similar. Seeing as the long term side effects have been minimal-”

  “But he was seeing a therapist!” Lena interrupted, and was ignored.

  “We are going to use this procedure on our field operatives. We will match you with a partner we feel you would be most successful with, and over the course of several weeks you will be given the treatment. Once that is complete, you will work as a team to bring down rogue operatives who have gone AWOL. Some of these people have altered their minds in a way that will cause them to be dangerous, others know too much for us to allow them to leave the confines of the Institute. It will not be an easy job, but we feel that you are very well suited for it. You will receive no additional training unless you specifically need it. You will meet your partner in two days’ time at a location that will be forwarded to your hotel. I hope this is all agreeable to you.”

  It took a moment for Lena to rearrange her thoughts into a coherent string of words. It wasn’t agreeable to her. She knew that she had signed a contract, and that this was probably included somewhere in the small print, but she still wasn’t happy with it.

  “But what about-” she started, but was cut off once again.

  “Thank you for your time, Miss Coyle.”

  ***

  Interlude 5

  "That wasn't my fault!"

  Sam was sure he was not meant to be hearing this conversation, but then, he was equally certain that they weren't meant to be having it. They, in this case (in every case, Sam pondered), were two rather careless employees of The Institute, a man and a woman, having a heated though hushed debate in a corridor which echoed loud enough to make a gnat's wings deafening.

  "You leaked it!" the woman said. "At least, you put it in a position to be leaked."

  "The Truro files were not my responsibility. I handed them over to the regional coordinator, as I was supposed to. If they weren't properly secure, that's the field agent's problem, not mine."

  Sam shuffled his mop further down the corridor to better listen in. The bickering pair didn't even realise he was there; he could have been a robot,
a tool to them rather than a person with a mind open and ready to absorb their secrets. All that time poking around with brains, Sam thought, and they still don't understand that we all have one.

  "The Truro Scandal has brought down this shit storm on all of us," she went on. "That's information no one is supposed to have. Do you get that? No one! Not just the proles out there. We shouldn't be able to know that stuff. These are secrets so deep they're never spoken, never even written down. My god! The questions that raises! How do we explain that? What do we tell the press?"

  "That's not my problem either," the man said.

  "You don't think so, huh? Well, the bosses might disagree. We need a win on the Blank Slate, soon. It's not just your head on the block, you know..."

  The pair went silent for a moment. Sam had pushed his luck, lingered too long to no purpose in their vicinity. Even a pair as ignorant as these can't help but feel the force of another human being's concentrated attention after a while. Sam nodded and smiled a broad and friendly grin that had served him well for a great many years. It said 'hello', it said 'harmless', it said 'trust'. The troubled couple smiled back and went to move away, but not waiting until they were out of earshot to strike up their cacophony once more.

  "We won't find anyone fool enough to sign up to it anyway. We're going to have to try to con it again. And we all know how that turns out..."

  Sam shuffled away, chuckling to himself, sorting out some papers that had been left on a table in the corridor. The dull plodding of student feet resounded from somewhere further on, approaching with a lazy inevitability.

  After a moment, seven foot of gangly nothing came tottering around the corner and straight into the janitor, sending Sam, his papers and the student's papers to the ground. The kid helped Sam back to his feet before proceeding to gather all the papers together and hand them back to the janitor.

  "Oh, they're not mine, son," Sam said and pushed the whole pile onto the student, who didn't complain as he gambolled away leaving a trail of apologies behind him.

  ****

  The student stopped to look at the papers he had accidentally acquired. It was some sort of contract for an experiment. He scan read the front page until his eyes fell upon the topic of reimbursement. It was a generous topic, very much indeed, and that sort of generosity was something he desperately needed. Fate was smiling on him today, he was sure.

  The student walked on with a greater stride and a prouder gate, ready to face the world, the janitor's casual whistling echoing around the corridor and his ears.

  ***

  Nemo

  Michael Staniforth

  0.

  First, a fall. This spreads and, in its place, a rise. The rise follows the fall and is, in its turn, replaced by a fall. The pattern goes on and on, interminably. The ripple spreads gently across the pond. And then it fades. Endless, unceasing as it might have seemed, that miniscule perturbance in the vast, universal plane is swallowed up by all the other little changes, all the other ripples, until it is unrecognisable, until it dies. Two men watch the short lived display from inception to demise and say nothing. They sit in the mist-cool air of evening, watching the world without being in it, as if the breeze from the lake blows straight through them. They are silent, staring straight ahead with no communication between them at all, yet they are clearly of one mind, one purpose. Together, they sigh once, carried off by the desolate beauty of the situation, and then, still in unison, take hold of one arm each, and escort the tottering body between them, lifeless yet alive, away and gone - forever.

  5.

  Nemo stared hard at the pitiful reflection of a broken human being in the mirror before him. The morning had not been kind, spiteful of the night before. He ran his fingers roughly through his unruly mop of head hair, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and dragged his hands down the forest of stubble decorating his jaw before once again glancing to his reflection.

  "Still handsome, though," he said to himself, with as wry a smile as he could manage.

  There was a lot of Nemo, and there was little of him. He possessed full seven feet of self, each foot in height carrying with it little more than one stone of weight. His bedraggled exterior spilled out into the room around him, spreading its untidy tendrils, infecting all it touched with the same unkemptness that hung off him like the tattered rags he wore. He was a force; not of anything particularly useful, one way or the other, but undoubtedly unstoppable nevertheless. If you could say only one thing of Nemo it was that he was definitely There.

  Nemo moved over to the drawers of his kitchen area. The tiny student flat was a studio; a kitchen and bedroom all in one with a claustrophobic shower through a door in the corner. If he put his feet against the back wall and laid down flat, stretching out his arms, he could almost reach the door; and he had tried.

  Nemo opened a drawer and pulled out a small bag of porridge oats - the last one. He swore and spun around to face a whiteboard on the opposite wall. Nemo dragged his finger tip across the screen, the magic red line following his point scoring off the word 'Gigolo' from the list before him; that had been an eventful failure which, if nothing else, had at least served to reaffirm his own sexuality. Above this were similarly struck through words -'Barman', 'Waiter', 'Shop Assistant', all much too much like hard work; 'Entrepreneur', 'Poker Shark', 'Lottery', perhaps a tad unrealistic; 'Adult Chat' and 'Gigolo', fun, but simply not enough call for the gender he was from the gender he desired. Nemo was reaching the end of the line; indeed, there was only one item left on the list; 'DOME'. Nemo sat and ate his oats, staring at the word, pondering.

  ****

  "You know it's bullshit, right?" Woody had asked the question rhetorically, yet Nemo seemed incredulous.

  "I can't believe it," Nemo exclaimed, confirming Woody's opinion. Woody had always known that Nemo lived somewhat permanently in Nemoland, a world with little in common with most people's reality, but this was a bit out there, even for him.

  "Seriously," Woody said, taking his turn at incredulity. "You think it's real?"

  "No, I mean, I can't believe you still think I care about your opinion whatsoever!"

  "Neeeeem!" The complaint, which came from a petit blonde girl with a face that bore the tell-tale signs of a permanent frown cast at the behaviour of others, was unnecessarily stretched out to a piercing pin-point.

  "Eeeeve!" came Nemo's mocking reply. To Nemo, this was enough, an end to any debate that said all that might ever need to be said. If a person could not comprehend why they were being mocked by Nemo, that was nothing to him but proof of their ineptitude.

  "What's bullshit, anyway?" Eva asked of the group.

  "You've never heard of Cole?" Woody said. "That's even worse than him thinking it's true!"

  "Just shut up and tell the story, will you?" Eva insisted.

  "Rumour has it," Nemo cut in. "That The Institute will give a modest compensation of a mere fifty grand to any student who is willing to participate in certain ‘psychological experiments’."

  "Why would they pay so much?" Eva asked.

  "Well," Woody tilted his head in an attempt to appear 'knowing'. "Kosher isn't exactly in The Institute's vocabulary."

  "Oh, please," Nemo protested. "Some idiot couldn't cope with some fake, so-called high stress scenario. I think the only thing that's hokum about this story is how much money I'm going to get." Eva's eyes widened at Nemo's last comment. She had wanted to speak, but her thoughts were lost somewhere in a fog of disbelief that prevented her from properly processing what she’d heard.

  "We're not talking about some improv session at the student theatre," Woody explained. "They drove him completely insane!" He turned to Eva, but she wasn't listening. "The story says there was this guy, Cole or Boyle or something, in, like, Canada or where ever. They gave him these tests and then he started hearing things and seeing things, like strange noises from a dungeon, and voices telling him what to do and when to sleep. Finally he killed some other crazy. Hunted him down like he was
tracking him or something, claimed he couldn't remember a thing, spent the rest of his life in the funny farm."

  "Sure, if you're gullible enough to believe that version of events," Nemo rebutted. "Anyway, it wasn't a guy, it was a girl, and it was her boyfriend that she killed, in San Francisco, I heard. Whatever the case, it's obviously exaggerated, but myths are always based on some truth."

  "You're going to get?" Eva whispered, almost to herself, barely conscious of what was being said around her. What did he mean, the money he was going to get?

  Woody continued the conversation, not noticing Eva. "You could always choose to believe the version where they cut into her brain."

  "Her brain?" Eva muttered.

  "Yeah, her brain!" Woody replied.

  "You're going to get?" Eva said.

  "Yeah," Nemo replied.

  "Are you some kind of fucking idiot child!?" Eva yelled.

  "Jesus, Eve, relax", Woody firmly suggested. "Like I said, it's all bullshit."

  "Yeah, probably," Nemo finally relented. The other two made their excuses and went off to their classes. Nemo was left alone, just himself, more than enough. He took the contract out from his coat pocket. The emblem of The Institute was tastelessly obvious on the front page. He took out a pen and signed across his knee. There was nothing they could throw at him he couldn't take.

  ****

  Nemo sat in the waiting room of The Institute. It was empty. Not in the respect that there were no other occupants besides Nemo, although this was decidedly the case, but in the far more literal sense that, besides Nemo, his chair, and a ceiling light, there was nothing in the room (one far too large for its purposes) at all. The walls were a colour somewhere between beige and gray that disallowed the description of decoration and casually drew any idea of shape out of the room. It was like sitting in nothing and, as he sat there, it became more and more to Nemo like being nothing. He glanced up towards the ceiling light. It wasn't there. Now he thought about it, he wasn't sure it had ever been; he had only assumed it had as the light in the room, his only companion beside the chair, had to be coming from somewhere. Where was it coming from? Nemo looked down at his hands to convince himself they were still there. He flexed the fingers a few times before turning his wrist and checking his watch. He had barely been waiting five minutes and already he felt his patience grow thin. Patience would have been something else to exist in the waiting room; it seemed not to be allowed.