Tales of MU

In Which Dee Places Second

Nobody said anything after that for a while. Dee had closed her eyes… I figured it was a concentration thing, though outwardly she looked pretty relaxed. Maybe it was just a way of making sure there was only one thing she had to “see” at a time.

“No, Rowan,” she said, eventually. “It will not ‘screw things up’ if you speak.”

“Okay… I wasn’t going to ask in case the answer was yes, but I didn’t really think you would pick up on it,” he said. “Sorry.”

“The front of the mind is always more prominent than the back,” she said. “But it is not unduly distracting… finding a way past the noise of the foremind is a necessary first step in learning to do deeper readings. I appreciate your concern, however. If you have any further questions or comments, I suggest that you simply speak them. Not only will it allow Mackenzie to hear them as well, but I find that unvoiced thoughts ring all the more loudly.”

“Okay, well… I was hoping you could at least confirm that I’m not lying,” he said.

“I know sincerity can be faked, but you haven’t yet struck me as the cunning type,” I said. “Though, I guess a good actor could come off as a bit of a rube…”

“Khee, thanks,” Rowan said.

“If I can tell you nothing else,” Dee said, “I can confirm that he believes what he’s been telling you, and so far as I can yet determine, his memories do agree with it.”

“Is that really the most telepathy can do?” Rowan asked.

“There is a lot to untangle,” Dee said. “The events in which we are interested have been on your mind quite a bit lately, which makes things easier in some ways, but also harder. There is a trail for me to follow from your recent memories to the older ones, the true record which you have been perusing… but it is a looping trail, fraught with the subjectivity of distance and time.”

“I thought all memory was pretty subjective,” I said. “The way it’s been explained to me is that only a few really solid details are nailed down, and if we have to think about what happened later, we just reconstruct what’s missing.”

“This is so,” Dee said. “When I said ‘true record’, I did not mean to suggest that what is recorded in Rowan’s mind is the truth. I meant the actual memory itself, fragmentary though it may be, rather than his recent recollection of it.”

“I know my memory of my childhood is kind of hazy and incomplete, but I figured that was just because it was years ago, and I was young,” Rowan said. “You’re saying that’s just the way things are?”

“With greater and smaller exceptions, yes,” Dee said.

“So being a telepath doesn’t mean you can root around and help me fill in the parts I might have forgotten?”

“In some cases, perhaps… in any mind, there are likely to be more memories stored than the mind itself knows how to access,” Dee said. “But recognizing them and bringing them to the surface is a highly specialized skill, one for which I lack the training. The subjectivity of memory makes it a dangerous task, as it is far too easy to alter memories or create new ones.”

“Uh… should that maybe have been mentioned up front?” Rowan said. “Just as part of the general disclaimer?”

“Do not worry, I am reading only,” Dee said. “I would have to actively assert myself to influence your thoughts, and I would not do so. It is similar to the difference between looking and touching.”

“Still, pretty scary,” he said. “I mean, I guess it was kind of a given that memories can be altered, given what we’re doing here, but I figured that would be like some kind of super-secret high-level mind-fu and not just something that anyone can do by accident. I kind of think I was entitled to know that you could scramble my brains before I let you in.”

“Your brains are in no danger from my gift,” Dee said. “Even if I had the raw power to rip your mind to shreds… and I do not… your organ of thought would be physically unharmed. Unless I chose to assault them telekinetically, of course.”

“…maybe this is not the time to split that particular hair?” I said, watching the color drain from Rowan’s face.

“I am sorry,” Dee said. “The mind/body distinction is important to my discipline, though it seems trivial to most who lack such gifts… Rowan, I apologize. In my attempt to construct informed consent, I failed to consider how little you knew, or what would be important to you. Would you like to continue?”

“I guess,” he said. “I mean, if you wanted to mess things up inside my head, I doubt you would have asked for permission in the first place, right?”

“That thought had crossed my mind, but I doubted it would sound as reassuring to you, coming from me,” she said.

“Yeah, I guess it wouldn’t have been,” he said. “Hey… you didn’t plant that in my head, did you?”

“Rowan,” Dee said. “This is exactly the reason I sought an affirmation of trust before I began. If you are going to require reassurance that each thought that crosses your mind is your own, we had best discontinue now, so as not to give you more opportunities to second-guess later.”

“Sorry,” he said. “It was more of an idle… I was thinking more that it would be pretty slick than anything else. I trust you as much as Mackenzie trusts you, and she seems to trust you plenty.”

“Dee is easily the… second most moral person I know,” I said.

“Second?” he said.

“That is fair,” Dee said.

“Hold on, why only second?”

“First place doesn’t have a dishonest bone in her body because her maker sculpted them by hand,” I said. When that failed to register, I clarified. “She’s a golem.”

“Is a golem really a pers… aaaaaaah!”

“My apologies,” Dee said. “I appear to have inadvertently triggered your memory of urinating inside your pants in the second grade.”

“I don’t think Two would approve of that,” I said, which was the only real criticism I could muster… I was unusually inclined to be charitable to Rowan, though, both because I needed him and because I felt I owed some extra patience to the apparent best friend I didn’t remember.

“And this is why I am only second,” Dee said.

“Okay, sorry, I get it… I’m an asshole,” Rowan said, throwing up his hands. “Bear in mind, I’ve never met one before. I don’t know anything about golems except what I’ve seen on TV. If you can try to remember that… I’ll try to remember it, too, the next time something pops into my head about one.”

“Fair enough,” Dee said.

“Going back on topic… if it is so easy to create new memories,” I said, “are we really accomplishing anything here? I mean, how can ”

“Believe me, from my vantage point, the difference would be apparent,” Dee said. “The possessor of a false memory is less likely to notice because their own need to have a coherent sense of self will drive them to integrate it into the whole, but structurally, they are quite distinct, more often consisting of concrete words or visuals than the abstract sensory impressions that make up a real memory.”

“Not that I don’t understand why you’d be open to the possibility that I’d be the one who was brainwashed,” Rowan said, “but… why would someone go to the trouble of making me think I knew you, if I didn’t?”

“There are people who would go to more trouble than that to get to me,” I said. “One of them tries to keep a low profile and the other one has been pretty assiduously sticking to the technically correct side of the law, but… well… if you volunteered to have your memory altered as part of a ploy to get close to me and slip in under my guard, I’m not sure that would in and of itself be illegal?”

“I kind of want to ask what the hell kind of life you’ve lived that you have to worry about that kind of thing, but I kind of don’t want to know?” he said.

“I’m not sure I’m ready to get into all of that, either way,” I said. “Honestly, I haven’t heard from anyone I’d call ‘one of my enemies’ lately, and I’m not in any hurry to dredge any of that up with a stranger, even if I’m not a stranger to him. But, I’ve been careless and stupid when dealing with them in the past.”

“It’s cool,” he said. “You just seem to be kind of yo-yoing on this whole ‘trust’ issue, and that doesn’t really seem fair since I have to commit all the way.”

“I know it seems that way,” I said. “But this is kind of what trust looks like, in my situation. I mean, I believe you, Rowan… I really do. But no matter how much I say that, in the back of my head I still know what I know. And I can believe with a near-dead certainty that it’s wrong, but it’s still what I know. I mean, if I can’t trust my own memory, how can I trust the guy who tells me he knows the truth? How can I trust anyone?”

“That’s fair, I guess,” Rowan said, though he looked increasingly nervous. “Maybe your paranoia is rubbing off on me, but I’m just suddenly acutely aware that I’m letting someone into my mind on the word of someone whose memory has been altered…… what if you’re all acting on some kind of post-hypnotic thingy to eliminate anyone who knows the truth?”

“Such buried triggers must necessarily be simple and straightforward to be effective,” Dee said. “It would be plausible that someone… not myself in particular but someone… could be acting under such a trigger. It would be far less plausible for said trigger to include detailed instructions such as scanning your memory to verify whether you in fact knew the truth or not before proceeding with the elimination. Of course, you must rely on my word that this is so.”

“Strangely, it’s still reassuring? Because even without knowing all the nitty-gritty details of how it works… yeah, it does seem more likely it would be all ‘crush, kill, destroy’ and not ‘laboriously verify, then crush, kill, destroy’… and I know, I know… I’m supposed to be thinking about my childhood, not all the ways this could go south,” Rowan said. “But it’s hard, okay? You don’t know how hard it is to focus on something so freaking mundane when there’s so much weirdness and newness and new weirdness going on… or maybe you do. I guess you probably had special training in focusing your thoughts.”

“Indeed,” Dee said. “among my people, even the mind-blind are given some rudimentary training in aligning their thoughts and raising or lowering their guards. I have not spent much of my time on the surface deliberately reading the thoughts of my fellow students… I had not considered how poorly prepared you would be for this.”

“I guess if nothing else I can stop talking, though,” Rowan said. “I mean, that can’t be helping, right?”

“It has not helped, no,” Dee said. “But I know how difficult it is to not think particular thoughts when nothing is there to distract oneself from them, and so I fear that forgetting your worries and focusing on your memories in silence will prove fruitless.”

“Wait, you’re giving up?” I said. I would have been the first to admit that the session had been pretty disastrous so far… except that I would have been the last to admit defeat, given how much was at stake for me.

“No,” Dee said. “Merely changing my angle of approach. Instead of less conversation, I believe we should have more… or at least, more focused conversation. It is far easier for the uninitiated to choose a topic of conversation than a topic of thought.”

“So we talk about what we want Rowan to think about?” I said. “I mean, me and him… you scan while we talk?”

“Indeed,” Dee said.

“…so how do we do this?” Rowan said. “Because I’m not sure where to start.”

“Mackenzie will ask questions,” she said. “You will answer with as much detail as you can, to the best of your ability.”

Tell me about my mother, I think, but something holds me back from saying it. Maybe I’m not ready for that. Instead, I say, “How did we meet?”

Rowan laughs, a nervous sort of barking laugh.

“Believe it or not, I don’t remember that,” he said. “Is that weird? I mean, does that mean something?”

“In this case, no,” Dee said. “I am told my early childhood recollections are uncommonly clear, yet my life is peopled with very important people for whom I have no clear ‘first’ memory. They were simply there, always there. It is the way of things.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly how it is,” Rowan said. “I don’t remember a time we didn’t know each other. We were in the neighborhood together… not next door neighbors, more like a couple houses down and a street over. But they were barely streets, you know?”

“Dirt roads on the edge of town,” I said, nodding. “Tiny little houses, no two alike. Lots of trees, overgrown bushes. A lot of untidy lawns, though I didn’t think anything of that until I went to live with my grandmother.”

“My mom liked me playing at your house, both because your mom was better at watching us and because my house was right up against the pasture land. The bigger kids would go off and play on the other side of the fence, and I always wanted to join them.”

“I did, too!” I said. “My memory is that I wasn’t allowed to join them. My mother didn’t even let me go over the fence into the pasture for a few years, but I still don’t remember playing with the older kids after she gave in. Or did I lose my memory of playing with them?”

“Mostly, no, they didn’t play with you,” he said. “By the time we were old enough that our moms said we could go on the other side of the fence, they were mostly too old to feel like running around playing rangers and stuff. Your mom called it…”

“The Big Kid Paradox,” I said. In my lonely memory, I was alone in our dining room lamenting that I had no one to play with, that the gang of neighborhood kids I’d chased after the heels of were no longer interested in doing the things that had made being a couple years older seem so appealing. “No matter how old I got, the older kids were always older. I remember that.”

“So, we made our own games,” he said. “We used to watch them playing war, you know, like their own little version of skirmish… but we just had each other, so when we did it, we were like generals of imaginary armies.”

Dee made a sound that, from anybody else, I would have sworn was a swallowed laugh turning into a snort. It sounded exactly like that, but I couldn’t quite credit her ever doing something so undignified.

“What?” Rowan said. “It’s the truth.”

“Yes, I… see it,” Dee said. “It is… I apologize, Mackenzie. I am certainly not laughing at the image of you playing war games.”

“I’m not laughing, either,” I said. “Is this for real? My mother hated any kind of play fighting. There were no toy soldiers in our house, I wasn’t allowed to pick up a stick and swing it like a sword, nothing. Is that real?”

“Yeah, she was kind of a tight ass about that?” Rowan said. “I think that probably hardened her resolve to keep you out of the pasture, honestly, but she gave in eventually as long as we weren’t really fighting, not even really play-fighting… that’s why we were the generals, I guess? Because as long as we were imagining what our archers and knights were doing, we weren’t actually fighting ourselves. We each had our own little forts. Yours was just a stand of pine trees on the top of a hill. Mine was the space between three big piles of deadwood. We’d take turns coming down with our armies and we’d sort of play out what they were doing, with a combination of storytelling and play-acting and… well, I don’t know how much of this was… our imaginations were kind of in sync back then. I didn’t really associate it with the mind-reading thing, but I never found someone I could connect to like that. It was almost like we shared our own little reality.”

“Could an untrained telepath do that?” I asked Dee.

“It is possible,” she said. “Children lack many of the inhibitions that would make such a thing difficult in the first place, and without training, telepathy functions mostly as an added channel overlaying speech… I learned to operate my mental and physical voices separately in much the same way a child learns to flex individual fingers independently of each other. If you did have some kind of latent telepathic ability, it would have been quite literally child’s play for you to weave your minds together as you shouted your imaginings back and forth.”

“This might be too weird for me to think about… and I don’t think that’s the suggestion rearing it’s head again,” I said. “I haven’t really dealt with the mind reading stuff yet… I mean, if I was telepathic as a child, what happened? Because I sure as hell am not now.”

“I could not begin to speculate without being able to examine your mind more closely than would be healthy,” Dee said.

“Also, I just can’t imagine having that kind of bond with anyone,” I said. “Telepathic or not. I mean, my childhood… the way you remember it… Rowan, I look back and there’s nothing like that. I was… I don’t like to think of myself as lonely. I almost can’t. But I was so alone.”

“You weren’t ever lonely that I noticed,” he said. “I had a real feeling that I needed you more than you needed me… like, you were happy to have an audience and someone to tell stories to and stuff, but I went looking for you way more than you went looking for me. Part of that was me being the littler kid, but I really do think you were better at being alone than I was.”

“Still, your version of my life sounds more fun than what I remember,” I said.

“Anyway, the one thing your mom had a bigger stick up her butt about than the fighting was you wandering off or whatever,” Rowan said. “And the thing about the cow pasture is that it had definite boundaries on all sides, so she could tell you to stay inside it and there’d be no fudging. I don’t know if you remember, but you used to get in fights with her about what counted as going into the woods… she’d flip her shit at you if she thought you’d gone too far out of bounds.”

“…I do remember that,” I said.

“I wasn’t much help there,” Rowan said. “I learned pretty quick that if I took your side in that argument, I’d see a lot less of you for a while. She was really touchy about that one thing.”

“Knowing what I know now… or suspecting what I suspect… I can’t say that I blame her,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s how she met… the demon,” I said. I’d called the man who’d impregnated her my father a couple of times for lack of a more natural way to refer to him offhand, but I didn’t like to claim him when I could avoid it. “Wandering off in the woods.”

“Do you think she knew…?”

“What I was?”

“I was going to say what he was,” Rowan said.

“I think she knew he was bad news,” I said. “After I turned, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what she knew and when she knew it… it was easier to believe she didn’t know anything, because then I didn’t have to wonder why she’d never warned me. But the specific things she seemed to worry about… not just me wandering off in the woods, but the fighting, and she’d freak out if I ate anything weird… though maybe that’s just a mom thing in general… I think she had an inkling? Maybe she didn’t say anything because she hoped she was wrong. Dee, are we maybe getting too far off-topic here? Is this useful?”

“…one moment, please,” Dee said.

“What, are we interrupting something?” Rowan said.

“I said, one moment, please,” she repeated, in a tone that did not brook any argument. “Continue speaking about the time when Mackenzie disappeared from your life, Rowan. When’s the last time you saw her?”

“…I couldn’t actually say,” he said. “I guess there wasn’t anything special about it? Like I said, one day you just weren’t there anymore. I didn’t think anything when you didn’t show up at school, though the second and third day I was kind of worried and curious.”

“You didn’t go by my house?” I asked.

“…no?” he said. “I usually did when you weren’t at school, though you didn’t actually get sick much? But I don’t think I did. I remember we were all in the dark. Why didn’t I, though?”

“Perhaps you did,” Dee said.

“I don’t remember!” he said. “This is starting to freak me the fuck out.”

“Dee… were his memories altered, too?”

“Not altered,” she said. “Not removed. Destroyed.”

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Characters: Dee, Mackenzie, Rowan