2 TWLA 02

Morning sun banished the last of the previous night's uncertainty. Between class and his afternoon stocking shift, lied the two times a week highlight of Mrs. Hurth, however. It sucked the light out of the day and made every small obstacle seem so much worse. Once morning class was over, he steeled his resolve and jumped a bus downtown to face his mind tinkering nemesis.

"Let's revisit the night you were taken by Child Protective Services. What exactly do you remember?" the lady led off with.

Jeremy grimaced. "The same thing I remembered the last two times you asked me. I know you can slap me with an 'argumentative' or 'refused to cooperate' but I've been recording our sessions with this smart phone. I believe I can can do some slapping of my own if you don't stop... whatever it is you're doing."

The woman gave a heartless smile filled with the sincerity of a B rated actress. "Alright, before I do exactly what you know I will, mind telling me why repeating for a third time what you've already said twice is so hard? You know what's on the table and anything other than full cooperation won't let you have it."

Narrowing his eyes he said, "Won't let me have it for now. Someone other than just myself has caught wise to you. I'm filing grievance and replacing you with another evaluator. I even have a few names I can try requesting. Three months under a different person is worth not having to put up with you for another minute.

"Oh, and your credentials don't stand up to a search engine and thirty minutes. The charges I'm going to file against you will have people snooping into your background and history a lot deeper than combing your social media accounts. Either tell me what you want or we're both done. You can start by telling me why NOT having me repeat the worst moments of my life over and over again is so hard."

She just laughed and closed the notebook in front of her.

Locking eyes with him, she said, "Hand me your smart phone."

An internal battle commenced.

While he struggled for all he was worth to keep from digging in his pocket and handing it over, she casually got up from her chair and said, "Stand still."

It barely took any real effort to swat his hand out of the way to grab the phone herself. He tried to scream for help but was ordered to remain silent. Reduced to whispered growls, he fed his will with all the impotent rage he had but the small rebellions against her commands weren't even close to enough to stop her.

At some point, without him knowing, she had coaxed his passwords and any other information she needed to erase his recording and remove cloud saved material. Under the strain, he began breaking the little codes and trigger words she'd installed into him like so much malware. Bits of returning shadowed memories revealed hidden portions of 'session time' that had gone far beyond talking.

She'd placed him in suggestive states and had him spill everything that he knew. The reason for her doing that was tied to some kind of device she carried. It was like a geiger counter and he made it go off in tiny spikes of static sound when he was emotionally agitated.

She was looking for hidden things in his mind. Looking for the origin of whatever that device's readings meant. Piecing it together, he realized she was looking for something supernatural. And with horror, he realized his dream version of events with Ray Ray were closer to the truth than the version his waking mind remembered.

Like the poisonous woman before him, someone had laid a seal over his mind and had replaced what he had experienced with a fiction. He was angry. But at the same time, he was glad. He had come close to caving under her probes to reveal it. It was close enough that the truth had seeped into his nightmares like a reopened wound.

Sighing, she called someone. "Agent Oriole, here. My cover has potentially been compromised... Well, according to my target, it's due to inconsistencies in social media accounts... Of course not but my cover did.

"I've combed him fine tooth. There's no usable leads to other potential assets, sir... Requesting local project termination and pick up... Thank you, sir."

She turned to him with a cold, expressionless face. "New deal. If you accept mental coercion instead of fighting it, I don't order a cleaner crew to erase potential security leaks at your foster home. That's quite a few lives you can save with a small sacrifice of free will, don't you think? You'll practically be a hero."

With a few simple words, she had turned a part of himself into his own enemy. Unable to fight a mental battle on two fronts, he temporarily succumbed. In what had only felt like a few seconds, he was reestablishing control over himself in the back of a windowless van.

There were two other 'assets' in it with him. And like himself, they were wrapped up in straight jackets. Muzzled and hooded as they were, he wondered how he was seeing anything at all. There was a strange buzzing in the air and his environment was displayed to him in a strange black and white static that only extended a few feet from him before cutting off into darkness.

The strange 'sight' cut off after a few minutes. It had been replaced by a splitting headache and sense of lethargy as well. Feeling empty in a way he'd never felt before, he was loaded on a dolly and wheeled away.

It could have been hours or days. Sharp stings to shoulders or veins was the only thing that interrupted lucid periods of nearsighted black and white static with ones marked by addled darkness. He preferred the darkness. A few snippets of those scenes had revealed things he wished he hadn't seen.

Parts ranging from animal to mineral and a few that were all too human had lined a wall near an area he'd been wheeled through. A table contained a body that looked like a blend of monster and person, in another. Voices occasionally spoke of finding an answer to this or that while he drooled and head lolled his way from one blind situation to the next.

Fear had levels beyond what he'd previously understood. He had listed and categorized quite a few before he was finally released from restraint but still fairly sedated. In a plain, gray room, he was dumped into a chair before his ski masked dolly operator removed his hood and muzzle, quickly exiting.

From a rather small and sectioned two-way mirror a gruff man's voice said, "State your name for the record."

The man repeated it for a second time with a growl of warning underneath before Jeremy realized he was being addressed. "Jeremy Finch."

The man said, "Jeremy, you've been selected for a rare opportunity. We would like to send you to some place special, a place where only special people can go. But, such opportunities come with a responsibility.

"You'll be tasked with objectives and collection requests. Each one filled will give you reward points to spend for things you might want or think you need there. What you can earn and how long you remain eligible to remain there are mostly on you.

"You can return at any time you want. But, after that, you'll no longer be eligible for the program and will have to be 'readjusted' for release. If you acquire enough complete missions, you will return with honors.

"I read here that you were already enrolled in academic courses geared for nursing school. We could grant you a full ride scholarship. Hell, outstanding performance might put you on the fast track to a high end government job.

"It's dangerous and it won't be fun. But, if you follow the directives, there's not a whole lot we can't help you get once you're done. For the first time in your life, hard work alone really can earn you your dreams.

"You're a smart kid. So, let me cut the crap. We have money and names behind us, big names. Be smart... Recognize that being a team player means success and being a trouble maker means... bad things. Any questions?-Good... Get him suited and send him. He's already at the high side of the adaptation ratio window."

It may have seemed like a simple one way dress-down and sales pitch but he could feel the unwanted pawing of different 'things' dragging over his body and mind. They knew what he was thinking and what he was feeling. They knew that he knew about the monster and people parts in the labs. They just didn't care. They also weren't keen on answering any of the questions he was wanting to ask.

The thing was, he didn't know HOW he knew that. He got the feeling that they weren't seeing everything he thought and felt, either. It was as if his growing awareness was letting him fight back in small ways, letting him hide things. He had probably started doing it the moment Mrs. Hurth had started messing with his head but was only getting sensitive enough to finally feel it.

It wasn't the only thing he felt. There was a small wrongness growing inside him. It was like the air in the place was dirty but the dirt wasn't being breathed in, it was being pulled in. Tiny bits were coming in with the weird stuff that let him see in black and white mode.

He didn't know what was going on and he was nearly out of his mind in terror but subconscious trumped when it came to the 'weirdness'. He wanted to fix the wrongness in his head and the wrongness from the dirty stuff. He wanted to be whole and healthy, clear headed, safe. He wanted a lot of things but his subconscious latched onto the thing he most wanted.

What he most wanted was for things to be the way they should be, the way he thought they should be. All the 'wrongness' within him, around him, scared him on a deeper level, a level beyond the emotions of the moment. Sensing it, he couldn't abide it. It got lumped together and averaged out in his head.

Like a puzzle piece snapping into place, the weirdness slowing building up in his body had a direction and purpose. On a conscious level, he wasn't aware of any of it but he had taken his first step. He had made a solid decision about something that, for good or ill, couldn't be changed, only added to.

While he was being fitted in a suit and given a kit bag, it was like the person standing across from him could feel that 'snap'. He suddenly didn't have any more time for niceties. It was all yelling and scooting him along at lightning speeds. Before he had time to adjust to anything, he stood in a dark room with a multi color 'wound' suspended in the air in a hovering device discharging plasma erratically into the walls and floor.

The grizzled veteran of a man standing in the room with him barked, "We don't have time for the full breakdown. Your adaptation has already begun. So, listen up.

"Once you get to the other side, start chucking the pretty rocks back the way you came. When you start to feel full like you've eaten too much turkey or haven't taken a dump for too long, get your a** away from the rift.

"You do good, we toss you presents. You do bad, we don't and maybe you die or the base camp beats you to death for not bringing enough goodies. Briefing over... Get to it!"

With little to go on but a whole lot of questions, Jeremy was all but thrown through the chaotically colorful 'wound' in the air. Landing roughly on the other side, he was in black and white vision mode. It was dark but there were things that glowed a rainbow iridescence in his special sight.

He seemed to be in some kind of geode. There was nowhere to run to. The pressure was painful but bearable but the 'weirdness' radiation bombarding him from the colorful crystalline rocks was not. It felt like he was bloating from needles being shoved into his pores, more agonizing by the second.

The only choice he really had was to toss the things into the rift behind him before they made him explode. Kicking for all he was worth, he broke the oddly softened bases of the stone formations off by the handfuls and tossed them in. He was in a war of attrition he was destined to lose.

Every handful gone was a little pressure reduced and a little 'weirdness radiation' subtracted from the total. But, that didn't do anything about what was already in him or the remaining amount's continual bombardment. The only small ray of hope was that the spot he was clearing continued to weaken and get softer.

He felt like he was going to die at any moment when the excess of 'weirdness' registered as another wrongness his subconscious needed to fix. A withered and faded part of himself he wasn't aware existed, his deepest primal subconscious recognized as the place where the 'weirdness' was supposed to be when it was inside a person and began fixing it. It was the lake to a number of ghostly and broken collection of dry rivers and tributaries throughout his whole body.

He was still bloating but he could feel a small relief of internal pressure. It lasted long enough to see the first spot of light on the other side of the relatively thin geode. Unfortunately, the other side had something just as deadly. A monstrous deer like alien thing covered in branch like growths and rocks peered back at him through the small hole he'd made.