The Bee Keeper

(Recall the books original quote.)

Sebastian's pov

'What a ride this has been,' I thought sardonically as I walked around the compound. Laura dropped me in some snow ridden place before she disappeared. I muttered a curse, I needed to get back to Kidman.

How is Laura back? I wondered, & what did she mean about Pride and Gluttony?

Walking to a large and elaborate iron gate, I realized that this place wasn't a compound. Actually, I recognized it as Krimson City's old person's home. Entering the gate I almost leapt out of my skin when a hologram popped out of thin air less than two feet from me.

"Tell me," Ruvik, in Leslie's body spoke, "preacher."

Another man was groveling at his feet, an older man.

"Tell me if this is hell?"

"Why are you doing this to me! The police will find you!"

"No, no, no preacher," he tsked, "I am God here. I listened to your messages, you know. My sister and I looked up to you before the accident."

"You're not Ruben! He is dead! I buried his sister! His father told me he was dead!"

"My death was all a part of the plan." Two figures emerged close to him, some large reptile I couldn't completely identify and a eight foot tall, bone thin, long headed humanoid monster. The skinny one groaned saying,

"Soo empty."

"So," Ruvik said, "doesn't Job say the leviathan is the king of Pride? Never mind that, Gluttony, eat."

The old man's voice became shrill, his mind unable to wrap itself around what was happening. The skinny bag of bones shook and frothed foam out the mouth as it shook in ecstasy. Bones audibly ground together as the beast's mouth opened three feet without the jaw so much as moving. Then mouthes opened up on its hands and three tentacle-like tongues of the mouths, whipped out and then the memory stopped.

"Well," I said sarcastically to no one at all, "that guys seems real nice."

Walking up the steps and opening the door carefully I peeked inside. On the other side of the door was a hall with cement walls and checkered tile floor. Lightbulbs lazily hung down from the ceiling. Once I stepped inside the door slammed and locked behind me.

The lights dimmed blue, so low that the ceiling was no longer visible. Sounds of Mozart's Requiem in D Minor began to play. As the hall grew colder I heard familiar voices, Jimenez and a younger Ruvik conversing as I slowly walked down the hall.

"Freud believed that there were three psychological constructs that formulated the human psyche. The Id, Ego, and Super-Ego. The Id is unconscious by definition, Ruven. It is the dark and inaccessible part of our humanity. What little we know about it is from the study of dreamwork, and the construct of neurotic symptoms which put the Id in a dark light. We only approach the Id with analogies, Freud called it chaos, and a seething cauldron of excitations. It gets its energy from the inner instincts but has no organization, no collective will, but only a unwavering desire to bring about institutional satisfaction from fulfilling the pleasure principle. In the Id contrary impulses exists side by side, without canceling it out. Morality, sound judgment, right and wrong do not exist within the Id. There is nothing in the Id that can be compared to and nothing in the Id corresponds to the idea of time. Inside the Id also houses all life and death instincts, or as Freud and others named them, eros and thanatos."

I was halfway down the hall when it seemed to be expanding away from me. A younger Ruvik asked, "Tell me more about the death instinct."

"For Freud the death instincts seek expression as an instinct of destruction onto the external world and other organisms through aggression. Any other questions at the moment?"

"Tell me about the various dreamworks used to study the id."

Jimenez sighed, "We don't have time for that in this lesson... but I will tell you a bit and about Night Terrors. Dreams are a place where the id is free from its competition with the ego and super-ego. Now, night terrors are different than nightmares. One having a night terror will wake with no memory of it and victims usually thrash, scream, or in cases with troubled soldiers and the like, become violent. If you ever have a friend with this problem it's usually best to wait it out. Waking someone from a night terror is extremely difficult-"

Suddenly there was a spark and I spewed blood out of my mouth. Feeling shot by a shock pistol to the back of the neck the world began to fade...

Fade...

And fade away.

***

I woke up in the STEM tub to sunlight filtered into the building from the dirty and dusty windows. Two of the tubs were empty and writing was written on the glass by a caked blood-like or paint-like substance. Oh no, oh hell no.

Did you sleep well? Was written on the glass!

Only Kidman was in her tank, and the school teacher and my daughter were gone. Turning my neck I screamed out in agony. The pain caused me to instinctively clasp where the needle was going into my neck and I felt burnt flesh. With a grunt and grimace I tore the tube out and applied pressure.

After calming down from the pain fueled frustration I somberly realized the fact that the tube was attached to my brain-stem. I'm lucky to be alive right now. Tossing myself out of the tub I stumbled around, trying to find the school teacher, trying to find my daughter! I didn't find them until I went into the hall where I first witnessed Ruvik kill a few police officers. Here the golden sunlight was grey after passing through the grime, dust and asylum bars on the windows.

Shivers ran down my spine as they held hands, eyes rolled back into their heads but looking straight at me. They started talking but never so much as moved their eyes away.

"The ego, Ruven, attempts to mediate between the Id and reality. It is often obliged to cloak the unconscious commands of the id with its own preconscious rationalizations, to conceal the id's conflict with reality, to profess to be taking notice of reality even when the id has been rigid and unyielding. The ego separates out what is—and is not—real."

They are continuing the memories from STEM.

"What if I," my possessed daughter said, "were to eliminate the ego?"

The possessed school teacher laughed, "Why, you wouldn't just be the queen bee, you would become a bee keeper of mankind."

I heard footsteps and dripping water behind me. As the sound grew closer Lily, still possessed uttered,

"And if I could make my will the pleasure principle?"

Kidman's voice, dry and distant, said from behind me,

"You would rule the world."