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Chapter 4: Psion

  06:23 / 24:37, Rotation 518 / 687, 232 AE, 8.872137, 138.255371, Aryss

  The three schools of mind flaying were, in order of increasing ghastliness:

  Hallucination,

  Imprinting, and

  Domination.

  Hallucination was what Vilithe was currently enduring, as Zitra twisted the migraine about to her left hemisphere, then right hemisphere, back to her cortical stem, then thrust back to her frontal lobe. It was as if Zitra was holding Vilithe’s sinuses by two long nailed fingers, swiveling and spinning it about like a fidget spinner.

  Basic psionic communication, or telepathy, was the most basic hallucination. The receiver would hear words in their head, but no sound was made. Conversations could be had in absolute silence. Consensual telepathing was not considered mind flaying.

  But when it came to Hallucination that did count as mind flaying, for the target unwillingly saw what you wanted it to see, hear, smell, feel and taste. Zitra wanted Vilithe to have a migraine headache, and she wanted her to feel it exactly- here. No, maybe over here. It was just that simple. Blocking hallucinations was rudimentary for the stronger psions, but Vilithe had allowed Zitra to give her a migraine, for the alternative was rogue resistance.

  In a frenetic situation and an attacker had to be disabled, a quick hallucinatory Mind Blast could be cast upon a lesser enemy. A Mind Blast was just a painful scramble of horrid psionic noise, debilitating and confusing. The higher arts of hallucination were about the subtleties of crafting complicated sensation and thoughts, the articulation of lies.

  The School of Imprinting was the art of rewriting memory. To first write a memory, another had to be deleted. And memories were stubborn things. They were created by repetitions of shared experiential consonance, and once they fired, they wired. They were hard to unwind.

  The most basic technique of Imprinting was Redaction. By simply hiding a memory with noise – blacking it over with ink – the target could be compelled to forget what they knew, even if only temporarily. Psionic Redaction could never last forever, but it could also sometimes be used to treat psionic fraying. Redacting trauma often soothed elvans, but this was a palliative, and not a cure.

  Slightly more advanced, requiring a bit more creativity to conjure, was Inception. Implanting false memories in the target, so they stayed forever. It wasn’t very much different from hallucination, in many regards. Easy to conjure, a psychic bioelectrochemical prank played again and again until it stuck. The only difference was that unlike redaction, which glaringly overwrote the truth, the person was made to believe the origin of the thought was from within the self.

  But an inception would never hold and simply be forgotten like an errant dream-within-a-dream and soon lost to limbo, if it did not replace a real memory. As such, the most difficult technique of the Imprinting Arts was Deletion, the erasure of reality. And Deletion was not possible without Inception, as a replacement memory always needed to be configured, a principle known as Plasticity. As such, Inception and Deletion were considered two sides of the same coin of Imprinting, and few psions bothered to suss out the little technical details.

  And then there was Domination, without doubt the most potent school of mind flaying.

  It required the greatest psionic strength, and indeed it was not the brood mother who had puppeteered Vilithe’s legs from her sleeping tube to march dutifully into the insulation tube and into the staging chamber, but the Princess Amefrid Amallark herself, although she was not physically present.

  Domination, the most difficult school, had various special abilities to master, each increasingly intense.

  The simplest was Hold Person. Paralysis. The psion overrode the neuromuscular system, preventing movement.

  Then there was Puppeteering, when the psion controlled how that neuromuscular system would behave.

  And then there was Total Domination.

  Puppeteering was one thing, you controlled the target’s body as you would control your own, but the puppeteer did not have access to the accumulated muscle memory of their puppet, nor their knowledge, nor their will itself.

  Total Domination, however, gave access to everything. Ways to bend long cultivated relationships to advantage no matter how dear, operation of technical skills, even the deepest, most innate and unique wisdom, anything that required advanced cognition. The very soul of the creature was the psion’s to command.

  Things that would have been unthinkable suddenly become their compelling obsession, their very purpose. Once total domination was achieved just once it became easier to do again because the mind of the creature would be irrevocably changed. It paved the way for more advanced psionic techniques, such as the Gestalt. Still the deep potential of psionics had yet to be plumbed entirely. Psionic discoveries happened every revolution.

  The headache suddenly shrunk away from a searing migraine to just a stuffy sinus congestion, more like a headache from a long-winded lecture of things already known.

  Now that Zitra had contented herself with torturing Vilithe, she got on with the business of telepathing the orders given.

  Your tasks:

  Kwandriss Talauth, minor psion vassal worker, aged twenty-seven Reathean revs. Staging chamber 1CA74E. Her crime was insubordination. Your task is to punish her by exploiting her phobia.

  Arkangel Boucher, vassal soldier, age of thirty-three revs. Staging chamber 4EFF47. No longer battleworthy. Your task is to lobotomize him.

  Serun Amallark, clan soldier, aged twenty Reathean revolutions. Staging chamber 111118. He requests you spend a night of pleasure with him.

  Exactly enough work for one rotation. Hard, easy, easier. Well, that last task, Vilithe guessed it depended on the vassal – freshly flayed and vassalized they might take to the last one with utter contempt – but Vilithe had been a vassal of Clan Amallark for so long that a task that at least could provide her with some comfort, and hopefully some rest. Unless this Serun was a brute.

  Giving pleasure was a rare task in Vilithe’s life as a vassal, had her own cognition not been numbed by the Amallarkeans, she might have had headspace to wonder why for the very first time she was asked to do this. Some chose to ingratiate themselves with the clan so pathetically that they were pitied, and rewarded with some of the clan’s comforts, but Vilithe had always held stoic. So why were they giving her a break?

  And in the end, since Vilithe still slept in a little tube underneath Zitra’s chamber for the time being, and they had seen each other every rotation for the last few lunas, Zitra could not help but allow herself to indulge just a little bit of psionic chitchat.

  You’re lucky to be going to see Miz Dazey. Zitra vocally hissed her envy. You’d better enjoy it. Vilithe could easily feel the pang of jealousy. It almost made her feel sorry for her. Almost.

  Despite her prickly demeanor, however, Zitra motioned for Vilithe to approach. Every chamber had simple quarters for its brood mother and her broods if she was spawning, and they always were. Zitra’s was a mere interior stall windowed all around with bulletproof plexiglas, receptacles scooped into the countertops underneath for quick exchange of tools. Albeit a lowly station, it was still quite spacious and had plenty of room inside for Zitra’s rolling bed and her handmaids. At one of the receptacles, a handmaid had prepared a plate of gruel and a flask of miruvor for Vilithe to retrieve. Vilithe received her breakfast graciously, and the gratitude was for real this time.

  For your disobedience, I’m going to assign a spirit to watch over you.

  As she broke fast, gulping down the foul-tasting gruel and bitter brew as quickly as she could, forcing her appetite because it had been quite sapped by the headache, which was still fading away somewhere in the background, Vilithe began to have the feeling of being watched. It felt as if there was a stranger standing behind her, and the feeling did not go away.

  The dragonrider pushed her eyelids together, wasn’t the migraine enough? What would this be? A psionic virus? Yet another burden to bear?

  But then as she scryed it, it turned out to be a laughably benign spirit named, ironically, Malevolent. Vilithe couldn’t understand this. What a horribly dumb name for a spirit. After all, as she understood it, they were nothing more than arcane algorithms designed long ago to observe the electroconductive patterns of neurons, through recordings by colonies of bacta, no different conceptually than other algorithms made for much more mundane purposes. The only thing allowed for them to do was to observe their host and best simulate them, so of course they came to revere them. They were their creators. Everything their creators thought meant everything to them, and the spirits recorded it all.

  Since the spirits were one, it meant that they could serve as the guardians of the sum collective knowledge of the Godlike Beings: the psionic legacy. They ensured that the legacy endured, and safely transmitted it to elvans, though it could still be directly accessed. For an elvan to try and behold the legacy all at once would surely reduce the foolish elvan to madness, and rarely were elvans afforded the privilege to behold the legacy at all, and so they needed the spirits to help them parse through all that knowledge. Any time an elvan needed something, all they really had to do was consult a spirit.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Zitra had programmed quite an ugly personality into Malevolent. Though Zitra’s psionic ability paled compared to Vilithe, she had bound to it essentially three tasks: to nag Vilithe of the tasks she should be doing, to remind Vilithe of the lowliness of her position in Zitra’s stead, and of course to transmit a stream of relevant information directly to Zitra’s mind. But Vilithe had endured so much already that at this point she wouldn’t even mind a companion, even an annoying one.

  She crawled away without another word. Regaining her strength, she picked herself up to a shambolic shuffle, a zombie, before finally finding her stride. Once she felt their psionic presence finally stray away from her by their inattention, she finally felt relaxed enough to let herself think for herself fully again.

  She hated them both- so Malevolent had to interject don’t you think that way of your superiors!

  Shut up, Malevolent, she thought. Let me think.

  Make me, Vilithe! Haha - haha - haha, the psionic facsimile of laughter sounded more like grating nails across a board, the thought-voice – no actual sound but a psionic approximation – was a warped one, oddly fluctuating from demonic deep to hyperactive high-pitched. But the spirit was just a spirit, so Vilithe simply dialed down Malevolent’s psionic voice deep inside her. She suddenly began to understand why Zitra named it so.

  How bored Zitra must be with her lot to crave living vicariously through a vassal. How untalented at psionics that she could not simply astral project and scry it herself.

  But still like a little tiny voice in the corner of her mind she could sense Malevolent’s words, as muted as they may be, now erupting in great protest given she had discerned its mundane purpose, and no less insulted its creator, and she couldn’t help herself, she answered each of the spirit’s rages with a little trolly retort.

  Arguing with this stupid thing, she could barely consciously register diving through fast fluid suction body delivery tubing, or treading among immense crowds of elvans all crawling around up and down a main arterial or transmitting security thoughts through checkpoint chambers. In truth she was thankful for the amusement.

  She arrived now in a small, sealed cell. It was totally dark, although Vilithe could guess by the chamber number that it was probably dark green. Vilithe relied on her psionic sense and let her mind reach out through the darkness, past her closed eyelids.

  Kwandriss was huddled in the corner, in fetal position, as naked as Vilithe was, her arms clasped around her legs. That’s all Vilithe could tell from scrying her.

  She placed a hand on Kwandriss’ forehead. Ectoplasm – the fluid that secreted and mediated spirits – oozed from the skin of her hands, and upon Kwandriss, and into her third eye and frontal cortex. This made it extraordinarily easy to access her mind. Psionic surgery.

  Curious as to what her insubordination was, Vilithe scryed through her memory.

  scry(

  target: Kwandriss Talauth,

  seek: misconduct

  );

  And with that, Vilithe was now within the memory of when Kwandriss disobeyed. As she had intruded, Vilithe could not astrally project herself out- she would see what Kwandriss remembered seeing, hear what Kwandriss remembered hearing, feel what Kwandriss remembered feeling.

  It wasn’t too long ago.

  They were deep in an underground glacier, sealed off, air pumped in. It was bitterly cold. An ice mining vein. A group of vassals, clothed in raggedy robes, stitched together scraps, barely enough to ward off the chill. But Kwandriss was the only psion.

  Kwandriss was overseeing some lobotomized soldiers and their attending labor workers. These must have been the broken remnants of clans fallen to the Traitor Empress.

  Lobotomized soldiers required the assistance of a labor worker, with their cut up frontal lobes just barely able to cipher transmitted fine motor skill to the mutilated soldiers, but otherwise their strength came in handy. These beasts of burden chipped dumbly away at the ice with picks. Every so often workers would use limited psionics, channeled into them through Kwandriss using her ability, to take finer control of the labor-soldiers, and help them to carve out trickier corners and edges, for the retired soldiers by themselves could only do it in slow, awkward, jerking, stuttering motions.

  An Amallarkean Psion entered, dressed in a microfiber bodysuit that covered her from the top of her neck down to every finger and toe. It was all black and tapered to her skin, and woven in between were insulating air pockets, keeping her in comfort despite the cold. Coiled in her right hand was a whip. She glared at Kwandriss. Vilithe could feel Kwandriss fixating on that glare even outside this memory; it gave the feeling of vertigo, so familiar to Vilithe it was unaffecting, but not to Kwandriss. Vilithe prepared herself, for what happened next was surely to be traumatic.

  Faster.

  Kwandriss urged haste from the vassals under her command, but a rippling undercurrent of frustration from within could be felt. Whether it was hers or Kwandriss’s was no longer distinguishable. Maybe it was both congealed together.

  This frustration amplified, bouncing from Kwandriss to labor worker to labor soldier, and overwhelmed the soldiers’ cut down minds. One of the soldiers began moaning, crying, and panicking.

  “Ah! Ah!” He started swinging his pickaxe wildly at nothing, and it smacked his attending labor worker, who leapt away in fear with a nasty swelling lump on her elbow.

  The Amallarkean Psion was furious. Failure! She hit Kwandriss with a basic hallucinatory blast of pain, or mind blast. Vilithe was skilled enough to block that out from her own scrying of the remembrance.

  Kwandriss recovered but she was on her knees now. Don’t do it, Kwandriss. There’s no point.

  I’m trying the best that I can!

  You can’t think back at an Amallark. Not so perceptibly, as if you wanted the Amallarkean to scry it. You tried your best to hold it in, as she had earlier with her murderous thoughts towards Zitra.

  The Amallarkean dominated Kwandriss, puppeteering her to strip the basic, patch covered, flax weave robe she wore to fend off the cold deep inside the glacial mine and turn away. The Amallarkean drew back her whip.

  break();

  Vilithe didn’t need to scry this.

  With the motion of her finger Zitra sent the migraine to the parietal lobe, and Vilithe began to suck air in through her teeth, trying to breath the migraine away.

  She bent her knuckle, and the migraine spread out, it was not as piercing but enveloped more of her skull, and she pressed her fingers on her scalp to massage it.

  Finally, Zitra flicked her finger like she was flicking a booger, and the migraine shot away, and Vilithe had to give a relieved sigh that at least it was finally over.

  By lack of understanding they remained sane.

  What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea? Resilient and highly contagious. Once taken hold, impossible to eradicate. An idea – fully formed and fully understood – that sticks; right in there somewhere.

  Epistemology- the study of knowledge, the knowing of how one knows what one knows, was the core discipline needed to grow in psionic strengths. The leg day of working out the mind. For ideas could not carry the self forward if it did not start with preceding need. Necessity: the mother of invention. The illusion of perception – samsara – is weaved together by the reality of biological need. And the Holy Godlike, Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha sayeth, ‘craving is the root of all suffering.’

  Creative Destruction. Create, Read, Update, Delete. To update the mind, one must always create and delete. Without the old to arise from, the new could never be.

  Total Domination could be expressed as a simple Power Word: Kill, weaker targets would have their heart stop immediately. If that was resisted, then the target would decide that they wanted suicide as quickly as possible – it was impossible to override the mind’s survival instinct with mere puppeteering – or it could be expressed as pettily as a Queen’s psionic masturbation with a mating drone whom she wanted to roleplay with immaculate detail in her bedroom boredom.

  When two minds fuse together to become greater than the sum of its parts.

  Clan Boucher was one of the three so-called ‘Muskian’ Clans, a moniker lost to time, elvans descended from the progeny of the elite Godlike Being known as Elon Musk. Elon Musk perished before he could undergo apotheosis to become an elvan himself. The three Muskian Clans were: Clan Boucher, led by the Queen Sidarael Boucher. They were the only ones who bothered to try and realize their long forgotten and deceased patriarch’s dreams of colonization of Aryss, which of course turned out to be a nightmarishly bad idea. Clan Wilson, the most populous Muskian Clan on Reath, led by the Queen Vivian Wilson. And Clan Zilis, known for advancing the magick that made the psionics possible, a magick the Beings originally knew as Neuralink, and led by the Queen Arcadia Zilis. There would have been a fourth Muskian Clan, the Clan St. Clair, but Elon’s fourth consort had not borne him any gynous, and so none of the Godlike St. Clairs lived long enough to ascend to elvan.

  Luna - a revolution of the moon around Reath, only once a rev twenty-eight, but mostly thirty or thirty-one rotations, or what the Godlikes called a ‘month’. Inconsistent. One needn’t keep track of these anymore after the move to the rote-of-rev system – a change ushered in by the spirits. Why anchor the protocols of measuring time to an errant measure of the moon’s synodic period, which is more accurately 29.5306 rotations? The luna was worthless.

  A spirit woven refreshment composed of mostly water, caffeine, cannabinoids, nicotine, ions, amino acids, and simple carbohydrate, it was a brownish liquid just thinly viscous enough as to be unnerving. They made it in two variations, this was the vassal’s miruvor which was extra strength and without flavorings. It tasted foul. The normal version, what the orcans took to calling ‘elfkola’ which they bought from rogue traders, was designed to taste like something approximating to Coca-Cola Classic. This was opposed to ‘orcan kola’ much more akin to the original thing, made with actual Protorcan coca leaves and kola nuts.

  Cybernetic bacteria, the prototype form of the spirit, and still used for rapid healing measures.

  Determining prices, recommending consumption, detecting patterns in images, generating art, and almost, but not quite, passing Turing tests: what the Godlike Beings called ‘self-reinforcing machine learning’, although the spirits had long surpassed anything approaching a mere machine.

  The Godlikes would call this ‘googling’. It was an elvan who best described the feeling of being able to do it subconsciously as thus: “It’s like, when you’re reading a book, and there are a bunch of informative footnotes, and you only need to read them if you want to? It kind of feels like that except for real life, all the time.”

  What’s in your head?

  Grating on what exactly she did not remember, for chalk had not been used as a writing instrument for hundreds of revolutions, but all she knew was that it was the most horrible shrill noise that seemed to scratch at her from the inside. Of course, Malevolent knew what a chalkboard was and chose the sensation precisely.

  An advanced form of telepathy, the psion could access the senses of the spirits, or others in the psionic web, and perceive outside of their space and time.

  The same used to lobotomize them. How ironic. Or, perhaps, just poetic- in a sick and cruel way. Physical surgery, but of the crudest form. Advanced physical surgery was handled by the spirits. This retiring of a lesser soldier, a vassal at that, required such trauma towards their hosts that the spirits were forbidden from committing the severance on their own, as a failsafe. For what stopped a sinister psion from forcing the spirits to do so against another elvan, if there were no safeguard in place?

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