Qrelling

I move through the train cars at a good clip, slowing between cars only because these junctures always make me nervous. There is hardly a soul on this train, but it’s enough to warrant my presence here. I can feel that things are progressing too slowly, I have missed my target somehow and now I am moving away from him. Disaster is eminent.
“Still no visual.” I say scanning the car. My voice, transmitted by the nano mics implanted in my hair follicles, reaches Zenith back at mission control as though we were standing shoulder to shoulder.
“Copy that.” Zenith’s voice sounds in my ear. “We’re reaching critical here.”
“I know.” I tell him. And I do, I can feel it in my rising pulse, the dizzying sensation that fills my head. “The third car, the third car.” I mutter under my breath and finally a little louder I announce, “I’m going back to the third car. He should have been there. He must still be there.” I turn on my heel and retrace my steps, jogging as I go, barreling through those doors between cars. Things are really hot when I reach my destination, my head is swimming.
“Ava, you’re running out of time.” Zenith’s voice is anxious. I scan the car. An old woman taking a nap, two small girls playing a clapping game besides a mother reading a magazine, a young man bobbing his head placidly to music only he can hear.
I push into the passage between the second and third car, standing right in that in between space that terrifies me. There is a whistling sound and I notice a maintenance flap that opens to the outside of the train.
“God.” I gasp, though I don’t believe particularly in any God, “He’s outside, he’s somewhere on the outside of the third car.”
I slip through the flap, holding tight to the hand grips mounted to the side of the train. The wind hits me with an icy blast and I find myself clinging to the side of the train, bathed in the pale light of the tunnel. There he is, holding onto the outside of the car just a foot away from me, red faced, perspiring, waves of anguish and fear radiating from his body.
He has a small black beard, closely trimmed. There’s only a brief moment in which he looks over his right shoulder and stares with surprise at the woman clinging to the train beside him. Then I started Qrelling.
All that I need is that moment of eye contact. In that instant I establish a connection, I begin to speak with them in a language beyond languages, I begin to unravel time and reality as though they were strands of yarn in a multicolored scarf. There are many possible moments, this moment is only one possibility, one possible choice.
For this man, for instance, this is a moment in a string of moments that may lead to him detonating a bomb that will wreck the train ending his life and the lives of most of the other passengers. One of the little girls in the third car may miraculously survive. But like pearls I lay the moments out for him, showing him possibilities that lead him away from anguish, away from suffering, away from death and destruction.
Some Qrellers could help this man to get off of this train, but maybe a week, or a year later he hangs himself or takes a rifle into an elementary school. Maybe another Qreller is there to stop him, or maybe not.
I have a talent and it is this: I can lead this man into a possibility where he never harms himself or any other being ever again. It is a matter of being able to see far enough, of holding the attention long enough, and most of all , of being able to maintain the contact with the target in order to take him with me on this journey.
I am showing him the possibilities, leading him through a labyrinthine web of moments, offering him a way that he could not find on his own, not just saving him in this life, but in many possible lives.
Finally we find it, that way, a translucent stream flowing through a perfect array of pearly existence, Ariadne’s thread. I extend my hand and he clamps onto it, tears streaming from his eyes. We are still there when the train arrives at the next station and the rest of the team helps us onto the platform. He grabs hold of my hand again before we part, his eyes are the wide eyes of a man who has seen for the first time to the center of his own being; the heart of the labyrinth of existence.
“Thank you, thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I say. There are tears in both of our eyes as we part.

Back at HQ Zenith shakes his head heavy with thick dreads and grips my shoulder grinning wide, white teeth gleaming in his dark face.
“You did it again. That’s a perfect record. 23 Ava, with no loses. No one in this division has ever come close.”
“It was a close one though.” I sigh, realizing finally that it’s over, my work for the moment is done. “You want to stop at the tea garden after operations are tied up here? I could use a warm cup of anything.”
Zenith grins wider and rubs my shoulder soothingly. There is a strange moment in which he doesn’t answer me. He only looks at me from behind that frozen grin. Then he says:
“Ava, there are some people here from Lancre.” We stare at each other.
“What do they want?”
His smile softens and he gives my shoulder another squeeze.

What is this emotion that we are feeling together? Elation. Lancre employs the most elite team of Qrellers in the world. They have access to the best and most innovative technologies and are contracted by the major global players, those whose infra structures reaches from Primus to Bedrock in their territories; the UN, the Tri-American Federation, and The Peoples Republic of Asia.
Sorrow. I’ll be leaving our little project funded by the local government and the team that trained me, the team I’ve grown with. I take a look around at our basement with white tarp functioning as dividers, Zenith’s folding table littered with electronics that look like something raided from an antique store specializing in 20th century home entertainment devices. I look back into Zenith’s familiar dark face finding his eyes again.
“23 Ava....23. With what they have at Lancre, imagine what you can do.”

Lancre is all steel and glass rising through two terra regions and breaking the surface of Primus. Hardly anyone can afford access to Primus anymore with its authentic blue skies. All of that glass takes advantage of the opportunity to flaunt such a rare view.
I am seeing true sky for the first time in this possibility. It is strangely unsettling, like looking at a prosthetic hand, except this is the real thing and what I am accustomed to is a prosthesis.
My guides through the halls of Lancre are a man and a woman in crisp black suits. Her hair is pinned in an immaculate French twist and her skirt is tight, very feminine. She does all the talking, he is silent with broad shoulders and a close haircut. He looks bored.

They have given me a brief tour of the facilities, introducing me to some of the technological advances being employed here, letting me shake hands with some of the legendary names; Felix Kaffa, Nora Al Gi. Now we are in an office of stainless steel fixtures seated at a long table.
Her name is Mia and she has already shown me the figure that will be my yearly salary, a number too large for me to comprehend the impact it will have on my life realistically. A number that simply means I shall not want for anything, ever again.
She has shown me the brochure of the living quarters offered to all Lancre Qrellers. We are free to obtain residence elsewhere if we wish, but the Lancre penthouses are equipped with state of the art equipment and facilities to help Qrellers relax and recharge. They are also above Primus where I will have access to fresh air and sunshine, and one is mine for the rest of my life, once I sign the contracts and become an agent of Lancre.

Mia is laying the contracts in front of me.
“The wonderful thing, Ava, is that you will take no more than six assignments a year, we have enough agents to rotate. You will never be overworked or overtired. And you won’t have to worry how things will get along without you because every agent at Lancre is as qualified as you are.” She tells me, handing me the thin stainless steel pen. “All I need is your signature. Then we’ll go over and select your penthouse or I can take you to meet a property manager I know who can help you find something else suitable. Tomorrow we can introduce you to your team and you can begin conditioning.”
I start to read the contract. And then I see it, the strangest thing.
“Excuse me, what does this mean?” I ask Mia
“Oh, it just means that when you are Qrelling you can’t arrange things too far. You can heal no more than three probable instances of violence.”
“What? A lot of people can’t Qrell beyond three instances. Why would you stop someone who can do more?”
Mia smiles
“Well, Lancre is a private firm. Someone pays us to avert the first three. Someone else will pay us to avert the next three."
I stare at the contract. A cold sensation washes over me. The temptation is not too strong. I feel only a slight sense of loss as I set the pen down. What is being gained is limitless, immeasurable.
“I’m sorry.” I tell her. “I am happily employed by the City States of California.”
Mia laughs a little as if she thinks I am joking. She falls silent as I stand.
“Thank you for the tour. I think you should show me out now.”
Show me back underground where I am needed, where they are wandering blind through the darkened passages of a coiled maze. I can show them the way, a way beyond skies of any color or comfort, or currency. Show me out now. I will show myself out. I will show us all out as I have always done, as I will always do, as I am doing now. Extending a hand, uncoiling a line, traveling to the center and back out again. I think you should show me the way out now, but if you won’t, then I will.

Journey Man

The prediction of a lengthy trial filled the television reports. In his own imagination, the possibility of a court battle was laden with steel doors that opened into caged terminals of a grayish hue. He remembered that it had been June when they knocked at his door. A certain conviction was already in their eyes, while a warrant was held in their hands. A doctor of animals, plants and invisible substances, his laboratory was covered in pencil sketches and colored photos of ferns and foxes. Did they have either of those in Iraq? He could not remember now. He had lived in the foggy Empire for years, coming here before he had learned to talk to women, long before he had ever mounted a porcelain skinned woman with painted lips and frosty colored hair, still smelling, as he leaned his face into the side of her neck, like chemical spray.
He was a doctor of unseen ailments, the kind the people behind windowless rooms complain of, the kind that are never treated. He would find them, he would go to them from the comfort of his padded rocking chair, projecting himself into the night sky when the world around him was asleep, yet awake with shining stars. In the ammonia drenched halls that would never lose their stench, he would wander unseen and look through the nurses desks and up their skirts. He might have felt a little guilty peeking into areas that usually required invitation, but the guilt added to his pleasure, it added to the bulging heat that pressed his cock to the front of his pants like an animal roaring to be freed from its cage.
Night after night, the conspiracy between darkness and his projections continued as he slipped into their sleeping minds. As their bodies twitched with dreams and their mouths drooled with backwards thirst, he poked inside, twisting memories and erasing old habits. Into the spongy fabric and folds, he sowed bright thoughts so that when they awoke, they were taken with the sudden urgency to write or draw or copulate. The nurses, thick legged women with large bosoms and a missing smile where often dragged into janitor closets, held steady and helpless with the aid of wooden broomsticks in at least one of their holes. Others were overtaken on the smooth Formica of cafeteria tables, spread-eagled and invaded while on-lookers in pajamas sipped their coffee and held onto the small Styrofoam cups with renewed strength and awakening libidos.
The conspiracy was silent, a combination of nature’s endless cycles and his own creative will. The minds he danced in were already bungled, warped by years of medication and outdated psychiatric methods. In the green hills of Glasgow, the patients exploded and pounded, gleeful and alive with rage and raw sex, pouncing upon small cats creeping in the night.
It was reported that the judge could not figure out what to do. The charges reeked of a time when the air was foul with the aroma of fires and burning flesh. Surely, they were beyond these sorts of accusations? This was a time for logic, for true science and detective work that went beyond the accusations of sleepwalkers and violated women still wet with sweat and semen. In the night, their sentences were vague and scattered. The patients in white, stumbled upon their words. The nurses, no longer white in their uniforms, gasped with each breath, each sound born with eternal pain while the cellular memories of flesh ripped violently apart, red and steaming were their words, each syllable plunging with cries.
Could the engineering of this plan have been so precise? Was it a plan? Or just a tinkering with pattern and light? A fusion of innumerable cords buried deep within the brain. Nothing died. No, perhaps something in the women died as their mental burns continued to eat through their failed power. The structure came down when roles were reversed, when the power of locks and needles and charts failed, it was this that ignited the long-flaccid army of cocks. The cylinders that had been protruding flaps of skin without the ability of attack.
Some nights, within the same district, he would watch from the rooftops of high brick buildings as bombs were abandoned in silver trash cans and metal canisters of mutated air where buried beneath trash heaps or the sleeping drunks that crowded within doorways. He watched as the nails of the city began to rust. Parked cars moved without drivers. The busy lights of intersections failed to light and attackers ran forward in zeal as the banks spilled money into the littered streets.
In that area, slightly less modern than the nearest city, there were still pay phones on every corner and every one seemed to be wired to his mind. From the comfort of his chair, he saw evidence of the mayhem. He could hear every call ringing, he could listen in on their conversations, thousands of them at once. Could all this be because of his two dreams? The timer was set, ready to explode when the signals from his body arose. Perhaps it would be in the morning, when he reached for his woman without another thought in his mind. Maybe it would come when the faulty plumbing failed him yet again and cold water burst forth from their tubes, a cold straight from the arctic. The bombs within him were ready, and yet, the codes were vague. Clouded from his waking consciousness like a wonderful insurance plan safely kept within his laptop.
And through this, he lived. Air continued to circulate within him, moving down and along each vein in a cycle that lasts only as long as men do. Perhaps the bombs would detonate on the moment of his last breath, as his body finally shuddered with its last release, or perhaps, on the precise moment of his next orgasm, just as he reached the cliff edge and toppled over the side, down, into the waters of sleep below. Extremists danced by nature, and he was indeed one. He intended to drink his wine, fuck his woman, laugh heartily and often, tinkering with it all until fear overwhelmed him. Until he saw the black mouth that awaited him, the colorless void that waited to swallow him once again. It would not kill, it was not a prosecutor. It only took back what was always One. From the height of his flights, he knew that he knew almost nothing. The crowds below him were large compared with his small scraps of knowledge. Could he even call it that? Entering their minds was a skill, an ability, a way to push around the day and play at night. But was it knowledge? He aimed for a discovery and he could take himself beyond the earthly confines of his skin to manipulate the tactile world, but he asked himself, was he indiscriminate? The third year into his initiation had commenced three moons ago. They had given him the title of "neurosurgeon," was it a joke? Perhaps this is why he took to venturing into sleeping minds, twisting and reorganizing their contents while their thoughts cavorted in other realms. The realization hit him like a brick, the title was so obvious, his tendencies so opaque that everyone could see his evolving tendencies but him. On that night, they had known. The health of his heart quickly spiraled into a void as he felt flush with embarrassment. They had seen him before he had understood himself, and this, being so naked, brought the blood out of his cock and into his face.
In his room, upon the soft sheets of his full bed, he remembered the charges against him. They were speculative at best. Cash would easily take care of the prosecutors, and perhaps he needed to counsel the defiled women as they slept. They would never know he had entered their dreams, they would only wake with a sense of finality, an overwhelming urge to release their resentment. Soon, they would be cooperating with his will. He would ready himself for his visit, he would focus late in the night, as his woman lay sleeping in a silk robe with nothing beneath to conceal her fleshy thighs. He would shower soon, preparing his body for the venture, although it would, as usual, stay behind. This night, the hot water ran from the pipes, scalding his skin with fires from Hell. The water washed away his doubts, his fears, his worldly life. He was loaded with pure intent, his mind fixed as firmly as a blackened terrorist. He sat in his chair, a soft yellow lamp faintly illuminated the far left corner of the room. He rose above the lawns of Britain, beyond the residential community, beyond the city. He had not earned their scorn. He had merely changed the tables on them without permission. He had brought up to down and down back up. Their university training could not have prepared them for the raw bestiality of men awakening from slumber. The bars of prison and the medications of science could not contain the twisted synapses of freed men. No, they were not really free, but momentarily, they jolted out of their stupor. For a brief time, before tougher men came with batons and needles, they moved down the halls like lions searching with hunger for prey. This is what the legal system would never understand. This is where all the verdicts in the world could never rectify the wrongs of cages and electrodes and pills that make zombies of men. He was a hand that twisted their contrived worlds, a wave of dark thought that turned the battle into a covert struggle of visible violence. They could not judge, they were the players of Britain, the small actors that blink beneath the bright spot lights high above the stage. There could never be a trial, these people were not subtle enough to prosecute a terrorist of the mind. Their world, which he was indeed a part of, fostered the need for this role. His was the player with risk tattooed to his forehead. Attack was spelled clearly across his chest. Suicide leaked from his penis. His body resided in this system. Within the mass of these people, he moved with a different sort of intelligence, at least some of the time.
His brothers had not warned him. His task now was greater, much greater than before he had swallowed their blood and piss, before he took their beatings. His ass was opened with heated poles, like the nurses he would one day see, his mouth filled with the thick cream from a dozen spurts of semen…but he withstood the pain, their inflicted wounds singed him with pleasure. While his ass burned, while his back was marked with a whip, while his legs were pried apart; all the while, his cock remained hard, almost steaming with heat. After the seemingly eternal night, his sisters came to lick him clean. A dozen warm tongues moved up and down like liquid snakes, an endless journey that, unfortunately, did come to an end.
Beyond the pain, discovered by another part of his mind that escaped the torture, that had, actually, watched his humiliation with innumerable tingling sensations; that part of him recognized a ghostly feature of the room. A light that slipped from his consciousness just as he reached to grab it. A hazy blue, a cloudy orb of purple that moved like feminine vapor past brutal raptors. His attention would involve itself with the color for a moment, then quickly jolt as a new blow to his back was delivered.
In his padded chair, as he steadied himself for the journey, he felt, in his deepest cells, the history of his body. The journey of his DNA from the mountainous caves, close to what is now known as Pakistan. His mind’s eye could feel the pattern that etched itself out of clear maps, his eyes, a part of that map…his lips, a part of that marked territory. The impending trials were based on the contemporary fear of Pakistan and its dark men, that he knew for certain. He was a terrorist, but not in the way they wanted him to be. Investigated by the police, he was devoid of any political ties. His only links to another society were the vertical scars across his chest and back, but these could be quickly explained by other agencies, other doctors. Pakistan was just another word for Other. He was indeed, Other. Within this population, within the population of earth, he was Other, as purely strange as the touch of the night upon the delicate flesh of the moon.