Complete Atopia Chronicles

“Ahh,” said my doppelganger, “it is not what I want, brother, but rather what we want. You and I, Jimmy. And by the way, call me James.”

He affected a tiny bow for my benefit. Several of the party guests had begun to rouse themselves now, encouraged by the first who was whispering urgently at them. The air filled hollowly with the sounds of clinking bottles and bodies coming awake.

“Come now Jimmy,” scolded James, his brow furrowing, “do you really think your rise through the ranks to a position of such power so quickly was all just happy coincidence?”

He smiled widely as he finished saying this, revealing a mouthful of yellowing teeth and large, sharp canines below his glittering black eyes. The waxy makeup on his face cracked as he smiled and he cocked his head playfully.

“The time for hiding is finished now,” he continued, shaking his head and sighing. “We are not children anymore. The world needs us now.”

Several of the guests were now sitting and watching us hungrily from nearby. Samson was here now too, watching me from a corner in the distance.

I began to recognize some of the faces around me, my childhood playmates I had invented to keep me safe, to keep me company, hidden away in my secret spaces when I was a child.

“You always knew I was in here Jimmy,” he said, looking towards Samson who acknowledged him with a small nod. “Most people with our, ah, condition, don’t get to meet their other selves—just one more of the wonders of pssi.”

He smiled again.

“We have been protecting you a long time now,” James added as he extended a hand to sweep past the assembled misshapen guests, who were all wide awake and encircling us ever closer. “Your children await.”

They were close now, and James reached out to touch one of them who sat down next to him, affectionately placing a hand on its head.

“Has your mind been clear lately?” questioned James, smiling as he ruffled the hair of his favorite before looking back to me expectantly, waiting for an answer.

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” I had to admit, feeling the hot breath of the creatures behind me. “The past few years, my mind has been gaining a clarity that…” I was at a loss for words.

“That what?” questioned James. “That escaped you before? The mind is cleansed with pain, isn’t that right, Jimmy?”

As he said this the eyes of the assembled flashed darkly as they leaned closer towards us. James splintered us off into a sensory imprint of the private world I had burned so long ago, feeding the pain of the writhing creatures pinned to the walls into my pleasure centers. I shivered and gasped slightly.

“Nice isn’t it?” said James smiling. “But we aren’t children anymore.”

Another splinter overlaid a new scene, a man we once knew growing up, Steve, who’d worked in the aquaponics group with my dad, the both of them playing privately together with proxxids after work. He was groping through a dark tangle of underbrush, desperate, someone was chasing him. Suddenly a flash of metal tore into him and he screamed, terrified, and his blaze of pain coursed through my system like rain soothing a parched desert plain.

“Not just pain,” explained James, “but through the careful research of our friend Dr. Granger, we now have the ability to recognize the direct nerve imprints of fear, hopelessness, guilt, hundreds of layers of desperate emotions, and mix these into a symphony of the senses.”

He was on his feet now, surrounded by our minions, holding a claret jug of dark red wine in one hand and a large crystal goblet in the other.

“Ah, the sweet melody of loneliness,” he sang out, and yet another splinter called up Olympia Onassis, wandering desperately. Her loneliness resonated in my auditory channels and then merged into a gentle, fearful caress across my skin.

“The taste of heartache,” James added while an image of Cindy Strong filled another splinter as she stood over the grave of Little Ricky. I could taste her heartache filling my mouth, an aching sweetness tinged with the hints of regret.

“And the soft caress of hopelessness and despair,” he laughed, and an image of Hal Granger hung between us, sitting with a doctor and looking down at a medical diagnosis of some painful, terminal disease, his fear of the world forgetting him coursing into our veins like a sweet melody.

“And pain, of course pain,” said James.

A hundred other worlds splintered into my sensory system, gorging it with terror and hurt and searing pain, as I watched people burning and butchered in their own private hells. I gasped, my body wracking itself in pleasure as I looked up at James, wiping tears from my eyes.

One by one I could see how James had captured each one of these souls, ferreting out their needs until they voluntarily ceded control to him, to us. At the apex of it all was Susie, all of the pain and suffering channeled through her neural system. She had borne the pain of the world, and now she would bear this pain for our world.