Trapped

"Exactly!" Myoko gave my arm a squeeze. "A psychic's power is entirely determined by where the initiator settles in. If it lodges in your visual cortex, you'll be able to see psionically. Maybe you'll be clairvoyant: your initiator can link with nanites half a continent away and see what they see. Or maybe you'll perceive auras… which means your initiator communicates with nanites in other people and presents their emotional states as colors. You might even be able to project optical illusions; your initiator sends images from your visual imagination to receiving nanites in other people's brains. Voilà: they see what you want them to see. There are lots of variations-visual processing occupies great swaths of our brains, and you get different effects depending on where the initiator lands within those swaths."

"I suppose if the initiator lands in a hearing center, you can hear things happening far away… or project sound illusions, or maybe hear other people's thoughts, transmitted by their own mental nanites."

Myoko nodded. "That's the idea. Things get weird if the initiator plunks down in an exotic corner of your mind; there was one guy at school whose initiator lived in his primary pleasure center and he could transmit the most…" She suddenly stopped in embarrassment. "Figure it out yourself."

"Lucky guy," I said.

"No," she replied, "very unlucky. He disappeared one day when he left school grounds. Now he's probably chained in some brothel where he has to make sure the paying guests have a good time… or he's playing gigolo to someone like Elizabeth Tzekich, who'll beat him if he doesn't give her orgasms on demand."

Myoko's voice had suddenly filled with bitterness… and her hand on my arm was an eagle's claw, fingernails digging fiercely through my sleeve. "Come on…" I began; but she gave me a look that made me hold my tongue.

"Don't try to comfort me, Phil. If you do, I might ram you through the wall. It's…" Her voice trailed off for a moment. "The threat hangs over every psychic's head. Always. Forever. The only protection is being too weak to interest the sharks. In a lot of psychics, the initiator attaches itself only loosely to the brain. You get a small intermittent power that isn't much use… or a power that takes a lot of strength and effort to activate. People like that-like me-are usually safe: more trouble than they're worth. But if you have a good strong power…"

"Like Sebastian."

She nodded. "Like Sebastian. Then you'll be a target your entire life… until someone finally gets you." She glanced at Sebastian's door. Her grip on my arm eased and I thought she might be ending the conversation; but I still had more questions.

"How do you know all this?" I asked. "About the nanites. How do you know things that scientists don't?"

"Oh, that. Forty years ago, there was a psychic man named Yoquito-came from a five-hut village near the Amazon, never learned to read or write, died young from chronic tuberculosis… but he had a hellishly powerful initiator in some analytic center of his mind, and he was undoubtedly the greatest genius ever produced by Homo sapiens. He didn't just think with his own brain; he could use all the nano around him like extra neurons. Yoquito wasn't the first person to have a power like that, but he was far and away the strongest: he claimed he could draw upon the power of every brain-nanite in the whole damned rainforest."

"So he was smart enough to figure out how psionics worked."

"He didn't just figure it out, Phil; the nanites literally explained it to him. As if they'd been waiting centuries for someone to ask, and were thrilled they could finally spill the secret. They told him about psionics and sorcery-"

"Sorcery?" I interrupted. "He knew how that worked too?"

"Sure," Myoko said. "It operates through the same nanites… just invoked a different way. Sorcerers don't have initiators in their brains; they initiate effects through gestures and invocations. If you say certain words or enact certain rituals, it triggers the nano to do specific things. Picture the nanites as trained dogs: if you say, 'Sit!' in the right tone of voice, they'll do what you want."

"Or," I murmured, thinking it over, "picture them as library functions in an OldTech computer. You invoke the correct subroutine and the nanites behave in accordance with their programming."

"All right," Myoko said, "if you insist on getting technical. The nanites respond to people performing certain actions… and those actions are intentionally bizarre so the nanites aren't triggered by accident."

"You don't think the aliens just invented crazy rituals so they could laugh at stupid humans dancing naked around a goat's head?"

Myoko nodded. "Maybe that too… but weird magical rituals date back thousands of years, well before sorcery became real. The aliens may simply have designed sorcery to match existing Earth folklore."