Synthesis - An Online Novel (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} shadownano) wrote,@ 2007-11-25 19:25:00 |
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| Entry tags: | 4598, day 24, day 25 |
Synthesis Parts 24 & 25
"So, how have you been?" Gen nervously asked, leaning against Trevor's kitchen counter. In addition to the few words that she spoke, her body language spoke volumes, screaming out how uncomfortable she was to be left alone with him.
"I've been well," Trevor said, although his tone betrayed the confidence that he wanted to convey. "I've been spending a lot of time hanging out with Cassie lately. She's really cool."
"Oh yeah?" Gen said, not entirely convinced of Trevor's estimation of the woman. "Isaac said that they met up downtown, and that he didn't seem to think she was all that cool."
"Well, no offense to your friend there, but I don't know if he is really the greatest judge of character."
Genevieve was prepared to unleash a witty rejoinder to his remark when, suddenly, Isaac burst back into the apartment, angrily sliding the glass door shut behind him, leaving Cassie alone on the balcony. Without looking back towards the balcony, Isaac walked with conviction, getting close enough to Gen so that he could whisper in her ear. "We need to get out of here. Now," he said, sharply accenting the final word.
Gen blinked at him, twice, not understanding why he was suddenly so adamant to leave. "I'll explain later, but we really need to get out of here now." This time Gen didn't question him at all, nodding sharply.
Gen hurriedly said her goodbyes to Trevor, and her and Isaac exited the apartment building, Isaac walking as quickly as his legs would allow him to.
"Okay, would you mind telling me exactly what that was all about?" Gen asked, trying her best to catch up to Isaac's quickened pace.
"It's her. That woman. She's worse that we even could have thought!" Isaac tried to explain, although he was sufficiently distracted and enraged that his words dribbled out as a stream of consciousness mess, the complete thoughts that were in his head coming out in singular phrases.
"Okay, I get it that you don't like her," Gen said firmly. "But what it is about her that you don't like? Please, explain it to me!"
Isaac stopped, paused, and took a deep breath, locking his eyes into Gen's as he continued.
"I'm sorry to be so random all of a sudden," he said. "When we were out on the balcony, Cassie was making stuff appear. Not just any stuff, though. She somehow had access to one of my deepest fears, and that's what she created. I don't know how she did it, though. How would she know that was she created would be able to affect me like that?"
"I don't know, that's really strange," Gen said. "If you don't mind my asking, what was it that she manifested?"
"Spiders. One at first, and then a larger group of them."
"Well, no offense, Isaac, but that's a pretty standard sort of fear, right? Maybe she just got lucky!"
"No, it wasn't that," Isaac said dismissively. "It wasn't just that she made spiders appear, it was her whole temperament about the whole thing. It was like she knew me, Gen!"
"That's pretty weird," Gen admitted. "Maybe she has extra abilities that you didn't have? Like she could read your mind or something? I don't know how all of this is supposed to work."
"Neither do I," Isaac admitted. "I mean, this is something that is so far outside of my regular reality. I think we'll have to get Doug involved in this again - he's the only one, I think, that knows enough about all of this to stop her."
Later, Isaac headed back to Doug's neighbourhood alone. Gen was unable to join him - she had an audition the following afternoon, she explained, and was horrifically unprepared for it. Alone, Isaac wandered the city streets, which took on the labyrinthine qualities that unfamiliar roads always took late at night, the building facades and storefronts all seeming to become one in the darkness as their windows were darkened and their entrances locked and barricaded.
After a few hours of fruitless searching, Isaac finally gave up, returning to the streetcar that he was becoming all-too familiar with and taking it home.
In the morning, after feeding Trebuchet and ensuring that he was continuing to return to a state of healthiness, Isaac completed the same journey in reverse. The soothing clacking of the streetcar took on an almost hypnotic quality, transporting him into a fugue state between consciousness and unconsciousness. It was only the eventual ringing of his cellphone that finally took him out of that state.
"So, did you have any luck trying to find our friend?" Gen asked him from the other end of the phone.
"No, none at all, sadly," Isaac said, sighing into the receiver as he did. "I was planning on heading back down to the same area today and resuming the search."
"Well, before you do that, I need you to come back downtown. Our friend Cassie is back at work again, and you need to see this."
"Oh god, what's she doing now?"
"No, really, you need to see this," Gen reiterated. "The action is going down at the corner of College and Bathurst. Just get here as fast as you can, okay?"
After transferring streetcars, Isaac found himself slowly moving up Bathurst, the combination of traffic and lights causing the vehicle to stop almost continuously. Each time that it did, he lurched forward slightly, momentum combining in order to make him slightly nauseous. Eventually he tired of this, and exited the streetcar, deciding to walk the final block and a half in spite of the unseasonal bitter coolness that was filling the morning air.
In retrospect, he was sort of glad that he approached the intersection on foot, because it allowed him to fully take in the absurd majesty of what was happening at the street corner.
Standing in front of him were dozens of people, all moving in unison, dancing. The marched forward in lockstep, and then backwards, and then shimmied both to their left and to their right. It was a simple, unpretentious dance, the type that looked like it could be taught to anyone that had at least a passing ability to move their body rhythmically. Standing in front of the group, facing the rest of them, was Cassie, barking out commands like a band leader. "Now, it's just a jump to the left!" she shouted, all of the group jumping to their left as she did. The sound of all of those people, moving in unison, echoed throughout the street. "And then a step to the riiiiiggght," she then sang, her vocal chords stretching as she sang. The group again moved in unison, although this time they did so in a much quieter fashion.
"Oh my god," Isaac said to no one in particular, both amazed by the audacity of what she was doing, and impressed by the style with which she was doing it. He hand never seen a live performance of the Rocky Horror Picture Show before, and he had never in a million years assumed that his first experience of such a show would be in such a public gallery.
As the crowd continued to time warp, Cassie turned around, her gaze fixing on Isaac as she did. "You!" she screamed out, pointing a finger at him as she did. Her hod on the crowd broken by her distraction, the rest of the crowd stopped dancing, but all turned and looked to see who this new interloper was.
"What are you doing here?" Cassie demanded as she started to walk towards Isaac. Still in lock step with her, the crowd started to walk as well. She stopped and turned to face theme. "Wait, stop, wait here. We need to have a moment of private conversation."
As the crowd stopped advancing, Cassie walked up to Isaac, sticking an accusing finger in his face. "What are you doing here?" she demanded. "I thought that we understood that you were going to stay out of my affairs!"
"Oh, I Just happened to be in the neighbourhood," Isaac lied, hoping that, whatever details she knew about him didn't extend to knowing what his schedule was.
"Oh really," Cassie said. It was clear from her tone of voice that she didn't believe him, although she had no way of actually knowing for sure that her feeling was right.
"Yeah," he continued, "I had a bit of time between classes, and I decided to just kind of wander around the neighbourhood a little."
"Seems like a bit of a long way to walk," Cassie said, trying to coax the truth out of him.
"I like walking."
"No you don't," she scoffed. "You forget how much I know about you."
"You don't really know as much as you think you do," Isaac said, his words becoming firmer with each sentence. "What exactly do you think you're doing here, anyways?"
"Actually, this is the coolest thing!" Cassie said, her eyes lighting up and her complete demeanour changing. "Okay, so you know how we have this ability to make stuff, right? Well, I found a way to use it to, like, make people do stuff as well. It was actually really easy to do. I just made these little nanite-like things that hacked their way into peoples' cerebral cortex, and affect their ability to work independently, which makes them extremely susceptible to anything that I tell them to do." She continued to babble on about neurotransmitters and brain chemistry, doing so with the type of rabid enthusiasm that only a true aficionado could muster.
Isaac paid no attention to what she was saying however, because he was too busy being horrified by the implications of what she was saying. It wasn't just a case of influence, or of convincing people to walk out into the street and dance along to instructions, she was actually changing the structure of their brain. He realized now that what he had said to Gen the day before had not been hyperbole. This woman actually was evil, and he needed to do something in order to stop her from continuing to do what she was doing.
"You seem a little distracted," Cassie said to him, which was such an understatement that he almost didn't register her complaint.
"What? Oh, yeah, I guess I kind of am," he admitted. "Do you realize what you're saying, though? What you're doing to these people - it's just not right!"
"Oh, give me a break," Cassie said in a mocking tone of voice. "Right and wrong don't even work into it. We have power, and they don't. Well," she said with a laugh, "I have power, at least. You don't really have it. I wonder if that means that I can make you do whatever I want."
As she spoke, a small, silvery slip of energy started to emerge from her forehead, working its way to Isaac. It looked like an eldritch inchworm as it did, moving in a winding, unnatural pattern towards him.
Isaac lifted up one of his hands, batting the thing away from him with it. The slip of energy fell lifelessly to the ground, writhing on its side. Isaac looked down at it, and then back up at Cassie, who was looking at him with a combination of fear and disgust.
"How did you manage to do that?" she said.
Isaac smiled as he responded, "like I said, there is a lot about me that you don't know," as he stepped on the piece of energy, squashing it.
"Okay, fine," she said, "I may not be able to affect you directly for some reason, but that doesn't mean that I can't affect you in other ways. I'm going to really enjoy this," she said as she turned to GEn, who had been standing incognito by the street corner. The same drama repeated itself, a silver strip of energy working its way out of Cassie's body, moving towards the other girl.
"Gen, watch out!" Isaac said to her, but it was too late. The strip of energy connected with the girl's body, sending her into convulsions, and causing her to drop down to her knees as she did. Cassie made an upwards-moving motion with her hand, and Gen rose from the ground, turning to face the two of them as she did.
"Oh, this is going to be fun," Cassie said with a devilish smile. ''Okay, Jennifer, here's what we're going to do."
"Her name is Genevieve," Isaac said through gritted teeth.
At the suggestion, Gen started to walk, although the large group of people that was mulling around in the street meant that there was little actual danger to her person.
Angrily, Isaac walked up to his friend, grabbing her by the arm firmly. "Gen, stop," he said, squeezing her arm as he did. She paused for a moment, but then continued her march. "I'm serious, Gen, quit it!" Isaac said again, this time raising his voice as he did. The girl stopped this time, turning to face Isaac.
"It's so hard," she said, her voice full of terror. "I don't want to move, especially since I don't want to give her the satisfaction, but I can't stop myself!"
"It's going to be okay," Isaac said, "we're going to get out of here, and then everything's going to be alright, okay?" His voice was firm, yet calm, and it soothed her enough that she was able to stop her forward motion. "Don't let go of me until we're out of here," she said.
"Okay, the first thing that we need to do is go find Dr. Van Dyne," Gen said once they were safely out of the range of Cassie's influence.
"What do we need to see him for?" Isaac asked, puzzled.
"We need to get him to reverse your hypnosis Gen said in a matter-of-fact tone.
"What? Why? Don't you remember what happened the last time?" Isaac said.
" know that it's a scary thing, but it's something that we need to do," Gen said, her voice filled with restrained anger. "That woman needs to be stopped, Isaac, and you're the only one who is capable of doing it. We need for you to be able to access your abilities in order to stop her!"
Isaac tried to call Dr. Van Dyne, but there was no answer at his office, or on his cell phone. "Maybe he's in with a client," Isaac said. The two resolved, then, to go to his office, reaching it with a surprising amount of speed. When they got to his building, they were surprised to find it empty. This surprised Isaac, as the last time he had been there, it had been bustling with activity. Something that was even more surprising when they arrived at his office and found it similarly empty. While Gen stayed near the front door, Isaac penetrated deeper into the office, finding the doctor's inner sanctum. As he entered the room, Isaac realized that there was someone else in it, seated at the desk chair, facing out towards the window.
"Doctor?" Isaac asked, hoping to get the man's attention. "Doctor Van Dyne, I don't know if you remember me, but I was a patient of yours recently, and I need you to, well, undo my therapy."
There was no response from the person seated in the chair. Isaac then approached the chair, putting his hand on it to turn it around. He knew it was rude to do so, but he so badly needed to talk to the doctor that he felt it was excusable. Isaac was shocked as he turned the chair around, however, and found Dr. Van Dyne seated in it, a knife sticking through his sternum.
"ISAAC!" he suddenly heard Gen yell from the front of the office, "can you come out here?"
Isaac walked towards the front of the office, in a state of total shock as he did. With each step, he ran through possible scenarios under which the doctor could have met with his demise. No matter which scenario he created, however, they all boiled down to the same one, unchangeable factor: Cassie.
Isaac's shock continued when he reached the lobby area of the office, and found Gen standing there with a pair of police officers. "What's going on here?" Isaac asked the the group.
"We received an anonymous tip that a murder occurred here earlier today," one of the officers said in a flat tone. "Would either of you happen to know anything about that?"
"Well, there is a dead body in the private office, as a matter of fact," Isaac said, realizing how incriminating it seemed for him to admit that, "although we just got here and found him that way. Neither of us knows anything about how he got into that state." He knew that this was a lie, because he knew in his heart that Cassie was, somehow, connected to this death. He didn't, however, know of any way that he could explain to the officers how he knew this, so he thought it would be best to avoid the topic of her completely.
"Mind telling us what you're doing here, then?" one of the officers s asked. He was an older man, with the gruff kind of voice that one can never seen to master until they had reached a certain age.
"My friend here was a client of Dr. Van Dyne's," Gen hastily explained. "He was experiencing some side effects as a result of his treatment, and so we were coming here in order to find out what the doctor could do in order to help him deal with those."
"I see," the other officer said, pulling out a notepad and starting to write down the details of what Gen was saying. "So," he continued, "I suppose that this is all something that can be verified by Dr. Van Dyne's records?"
"I would imagine so," Gen said.
"So, sir, you say that you found the body inside the doctor's office?" the gruff, old officer asked Isaac.
"Yes, that's right," he said. "here, if you come with me, I'll show you."
Several hours later, all of the evidence had been collected, and their depositions had been taken, and Gen and Isaac found themselves having to take a long ride home from the police station. "I overheard them saying that they found some DNA evidence," Isaac said, "so hopefully this time I won't end up being falsely accused of anything!"
"So, do you think it was her?" Gen said after a few moments' worth of silence.
"Cassie, you mean?" Isaac said, although he was fully aware that that was what she meant.
"Yeah, Cassie," Gen said. "I mean, we know that she is capable of a lot, but do we really think that she could be capable of something like that?"
"I wouldn't put it past her," Isaac said, shrugging his shoulders as he did. "What are we going to do now, though? Without Dr. Van Dyne, I don't know how we're going to get rid of the mental blocks that he put in place for me."
"I have an idea, actually," Gen said with a smile. "A friend of mine was telling me about guided meditation, and how it can be used to get past subconscious blocks that we've set up. He showed me a couple of the basic practices involved in it, we could always give that a try." The way that she said it, it sounded almost like a question, her words lilting upwards near the end of her sentence.
"Yeah, I guess that would be a good idea," Isaac said. "I mean, it couldn't hurt, right?"
Later, they arrived to Gen's apartment, and started to rearrange the furniture in order to make it more conducive for the meditation process. "Uhm, I don't really know what the best way to sett this up is, but I guess we could do like a feng shui sort of thing?" Gen said, her voice fluctuating between question and statement.
"Okay," Isaac said, "I really don't know anything about any of this stuff, so you're going to have to show me the ropes."
They set the furniture up, and sat opposite one another, soft cushions beneath them and legs crossed. "Okay," Gen said, "to start, I want you to just visualize and empty plane."
"What, you mean like a 747 or something like that?" Isaac asked.
"No, I mean like, just a horizontal plane. Do you remember taking art class in high school? Just like that."
Isaac did his best to do so, although he imagined that the result looked more like something out of the movie Tron rather than what he imagined that Gen had been describing. "Okay," he said, "what do I do now?"
"Well, now that we're into the visualization process, I'll guide you through it - you're going to be creating a landscape that's a representation of your brain, and interacting with it. I want to say, though, that at this point it's absolutely necessary that you make sure that you keep your eyes closed, and stay focused on the visualization. Okay, well, we need to get inside of your brain, right?" Gen said. "So in order to get in, we first are going to need a door."
Isaac screwed up his face and concentrated, doing his best to visualize a door to his own brain in front of him. Finally, an old oaken door appeared. Isaac walked up to it and examined it. It was dark brown in colour, with cracks throughout, showing the age of the wood. In the center of the door was a giant bronze knocker, resting on an exotic-looking cast of an open, lidless eye. Without thinking, Isaac reached forward, grabbed the knocker, and rapped it against the unblinking eye. Despite the complete lack of walls or landscape around him, it echoed sharply, growing louder and louder as the seconds passed.
Eventually the sound faded away, and as it did, the door started to creak open, undergoing the same pattern of growing echoes as it did. Inside the doorway appeared to be nothing but darkness, but Isaac entered regardless. As soon as he was in, the room that he was in became illuminated, and he found himself to be inside a giant cavern, the walls of it smooth, looking like they had been gradually worn away by an underground river. The western half of the room was filled by a lake, the water appearing almost black from its depth. Isaac found himself both amazed by the beauty of the image in front of him, although at the same time he wanted to wince from the cliched nature of it all.
"Okay," he heard Gen say, "what do you see around you?" He related his new surroundings to her, and she got quiet for a few moments, trying her best to process the incoming information. "Okay," she finally said, "I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of psychology is a little wonky at best, but it seems to me that the lake must represent your subconscious. So, if the hypnotic blocks are located within your subconscious, we'll have to get inside there!"
"Wait, are we sure about that?" Isaac said. "In my psych class, I remember reading that the psyche is supposed to have three parts to it, isn't it?"
"Yeah, if you listen to Freud, but does anybody really do that any more?" Gen said, the smile obvious in her voice.
"And since when did you become the expert on psychology?" Isaac said, slowing walking over to the edge of the pool.
"I used to date a guy that was a psych major," Gen explained. "I don't remember much about what he used to prattle on about, but one of the few things that I do remember is that most psych people don't really follow Freud at all any more.
"Okay, well, I guess that's good to know," Isaac said. "So, what am I supposed to do with this lake here?"
"You're not going to like this," Gen explained, "but I believe that you're going to have to go in there."
Isaac was afraid that that was going to be what she said. He had never been a strong swimmer, and was perpetually afraid of accidental drowning. However, he reasoned, since he was in his own subconscious, drowning was probably not something he needed to worry about.
Wading into the water, Isaac was surprised at first by how warm it was. He had always associated deep waters with coolness, but this was definitely an exception to that.
As the water came up to his knees, Isaac started to be able to make out some of the general contours and depths that lay beneath the murky depths. He knew that, after only a few more steps, he was going to reach a precipitous drop off, and would need to prepare himself for that.
Taking a deep breath, Isaac plunged under the water, doing his best to push himself further and further down. As he did, he found there to be no pressure on his lungs, as if none of the oxygen in them had actually exhausted itself. He knew that, since he was only really a psychic representation of himself, that this would be the logical outcome, but at the same time, he found it difficult to reconcile that with the reality that he knew about being underwater.
As he reached further underwater, he noticed a small light coming out of the bottom of the lake. He swam down to it, as fast as he could, hoping that whatever it was that was causing the glow would reveal to him what he was doing here.
Isaac reached the source of the light; it was a small treasure chest, the light seeping out of the cracks between the main body of the chest and its lid. There was a rusty old padlock keeping the lid of the chest down, but as Isaac grabbed a hold of it in order to examine it, it collapsed, crumbling away into nothingness. This obstacle gone, he shoved the lid of the box open, peering into it as he did. Inside, there was nothing but a ball of light, which seemed to glow more intently now that it was not being hidden away.
Again acting entirely on instinct, Isaac thrust his hand into the chest, attempting to grab a hold of the light. It had no substance, however, and rather than being able to hold on to it, his hand moved through it, permeating into his flesh. As it did, the ball of light started to dissipate, the energy flowing from the ball into Isaac's hand, and then throughout his entire body. Eventually he started to glow, a strange bioluminescence that felt roughly like all of the skin in his body had fallen asleep at the same time.
As he felt the energy rush throughout his body, Isaac's immediate reaction was to swim upwards. He did not want to be limited by the water anymore - he had an urge to sing out to the heavens, and knew that he would not be able to do that as long as he remained beneath the water.
