On my toes, I walk like I'm on the moon.
Floating a few meters forward with every step, I jump up a little higher on the last one to ascend above the stage with an impossible lightness, like I weigh nothing. Then I drift back down like I'm falling through water. Tip-toeing to my corner, I exhale a sigh.
I feel so free. So relaxed. Psionics are the best.
"Fives," the Lead says, then pauses for a moment. "Your field of battle will be within the Halo Stream itself. Clash however is required in order to reach the core of your opponent's mind. The first to subdue the other is the victor. Your metrics are resistance, ferocity, and control. You have a question, Five-Five?"
I lower my hand. "What exactly does 'control' refer to?"
"How well you exert your will over the conflict."
"Thank you. And what do you mean by 'subdue'?"
"Incapacitate, render unconscious, or draw out surrender."
"Understood. No further questions."
"Touch off when ready."
I glance up at the displays. Anything we see in the Halo Stream will be projected for the others to witness as well. Good, they'll all see my ability front and center. Especially the Black Helmets.
Now that I'm directly facing her, I can tell Zero was right. Four-Five is an angry looking girl with a nasty curl to her lip and a cruel look in her eyes. She wants to win. Badly. She's intending to prove something to someone.
The difference between us is that I don't want to win; I know for certain that I will. Four-Five's instability, her agitation, her insecurity, they're all openings. I'm going into this with such an advantage it isn't funny. How she doesn't realize that is beyond me.
Running final checks, I find that my synchronicity with the Halo Stream is at eighty two percent. I'm in decent form, despite everything.
The Watchers are here.
I'm ready to impress.
I'm ready to win.
I touch off the stage and float.
A few seconds pass.
As the silence drags on and we wait for the starting shot, her anxiety only grows. She wants to begin. She wants to do this quickly. Another mistake.
Being a Five is not a swift endeavor.
The shot goes off, and we clash. Neither of us move, but we sink hooks into each other's minds and tear. I bide my time and go on the defensive, intending to counter whatever she does. Colors rush past my mental vision, my imagination becoming tangible, so intensely vivid it feels as if I'm truly within it.
The Halo projects the psychological battle we're undergoing in real time, visualizing it as these violent shades and shapes and contortions. They will not understand. They will never understand. No one but a Five possibly could.
I can feel her searching, hooks pulling, needles prodding in my mind. I let her do so, unbothered and poised to strike.
Watching. Waiting. In control.
She picks through my memories. I have to question if she realizes I'm letting her do this so easily. She finds the intangible textbook of information I've absorbed about fireflies, which makes me laugh a little out loud. I can feel her frustration as she keeps digging for something useful in the seemingly random assortment of my curiosities and interests.
Metabolism, Swedish history, anime featuring tanukis as characters, open air root systems, the Ottoman Empire, technocracy, how oatmeal is made, different types of beetles–so many beetles, glass blowing, how to catch moths, Franz Kafka, code breaking, crimes in the middle ages, Christian heresies, Eltz Castle in what used to be Germany, types of biblical angels, victorian ball gowns, nuclear explosions on film, the star Sirius.
She's angry with me. She's questioning why and how I have all this in my head. Part of me does too. She's wondering where anything useful is, but I hide it all behind the mountains of information I can easily force to the forefront of her attention.
When she wonders if this is all that's in my head, I try not to laugh again, then slip her a couple carrots.
Why am I here?
Why do I exist?
What is my purpose?
Bland topics, in my opinion.
She seizes them all too readily. Maybe she thinks I'm truly still lingering on such questions. She thinks I'm like her, a little girl scared of her place in the universe, afraid of her lack of understanding.
I'm not. I take solace in not knowing.
Existence is ruled by chaos.
She buries her fangs, manipulates the Halo Stream like clay, forming the first truly concrete and sensational abstraction of our fight.
I'm lost in a cosmic emptiness.
Floating, weightless, cold. The stars are infinite, too many to count. The endless space contains multitudes, contains me, and everything else in the universe. I am so small. So meaningless. There is so much out there that's empty, and I'm barely a piece of dust.
I used to fear the thought, but now I find comfort in it. The emptiness is relaxing. It's so quiet. I feel as though I can truly breathe. I'm at peace. I am here, a lone particle quietly dying in the void, and I'm perfectly fine with that.
A ripple goes through my universe.
I wake up from the illusion. Easy.
That was bait, and here's the switch.
I trade places with her, looming over a crystal sphere in perfect darkness. The only thing before me is the glass container holding her in exactly the same prison she put me in.
She's trying to breathe, but there's no air. She's flailing for something to hold onto, but there's nothing. There's so much of so little. She is viscerally afraid of this. No way. Why would she send me to a place she herself fears?
It's a mistake, bringing me so close to her core.
Part of me wants to draw this out, to keep toying with her. Give her another chance to try again, maybe raise my resistance and control scores a little higher. But I don't think that would reflect very well on me. It's a bit sadistic for what my interpretation of the Program would entail. They don't want us to be cruel to each other, only to fight and win.
So I leave her there, and I don't give her a chance to escape, nor any hint that this is all an illusion, nor that I'm the puppetmaster to her terror. I smash the glass in my hands, picking the shards apart and snuffing out the stars, forcing her to float in perfect blackness.
She likes that even less.
I almost feel bad for her. So distracted, the path to her core is wide open. I again consider giving her a chance, being sloppy with my excavation, but I decide against it. Best to get this over with quickly.
I'm in a dark hallway–it's the same as those of the Complex, but black, with all four corners extending before me blinking a weak green. The doors at the end are the same as the Complex's doors we pass through every day. A lot of us have the same core structure. This place is all we've ever known, after all.
I consider knocking. I think that would be really funny. I highly doubt she'd be able to do anything even if I did. So I lift my knuckles and knock three times. Then I start laughing to myself, shaking my head.
Oh, I'm awful.
She panics and thrashes in her illusion, terrified of what's happening that she can't discern. I was expecting more of a conflict here, more defensive measures, or some kind of trick. But no, the doors squeak right open on rusted sliders.
Inside the room, I see a boy. It's Four-Four. The one who beat my Four. He keeps getting higher scores than Four-Five in training, and she hates it. She hates feeling inferior to him.
Why him and no one else? Oh. Whoa. She likes him. She has feelings for him. This anger stems from feeling rejected. Walked on. Stepped over. She thinks he hates her, and knows her outbursts aren't helping, but she can't stop it. She needs him to notice her, but he won't.
Poor thing.
Hm. Should I snap her neck?
Stab her to death?
Crush her with force?
Nevermind, I know what to do.
My hands close around Four-Four's throat. I clench as hard as I possibly can and his form changes to hers, body going limp, incapable of fighting back. I throttle her without any emotion to it. This is simply how I win, so I do it without feeling anything. I'll choke her until she passes out, and that will be that.
In my hands, she rattles like a dead snake, eyes rolling back, face going pale and lips turning blue. I'm not holding her anymore, I'm gripping her heart. The ventricles thrash against me in protest, but I crush harder. Blood leaks from between my fingers. The muscle tissue pumps faster and faster, more frantic, more erratic.
I'm hurting her. She's afraid.
"Please," she cries into the void. "Please! I forfeit!"
I hardly hear her, the words passing through my head before they're gone forever. The rhythmic beat in my hands is hypnotic. I can't seem to let go. I don't want to. I've never felt like this before. I've never felt so alive. I'm exerting my will over another. Not in a simulation, but a real person.
I've felt powerless for so long, stepped on by my own Deca, invisible to all the rest, hated by all, but here I am with her heart in my hands and I will not let go. It's an illusion. It's not real. I'm not holding her actual heart. Only the one in her mind, and it's bleeding on me.
I am all red. It tastes like salt and iron. It feels hot, sticky. I marvel at the sight of it. This is what it feels like to be alive.
Her heart races faster and faster, then gives out. It's still, lifeless cardiac tissue in my hands. Hot but growing cold. I've destroyed her. I've won. Without any doubt, I am victorious over her.
From thousands of light-years away, I hear the alarm bell, and I withdraw from her mind back into my own before settling back into my body, having been stationary for all this time, floating, floating, floating
She's collapsed on the floor. There's a ringing in my ears that I think is from the rush of it all before I notice the Orders hurrying in to throw her on a stretcher. No, that ringing isn't just in my ears, it's over the dojo's speakers.
In a daze, I blink a few times and sluggishly look up at the display screens. Her injury report is completely red. Her EKG has flatlined. Since I'm looking at it, the screen showing my vision repeats itself into the infinite, but hers is just… black.
My lips move and my voice croaks, "Did I… kill her?"
"Five!" Mister Mason shouts in my ear. "There you are. Come on. You need to come with me."
"Did… I kill her?"
I let him take my arm, floating along as he goes, like I'm only a balloon. Everyone is staring at me, watching me go out into the hall. I don't know why. Why are they looking at me like that?
I don't get it.
I don't get it.
I don't know what's happening.
Mister Mason takes me to the sensory deprivation pods. It's a punishment for others but I know it isn't for me–I love being in them. Without a word he puts in his code and one opens, so he lets me inside. Lowering myself into the warm salty water to lay back and cease to be, I hear him sigh before the pod closes and severs me from reality.
Where nothing can hurt me.