Psychic Pollution
14 February 2013 12:49![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skonen_bladesThe skeletal youth with bad skin and missing teeth has just voided her bowels in the corner of the room. She’s crashing hard and jonesing for the drugs. She is in a fugue of need. She moans.
The five-year old girl in the room with her is shouting, almost barking with terror, and pounding on her own head, shaking with the assault of horrifying imagery.
To teach the young, unshielded psychics how to perform shutdown and fence procedures, we’d lock them in the same room with drug-addicted child prostitutes. Broken, near-death scarecrows with memories so toxic that anyone with unfiltered access to them would immediately be scarred. It was the psychic equivalent of standing too close to a furnace. Waves of the worst experiences humanity has to offer shaking off through the shudders of withdrawal. What this teenager would do for six dollars and what people did to her for that amount exposed the worst that people could become. No one pays that little to have a good time with someone this far down hell’s staircase. It’s always humiliation and abuse. Sometimes it’s not even sex, just violence. She was only nineteen but she looked like a hard forty.
The psychic was screaming. We’d found her on a small asteroid farm near Tentalus. We’d paid her stoic parents an amount of money that would keep them in the black for ten years. They had four other children. This wasn’t uncommon. Amongst those practical folk, it was an acceptable practice, almost like winning the lottery. She hadn’t been pulling her weight with the chores anyway. She couldn’t focus. So far, we’d been nice to her but the exercises were going slow. She didn’t understand that this was a military facility.
This was the whip. We’d given her the carrot; food, warm place to stay, other psychic children her age, toys, and a comfortable time in our kindergarten. The whip was that she would be brought here until she could learn to shut out harmful psychic pollution. We were teaching her to block with her mind.
After a year of this, we would teach her to attack.
Watching this from the observation booth, I remember when I went through the same process so many years ago. Even now, as a veteran of several messy campaigns, the memories make me sweat with fear.
tags
The five-year old girl in the room with her is shouting, almost barking with terror, and pounding on her own head, shaking with the assault of horrifying imagery.
To teach the young, unshielded psychics how to perform shutdown and fence procedures, we’d lock them in the same room with drug-addicted child prostitutes. Broken, near-death scarecrows with memories so toxic that anyone with unfiltered access to them would immediately be scarred. It was the psychic equivalent of standing too close to a furnace. Waves of the worst experiences humanity has to offer shaking off through the shudders of withdrawal. What this teenager would do for six dollars and what people did to her for that amount exposed the worst that people could become. No one pays that little to have a good time with someone this far down hell’s staircase. It’s always humiliation and abuse. Sometimes it’s not even sex, just violence. She was only nineteen but she looked like a hard forty.
The psychic was screaming. We’d found her on a small asteroid farm near Tentalus. We’d paid her stoic parents an amount of money that would keep them in the black for ten years. They had four other children. This wasn’t uncommon. Amongst those practical folk, it was an acceptable practice, almost like winning the lottery. She hadn’t been pulling her weight with the chores anyway. She couldn’t focus. So far, we’d been nice to her but the exercises were going slow. She didn’t understand that this was a military facility.
This was the whip. We’d given her the carrot; food, warm place to stay, other psychic children her age, toys, and a comfortable time in our kindergarten. The whip was that she would be brought here until she could learn to shut out harmful psychic pollution. We were teaching her to block with her mind.
After a year of this, we would teach her to attack.
Watching this from the observation booth, I remember when I went through the same process so many years ago. Even now, as a veteran of several messy campaigns, the memories make me sweat with fear.
tags