skonen_blades

Orson Welles once became a fortune teller
(In disguise back when not every person knew his face)
To try and discredit them
To debunk them

He set up shop and would say things to customers like,
“Your life changed when you were around fifteen.”
“You have scars on your knees but you’re not sure where they came from.”
“You like rules but you don’t like being told what to do.”
(Everyone’s life changed when they were around fifteen)
(Active kids skin their knees all the time and forget)
(No one likes to be told what to do)

But once he’d amazed them with his cold reading skills
They’d crack wide open

He would use leading statements
And go off the resulting body cues
To give nebulous guidance
Practical advice and comfort
That only sounded specific
Proving to himself that so-called psychics
Were con artists preying on the desperate
Or counsellors in wolf’s clothing
He didn’t take anyone’s money
He did it for a full day as a lark to prove a point

Until near the end of the day

A woman walked in and sat down
And before she said anything
Orson said,
“Oh, no. Your husband passed away last week.”
And she started crying
Because yes, he had

After comforting her, he packed up shop
And stopped doing fortunes
Scared, intrigued, confused, and wary
He didn’t know how he’d known about her widowhood
She wasn’t dressed in black and she wasn’t that old
He only knew that on some level
He’d become very good at reading cues
To the point that his mind was adding stuff up
On a level that wasn’t conscious
A mental underworld doing Sherlock math
A savant starting to form
And giving answers

He knew that if he continued,
He’d start to believe that he had become psychic and powerful
That he’d succumb to the wrong certainty
Believing in his own myth

I think about this situation often
How practice can make perfect
In a way that scares you
That opens you too much
That shows a result you need to run from
Shaken by your own mind
And left exposed
By the plain existence of magic by another name



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The 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.



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“We’ll start with the feelings of the attack. That will help the imager,” said the psychologist.

Julie bit back tears and remembered the alley where the assault had taken place.

Julie was sitting in a police interrogation room. A police software sketch artist sat across from her along with a registered boosted telepath and also a psychologist educated in the ‘fine points of non-invasive memory retrieval trigger techniques’. He was a low-grade hypnotist, in other words.

The three of them looked intently at her as she looked above their heads at her own reflection in the mirror. A black eye and one arm in a sling. Bruises and a broken nose that would heal in time but her face would never be back to the way it was.

Every mirror would remind her of that alley for the rest of her life.

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she looked at the computer monitor screen on the desk in front of her through the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut. She felt the electrodes at her temples. The pattern on the monitor screen swirled in a fascinating way.

She let the fear come back. She let the sensations of surprise followed by horror rekindle in the base of her stomach. She let the shock of her purse strap biting into her arm remind her of that initial pain. She remembered being pulled from the light.

“We’re getting something,” said the telepath in a small voice and turned a few dials on the table in front of him. His eyes stayed pointing at the ceiling no matter how he moved. It was disconcerting.

“Hooking in.” said the software sketch artist.

Black petals fluttered across the screen in front of her like ink on a raven’s wing. It was the flourish of a matador’s cape at a funeral and then she was looking at the alley where the attack took place. Black bricks and steam from the manhole. Water dripped off of the pipes.

“Now,” said the psychologist, “remember that this is not happening to you. This is happening to another Julie. This is a memory being brought back into visualization. It cannot hurt you. It is a fabricated simulation. You are safe here with us.”

“Okay,” said the software sketch artist, “I’m getting something. Male.” He smiled and gave the thumbs up to the psychologist who rolled his eyes and jerked his head towards Julie. The sketch artist glanced back at Julie and his smile disappeared instantly. Red-cheeked, he looked back down at his input module and re-commenced his work.

On the screen in front of Julie’s face, she saw the face take form. It was lit from the back by a weak streetlight. The face was hard to make out.

The telepath winced. “It’s going to be tough. He got to work right away," he said to his colleagues, and then, "Julie, I’m taking as much of the pain as I can to let you through but you’ll, uh, have to be quick.” He stopped staring at the ceiling and closed his eyes with a hissed intake of breath through clenched teeth.

Julie smelled smoke.

“Smoke.” said the telepath and wrinkled his nose.

“Smoke, that means….” said the sketch artist and typed a few commands into the processor.

“Was the assailant smoking, Julie? Did he have a cigarette?” asked the hypnotist.

Julie’s legs stiffened. She could feel sweat starting to make the grip of the electrodes loosen on the sides of her head. She remembered.

On the screen in front of her, a cigarette came up to the assailants lips. He inhaled. The tip of the cigarette cherried bright red siren-light onto his features from the crack under hell’s bedroom door. A handsome man except for the acne scars, the sweat, and the cold drive to do harm held glinting in his glassy eyes.

He breathed smoke out into Julie’s face and flicked the cigarette away. She could feel his thick, callused hand fishing around under her skirt and grabbing a hold of her panties as her legs thrashed.

“We got it!” said the digital sketch artist with a proud laugh before colouring again and shutting up.

He hit a button and the smoke-filled monitor screen in front of Julie went blank. The lights inside the room returned to full brightness.

“Okay, Julie. We’re done. You’re okay. On the count of three, you’ll wake up, uh, refreshed and happy and well-rested. One. Two. Three.” Said the therapist. For a second, Julie thought that he was actually going to snap his fingers.

The telepath slumped forward, let out a pent-up breath and opened his eyes. He was bleeding a little where he’d bitten his own lip. He stood up, shivered, and dusted imaginary dust off his suit.

The technician took out the disk to take it to processing and warrant control. He left the room quickly, embarrassed about his lack of tact during the questioning.

The telepath left next with a backward glance at Julie, mopping the light sweat from his brow.

The hypnotist stayed in the room with Julie. The door closed behind the telepath, leaving the two of the alone in the interrogation room. The hypnotist put a hand over Julie’s good hand on the desk.

“You did good, Miss Jalkin. Julie. We got a clear shot at him. The attack happened not that long ago. The nurse will take one last look at you and you’re free to go.” He said.

He seemed to go through a bit of an internal struggle before he took out a pen and his card. He wrote a phone number on the back and then tucked into the pocket of Julie’s blood-stained blouse.

“That’s my home number. You call me anytime you want. I mean it.” He said and then he left as well, whistling.

Julie sat alone in the room and waited for the nurse, feeling like she’d just been assaulted again.





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