Mind and Flesh Read online

  Once I have emptied all the organs in the hole, subsequently covering the rapists, I try once more to lift the pigs.

  I finally succeed to budge them. Then, bit by bit, I drag them next to the hole and kick them inside. My clothes are covered in mud, blood, vomit and excrements.

  I look in the grave. A disgusting mess of naked pink skin, organs and blood. Worse than a murderer, I am now a butcher.

  I pick up a shovel and proceed to fill the grave with the mount of soil next to it.

  I wonder if the rapist was crushed by the pigs and died from internal bleeding. Or if he bled out from his testicles. Or if he will now suffocate.

  ***

  I am lying on the floor, in the barn.

  What happened?

  I try to get up.

  I can’t. I am tied.

  I look at my body.

  Breasts. I am female.

  I struggle to free myself.

  I hear grunting.

  What is happening?

  The pen door opens.

  A pig enters and walks towards me while grunting.

  I hear others grunting and squealing. Are they all around? What the fuck?

  The boar comes closer to me. It climbs on me.

  No! No!

  The pig penetrates my vagina with its twisted penis.

  Noooo! I don’t want that! I want him to go away!

  I squeal.

  Someone laughs.

  I am sweating. After a few seconds, I realize that there is no pig on top of me and that I am in bed. I can still smell yesterday’s scents. My nose is still full of it. Excrements, animal sweat and juices, blood.

  Fuck, what I did yesterday... That was disturbing. I got my revenge and then some. I tortured and executed those rapists. They got what they deserved. Although… If I am a murderer now, what do I deserve? Is what I do worse than them, since I take lives?

  Actually… I don’t think so. I take lives, and they don’t feel anything else anymore. While those that rape force other people to suffer and carry the burden for the rest of their lives. I still think it is worse, even if I might be biased by not wanting to judge myself too severely.

  I too have a bad impact on the people around me. For instance, I completely changed the life of the neuro-engineer’s wife. And I kind of feel bad for having killed the pigs. The pig metaphor did not turn out such a fun plan, since I could not be sure of how much of their past selves there was inside the animals and evaluate how much the human part in them was suffering. And it did not feel like punishing the humans, it felt like punishing the pigs, which does not make me feel good. And I end up being just what my wife feared, someone that tortures animals.

  However those rapists… Good riddance. What I did will protect all the innocent girls they would have met had they still been alive. There is no changing what they did in the past, but the future is free of them. Except that there are probably thousands like them still alive and free to hurt people. Humans are fucked up. I wish I could change that.

  I go to the computer, enter the password and open the e-mail client. Time to set up a meeting with the government asshole.

  ***

  I enter the restaurant. Luxurious furniture. Near the counter, a large selection of desserts and pastries behind glass. Not exactly the kind of place where I would have such a meeting, but he picked the place. I scan the room with my eyes. Some couples are sitting at the tables, or some business men and women together in groups. None of them is the guy I am looking for. I look for a table more isolated, near a corner. I find one and sit there.

  Quickly thereafter, a waiter comes and gives me a menu and walks back. I am not planning to order anything yet, but I open it anyway. Shit, that stuff is expensive. I close the menu. My sleeve falls off, revealing numerous trails of blood.

  I need to be more careful! I close the sleeve buttons of my shirt. I had to wear a black shirt today, since when I tried to put a white shirt, blood was visible on my chest and arms. I kept cutting the skin of that body, again and again, almost everywhere I could reach. I cannot wait to get out of that awful shell.

  My penis wants to get hard. I feel it bumping against my pants, increasing in size. It happens at times to times during the day, maybe following my testosterone cycle? My testicles must be about to burst, full of the accumulated sperm that I did not discharge in a good while. This penis disgusts me too much to even hold it, besides taking a piss. I even tried to cut down there. I barely scratched it, and blood started flowing at an impressive rate. I panicked and applied band aid. I still feel the light tickling of the bandage as I change my position in the seat. Removing the band aid is going to be painful.

  The entrance door opens. There he is. That asshole. I fucking hate him. He looks around and sees me. His smiles broadens and he walks towards me. He says “Hi” and extends his hand for me to shake.

  I hesitate. I need to shake it to keep up appearances, but… I fucking hate him. I swallow my pride and extend my hand. His grip is firm. I tighten my own grip. I want to rip his hand off. I smile. He smiles back, and we both let go. He sits down in front of me, nonchalantly takes my menu and scans through it.

  “So,” he says. “What will you pick today?”

  “I don’t know”, I reply. I did not check the orders, just the prices.

  “Then, might I suggest pork?” He smiles broadly. “I’ve heard from the chef yesterday, he said that today they would receive quality meat of freshly slaughtered pigs, straight from the butcher.”

  What the fuck? Is he doing this on purpose? How could he… The waiter silently drifts to our table. The asshole promptly orders two meals based on pork and some wine to accompany the meat. He did not let me choose. He must definitely know.

  If he knows, why didn’t he capture me yet, like last time? Or arrest me? Does he lack a definitive proof? I do not even think that he is the kind of person that bothers himself with details like proof.

  “Let’s chit-chat before going into business”, he announces. “I hope you didn’t reveal what you are working on to your wife?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Good.” He marks a pause, and then smiles. “How is it going with her?”

  “We are getting divorced.”

  “Oh no! I am so sorry to hear that. What happened?”

  I ponder his question and what I could reply. This is a personal question, too personal, perhaps I should just answer him to go fuck himself. Politely.

  However I do not feel like antagonizing him would be the best course of action. He could organize my abduction without anyone noticing, and I would be trapped in this body forever. Or dead. Moreover, he could be useful to my plans, since right now I think we both want to deploy the machine for large scale use.

  “Unsolved issues that finally blew out of proportion,” I tentatively answer.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, really. Let us not delve on this sour topic and talk about business.”

  “Yes, yes. With great pleasure. So here is my offer. With the… knowledge gained from working on the machine… I want you to help build a different model. A wireless one if you prefer, that does not rely on having to put a helmet on the subject. I want one that you can install in a room or carry with you that reads mind from a distance. Do you think you could do that? Needless to say, you would have substantial funding.”

  So this confirms my suspicions. The reason why he did not arrest me over the murders, or why he did not lock me in. He knows he should rather keep me alive and working for him. I am the only one that can build that machine for him. Did he even… play his hand into forcing some situations to happen, in order to corner me into using the machine so that he sees what it can do? Or am I being paranoid?

  The waiter appears on the side and deposits our plates in front of each other. He opens a bottle of wine, and asks for someone to taste it. The asshole signs him with confidence, drinks some wine and looks like a prick while he appears to chew it as an expert would. He says that
it is perfect, the waiter smiles and leaves.

  “Bon appétit,” he announces before diving in his food with great appreciation.

  I imitate him with far less conviction. I do not really want to taste pork right now. Not after the disgusting scenes I initiated. I engulf food almost without chewing, trying to hide my disgust. If I finish the meat quickly, I can then have a better time with the vegetables around. I would rather be cutting through the flesh of that asshole in front of me. Spread his guts all over the table as he watches, still alive. Then stab forks in his eyes before serving them for him to eat.

  “So,” he finally says, “did you think about my proposition? Would you build a machine according to my specifications?”

  “I can’t do that myself directly, but I can… introduce someone to you. I can do the interface with him and he will take care of the rest.”

  “Oh…” He seems thoughtful for a moment. Is he reading through my intents? Is it bad if he does? “Just to be clear, will you be passing the torch to that person, or do you intend to work together?”

  “I want to… pass the torch.”

  “I see, I see. Oh well, anything that is required for that project. I can organize the meeting with that person if that makes things easier for you.”

  And here I thought he was an asshole! I guess he is nicer when our interests align. Enough with the sarcasm, I will use his assistance until I can reach my objective. Until then, as long as I am on his side he will help me out. Although I wonder, this help does not come without any strings attached. How does he plan to keep me on a leash?

  “So the mind reading, how accurate will it be?” he asks.

  “It will not be as clear as you would want, I suppose. First, reading from a distance will be very difficult. The subject will move often relative to the sensor, and there will be a lot of interference and background signals. The use of new detection technologies and a lot of calibration will be necessary before the machine can work without neuro-helmets. This will be a tough piece of engineering. Secondly, the big issue remains to translate the subject’s neuronal signals into images and sentences. To this day, with our current knowledge only a rough translation can be done. However, using this system on a large scale and numerous people will indeed help make quick breakthroughs.”

  “And the coding of the machine, are you on top of that?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I thought so,” he grins at me.

  No! I went ahead of myself, caught up in my thoughts on the machine. I am the only one that would have been able to understand the coding part of the machine. The neuro-engineer whose place I took would have been able to observe crudely how the machine works, but he would still miss the algorithms that allow using it. By acknowledging the coding so easily, I might have just given him another confirmation on who I really am. However, he still does not seem to act in a hostile fashion towards me. He needs me.

  “And then will it still be possible to modify the minds despite the distance?”

  “Reading the signals is already a challenge in itself, modifying them from a distance will be an even greater one. There is no guarantee that we can control electromagnetic waves of such precision from a few meters away. And again the fact that the subject moves might make it even more difficult. If it comes to that, when the subject is asleep it could have a higher chance of success.”

  This work will prove very difficult. I am not even sure that it can be done. I need to make it happen. This is my objective, and I am glad that the aims of this asshole align to mine. However, as long as no one else can oversee my code, ultimately I am the one choosing what the machine will do.

  “Why do you want the machine for, exactly?” I inquire.

  He looks around before answering in a lower voice, “I shouldn’t make any official comment, so this will just be my personal view. I probably shouldn’t even talk about this, but at this point, you probably do not care, right?” He sneers. “You could probably guess anyway, I don’t even know why you ask. Reading minds would be very useful in a lot of situations. Spying on our allies, enemies and some industries. Negotiating with our partners. Finding wrong-doing citizens, such as terrorists and pedophiles. The possibilities are endless, there are no laws against it. And since we write the laws anyway… This technology would have a good future.”

  “And the brain manipulation part?”

  “Oh. We are navigating in even less ethical seas here, but since you are now a precious collaborator, I will let you in. With the possibility to influence the mind, everything will become the way we shape it. We can push specific candidates for elections even more easily than now. Force other countries to vote the laws we feed them. Influence contractors. Convince corporations to cooperate to our demands. Change the mind of our opponents. This is juicy! Imagine a world where everything is under control? We can gain any advantage we want. Reading minds is already beneficial, but controlling them is the next step. “

  He pauses. “Needless to say, all of this is extremely potent and dangerous. We wouldn’t want it to fall in other hands than hours. I will take the required measures if that situation happens, you can count on that.”

  He smiles and moves his head closer to the side of his plate, looking very attentive. He grabs a glass and moves it slowly to the point on the table that he is fixing. And then I see it, too. A small spider, crawling on the white tablecloth.

  Suddenly, he slams his glass on the table, imprisoning the spider inside Why would he do that? Couldn’t he just brush it away? He doesn’t seem panicked as if he had arachnophobia, so this is not an instinctive reaction. He has a victorious smile. His behavior is intriguing. Is he going to show me that he captured it, a little boy’s trophy to prove his strength and cunning?

  No, he doesn’t even look at me. He is focusing on moving the glass little step after little step. Until he stops trying to move the glass and keeps applying pressure instead. He grabs a knife. I look closer. He managed to put the glass on the junction between the four right legs of the spider and his body. And he… he cuts those four legs with his knife! He then pulls away the glass and frees the spider. The spider is trying to escape as quickly as it can, but its legs doesn’t carry it forward. It then clutches the four remaining legs next to its body and stops moving.

  He prods the spider with the tip of his knife. The legs deploy and jerk as if in protest, then they go back to an immobile position. He blows on the spider to throw it off the table, and grins at me.

  “Enough playing, who is that person that you want to meet?”

  ***

  The doorbell rings. I give a glance at the dining table, checking that everything is nice and neat, and then I quickly pace to the door and open it. A handsome man in his thirties is at my door, holding a bottle of white wine.

  I shake his hand. “Please come in,” I say while grinning. He hands me the bottle. “Oh. You really did not need to… This is embarrassing…” Especially considering the situation. He is the little red riding hood bringing food in the basket and giving it to the disguised wolf.

  He stares at me, looking a bit lost “Should I remove my shoes?”

  “Yes please.” That is really nice and polite of him. And also, less dangerous if he struggles.

  I lead him to the dining room and ask him to take a seat.

  “I am much honored to have been proposed to work with you,” he says excitedly. “Your last paper was amazing. I included your methodology in my own work, and it yielded way better results than I ever had before.”

  “I am glad”, I smile with a corner of my mouth.

  Talking about these publications is awkward, as they are not mine but from the neuro-engineer whose body I took. At least I am familiar with the work of the neuro-engineer in case he starts to ask questions.

  He seems very restless. He genuinely looks impressed to have been asked to work with me. This is the first good thing about this body I took over.

  “I will heat up the pizza,” I say. “
I am sorry, this is nothing fancy and I feel bad that you brought wine for that... I had a few cold beers at the ready. The thing is, as you have probably been told already, this joint collaboration is on a highly confidential project. We couldn’t afford having this present discussion in a public place. So it had to be done at home, and, well, I am not a cook.”

  “I understand, don’t worry, I will enjoy some pizza. I just expected something more formal than pizza and beers, but I am all up for it!” He smiles broadly.

  I leave to the kitchen, get the pizza and insert it in the microwave.

  The government guy and I were in a public place, sweet irony. However this meeting right now has a whole different purpose.

  While the pizza is warming up and the cheese is melting, I grab a cork screw and a few ice-cold beer bottles that I bring to the table “We can still have the beers before the wine, I will put the wine in the fridge for later”.

  He acknowledges. I pick up the first pizza and bring it to the table. I serve us slices, open the beers and toast our bottles with each other so he has to start drinking. I engulf a bit of the cold beverage. I have to be careful not to drink too much. On the other hand, I want him to drink as much as possible. In order to achieve that, I must make him feel comfortable and distract him from examining my alcohol intake. “A few of those and we will be full of out-of-the-box ideas for the project I will talk to you about!”

  “Aha alright, if you say so. Thank you for the food and the beer!”

  “Go on, eat, drink!” I try to have both a cheerful and authoritarian tone.

  After a few moments of seeing him follow my recommendation, I initiate conversation again by making small talk “Did you find the way here easily?”

  “I have a GPS in my car, and I just had to follow. No missing road or any surprise.”

  “Good! How long did it take you?”

  “About four hours, I’d say.”

  “That sounds like a long and boring ride!”

  “No, it was ok. I played a few podcasts, one of the debates was quite heated and it pumped me up!”

  “I see, that’s nice.” I open another bottle and give it to him. “Do you have a wife and kids?”