As I sit here, burning, freezing, scribbling with a hand that was amputated not so long ago, I am left to wonder… How did I let it go so wrong?
I’m sorry. I should explain. Buckle in and suit up, whoever finds this, because the concepts and events I will explain here are better left unexplored. But as a self-proclaimed ‘scientist’, I simply cannot allow all of my valuable data to die with me.
My name is David Callows. Up until recently, I worked as a psychiatrist for a company researching into mental and physical disorders. My work was off the books, meaning that aside from my assigned testing, I was given free reign to poke and prod the patients I was given in whatever manner I liked, so long as I didn’t kill them.
Before that, and in my youth, I was fascinated by all kinds of magic and otherworldly arts. The world and its education tried its best to convince me that there was no such thing, that all aspects of the world either could, or would be explained by science.
I always found it arrogant to believe science had a handle on all things. To me it was like playing chess, but your opponent was adamant that the knight was not meant to be in the game. And as you played, the void left behind by the missing piece was only partially accounted for by other pieces.
Reality was quite the same to me. It took me many years before I finally found the name of my ‘missing piece’. Perception.
My teenage and young adult years were spent researching into how perception played its part in the game we call ‘reality’. At 22, I devised a small experiment, one that would remain entirely theoretical until I was given the means to test it.
It is as follows:
It was through this idea that I discovered the key between personal and true reality. Personal reality is directly tied to your own perception. Mastery over your own perception can increase the quality of your life. You see good when there isn’t, light in the dark, etc. This can also turn on you, usually in the form of a medicated ‘bad trip’, where your perception is taken entirely away from your control, temporarily changing your personal reality.
If this seems far fetched, and I know it does, let me counter. Christians see random acts in the world as miracles, but only because they perceive the world through Christian eyes. Same as the scientist, who studies the events with the expectation of their falsehood, perceives nothing but random chaos. More concrete, perception alters reality on a physical scale. Light acts as a particle when observed, but a wave when ignored.
I began attempting to master my own reality not long after I devised my little theory. It took years of effort, a few psychotic breaks, and many sleepless nights listening to whispers designed by my own mind, but I perfected the art.
Safely and quickly, I can convince myself of things that are not true. Furthermore, I can do so with such an intensity that my body undergoes a measurable physical response. I can induce cold shivers, sweating from heat, and audiovisual hallucinations if simply given a few moments to think. I can taste and smell coffee in the next room, and feel the grasp of another hand in mine. All the while, in true reality, I am alone in my house, perfectly comfortable at 70degrees F.
At 31, I was offered the position of an experimental psychiatrist, and told that it was my various publications of my theories that had drawn them to me. While my public work would not relate to my study, I was promised the opportunity to explore them at my leisure. They would supply funding, patients, and strict confidentiality until I was ready to make my reports known to the scientific community.
The experiments I conducted lead me to a new set of rules for the art of perception. I apologize for the lists, but as I said, this is not a dying man’s cry for help. I am simply a scientist hoping to save his work.
I started small. Suggestions given subconsciously to the patient. Right, my patients. Usually either volunteers or convicts sent to me under the agreement that attending my sessions and cooperating would decrease their sentence.
The room was held at 72degrees F, perfectly comfortable, yet I’d enter wearing a jacket and gloves, complaining of the cold. Through our conversations, mostly about themselves, I’d find ways to mention the cold, either complaining about the easily seen thermostat being broken, small smoke packets in my hands to create the fog of breath as I blew into them, ice packs in my pockets to make my hand freezing as I shook their own.
Within an hour or two, most would reach for the available blanket and bundle up. Halfway through, I’d change the script. I’d convince myself of the heat, sweat on command, fan my face, the works. And again, they’d slowly follow suit.
I did this with a myriad of things. I convinced patients that the ambient noise in the room (artificially created by hidden speakers) was actually distant classical music, or barking dogs, or people yelling. I could hand them pure water after hours of bragging about how good the ‘sugar free lemonade’ tasted. Eventually, when they drank it, they’d agree with me.
Hypnosis, once I mastered that as well, offered me much quicker results. Repeat patients were given planted triggers to convince them that I was trustworthy, that my words were true, and that anything I told them could never be a lie. On one experiment I managed to get a rather uncooperative inmate to cycle between shivering in the cold and sweating in the heat four times in a single hour.
I was dipping my fingers into the pie of reality manipulation. True reality, that is. Because in this room, with no cameras and no other perception but the patient’s and my own, reality was whatever we agreed on.
The lust for data pushed me further, and I began to tamper dangerously into these perceptive arts. In the patient’s eyes as well as my own, I changed the shape of the room, the color of the wallpaper, the color of my eyes. All things that were direct contradictions. They took time and incredible mental strain as I was forced to juggle both my own perception as well as the difficulty of managing theirs. But I was on a winning streak, making progress beyond my wildest dreams.
All of that changed when I met her. A patient like any other, a volunteer. She was a Spanish woman, middle aged with a quite fair complexion. Brown hair and hazel eyes, tanned skin, wearing a darkly colored article of clothing looking like a mix between robes and a dress.
I still don’t know who, or even what she was, but she had quite the effect on me. See, I never figured that I was the best at my perceptive arts, but at least I had assumed I was in the top 1% of folk who could perform such mental gymnastics.
Her name was Esca, I never got her last name. The memories of the meeting are foggy, hidden behind delirium, but I will recount them as I remember them.
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I walked inside through the office branch of our compound, my Room hidden in a corner of the building away from prying eyes. It was early fall, still quite warm, and I arrived at 3pm on a sunny, clear day. A Teusday.
“Afternoon, Ms. Esca. It’s nice to meet you. My name is Dr. Callows.”
I outstretched a hand to shake hers, but she remained still, giving me a thin but charming smile. As she spoke, I noted her thick accent and calm voice.
“Likewise, Doctor. A lovely night, isn’t it?”
“Yes it is.” I replied. “Thanks again for coming in at such a late time.”
Briefly, for just a moment, I was struck with a wave of nausea and confusion. I recognized the feeling. It was the reeling, lurching sensation of a rapid change in my perception. Except this time, I didn’t fully understand what had changed.
Absently, I glanced sideways at the window, open and without blinds, showing me the lights of the city glimmering in the dark. My watch read 9:30pm. It was night. Wasn’t it?
No. No. My mind lurched again as I fervently recounted my day. 8am, I at breakfast. 9am, I exercised until almost 11. I meditated until 12, relaxed until 1:30, ate lunch, and then came to the office. Even if I was behind, there was no chance it was any later than four or five.
I looked at the window again, daylight shining through and illuminating the room. I had made to sit down, but decided to close the blinds on the window, blocking both of our sight. When I sat down, Esca still had the same smile, and her eye contact was unyielding. My voice took a moment to find itself as I affirmed that my mind was simply a bit shaky. I had been pushing myself pretty hard lately.
“No, I’m sorry Ma’am, but you’re mistaken. It is 3 in the afternoon.” At this, her smile drooped ever so slightly. She hummed very quietly to herself and her head cocked just a few degrees. Her eye contact did not break.
“In any case,” I continued, “since this is our first meeting, I’d like to start with the routine questions first. Sound good?”
While talking, I fished my tablet from its holster and opened a few tabs. Most of them controlled the variety of hidden PMD’s, Perceptive Motivation Devices. Those were the speakers, thermostat controls, draft creators, small oscillating weights to vibrate nearly any surface in the room. Of course, I also had her file and my personal notes.
Esca answered the questions quickly and simply. We spoke of her age (21), her birth place (Wind River reservation), her family (none, not even married), and all the other pleasantries of a typical questionnaire.
Every question answered raised a few hairs on the back of my neck, but again I could not place the details until the entire picture changed. After completing the questionnaire, I looked up expecting to see the locked gaze of that same middle-aged Spanish woman, and was instead met with a young Indian woman, barely out of being a teenager.
Whatever segway into the first step of my experiment fell apart as I stammered. “Y-You were…”
My words fell flat, and Esca smiled brighter. She spoke, her Spanish accent gone as if it had never existed, replaced by an incredibly thin Arapaho dialect.
“Something wrong, Doctor?” There was no concern in her voice, and I recognized the tone. I had used it countless times. It was softly cocky, prodding further explanation, and had a superior attitude.
I blinked hard, pressing my eyelids tight as possible for the span of three breaths, reassuring my own reality. Esca, aged 33, born in Mexico. It was day, early fall, and quite comfortable. I opened my eyes again, seeing that terrible fake 3D overlay of the original Esca on top of the new one. A few more seconds of shifting clarity between the two realities, before they settled back into the original.
“How are you doing that?” I asked. I was not afraid yet, but my voice did not come as strong or as confident as I had intended. Esca chuckled, a sound as warm and dry as campfire.
“You’ve never been on the receiving end, have you, James?” She spoke with a deadly calm, dense and potent. Her eye contact did not break. It was obvious that my experiment had run aground, yet my steady heartbeat quickened in view of the life raft perched above the churning water, offering me a new path. New data.
I straightened my back, placing my tablet away from me and face down, before meeting her eyes. Hazel.
“Me: No, I cannot say that I have. At least not to this extent.
Esca: Well, a first for you and myself. Your persuasio is quite resilient.
Me: Latin, usually meaning ‘conviction’. Thank you for the compliment.
Esca: You seem to like pushing people, James. I would like today’s experiment to run a little differently. Tonight, I will push you, see what you can handle.”
It was night again. I strained my mind, pushing her ideals consciously, until sunlight filtered through the blinds.
Trepidation began creeping in, but my lust for knowledge was stronger, and so I accepted.
“Allow me to clarify before we begin. I am going to pit my persuasio against your own, and I will win. I am going to make you feel euphoria, dread, burning heat, freezing cold. You will feel pain, you will feel terror, and you may even forget who you are. At the end of it all, when I have finished, you will either be a shuddering mess, or you will be whole. Do you still accept?”
I did, and the experiment began in earnest. She directed me to resist her reality to the best of my abilities, and if at all possible, impose my own on her. Unfortunately for me, I would never find a foothold to fight back.
She started small, using vocal triggers, convincing me of different facets. The night and day outside the window was quickly forgotten as a parlor trick. Esca continued intensifying her efforts. Despite my best attempts to imagine a sweltering room, I began to shiver.
But she took it further than I thought possible. At most I could raise or lower my body temperature by a degree or two, just enough to register as a fever to sensitive equipment. I shook uncontrollably after just a few minutes, and within 10 my fingers had started turning blue. I could see my breath, smoke packets nowhere to be seen. The water in my glass had frozen solid.
The cold broke, and the direction changed. More vocal cues. I could hear birds singing, dogs barking, people screaming in pain. My mother, deceased for almost a decade, banged and smashed against the door behind me, crying out my name. Once I even glanced at the tablet’s screen to make sure all PMD’s were inactive.
“Do not look away from me. Toss away that useless plank and look at me.”
I dropped the chunk of plywood and turned my eyes back to Esca. She was still smiling. After this, things got painful. She started planting lasting persuasions in my mind, working unconsciously without her action. Every thirty seconds I switched from the freezing cold of an Alaskan winter to the blistering heat of Death Valley.
With fake concern, she alerted me to the fact that I was bleeding, and I realized there was a gash in my hand gushing blood onto the recliner I sat in. It hurt. She made my ears ring like a shotgun had gone off next to them, made my eyes burn like I was staring at the sun, even if my eyes were closed.
While the assault on my senses weakened my resolve, Esca picked away at my identity like a loose scab. Slowly, I forgot my dog’s name, my date of birth, my parent’s race, all replaced by falsehoods. None of it could be corrected as her words were printed along my driver’s license, written on my skin.
Fear slowly overtook my scientific mind, and after a grueling four hours, I asked her to stop. I had enough. It was too much.
“Are you sure? I’m having so much fun with you.” Esca said, still smiling.
“Yes, I’m certain. I give up. You win.”
Esca smiled even wider, almost too wide.
“Oh, thank you for telling me. And for my reward, I’ll be taking your left hand. And you are going to give it to me. And then, you will thank me.”
I couldn’t believe it. There was no way I’d willingly cut off my hand, and then thank her for taking it from me. It was simply impossible. She told me that I had always hated my left hand, malformed and somehow constantly dirty. That the ridicule of others was constant, always talking behind my back about it.
No more than sixty seconds passed and I was cutting the hideous thing off with a knife produced by Esca. I didn’t know how she got it past the metal detector, but I was thankful that she did. Without it, I’d be trapped with this thing attached to my wrist.
Blood poured onto the table and I grit my teeth, smiling at the thought of finally being free of it. And when I presented the severed limb to Esca, not unlike a man proposing, I thanked her from the bottom of my heart. Esca took it, wrapping it in cloth before placing it within her robes.
Then, as she walked away from me and to the door, she gave me her final persuasion.
“Don’t worry about cleaning up the blood, James, it will fade, just like all that occurred tonight. I can’t wait to play with you again. You are such a good sport.”
She exited the room, leaving my gaping wrist dripping blood onto the pristine coffee table. I stared at my hands, no, hand, and saw my watch from the corner of my eye. 3:01pm.
It’s been 48 hours since then. I’ve taken a vacation from my work, one that I’m not sure I’ll return from. Esca’s influence has faded, but not entirely. I have to maintain full focus in order for them to not be debilitating.
If my train of thought falters, my skin feels set ablaze, my breath comes out frozen, and my left hand disappears, replaced by shoddy and blood-soaked bandages. I keep trying to convince myself that the sensations should be nearly gone in a few more days, but I can’t fully commit to the thought.
All thoughts are consumed by keeping Esca’s influence locked down, by me writing this, and by Esca’s parting words.
“I can’t wait to play with you again.”
I’m not sure any of me will be left if this happens again. I still don’t remember my dog’s name, despite them trying to comfort me. My mother’s face is still blurry in her photographs, and any personal ID that I have is replaced by rampant scribblings.
Though I’ve detailed my work here, I urge you to make peace with insanity before pursuing it. And remember Rule 6. If you don’t, then you’ll just become another perceptive plaything. A toy, like my patients.
Like me.