Authors: Rani Manicka
Then… At twenty-two minutes her sweat-soaked body convulsed horribly and became still. He sat forward and watched eagerly as her eyes turned in their sockets. To stare at him!
‘Impossible,’ he exclaimed. The cameras were minute and so skillfully concealed amongst other equipment that they were undetectable even to professional sweeps. But those large, empty eyes were boring into him. She had ‘located’ him! He jerked back and stood suddenly, his chair skittering away on the smooth floor, a creature of fear. But nothing happened, and he realized that months of torture had turned her gaze weak and harmless.
He bent toward the mic, his eyes no longer anxious, but shining with excitement. ‘The men will only stop if
you
stop them. The same way you stopped the rabid dog.’
She frowned. A memory, not yet lost. Sleeping on the sunlit porch. A pink tongue on her face. Shadow. Her father’s voice, ‘If I see one teeth mark on your face, young lady, that wolf’s going right back to where he came from.’ Her voice full of laughter, so confident, ‘He won’t bite me, Daddy. He loves me.’
Schooner Klaus willed her to act. ‘Come on,’ he whispered.
Suddenly, movement on the other screens. His eyes darted to them. Two of the targets had downed their tools and were coolly untying the girl’s hands. She had gone for two. A thrill of pleasure coursed through him. Not taking his eyes off her face, he signaled the Dead Man.
The Dead Man responded instantly and with great efficiency. Both renegade targets crumpled where they stood. The other four stared ahead stonily. None dared look at the fallen. True, they had undergone the rigorous de-sensitization process and been injected with all kinds of drugs to deaden the evolutionary instinct of self-preservation, but even so, by God! With fear in their throats they clutched their shining instruments and rued the day they had ever thought to enter that hell-hole. Within minutes the standby targets assembled outside the door came in, to take the places of the dead.
Dakota’s hands were rebound.
Schooner Klaus leaned forward until he was inches away from the middle screen. She looked an ill little thing in that monstrously clinical room, but he suffered neither shame nor pity.
‘Go on, show me what else you can do,’ he taunted.
As though she had heard his challenge, all six targets as if of one mind turned away from her and buried their faces in their hands.
Schooner Klaus took a startled, delighted breath. Impressive. No, not impressive; extraordinary. He alerted the Dead Man. ‘All,’ he ordered callously.
With their faces still covered they died. Not one had tried to run or defend himself. The Eye in the Sky did not spare a thought for the men he had sacrificed. They were not important. What was important was that the child understood that no matter what she said or did, the torture would carry on. She must conclude that all resistance was useless and passively submit to her fate. Blind, unthinking obedience - that was what he needed. He barked for more back-up to stand by. From their quarters men heard the buzzer and poured into the rubber-tiled corridors, perhaps to their death
The girl was grizzling softly when the six new targets arrived at the door. They stepped over the corpses to take over where their predecessors had stopped. When the girl saw the implacable faces arranged around her, different and yet the same, she stopped crying. She had lost heart. She knew then - her enemy was too great to defeat.
Schooner Klaus sent a directive to the ECT controller.
The tech knew the girl’s brain was close to frying, but displaying neither emotion nor hesitation he increased the voltage. The girl convulsed uncontrollably. Her mouth frothed and her eyes rolled up into their sockets. They remained white for so long Schooner Klaus felt a tinge of apprehension. Had he gone too far? But like blue stones, they slowly dropped into place to stare blankly at the overhead lights. Years of practicing on hundreds of children brought in from Mexico and other poor South American nations had taught him the meaning of that glazed look.
She had lost and he had won.
The Hypercube
(The perfect double prison)
‘Put her down,’ Schooner Klaus commanded the biotech.
The trauma had become so unbearable that her child’s mind had said, No, this isn’t happening to me, and escaped to a place without fear or pain. Monstrous details that should have mattered terribly no longer did. The taste of the rubber plug jammed between her teeth, the feel of the steel clamped to her skin, the smell of her burning flesh and hair. They collected harmlessly in glass jars while she floated free. Pain had become pleasure.
While the sedative was being administered, Schooner Klaus dabbed lavender perfume onto his wrists. It was no shallow affectation - in future, he would be able to make her dissociate with nothing more than a whiff of the scent. He stepped into a pair of specially made rubber boots and walked into the deserted corridor. He entered the torture chamber where the bright headlights had been dimmed and stood for a moment looking at her small, still figure. He registered and savored a victorious sense of cold possession. It had been a spectacular battle of wills: he had gambled the thing he believed to be his most precious find, and he had won.
He had shattered her mind. Now his intention was to further split it many times more and to mold each fragment into a personality in its own right, capable of thinking, feeling, and functioning by itself. Each one would have its own name, memories, behavioral traits, emotional characteristics. Separated by amnesic barriers, they would all be unaware they were sharing a body with ‘others’. And all of them unavailable to the core personality or the ‘real Dakota’s’ conscious recall. Her inner world would become a labyrinth full of strangers who could only be called forward and controlled by him or someone to whom he gave the appropriate access codes.
The other programmers and handlers owned the obligatory three-ringed notebooks and laptops with all the access codes and triggers for their slaves, but he had been trained in the oral method. He had it all memorized, especially the secret back door codes that he never revealed to anyone.
He was not a squeamish man and he stepped easily into the growing puddles of blood, to lean over her. Her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling. He removed her earphones. His nostrils flared. The smell of her. Blood, sweat, a sour note - vomit, fear and something else… A child thing… His thing.
The first alter to be programmed utilizing the thirteen by thirteen grid was always the protector persona.
‘She looks like you,’ he whispered. ‘But she is not you. We will always strap you down and hurt you. But
she
will come forth and hold all
your pain. Her name is Merica.’ He paused for a moment to let the formal, unique name he had given the protector persona sink in. ‘I am now speaking with Merica, the one who holds all the pain. You are Dakota’s protector. From now on your only task is to keep her safe. If she disobeys us, you must do whatever necessary to stop her. ‘Or…’ He touched her face with an electrically charged ball wrapped in salt water. Dakota’s body convulsed violently. ‘We will hurt you. Don’t ever forget. Do your job well.’
He lightly pressed his fingertips behind both her ears, and administered another low dose of electroshock to lock in the command. This ‘feel the pain’ sequence would be repeated again and again until Merica could be ‘trusted’ to take over the function of Dakota’s prison guard, the insistent voice inside her head that her twisted logic would call ‘her protector’. For the rest of her life Merica would keep not only the girl and later the woman isolated and pliable, but, more importantly, also her programmer and owner from capture or retribution. Merica would resist any recollection even in the hands of the most qualified therapist.
The next persona he sectioned off was a weak thing, hardly human. It had no courage. Its heart, he told the girl, had been ripped out and sealed in an Earthen jar. ‘Now give all your feelings of wanting to hurt us to it,’ he commanded. In this way any desire for retaliation or revenge against her tormentors would no longer be accessible to the dominant personality, but held by that sorry, stunted creature. It too was given a formal, unique name - Eylon.
In this manner anger was channeled into another alter and told it that it was not human, but a chained, wild creature. Only he had the keys. Only he could access that frothing beast. Over time that creature would be stoked, nourished, given legs, hands, wings, heart, mind, soul, and be set against any that would try to help her.
Week by week with faultless precision he created many other alters. Almost all, permanently crippled, or taught to view themselves as hateful and hated. Some were frozen as little children; others blind, mute or deaf.
Hope, he told her, led to wanting, and wanting was very bad, the cause of great suffering. ‘Friends will always hurt you. Boys will hurt you. You must remain alone. Don’t ever let anyone touch you. Or…’ He held open both her eyelids and squeezed a few drops of chemical irritant into her eyes. While she writhed with pain the lights were switched off to simulate blindness.
‘See what wanting does? Now you are forever blind.’
Wanting was christened Cromag.
‘Your job,’ he told Cromag, ‘is to keep her from wanting. If she wants, take it away instantly. Replace it with doubt and discomfort.’ Cromag would spend the rest of her existence, isolated, blind and in terrible pain; nevertheless ferocious in the performance of her job.
Another personality was created to house curiosity. ‘Never,’ he spoke firmly, ‘let her have questions. Questions belong to us. Do not look for answers. Answers do not belong to you. They belong to us.’ Holding her by the throat he injected an irritant into her larynx. The pain was so severe that the girl temporarily lost her voice. ‘You will never again be able to speak,’ he lied, and instantly that alter became mute. Another poor mute was given the task of remembering Dakota’s past. ‘If she remembers she will die. Do your job well.’
When all the traits that were thought to be detrimental to his control of ‘the real Dakota’ had been locked away into a truly impressive myriad of alters, it was time to invoke the personas that would control access to her psychic abilities. It was vital that she have no access to her own powers in her daily life. He referred to the first such alter he created as ‘the powerful one’ or ‘the one who holds your powers’.
‘I am talking to Shekina,’ he said, using the imprinting gesture of rubbing her forehead just above the bridge of the nose. ‘ You hold
all
her psychic powers. She must never be allowed to use these powers. These powers belong to you. Only you. If she tries to use them you must stop her. If you fail to stop her, we will hurt you.’
He hurt her.
Then, he created a secondary alter called a key, so it would be impossible for her to either intentionally or accidentally access her own gift without this trigger alter. This gatekeeper he named Timu.
‘When you hear Timu you will know it is we who want you to use your powers. You will use your powers only as we tell you to. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
Death to the weakling,
wealth to the strong!
-
Book of Satan 1:1
One day the door of Dakota’s dank prison opened and a huge man enveloped in a cloud of lavender perfume approached her cage. Even though she had been programmed not to remember his face, for a bewildering moment, she was unaccountably terrified by the juxtaposition of his imposing military figure and the familiar smell. But then he smiled and it was an indescribably wonderful smile. It lit up his entire face and he seemed beautiful to her beyond anything she could imagine. There was no doubt in her child’s mind: her troubles were over. He was some sort of policeman who had come to save her.
Schooner Klaus unlocked the cage and told her that he had come to take her away from that horrible place. After the abominable cruelty she had experienced she felt insanely grateful to him. When he gathered her nearly skeletal body into his clean, sweet-smelling arms she clung pitifully to his strong neck and emitted a low, frightened howl.
‘I know, I know,’ he soothed gently. ‘But everything is going to be all right now. You have been a good girl and you deserve good things from now on.’ With infinite tenderness he carried her down the bare corridors and into a rather odd room.
The walls were purple, and from the black and white tiled floor sprouted three pillars of different heights, none of which quite reached the ceiling. Although she had the impression that there were no windows, yellow drapes drawn shut made it seem that there were.
On a black stone platform in the middle of the room stood a marble bath with clawed feet. He carried her to it and she saw that it was half filled with fragrant water. Gently, and with kind words, he lowered her into it. The water was deliciously warm. He took off his jacket with all its gleaming medals and rolled up his shirtsleeves. With a washcloth he proceeded to wash her. He unclenched her fists and examined her fingers, blue with needle marks underneath the nails that ran from tip to root. She heard him sigh sorrowfully. For some time she remained with her eyes lowered, but as his soft, reassuring voice kept on repeating just how incredible it was all going to be henceforth, she turned an adoring gaze up to him.
He lifted her out of the bath and enveloped her in a thick towel. She put her cheek against the soft material, and unconsciously made the contented sound of a dog when its master bends to scratch its ears. There were polka dot panties and fine clothes laid out on a black velvet chair. He dressed her in them. In a daze she ran her palms down the front of the dress and smoothed it over her legs. This was her first time in clothes since she had woken up caged.
She was taken to a playroom. There were many toys in a big, lidless wooden box, and another child was sitting on the floor playing with a train set.
‘Tom is the same age as you, Dakota. Would you like to play with him?’