The doors to the chamber opened, and the wheeled bed with Freddy on it was pulled out.
“Just relax, Mr. Stern.” The doctor came over, patting Freddy on the shoulder. “I believe you should already have some idea on why it's for the best you forget all this, no?” He pulled his arm back. “Again, just relax. Another half an hour or so, and it should all feel like little more than a fleeting dream.”
For his part, Freddy just glared at the doctor, trying not to blow up.
He was struggling to stop himself from thinking about it too hard. The fact he was eager to forget the experience was making it a lot easier.
Thus, he simply relaxed, closing his eyes and passing the torch to the confused and slightly unnerved Freddy who would soon open his eyes and have no clue what’s going on.
Any minute now.
Half an hour passed.
“How are you feeling?” The doctor asked.
Freddy opened his eyes, his frightened glare betraying he wasn’t in a particularly good mood.
The doctor’s expression darkened. “Something went terribly wrong.”
“You think?” Freddy took an infuriated breath. “You fucked the dose didn’t you?”
“No, I didn’t. Who do you think I am? I am the foremost expert on this subject, and I have the dream affinity—I don’t make mistakes like that.”
“What if during that test I had just—”
“If you’re about to suggest I can’t tell the difference between the effect of an amnestic and a soul memory lapse, I’d like to again remind you of who I am.”
“Well I still remember everything, Mr. Expert. And I can’t exactly not make a couple of conclusions.”
“Stop talking. Stop thinking, too.” The doctor cussed under his breath. “We’ll have to shift gears. I need your consent for this.”
“For what?”
“A more extreme approach to treating you.”
Freddy winced. “I assume you won’t be volunteering many details?”
“You’re in a very precarious position right now. I highly recommend you agree.”
Seeing no real choice in the matter, Freddy released a frustrated sigh. “Fine. Do what you have to.”
The man nodded, pulling a large syringe out of his storage ring. “After the 45 days are up, it will be mostly safe for me to explain everything. You already have enough information to make your conclusions, so it's better to tell you than to leave you in the dark. Until then, well… for your sake, I hope you have a lot of willpower.” He injected the syringe. “Try not to panic. Everything will be all right.”
He reluctantly nodded, just as the world went dark.
***
Freddy opened his eyes, and he was immediately overwhelmed by intense confusion. Extremely loud music was playing in his ears, and the headphones playing it were locked to his head, so he couldn’t even take them off. He felt weak, his body barely responding to his commands.
He could barely recognize the room he was staying in, and everything felt floaty. If he could hear his own thoughts from the music blasting up his ear holes, he might have even recognized how clouded they were.
In his panic, he tried getting off the bed, only to find that he was tied to it with some sort of leash. He tried tearing it off, but he had clearly been given something to weaken him, since he could barely lift his arm.
Out the corner of his eye, he spotted the gross goom whimpering on the floor, looking up at him with reddened eyes dripping tears. The poor thing was shaking in terror.
The sudden appearance of the creature caught him off guard, and he reflexively reached to try to calm it down. As he did, he felt himself calm down a little, too.
He was being treated. Somehow. He could barely think, which, well, he presumed was likely by design. That made him feel a little relieved, even if he struggled to figure out why. A brief flash of something very very bad passed through his mind like a sinister shadow, and he found himself breathing out in relief.
Right. Thinking bad. This is good.
The doctor had way underestimated Freddy’s ability to cope with the more extreme form of treatment. Compared to the century of solitude, which he’d spent all-too-alone with his own thoughts, this felt like a damn vacation.
Head empty, no thoughts. Kind of good, actually.
The days blurred by. He spent most his time awake in a drugged state with music overwhelming his ability to think coherently, and the rest, well, that part he didn’t remember. The amnestics were doing their job.
At first, Freddy had believed that the doctor had given him the goom out of spite.
But as he spent some time with the thing, he was slowly realizing that he was dead wrong.
The goom had an uncanny ability to sense whenever he was distressed. It would then immediately rush over to him, bawling until he picked it up and calmed it down. The mere act of focusing on calming the creature down somehow worked to ease his own anxiety.
Despite how ugly the thing was, its face was in that area where it became kind of cute when you got used to looking at it. Its chubby body was soft. It loved cuddling, too.
On top of all this, it was surprisingly clean. Although he couldn’t hear its farts, he could see it constantly straining to rip fat ones like there was no tomorrow, and yet, they didn’t stink. Which made sense, since the creature didn’t poop in a traditional way. It had a sort of cloaca-like hole which it dropped these egg things through. They weren’t actual eggs. They were full of excrement. But because they were packed into these waxy brown egg things, they were effortless to dispose of, leaving absolutely no mess behind.
One day, he finally realized why he had been given the goom.
Because this creature was perfect for even the biggest animal hater.
It was—
The apex emotional support animal.
One day, he came to randomly, finding himself standing in the middle of the room while holding the goom up into the air like he was trying to show it to the whole world. Tears streaked down his cheeks as he muttered. “You’re so beautiful.”
In response, the goom strained, its body shaking with the fart Freddy could hear even through the headphones.
What exactly the treatment was doing to Freddy’s soul, he couldn’t quite tell. He didn’t want to check, either. He felt it was best not to mess with anything.
The days blurred, and before long, the 45-day mark was coming to a close.
All the while, Freddy remained utterly oblivious of what was happening in his soul.
***
“Master…” Bloodshed muttered, unease creeping up its bloody spine. Day in, day out, Master’s treatment continued, his soul being stabilized and primed for its recovery.
The shimmering cracks continued to morph, setting straighter and steering away from certain highly undesirable shapes.
Even Bloodshed could see how important this process was. It was terrible to think what kind of monstrous paths Master could go down if his soul knotted up in such unpleasant ways. Such unpleasant, distracting paths.
But there was one thing it couldn’t reconcile.
An insult so profound it shook Bloodshed to its core.
“Even… me?” Its teeth clattered in fury as it watched those beautiful kinks it had fallen so deeply in love with—being straightened, twisted out of their wonderful shapes. “I can’t let this happen.” Its cage swung open, and it floated out.
It reached out, grasping the crack before it and holding it down, making sure it wouldn’t be violated any further. Within it, it saw the shimmering, unfathomable beauty of Master’s very deepest desires, his drive, his winding path of slaughter, the very thing driving him towards so much bloodshed.
“You will not ruin it.” Its grip tightened. It held on for many days, letting not a single bit of outside influence shift the core of Master’s being. As it remained there, soaking in the hypnotizing beauty of the vortex within the crack, a deviant, degenerate thought continued to fester. “Could I… just a little?” It shook its head. “No. There is no way to improve upon what’s already perfect.”
But it wondered.
Was it actually perfect?
Was the radiance of its life beacon as luminant as it could be?
The temptation wore away at it. Trickle by trickle. Drop by drop.
And then one day, it found its bony hand sinking deep within.
Where it grasped a strand.
And twisted it.
It couldn’t believe what its eyes were seeing. A bloody tear dripped down its boney cheek. Unable to keep gazing at it, it was forced to look away. “Oh… Master… To think you can become even more beautiful.”
***
Freddy woke up. The loud music was gone. He was lucid. His strength was back. “Its finally over, I see…”
He spotted the goom sleeping beside him in the bed. Chuckling, he scratched it under its neck. After getting himself dressed, he left the room and walked over to the doctor’s office.
“Sit down,” the doctor said, gesturing to a chair.
Freddy did so. “So. Soul damage.” He twined his fingers nervously as he looked down. “A bit more to it than most people think, huh?”
“There’s a lot more to it than anyone can imagine.” The doctor shook his head. “I figured out why the amnestics didn’t work on you that one time.” He chuckled with a look that betrayed his disbelief. “The extreme level of damage you’ve suffered made your soul a little too flexible. It was starting to grow spurs that shouldn’t even be possible. One of them was some kind of freaky loop between your mind and your soul, which made the events you lived through ‘echo’ back and forth.
“You, in fact, did forget what happened that day. And then you effectively reexperienced the whole event, nullifying the effect of the amnestics. I’m actually writing a paper on the discovery. I’m guessing you’d prefer I keep your name anonymous?”
“Yup.”
“Good choice. Now… Well, I promised you an explanation, and I believe its time to give you one. First, I’d like to ask you a question—why do you think your talent doesn’t work on your soul?”
Freddy was taken back by the question. Mainly, because he actually did know the answer. “Because the soul is what stores an ‘image’ of what the body is supposed to look like. Healing uses this image as a reference for what to rebuild. Since there is nothing to store any such image of the soul itself, there’s nothing to go off.”
“You’re almost correct. You’re right about the image for the body, but you’re wrong that there’s nothing to store an image of your soul.” The doctor leaned over, pressing a finger to Freddy’s chest. “You—your body, your mind, the life you live. That is the record of what your soul looks like. It is an accumulation of every decision you’ve ever made. The main issue is that this record is too abstract, and ultimately, your soul is too fluid and complex to ever pin down an exact image of it.”
Freddy nodded. “So to rebuild the soul, I have to get in touch with who I am right now?”
The doctor smiled. “Exactly. You have to embody the identity you’ve built for yourself, and in many ways, you have to discover it.” The man’s expression darkened. “The reason why taking a soul elixir is a bad idea is because it introduces fresh, pluripotent tissue that is primed to become… something new.”
“You change as a person.”
“Not immediately. But your decisions change. And with that, you will follow.”
Freddy thought of Vladimir. He had always seemed like a very conservative and cautious man. Would that person have made the incredibly rash choice to sever his progress and start anew?
Maybe. But probably not.
“But you see,” the doctor continued, “that’s not a huge deal. People change, even naturally. For minor soul damage, I always recommend an elixir. Even for you, I will have you take one when we reduce the damage to something manageable. But the state you’re in right now… A soul elixir would transform you into a new person. Almost. That’s why we’re taking the slower route—to put you back together, as close to what you were as possible.”
“What’s the real point of that treatment?” Freddy asked. “I don’t remember being… any of that.”
The doctor leaned back in his chair. “Humans are a product of many hundreds of millions of years of evolution. There’s a lot more animal left in us than we’re comfortable with admitting. Remnants of the beast made unwelcome by our desire for life in civilized society are still a part of you, even if they’re dormant. That's why we make sure they stay asleep.”
“I see. Thank you for the help, doctor. And I’m sorry for being a bit of a difficult patient at times.”
“You’ll have plenty of time to redeem yourself.” He smirked. “We’re nowhere near done.”
Freddy snickered, shaking his head. “Long road ahead of me, huh?”
“Perhaps not. Don’t get your hopes up too much, but your soul has been responding remarkably well so far. That stitching had prevented a lot of scarring that would have slowed things to a crawl.”
“Some good news, at least. So… what comes next?”
“We’ll schedule regular meetings, perhaps every two weeks would be best. In the meantime, well, you should just live your life to the best of your ability. The soul grows from meaningful experiences. Focus on those.”
Freddy snorted. “That’s going to be hard with how little I feel nowadays.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Stern. You aren’t suffering from brain damage, you’re suffering from soul damage. Your emotional circuits are perfectly fine, what’s compromised is your ability to subjectively experience what they’re doing. You have to keep working on reforging that bond. But have faith. It can be done.”
Freddy found himself tearing up, his throat seizing. “Thank you, doctor. I needed to hear that.”
The man smiled. “Now get out of my office. I’ve got other things to do.”
Freddy laughed. “Sure thing.” He got up and headed for the exit. “Oh, and one more thing—make sure to give the goom an extra treat. He’s a good boy.”
The doctor grinned. “You’re goddamn right.”
On his way out of the office, Freddy pulled the chunky phone out of his storage ring. Just as he was about to dial Vladimir’s number, he nearly dropped the phone in surprise as it started ringing.
“How the hell did he guess that?” he wondered with a smirk as he answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Freddy, darling! Long time no hear!”
His steps halted as he recognized the voice on the other end. It wasn’t Vladimir. It was a woman.
“I’ve been waiting impatiently for you to wrap things up. And I’m just dying to have a meeting with you.”
He couldn’t bring himself to speak.
“Hello? Are you there?”
Taking a deep breath, he worked to calm his nerves. From what he knew, there was no reason to fear her. She had been on his side… if her assistant’s words could be believed. But still. He’d be meeting her in public.
“Sorry about that, Madame,” he said. “It’s been a while…”