Lacrima: Chapter Twenty Six

Nervous Energy

Catherine drowned in information. Buzzing constant static. Roiling emotions. All constrained in a fixed, tight system.

She could vaguely pinpoint her center, The painful spreading of her consciousness had long, if “long” had any meaning here, faded. Now, all she possessed was a deep sense of disconnection. The seat of her sensation no longer resided in the skull, but became more ill-defined. Borders of herself and everything broke away. Catherine strained to define what she experienced.

Catherine focused on the shell of her body. Visual information flowed into her mind, but wasn’t provided by her eyes. Much like a dream, the images simply generated themselves. She saw herself: her body tangled in the wires of the throne. Before her, an ostensibly physical, but experientially spectral orb glitched and warped. Somehow, she knew this was what remained of Esau. Sisyphus resided in that orb as well. Where the human began and the central program ended couldn’t be unraveled. The King nor the Master spoke. The two merely flowed into her through the insulated wires embedded into the topmost vertebrae of her spine. Auxiliary wires attached at key meridians and nerve junctions on her mortal body.

The Master resided with the King and her body was but a witness.

She, the disembodied consciousness, absorbed this scene. It distressed her, but the usual bodily sensations did not arrive. Merely, she was burdened by the sight of her haggard, malnourished body. She couldn’t have more than a day left before dehydrating to death.

Catherine needed to escape. Her primal desire to survive overrode her initial desire to see this mystical box unlocked. If she left some mysteries untapped, but kept her life - then so be it. Just seeing her emaciated flesh and sallow skin made her regret her descent.

Catherine began to work through her current situation, so she could then chart a solution. She knew she wasn’t something as crude as a ghost. This spectator view didn’t come from any given point-of-view. It was painted by several angles composited and given the impression - straight into the visual centers of her brain. At least, that’s how Catherine rationalized.

This diffuse awareness floated in a sea of particles. Waves crashing through and into her. Suddenly, they folded inward.

Her fingertips pressed against the smooth ivory of piano keys conjured from a forgotten memory. Frustration mounted until it steamed out, billowing out as satisfaction. Then, a swig of ice-cold water from a glass.

Catherine clicked on a flashlight. A shiver rips through her and she steps back.

A brick wall. His (Her?) boots were weighed down by slush. January was always his (her?) second least favorite month of the year. Only beaten out by February. How many more Februaries could he (she?) survive?

She shaved her face. She had a date tonight.

Catherine inhaled lovely burning smoke into her lungs. The feeling of paper between her index and middle fingers. Laughs from her friends. The sight of cars rolling down the narrow street. The memory broke with a fit of coughing.

Me-Ma looked at her with those wise eyes, but she would never understand.

The bastard balled his fist, raised it, but would never let the hammer hit his delicate nail. His face red - from rage and alcohol. She forgot why she married him. This trailer sure as hell wasn’t the reason.

She stared at the ceiling fan. First day from the gym. She can’t move her legs.

Bees buzzed around her ears. Two choruses fighting with their songs and their clumsy bodies. They waged a war for the shed. The hives knew no ideology, only raw survival. Did man learn war from the humblest of God’s creation?

Catherine tasted marmalade. Sweet, tangy preserve stuck to her tongue.

Two hampers of laundry remained full and overfilled. Crushed red bull and Coca-Cola cans litter her desk. His (again her?) finger clipped through a series of scantily clad women. He (she?) sighed before shutting the computer off.

Catherine breached, shutting her mind off from the choppy fluid of memory static. Every sensation: most mundane, many unpleasant, many lovely - all intrusive. They washed through her and she risked drowning in all of it. She needed some way to organize it all. If she let it, the mansion would consume her. There would be no more Catherine. Maybe the body or even anemic mind would remain. But Catherine would be erased. An inverted Nirvana. Instead of being extinguished, the soul would be so caught in the immensity that it would cease to distinguish itself from the whole.

Concrete. She needed something concrete. Humans were not built to be mere minds. Our bodies do much of the organization of our senses and experiences. Catherine couldn’t rely on her body to ground her. That part of her was a bit preoccupied at the moment. She had to build a consistent reality herself.

With all her will, she narrowed her focus. Catherine imagined a room. She stepped inside. In that room, she sat at a desk with a computer. Easy enough to conjure. Her fingers tapped on the keyboard. Catherine took the liberty of making the keys mechanical. She missed the clicking of so much before Lacrima. The tinny arms of the typewriter could never suffice. In the word processor, the insertion point placed each letter on the blank whiteness.

“Whose memories are these?”

It was a good start.

“Could all of these memories be from the guests?”

“No.” She typed her answer. “Too many different streams. Way more than five. Sisyphus is a Large-Language Model. It needed training data, so these could be from that.”

“They all just meld together.”

Catherine remembered which throneroom her body was imprisoned by.

“Sisyphus maintains the system. I assume it is some kind of higher program to delegate tasks to more simple programs - Service. It would probably have access to all the data in the mansion. And it definitely is not just auditory sensations. Service omitted that the mansion also can see us, feel us, maybe even taste us…”

Catherine tapped on the imaginary desk. The first tap resonated against wood while the second scratched against plastic. Her computer disconnected from her. Her room drifted apart.

Wood! The desk is wood!

The tapping, now at a feverish tempo, seemed to realign her mental room. The walls closed together. Again, she sat before the keyboard and monitor atop a wooden desk. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. Catherine steeled herself.

Concrete. Nothing vague. Nothing abstract. There’s plenty of that all around me. I need structure.

Catherine inhaled and continued to type. Her vision flashed back to her diminished body and the cables jacked into her.

“Do I regret descending down here?”

Pause.

“No,” she typed. “Not at all. What I have gained access to is terrible and amazing. I knew the risks. Not specifically, but having seen what this mansion is capable of. Still, I was not ready or prepared for this. It would’ve been prudent to let Bae escort me back to the others.

“But prudence never begets results”

“I wanted results.”

Catherine contemplated the nature of what she experienced.

“I am a mind without a body, but still beholden to physical laws. ‘I think therefore, I am,’ but with a very large asterisk. A contradictory mix of dualism and materialism No wonder Esau Nebble was fixated on religious and philosophical ideas. What he would soon create could be conjured from a mind obsessed with life, meaning, immortality.”

She looked back at that first line and highlighted it.

That might be the key to get out.

Catherine dissolved the room around her back to choppy waters of unmoored existence. She traced the wire from her body to the orb. The throne. Connected to it, Catherine drew her attention deeper toward it. She tried to scrutinize the form of the unsteady ball of raw data. As she did, she noticed that it wasn’t some magic ball of energy. Cylinders, no wider than a thread, orbited around a central nucleus. They glided along this round surface. Millions, nay, billions of these glassy tubes spun. They rotated within themselves. The shades of blue so central to the look of Lacrima were housed in their crystalline structures. Blues so fine, they created pixels. Rays reached from these base pounding and sliding cylinders to give the orb its ill-defined shape. The mere jelly of human eyes would have strained to make out these fine data. But for the unfiltered perception of data which directed to her brain, it was trivial.

The throne burned with this multifaceted, blue luminance. At first, it seemed like static, white noise, or an ill-defined texture. However, the jumbled mess had a logic. As she focused, an underlying pattern of rigid execution could be made out. The cylinder moved and shifted subtly, but predictably. They moved like visual music. Notes and chords of light at particular intervals. On top of that, another layer of noise complicated this simplicity. Wild flashes, a traveling rogue continent on this metallic globe, sharp flickers. These, while less frequent, combatted the subdued elegance of the machine.

Sisyphus, the machine. Esau, the man. Together as one throne.

Catherine drew in closer. If this was the nexus of sensation, then taking a step deeper might allow her to reach beyond. Instead, information distilled to a poisonous purity shined as white light. It filled her. Consumed her. Rattling, groaning in an inhuman song. Her shriveled body opened its mouth and screamed. Catherine pulled against the current, fixing the walls around her, and abruptly snapped back into her custom-made computer room. Minutes passed as her brain sweated out the excess data.

“Yes, I am a mind,” she slowly typed. “But I am also a brain in a skull with only so many nerves and neurons. I cannot just step atop the throne of this mansion.”

“I need another way.”

She retraced her understanding. Catherine tried to find a memory that might help her better grasp her current situation. The mansion emanated from this throne and the phenomena it authored. Surely, a clue could be found to navigate this labyrinth. As she did, her hand, so used to fidgeting that she even moved it in this made-up room, rubbed its fingertips together. Eventually, the memory came to her. Paper. Mere skin no longer ribbed against one another. The cheap paper one could easily find in an office printer materialized. She pulled up to her face the map Service provided her. The map of the mansion. She laid it down next to the keyboard and typed again.

“If Service functions like the limbs of Sisyphus, can I extend myself?”

“Back into the waters then.”

Catherine let the image of the map superimpose itself on her field of vision. On a whim, she focused on the dining hall. Her consciousness pulled itself taut into the rendered square of the imagination-copy of the map. Slowly, bit by bit, the room came together. The moveable boards came into place. The long dining table every guest ate at stretched out with food. Esau’s eclectic mandala decorations adhered to the wall. The gentle water curtain continued to spill, fill, and flow.

Catherine successfully projected herself into the room. Or, rather, she became the room. She didn’t see from one vantage. The entirety of the room could be observed and felt. And what she saw and felt surprised her. Instead of the dim light, the fixtures raged with full power. Awash in warm light, billiard tables, one more ball-scattered than the others, and other game tables populated the room as a maze. Servants contained their glitchy bodies into suits of all things. A bar rested at one end with a bartender as its steward.

She knew this wasn’t an approximation of the dining hall from her memory. No, this was as dining hall was at the current moment. Catherine couldn’t imagine something this outlandish.

Out of curiosity, she zoomed in on the bartender. The Servants fascinated her ever since she caught a glimpse of them on Konrad’s feed. She barely came in contact with them through her fall to the throne. Perhaps more out of luck than anything else. Regardless, she wanted a closer examination. Her out-of-body existence facilitated such an easy look into one.

Immediately, she noticed the suit floated over a space, rather than we clothed over the Servant. It hung in the air and the Servant slipped through the gaps and holes of the fine garments. Catherine now realized that calling what the space the Servants occupied as a body would be inaccurate. The outlines jittered and jagged too much. When the Servant manipulated a rag to wipe down the bartop, the hand’s grip served as a suggestion. An individual Servant occupied space in the same way a radio wave spread out across a region. They were there, but the actual edges of that were nebulous at best. It would be more accurate to say that a Servant filled a space; instead of saying they inhabited or existed in a space.

Catherine drew herself into the Servant. Marmalade again. She tasted it. Could that marmalade experience come from this Servant? A consistent stream of memories rotated within the Servant.

The big move to the states. A camping trip with two older brothers he looked up to his whole life. Those same brothers flying the nest. A desperate sprint to find them again. Both loved their distance. An agonizing gap between him and them. Went to college. Got his business degree. Surely, he could rub elbows with his brothers now. Missed phone calls. Interactions cold. Then, Esau disappeared. The youngest brother would bring his eldest home. Lacrima. Jacob let me know. He told him about the recent invitations. Other guests. Then, a pool. Thousands of voices. Water all around. Blackout.

This, among hundreds of small, unaccounted for moments, swirled around the locality which the Servant manifested in. Catherine pulled away.

Poor Argus, she thought. Wait, Argus?

Was that Servant really Argus? Catherine saw him dead. Saw his corpse. If this Servant had Argus’ then all the other Servants…

Are dead people? Or the data of dead people? I didn’t see anyone else plugged in except me. Did Service take Argus away to plug his body in? Using it in the same way my mind was connected.

Does that mean I’m a Servant?

No. Catherine didn’t experience her own memories as a fixed loop, but when she dipped into the Argus-Servant - this was a confined feedback of his memories. She sensed no mind behind the information.

But I’ll probably end up a Servant if I don’t get out.

Entities entered her awareness. They stood outside the threshold of the dining hall. Four in total.

“Service, rearrange the dining hall back to its base. Have a ouija board on the table.”

Lucille’s voice.

“Of course,” Service replied. The reply echoed through Catherine as well. “We’ll fix this room up for you.”

Catherine fully spaced back out. All the lights shut off. Servants moved in the black as flashes of blue. Boards retracted as the specters lifted up furniture and lowered down to the depths below. The Argus-Servant unhitched the bar from the wall as others eased it down a hole. With a sweep of an arm, one of the Servants levitated the various liquors up and followed the bar down. Within a minute, the lights came back on. A lettered wooden board and magnifying piece rested on the long length of the dining table.

Lucille entered first dressed in a loose-fitted blue shirt with a plunging neckline. Her sandalled feet emerged from light khakis with wide leg bottoms. Her stride and confidence, while there previously, had now blossomed and then calcified. The air seemed denser around her. Much denser than the three guests who orbited around her.

Previously, Catherine already found Lucille grating. Now, with this haughty ego brandished for all to see, Catherine despised her.

Behind Lucille’s left, Bae walked. Bae kept pushing the bottom of her dress to stretch the fabric. A beach towel hung over her shoulders.

Discomfort. Feet on egg shells. Rigid performance.

Instead of memories, impressions came off the different guests. Closer to the throne, people could hear each other’s thoughts. Here, you could maybe feel their vulnerabilities and states of mind. Catherine wanted to know if she could fold into one of the other guests. For now, she waited.

Job followed at Lucille’s right. He sported a pair of damp swim trunks and had a netted shirt over his plush, but robust torso. Job laughed with a jolly affect.

Confusion. Reserved loyalty. Promised rewards?

What is going on? Catherine wondered. Something is going on here. The whole mansion’s changed too.

Konrad reserved a comfortable distance between him and the three. He hid his teeth behind a strained close-lipped smile.

Hope. Pins and needles. Potential escape.

That’s when Catherine decided to hyperfocus on Konrad. She felt the difference between a fleshy person and Servant immediately. His thoughts bloomed and died with a rapid chaos only a human brain could gestate. Somehow though, she felt a net over the mind. Not constraining his thoughts per se, but one that could tighten at any moment.

Electricity. Thoughts as electricity. What I saw in the journal. Maybe work. Maybe won’t.

She knew she couldn’t reside within for long. But she needed to know Konrad’s plan for escape.

Ouija board. Disappointing. Not really spirits. Actually ideo-motorics. But might there be an application here? Get past Lucille. Call whoever is below.

Call whoever? Catherine thought.

She slipped out of Konrad and went into Lucille, for she couldn’t get a good reading earlier. Inside, despite the atmospheric difference, Lucille had a similarly conjured storm of thoughts. Though, hers turned out to be more articulated.

I’m so happy. The others should thank me. Esau. He’d be proud. Excited about what Konrad’s doing. He’s doing great! I’ve never done a ouija board before.

Catherine mused: Konrad has a plan, though I’m not wholly clued in on the details. But it seems that Lucille has no idea and is the one he’s trying to outwit.

The guests pulled chairs close to the board. Lucille raised her hand and fluttered the fingers down. Lights above dimmed to her gesture.

“Lead us through this, Konrad,” Lucille invited.

Job stiffened a bit at the sight of the board. Old habits of fearing the occult came through him. He sighed and settled into his seat. Bae squinted at it, unsure what to think. She heard of ouija boards, seen them in horror movies, but never in person. Konrad loosened his wrists and displayed the board.

“I’ve used ouija boards before in my investigations,” he said. Catherine picked his brain again.

Little lie. I stopped using them quickly after the first time. EMF readers. Thermal cameras are better anyway.

“They’re really simple. First, get yourself a place of import and spiritual presence.” He threw his arms back. The force buckled the chair and suspended him on just the back legs. Konrad jammed his feet down to keep the chair on the firm floor. “Check,” he laughed. Polite and awkward laughter came from the other guests. “Next, every participant places their hands on the planchette.”

“The wooden piece?” Job asked.

“Yes, that.” Konrad placed his finger on the heart-shaped. Fixed in the middle, a magnified glass lens enlarged the grain of the wooden board. “Then, we wait for the ghost to move the piece.”

“So, we don’t move at all?” Bae asked.

“Not an inch,” Konrad emphasized. “The ghosts will do all the work.”

Ideomotoric theory, Catherine felt Konrad’s thought. Let’s hope this can connect us with them.

Catherine heard of the Ideomotorics Theory before.

That’s how the unconscious mind can affect even our movements. What is Konrad trying to do here? He’s definitely slipping something under Lucille’s radar. And what does that have to do with escape?

“Everyone,” Konrad called, prompting the others by setting his long fingers onto the planchette. His fellow guests did the same. “Breathe in.” They did. “And out.” And so they did as well. “Now, the spirit of this mansion - perhaps Esau himself…” That got a chuckle out of Lucille. “Steady yourself, you’re moving piece. Spirit!” Konrad tapped his teeth. “Are you there?”

In rapt attention, the guests stared at the board. All the letters of the Latin alphabet and a “YES” and a “NO” were carved into the wood. Catherine saw the fine particles twist around them. Minute vibrations coiled together. This was a weaker version of the thought-sea that roiled in the throneroom. After a pause, the planchette moved. Bae gasped as the lens settled on “YES.”

“Ah, you are here then.” Konrad straightened up. “Good - the real conversation can begin.”

Catherine refocused back on Konrad.

Is this even working? Am I connecting with them? Please. Please. I know that’s the trick with a ouija board. People get what they expect. But, maybe with the thoughts and the electricity and the… I don’t know. Please work.

Did Konrad learn about the thought projection below? Then, she remembered Bae had been there too. Yes, she must have told him about her attempt to rescue Catherine and what she saw down there. But all this talk of electricity and thoughts? Is that perhaps how…

Yes, she thought. That would explain how the Service could respond to us. How I’m able to interact with them in this way right now. He’s trying to use a ouija board as an interface to connect with ‘whoever is below.’

That’s me. Catherine realized. He’s trying to speak with me.

Konrad, you genius.

I picked a good partner, afterall.

But why doesn’t he think of my name?

“Spirit,” he intoned.

Break the wall. Then, Lucille will be weakened, Konrad thought.

“What is your name?”

Oblivious, Lucille watched and giggled. Beads of sweat perspiration weighed Konrad’s brow down. Job frowned. Bae stared.

Catherine slipped into the closed circuit that was her fellow guests. She felt their minds, their memories, and the tiny pulsing of their nervous systems. Most flew off as exhaust. Some sparks wove together into knots around them. All contributed to the fluid static that filled all the rooms and chambers of Lacrima’s mansion. Catherine spread herself through them and extended into their fingers.

The planchette moved.

C-A-T-H-

“Wait!” Lucille ripped herself away, hoping to disrupt what was happening. But she couldn’t stop what she allowed to occur. Job cringed as blood filled his ear canals. Bae screwed up her eyes as red tears pulled down her cheeks. Konrad could smell the iron in his nostrils.

E-R-I-N-E

The woman cast from their minds, whose name was exiled and scrubbed when they received their scripts, pulled away from the group. Catherine saw as they scrabbled away in a clamor of limbs and headaches. The din echoed through her as well. The whole mansion flickered as the scripts lay tattered over the brains.

Lucille gritted her teeth as she saw her three guests pull themselves up. One by one by one. She shot a look at Konrad, who cupped his head and bared fangs of pink. He spat out a bullet of blood. It splattered on the boards. Konrad stood at his full, impressive height. For the first time since he was put under, his mind felt clear and could move where it needed to.

“Catherine. Catherine.” He grinned at Lucille. “Catherine.”