WK: The Ultimate Self-Made Man
Title: The Ultimate Self-Made Man
Rating: PG
Pairing: None
Disclaimer: All of it belongs to someone else.
Notes: Um, it's weird.
Summary: The origin of Schuldig: Composition, Order, Balance, Design, Harmony.
Mad world! mad kings, mad composition!
- Shakespeare, "King John"
Of all the gifts Estet has recorded, telepathy is the one most likely to destroy the gifted. The strongest die when they are literally burned out, their overloaded neurons unable to handle so many overlapping and conflicting impulses, but even the weakest can be irrevocably cracked by the constant whisper of voices not their own. Telepaths at Schuldig's level of strength fall somewhere between those fates; to a man, the emergence of their abilities has developed in every one of them a severe and very unstable case of dissociative identity disorder. Recovery is less than uncommon, with perhaps one in a thousand of those so afflicted able to make themselves useful enough to avoid being put down as a waste of resources.
When they first found him, the boy was so far gone that two- thirds of the three man team sent to retrieve him from the asylum voted he be killed on the spot. According to his files, the boy had not existed before his appearance in a shelter for the homeless six months before. He seemed to be fairly well fed and uninjured, the shelter director had reported, though his ragged clothes and tangled hair indicated that he had been neglected for at least the last several days. The hair had to be cut off; the boy looked older after it was finally cropped down to spiky fuzz, though the director guessed that he was about twelve. Most disturbing was the total amnesia he claimed to be experiencing: he was a blank slate, with no idea about anything from his own identity to how he had ended up at his current location.
The rest of the file read like a textbook case of an emerging high-level telepath. Police were contacted, but the boy abruptly became belligerent and uncooperative when he was taken back to the station. The real fun began after he was delivered to the hospital for an evaluation of his condition: at that point he began manifesting the symptoms of twenty-eight separate psychiatric disorders as he channeled every patient in the ward as well as any strong personality that wandered into his range, which appeared to be quite extensive. He was restrained, sedated, and, after an inconclusive search for any family, locked in a padded cell to rot.
He was still there six months later when the retrieval team came. Kingsley, the team's pyrokinetic, took one look at the shape huddled in a corner and wrote him off. Marcoen was a psychometrist, and he took the time to actually make contact and reach out with his gift before declaring the boy "catatonic, with a mind somewhere between scrambled eggs and total vegetation." Two votes for termination.
The team leader was a telepath. A relatively weak one, especially compared to the mind she could feel reaching out even underneath heavy sedation, but one strong enough to be well versed with madness and what Estet could do with it. She overruled them.
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the
mastery of a subject- the actual enemy is the unknown.
- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
The evaluation upon reaching Rosenkreuz classified the boy as a level three telepath. Level ones were the burn-outs; level twos lost their hold on any trace of self and became nothing but empty shells. Level threes were the strongest with any hope of retaining a consciousness, and it was a slim chance indeed, but the sheer potential strength that distorted their minds made recovery attempts worthwhile. After shielding to block outside influences, his handlers began sifting through a psychic mess even more tangled than his hair had been all those months ago. The nameless boy was found to have seventeen core personalities that, while hardly able to be called stable, were at least solidly rooted in his psyche. Third levels were always difficult to work with: their gifts imprinted on the strongest minds they were exposed to, meaning most of the boy's identities were going to be strong-willed and likely older than he actually was. Rather than trying to discover which was the original (assuming it still existed, and had not been washed away in the flood of the awakening gift) his handlers searched for the one that could best be molded to serve Estet's needs.
The most easily identified and discarded were the strongest, the personalities copied whole from the minds of others. Philip and Ellen were the boy's middle-class parents, completely unsuitable. Johannes was the psychiatrist who had been chiefly responsible for treating him, and Felix was the paranoid schizophrenic from the next cell over. A war veteran, possibly an older relative or a teacher, Wolfgang was prone to offering tidbits of advice and long, rambling stories. Erik was the weakest of the duplicates, a sort of older brother/best friend whose rejection of authority would make him unnecessarily difficult.
After the clones came the amalgams, the dreams and archetypes that had been collected and condensed from multiple sources. Peter was instantly ruled out, the purified Eau de Lunacy rendered down from all those unable to make as lasting an impression as Felix. Similarly, Taylor was the distilled essence of prostitution, neither male nor female and open to absolutely anything for the right price. Completely opposite was Sebastian, an innocent and a child unaware of the existence in the world of suffering and wrong. Amadeus was a pathological liar, a con artist, and a pickpocket who refused to trust or believe anyone. All of the boy's acquired knowledge was concentrated in Aaron, the scholar, while Francis could inexplicably operate every form of heavy construction equipment the handlers could name. Kai was an artist, a singer, a musician, and a dancer. Magnus adored cooking and sports, though he could barely boil water or catch a ball; his real skill lied in his ability to keep track of and monitor absolutely everything in his environment. The last two came as a matched set: Hannah and Seth, sadism and masochism, pure pleasure derived from inflicting and receiving physical and emotional pain.
This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE;
God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.
TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and
art found wanting.
PERED; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the
Medes and Persians.
- The Book of Daniel 5:26-28
In the end, having interviewed and tested all sixteen of the identified personalities, they judged them all unfit and selected the seventeenth, the little lost child without memories who was most likely the only remnant of whatever the boy had been before his gift wiped it all away. A comment became a reference became a nickname, and soon Rasa began his education as a telepath. His trainers took over the barriers that guarded him from the world, adding more layers inside the outer walls to keep down the echoing press of his many conflicting natures as they taught him to be what Estet wanted.
Third level telepaths were worth the effort required to stabilize their minds and deal with their various states because of a mental fluke Rasa's instructors called a "greenroom." It held the dormant personalities like a mental waiting room, and its creation was an instinctual reaction. In practice, a lower level telepath could piggyback on another person's thoughts and ride along as a hidden observer, maybe adding an additional nudge or compulsion before having to withdrawal. A level three could box those thoughts up, set them aside, and take total control.
They knew what he could do, but they did not understand. A stronger telepath could always shatter a weaker one's shielding through pure brute force, and they watched for that, but they did not appreciate or guard against subtlety. They had shut the door of the greenroom. They had forgotten it was not soundproof, and that a telepath could alter his own mind even easier than he could someone else's. They had also underestimated the survival drive of someone without a body.
He was always Rasa, they saw to that, so they passed off his quirks of behavior as the actions of an amnesiac trying to build an identity. When they taught him the best ways to manipulate the human mind they saw a fast learner, not Johannes' years of schooling. When they taught strategy they forgot Wolfgang's experience and Magnus' calculations, and when they taught him to torture and kill they missed Hannah's fierce love of the hunt. In the more standard classrooms it was Aaron's intelligence that came to the fore. Even when he was disciplined, courtesy of Erik's insubordination, they mistook Seth's cries as pleas for mercy.
Rasa was a very good student, he was simply learning a great deal more than Estet realized they were teaching.
Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.
- Wallace Stevens, "To an Old Philosopher in Rome"
As much as they might wish it, sending out a trained telepath with a sealed dissociative disorder was a little too much like assigning one of the field teams a ticking bomb instead of an agent. So at fifteen, when they believed Rasa had developed a strong enough sense of self to hold his own, he was taken to the infirmary and fixed to a bed with four-point restraints and an additional strap to keep his head in place. Then they unlocked the greenroom.
Past experience told them to expect several days of external struggling, possibly even grand mal seizures, as the internal fight for dominance continued. Eventually the victor, hopefully Rasa, would be left with a position something like the alpha in a pack of wolves. At best the winner would even be able to keep the others suppressed, but that was rare. If the ultimate outcome was one Estet deemed unacceptable, either by the results of the fight or if the boy's mind fragmented further, he would be put down like a rabid dog.
They were not expecting Rasa's first actions after the drop of the shields to be a series of meditative breathing exercises that eventually tapered off into a trance state so deep it bordered on a coma. He spent over two weeks unconscious, whatever activity that may have been going on in the greenroom beyond the reach of his trainers. They had begun to suggest that he may have gone the way of the level twos, burying or erasing his mind completely, when he woke up.
He had spent three years planning for this. He had, among other things, an artist's creativity, a psychologist's knowledge, a con man's persuasion, a worker's practicality, and a killer's arrogance. He could have told them it would work out the way he wanted.
Harmony in discord.
- Horace, "Epistles"
Whatever else they may have missed, they knew immediately that he was not Rasa. What they did not know was what to make of the figure that smiled pleasantly and asked for his restraints to be removed. The smile was pure Amadeus, a mockery of Sebastian's innocence that pretended to be reassuring while failing to cover the knife-edged smirk full of Hannah's promises. The motions as he shrugged and spread his hands were made with the effortless grace of Kai, the unshakable confidence of Francis, and the careless seduction of Taylor. Even the shields blocking the telepaths as they tried to scan him were blended, built with Ellen's protective instincts and backed with the threat implicit in a taste of Peter's insanity.
The greenroom was empty. The young man that left Rosenkreuz for his assigned team three months later was alone in his head, his only company the continuous background hum of outside thoughts. He could no longer leave his own body, not with no one left behind to mind the store, but he had the handpicked skills of seventeen individuals who had been, if nothing else, paragons of their particular talents. Seventeen individuals that had been completely assimilated, spun down to threads and woven into their own design on the loom Estet had thought it was preparing for its own use.
He knew what he was, knew he had been the only possible outcome that hadn't included chaining parts of himself or becoming a mindless drone. But someone had obviously had a strong sense of morals, if a rather skewed one, because he blamed himself for those seventeen deaths even as he ignored those who died beneath his gun and his will. For those murders, though, he judged himself.
He was Schuldig.
Rating: PG
Pairing: None
Disclaimer: All of it belongs to someone else.
Notes: Um, it's weird.
Summary: The origin of Schuldig: Composition, Order, Balance, Design, Harmony.
Mad world! mad kings, mad composition!
- Shakespeare, "King John"
Of all the gifts Estet has recorded, telepathy is the one most likely to destroy the gifted. The strongest die when they are literally burned out, their overloaded neurons unable to handle so many overlapping and conflicting impulses, but even the weakest can be irrevocably cracked by the constant whisper of voices not their own. Telepaths at Schuldig's level of strength fall somewhere between those fates; to a man, the emergence of their abilities has developed in every one of them a severe and very unstable case of dissociative identity disorder. Recovery is less than uncommon, with perhaps one in a thousand of those so afflicted able to make themselves useful enough to avoid being put down as a waste of resources.
When they first found him, the boy was so far gone that two- thirds of the three man team sent to retrieve him from the asylum voted he be killed on the spot. According to his files, the boy had not existed before his appearance in a shelter for the homeless six months before. He seemed to be fairly well fed and uninjured, the shelter director had reported, though his ragged clothes and tangled hair indicated that he had been neglected for at least the last several days. The hair had to be cut off; the boy looked older after it was finally cropped down to spiky fuzz, though the director guessed that he was about twelve. Most disturbing was the total amnesia he claimed to be experiencing: he was a blank slate, with no idea about anything from his own identity to how he had ended up at his current location.
The rest of the file read like a textbook case of an emerging high-level telepath. Police were contacted, but the boy abruptly became belligerent and uncooperative when he was taken back to the station. The real fun began after he was delivered to the hospital for an evaluation of his condition: at that point he began manifesting the symptoms of twenty-eight separate psychiatric disorders as he channeled every patient in the ward as well as any strong personality that wandered into his range, which appeared to be quite extensive. He was restrained, sedated, and, after an inconclusive search for any family, locked in a padded cell to rot.
He was still there six months later when the retrieval team came. Kingsley, the team's pyrokinetic, took one look at the shape huddled in a corner and wrote him off. Marcoen was a psychometrist, and he took the time to actually make contact and reach out with his gift before declaring the boy "catatonic, with a mind somewhere between scrambled eggs and total vegetation." Two votes for termination.
The team leader was a telepath. A relatively weak one, especially compared to the mind she could feel reaching out even underneath heavy sedation, but one strong enough to be well versed with madness and what Estet could do with it. She overruled them.
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the
mastery of a subject- the actual enemy is the unknown.
- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
The evaluation upon reaching Rosenkreuz classified the boy as a level three telepath. Level ones were the burn-outs; level twos lost their hold on any trace of self and became nothing but empty shells. Level threes were the strongest with any hope of retaining a consciousness, and it was a slim chance indeed, but the sheer potential strength that distorted their minds made recovery attempts worthwhile. After shielding to block outside influences, his handlers began sifting through a psychic mess even more tangled than his hair had been all those months ago. The nameless boy was found to have seventeen core personalities that, while hardly able to be called stable, were at least solidly rooted in his psyche. Third levels were always difficult to work with: their gifts imprinted on the strongest minds they were exposed to, meaning most of the boy's identities were going to be strong-willed and likely older than he actually was. Rather than trying to discover which was the original (assuming it still existed, and had not been washed away in the flood of the awakening gift) his handlers searched for the one that could best be molded to serve Estet's needs.
The most easily identified and discarded were the strongest, the personalities copied whole from the minds of others. Philip and Ellen were the boy's middle-class parents, completely unsuitable. Johannes was the psychiatrist who had been chiefly responsible for treating him, and Felix was the paranoid schizophrenic from the next cell over. A war veteran, possibly an older relative or a teacher, Wolfgang was prone to offering tidbits of advice and long, rambling stories. Erik was the weakest of the duplicates, a sort of older brother/best friend whose rejection of authority would make him unnecessarily difficult.
After the clones came the amalgams, the dreams and archetypes that had been collected and condensed from multiple sources. Peter was instantly ruled out, the purified Eau de Lunacy rendered down from all those unable to make as lasting an impression as Felix. Similarly, Taylor was the distilled essence of prostitution, neither male nor female and open to absolutely anything for the right price. Completely opposite was Sebastian, an innocent and a child unaware of the existence in the world of suffering and wrong. Amadeus was a pathological liar, a con artist, and a pickpocket who refused to trust or believe anyone. All of the boy's acquired knowledge was concentrated in Aaron, the scholar, while Francis could inexplicably operate every form of heavy construction equipment the handlers could name. Kai was an artist, a singer, a musician, and a dancer. Magnus adored cooking and sports, though he could barely boil water or catch a ball; his real skill lied in his ability to keep track of and monitor absolutely everything in his environment. The last two came as a matched set: Hannah and Seth, sadism and masochism, pure pleasure derived from inflicting and receiving physical and emotional pain.
This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE;
God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.
TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and
art found wanting.
PERED; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the
Medes and Persians.
- The Book of Daniel 5:26-28
In the end, having interviewed and tested all sixteen of the identified personalities, they judged them all unfit and selected the seventeenth, the little lost child without memories who was most likely the only remnant of whatever the boy had been before his gift wiped it all away. A comment became a reference became a nickname, and soon Rasa began his education as a telepath. His trainers took over the barriers that guarded him from the world, adding more layers inside the outer walls to keep down the echoing press of his many conflicting natures as they taught him to be what Estet wanted.
Third level telepaths were worth the effort required to stabilize their minds and deal with their various states because of a mental fluke Rasa's instructors called a "greenroom." It held the dormant personalities like a mental waiting room, and its creation was an instinctual reaction. In practice, a lower level telepath could piggyback on another person's thoughts and ride along as a hidden observer, maybe adding an additional nudge or compulsion before having to withdrawal. A level three could box those thoughts up, set them aside, and take total control.
They knew what he could do, but they did not understand. A stronger telepath could always shatter a weaker one's shielding through pure brute force, and they watched for that, but they did not appreciate or guard against subtlety. They had shut the door of the greenroom. They had forgotten it was not soundproof, and that a telepath could alter his own mind even easier than he could someone else's. They had also underestimated the survival drive of someone without a body.
He was always Rasa, they saw to that, so they passed off his quirks of behavior as the actions of an amnesiac trying to build an identity. When they taught him the best ways to manipulate the human mind they saw a fast learner, not Johannes' years of schooling. When they taught strategy they forgot Wolfgang's experience and Magnus' calculations, and when they taught him to torture and kill they missed Hannah's fierce love of the hunt. In the more standard classrooms it was Aaron's intelligence that came to the fore. Even when he was disciplined, courtesy of Erik's insubordination, they mistook Seth's cries as pleas for mercy.
Rasa was a very good student, he was simply learning a great deal more than Estet realized they were teaching.
Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.
- Wallace Stevens, "To an Old Philosopher in Rome"
As much as they might wish it, sending out a trained telepath with a sealed dissociative disorder was a little too much like assigning one of the field teams a ticking bomb instead of an agent. So at fifteen, when they believed Rasa had developed a strong enough sense of self to hold his own, he was taken to the infirmary and fixed to a bed with four-point restraints and an additional strap to keep his head in place. Then they unlocked the greenroom.
Past experience told them to expect several days of external struggling, possibly even grand mal seizures, as the internal fight for dominance continued. Eventually the victor, hopefully Rasa, would be left with a position something like the alpha in a pack of wolves. At best the winner would even be able to keep the others suppressed, but that was rare. If the ultimate outcome was one Estet deemed unacceptable, either by the results of the fight or if the boy's mind fragmented further, he would be put down like a rabid dog.
They were not expecting Rasa's first actions after the drop of the shields to be a series of meditative breathing exercises that eventually tapered off into a trance state so deep it bordered on a coma. He spent over two weeks unconscious, whatever activity that may have been going on in the greenroom beyond the reach of his trainers. They had begun to suggest that he may have gone the way of the level twos, burying or erasing his mind completely, when he woke up.
He had spent three years planning for this. He had, among other things, an artist's creativity, a psychologist's knowledge, a con man's persuasion, a worker's practicality, and a killer's arrogance. He could have told them it would work out the way he wanted.
Harmony in discord.
- Horace, "Epistles"
Whatever else they may have missed, they knew immediately that he was not Rasa. What they did not know was what to make of the figure that smiled pleasantly and asked for his restraints to be removed. The smile was pure Amadeus, a mockery of Sebastian's innocence that pretended to be reassuring while failing to cover the knife-edged smirk full of Hannah's promises. The motions as he shrugged and spread his hands were made with the effortless grace of Kai, the unshakable confidence of Francis, and the careless seduction of Taylor. Even the shields blocking the telepaths as they tried to scan him were blended, built with Ellen's protective instincts and backed with the threat implicit in a taste of Peter's insanity.
The greenroom was empty. The young man that left Rosenkreuz for his assigned team three months later was alone in his head, his only company the continuous background hum of outside thoughts. He could no longer leave his own body, not with no one left behind to mind the store, but he had the handpicked skills of seventeen individuals who had been, if nothing else, paragons of their particular talents. Seventeen individuals that had been completely assimilated, spun down to threads and woven into their own design on the loom Estet had thought it was preparing for its own use.
He knew what he was, knew he had been the only possible outcome that hadn't included chaining parts of himself or becoming a mindless drone. But someone had obviously had a strong sense of morals, if a rather skewed one, because he blamed himself for those seventeen deaths even as he ignored those who died beneath his gun and his will. For those murders, though, he judged himself.
He was Schuldig.