NewU Pt. 07

Dr. Livingston, I presume.

Some of mankind's most memorable moments were suddenly in my mind to be browsed and re-lived at my leisure, in exactly the same way that my memory of Olivia had been a few weeks earlier. It was incredible. What was even more astonishing was the fact that I could somehow tell that these memories came from only a handful of people in the Sect. A memory had been shared with another Evo, who in turn and shared it with another, who had passed it on to someone else, all the way down the line of history to me. But there was more, so much more, that had been lost during the schism. It was one of the few things that the members of the Sect mourned from their separation with the Conclave. Not every memory of every Conclave member had been shared with every other member. It was only those you were lucky enough to encounter that were passed on. There was a vast, unimaginable source of history contained within the minds of the Conclave Evos that were lost to the Sect and it grieved them deeply. Memories of every point in history, every major event and every person of significance for the past 700 years was contained, in vivid detail, in the vaulted recesses of the Conclave psyche. Their questionable thirst for power aside, it was almost enough to get me to sign up immediately.

Over the years, as I would meet more Evos and as my powers grew, a whole new historical timeline would become clearer. Parallel, influencing and yet entirely separated from the history taught in high schools all over the world. The Conclave, with their lust for control, had influenced human history far more than the vast majority of people could even imagine and in their move to separate themselves from the Conclave, and the Sect had made just as significant an impact.

What was more amazing, and something that I still hadn't quite gotten used to was the fact that Charlotte and I had been conversing in the mindscape for hours. If we had been talking in the real world, the sun would have set long ago and the new dawn would be approaching, yet less than a few minutes had passed outside of the mindscape. Despite the enormous amount of time I had spent in my bunker, or wandering my city, in the month since my awakening, - not to mention the day's work on my University project - the dilation of time between the mind and the world outside of it was something that still astounded me.

Charlotte seemed perfectly happy to talk and share those memories as we idly wandered the streets of my city, her hand, more often than not, linked with mine. It was still a novel position for me to be in. I had something of a relationship already with Becky, and the beginnings of one with Evie, but this simple act of intimacy in no way contained the guilt -- or the thrill, if you are that way inclined -- of cheating. It was if each relationship was on their own separate plane of existence. Becky was my human relationship, Charlotte was, in a way, my Evo one. I still had no idea where to place Evie's, but they all seemed entirely independent of each other, not intertwined or connected in any way other than the fact that I was in them. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my entire life was run in the same way; there was my life as a human, with my human friends, my human concerns and commitments, my human relationships, my human desires for wealth, success and happiness, and then there was my Evo life, completely separate from my human one and one that I was only just beginning to explore.

"A lot of us feel like that." Charlotte smiled, stopping for a second to gaze in wonder at one of the many plazas we had passed on our walk. This one seemed to commemorate the day that I left home, a grey marble statue of myself, suitcase at my feet, staring off into the future was surrounded by ornate fountains and perfectly manicured gardens. Ghosts and motes of light flitted around the open space in the same casual manner as my own stroll with Charlotte. "It's a function of the mind," she continued as we resumed our wandering. "We are biologically programmed to keep our Evo identity secret from society, it's a survival mechanism, it's instinct... Darwinism in practice. If our mind was incapable of separating those identities so completely, mistakes would happen which could lead to public exposure. Historically speaking, that meant death." She let her sentence fade off as a mote of light shot over our heads and off into the distance, her eyes raising to follow it. "What do you think they are?" She asked, changing the subject.

"I thought you would know," I answered, my own eyes tracking the light as it faded into the distance.

"No, I mean, the ghosts I understand. They are no different from mine, there are just less of them. I have never seen those lights before."

"Jeeves?"

"They are impulses, Sir. Spontaneous thoughts in their purest form."

"Cool, thanks."

I relayed the information on to Charlotte. "Who is Jeeves?" She asked with a quizzical smile.

"How do you..."

"We're in your head," she said through her smile. "It's the same way that you can receive those memories. There are no secrets in here, that's one of the reasons we consider it to be so intimate. Compared to this, we could jump out of here and have wild, rampant sex and it would be no more significant to either of us than if we had coffee."

"Oh." I blushed slightly at the idea of the sex, not because she mentioned it, but at the hardening in my pants at the idea, I didnt miss the wry grin from my companion as I did. "Let me see if I can do this." I squeezed her hand slightly, consciously pressing my memories of all my interactions with Jeeves into her. Her eyes flickered a few times before refocusing.

"Wow," she said after a few slack-jawed seconds. "So, you actually communicate... like, real, two-way communication... with your own subconscious?"

"Err... Yeah, I guess so."

"That is..." her lips floundered for a second as her mind raced to find a suitable word. "That is fucking incredible!" she finally exclaimed.

"Why, thank you, Madam." Jeeves faded into existence in front of us. "And might I say, your tutelage has been most informative. I have greatly enjoyed processing it."

"Does he always talk like that?"

"Yes, I do," Jeeves answered before I could. "He..." he nodded his head at me, "...thinks it's funny."

Charlotte looked at me, another grin pulling at the corners of her lips. I just shrugged with a smirk of my own.

"Jeeves, it was very nice to meet you," Charlotte said after rolling her eyes playfully. "I look forward to getting to know you better in the future."

"And I, you," Jeeves replied with a formal nod of his head before shimmering away into nothingness. I don't know why I had expected more of a conversation between the two, though it quickly dawned on me that Charlotte now knew as much about Jeeves as I did.

"Jesus, Pete," Charlotte said as we remained standing in the middle of the street. "You really are full of surprises. I don't think I can even properly grasp how powerful you are. It's..." Her voice faded off as she once again grappled with her grasp of the English language.

"Interesting?"

"Scary," she corrected with no hint of humor. "Not in a bad kind of way..."

"No," I chuckled, "I totally understand the good kind of ways to scare someone."

"All right, maybe scary wasn't the right word, although I can't even begin to imagine what that mind of yours could do if someone pissed you off. Especially with those enhanced combat abilities." It took me a second to work out how she knew about them until I realized that knowledge of them would have been included in my memories of Jeeves. "Maybe 'intimidating' is a better word."

"Is that any better?" I asked with a grin. Charlotte's thoughts were enough for me to know that I needn't take offence at any of this, but it was always fun to play along.

"Hey, some girls find it sexy. The big strong man who was able to protect her."

"Hmmm... are you one of those girls?"

"Now that would be telling," she said with a wink before pulling me on with our walk.

"So, what about Evie?" I said after a short time of silence. "Why is she so different?"

"I have no idea," Charlotte admitted after a short pause. I squeezed her hand again, trying to push these memories into her as well. "That won't work," she said after glancing down at our hands and realizing what I was trying to do. "Mindscapes are unique," she continued. "Think of it like an encryption. What you saw in her mind was not her mind, but rather your interpretation of her interpretation of her own mind.... if that makes sense. You cannot communicate it with another person because they would probably have their own separate interpretation."

I blinked a few times. "You like that word, don't you?" I chuckled.

"You have a better one?"

"Understanding, explanation..."

"Shut up, you know what I mean. Anyway, back to the point, I would have to meet her myself to be able to see her mind, and that could be a little awkward. Especially if she already thinks she is different, which she almost certainly does."

"Hmmm..." The puzzle that was Evie was getting more and more intriguing the more I thought about her. "Yeah, we may have to put that on the back burner for a while."

We carried on walking for a while, stopping every now and then for Charlotte to stare up in wonder at the towering skyscrapers, bathed in their blue light as they reached for the endless cloudless sky. Very little was said. We just walked as we each took in the city around us, our fingers entwined and the simple contentment of just being together. We wandered for hours. Of course, I had already seen most of the city in the time I had spent exploring it, but there was something indescribably special about sharing it with someone else. The more Charlotte saw of my city and my mind, the more I understood; it was pure intimacy.

After an unknown number of almost silent hours, we found ourselves in another plaza, at least a dozen miles from the last one we had stopped at. This one commemorated my sixth birthday. My grandparents had taken me out, away from my parents and for the first and only time during my childhood, I knew what it was to have a birthday that wasn't filled with mockery and misery. Willful ignorance: that is how I came to understand my grandparent's place in my life. They knew what was going on, they did what they could for a while, but it was never enough to make a difference and eventually they just left me to my fate. But for a large portion of my life before leaving home, those few hours were my benchmark for what happiness could be. It was odd to think that my idea of happiness back then was the simple lack of abuse for a short period of time. Happiness and the absence of misery, I had come to realize, were very different things. It took Jimmy, my first real friend, to show me what belonging truly felt like.

We sat on a bench, the warm sun bathing the plaza in light, the cool breeze coming from the east, the motes of light playing in the temperate air as Charlotte and I watched. I would later learn that the weather in my city was based entirely on my mood. Contrary to the depiction in front of us, it would seem that at that moment, I was genuinely happy. But, of course, I had to spoil it by speaking.

"Tell me about the Inquisitors," I said after a short while sitting, realizing that my training had been replaced with wandering.

Charlotte, who had seemed just as happy and content as I was, changed in an instant. The soft smile vanished, her eyes darkened with the rest of her exquisite features and she let go of my hand, leaning forward to rest her elbow on her knee, rubbing her mouth and jaw along the palm that had just held mine.

"The Inquisitors..." she repeated quietly. "It's strange, we have been fighting them, fleeing from them or hiding from them for over seven centuries, but we know very little about them." She said after a short pause. She turned to look at me, "Your abilities are impressive, Pete," she went on, "but the powers you have given yourself in your 'internal editing station', we can all do that. Over the years, countless of our kind have dedicated their gifts to science, to genetics, to medicine; some of them did it to help people, but most did it to try to understand an enemy who, for reasons we still don't understand, seem hellbent on our extinction.

"Centuries of research, centuries of infiltration, some more successful than others, but more than anything else, there have been centuries of death. We know where our species come from, it may be unpredictable, but we understand our mutation. We have no such luxury when it comes to the Inquisitors. We don't have the first idea how their biology works, or how it is passed on, let alone where it comes from and more people than you or I can imagine have given their lives trying to find out."

There was another long pause before she spoke again, there was a tremble in her voice, the soft words vibrating with unspeakable fear. "We don't know where they came from, we don't even know if they know, but our kind first recognized their biological distinction from other humans in the late 1500s. It was like a bastardization of our own mutation, it was like they could feel us in the same way that we can sense each other. Not our powers, they couldn't sense us, but it was like they could see the effects of our abilities. My grandfather told me it was like painting a room, they may never have seen the painter or the paint, but they could tell that the room was different when nobody else saw it, and by seeing the paint on the walls, they knew to look for the person with paint on their hands.

"They hate us, Pete." She went on after another pause. "And nobody knows why. In the beginning it was easy to put it down to religious zealotry, maybe that was a lazy explanation but the church doesn't have the influence that they used to and some of the Inquisitors we have encountered have no affiliation with the Vatican at all, as far as we can tell, and yet they still hunt us."

"I thought they had left the Sect alone." I asked after Charlotte stopped for another pause.

"They have, for the most part." She nodded softly. "Their coordinated attacks seem to still only be targeting the Conclave, but individual Evos? They make no distinction, if they identify one of us, they will use every one of their considerable resources to hunt them down and kill them. Take you, for example, and me, neither of us look like this naturally, if an Inquisitor got close enough for long enough, they would see that... and that would be it, a lifetime of being chased, inevitably caught, and executed, just for the crime of being born an Evo."

"Alright..." I said after another silent pause. "Let's start at the beginning. Tell me what you know."

The memories and the knowledge came pouring into me as she retook my hand. The Inquisitors really were a mystery. There were theories that they had been around for as long as the Evos, a separate but distinct evolution of mankind who seemed to be biologically programmed to be in conflict with our species. It was a long time before the Conclave recognized that the Inquisitors were more than simple humans, what started as an unexplained rise in the number of Evo exposures and executions suddenly turned into horrified fear as the source of this murderous trend announced itself with a vengeance. A curious anomaly quickly became an existential threat.

The early Conclave had sought to dominate and control the human population, causing them actual physical harm was rarely considered, let alone used unless as a last resort to ensure an Evo's survival. If an Evo was exposed, the human population could be coerced into leaving them alone, they could have their memories altered or wiped completely to guarantee and Evo's safety, there was never really a need to harm them. A dead human was of no use to the Conclave.

My own editing station had filtered my reading of human thoughts to those directly concerning me. It would have been easy to change that so any human thought concerning anything about Evos would be detectable and it would appear that this is exactly what the early Evos had done. Then, one day, a group of them had been ambushed and massacred. The Conclave was still in its infancy at the time, barely 70 years had passed since the order's foundation and although that may seem like a long time in terms of an ordinary lifetime, it was nothing compared to the ages that most Evos could reach and a blink of an eye in the longer term history. Secrecy and security, although were taken seriously, were not top priorities for the fledgling Conclave.

The attack that changed it all had been brutal. The ambushed group had been made of low ranking -- and therefore, comparatively weaker -- Evos who had been at a gathering with their mentor at an inn on the outskirts of Munich. They had been talking for less than an hour when a group of heavily armed men bearing papal insignia had burst in, the man closest to the door had been cleaved in two by one of the armored intruders and the rest of the Evos had been slaughtered with the same levels of ferocious violence. Only one man had escaped, and his story had been terrifying, so much so that it was doubtful that his survival had been an accident.

Aside from the acts of barbaric violence, the most concerning part of the survivor's story was that none of the Evos had sensed the men coming until it was too late, the mentor freezing, mid-sentence, only seconds before the doors to the inn had burst open and the carnage began. At first, the higher Evo ranks, including the Archon, had viewed this detail with suspicion, suspecting that the ambush had been the result of negligence more than anything else. But to be certain and to quiet the spreading rumors, they dispatched a group of higher ranked members -- ones with military experience -- to Munich to find out for themselves.

It had taken less than a day for the blurred, intermittent minds of the inquisitors to be found. One of the investigating Evos described it like trying to view a damaged painting, you could view the whole, if you had some idea of what you were looking at but picking out individual detail was almost impossible. What was worse was that their zealotry had spread to the general population. The Evos had kept a low profile, hiding in plain sight and doing nothing to draw attention to themselves while slowly making their way towards the source of this new hostility, hostility towards a species that these people should have had no knowledge of.

It didn't take long to find what they were looking for.

There, on the steps of Munich's ancient and beautiful cathedral were seven members of the clergy, a cardinal at their head and proselytizing against enemies of god, abominations that the frenzied crowd became more and more determined to hunt down and kill. It was there that the members of the Conclave first heard a word that would be used against them for the next few centuries: 'Heretics'. Within a decade, the Spanish Inquisitions that had once only targeted Jews and Muslims for conversion, was now hunting the Conclave, not for religious conversion, but for extermination. Evo men were hung, drawn and quartered, the most horrific of medieval execution methods. Evo women were burned at the stake as witches, none who were found were spared.

The twelve Evos who had been massacred at the inn, however graphic and violent their deaths may have been, were shown a modicum of mercy compared the wave of torture and public executions that spread across Europe over the next hundred years. Each story told by Evos who had somehow survived this onslaught had been the same. There had been no change in the minds of the human population, not before their exposure, at least. All had seemed normal. The more powerful Evos had sensed them coming; almost always less than a mile away, always with murderous intent and a full knowledge of the Evo's identity and whereabouts in every single case. It was this intent, however blurred and unclear, that had alerted the Evos to the danger heading their way. The less powerful Evos had no such luxury, they were almost always caught off guard, only those with military training or friends in very high places had been able to escape. The rest were not so lucky. Invariably though, after the initial attack, the minds of the local human population grew significantly more hostile towards the Conclave. Although it had never been confirmed, it was hypothesized that the Inquisitors influenced the humans against the Evos in a similar way that the Evos had manipulated them for their own ends.