After a long time using acid, you get used to the feeling of going off on a trip. You learn to recognise the signs; sight and hearing blending together, touch fading, everything feeling too far away. Finally the world drops beneath you and you begin to drift...
My feet met solid ground--cold tile, to be exact. A whiff of cool, air-conditioned air caressed my antennae and I looked around. People dressed in suits and formal clothing bustled down the hallway, ducking into cubicles, trading papers, chatting around a water cooler that bubbled like a plastic cauldron. Where was I?
"Welcome to MNU. Or, at least, an MNU building." George jumped up and sat down on a fax machine, ignoring the human who passed through him as she went about her work sending some sort of a document. "See everybody?"
"Uh..." I looked around, analyzing the faces swarming in the hallways. "Yes."
"Alright." George held up a hand and began counting down with his fingers, ignoring my bewildered gaze. "Three...Two...One."
A resonating bang exploded somewhere underneath me and orange bloomed all around. Like the last time I'd been "spirited away", it was sensed only as a mild, dim warmth--a fraction of what others felt around me. I had time to count to two before the walls shook and smoke billowed out, blocking the view. The flames roared and there came loud crashing, banging, shattering--
Scream. One scream, choked, gurgling, female. It was the fax machine girl, her document now just ash. Most of her was ash, too; a leg, an arm, half of the twisted, reddened lump of flesh that had once been a torso. Black, charcoaled meat, cooked well done.
I could feel her pain, I really could. The struggling boom-boom of her heart as the pauses between got longer and longer. Boom-Boom Boom. Boom. Boom...Boom. Boom...
What's going on? A voice at my ear, sibilant and quiet. I don't understand--what's going ON? She seemed to understand what had happened and dull panic set in, pushing into my heart like a butter knife instead of a razor. Funny how everyone says that pain cuts clean; it really crushes your organs and thoughts, drawing them in and compressing, compressing, smaller smaller smaller...
No. Nononononononono. Was it the prawns? The--prawns? Did this? No. John-- I saw a man, blond hair, laughing. --alive? Pleasegod let him be okay...ohgod. ohgod.I didn't ask--badbadbadwhy? whybadwhybadwhybadwhybad--
"Shut up!" I couldn't take it, the sluggish trickle of thoughts, so i started to yell at her. "Shut up! I can't--I can't listen to you! Shut--"
The stream of thought cut off, the trickle of emotion and pain died down. I froze and stared at her as she stopped moving. I'd told her to shut up, but not like this. "No--no, I'm sorry, I'm sorry--!"
Others joined in my screaming, as if the one cry of pain had broken the ice and everyone was free to give voice to their agony. I could hear them too. All of it, the thoughts, the straining of lungs and hearts as they struggled to work. Most gave out without completing what they set out to do.
I turned away, facing George, who was still glowing and outshining the embers. "Get me out of here."
"That's not the way it works, bud." George snickered. "You're here now, and you'll never leave. You can't kill a ghost, and this will stay with you wherever you are."
"Are you a ghost? Is this a ghost?" I wanted to strike out at him, but I somehow knew it would do nothing. My blow would pass through him like a blade through mist, or would hit him and not damage him; a feather against steel. "Or are you just another hallucination, like those people--" The memory of their strained thoughts
what'sgoingonohgodohGODpleasehelpIdon'twantthis
flooded my brain again and I sobbed.
George's antennae flicked, but he did nothing to quell my lamenting. "It doesn't matter if it was a hallucination--nobody knows what happened, and most likely nobody cares much. Ryan sure as hell doesn't." George's words pierced into me like bullets, or the shrapnel that had most likely pierced those people when the bomb went off. "Only you know what happened. Does that make it real? I don't know."
"But--" This was Ryan's doing? This is when he blew up the building? I'd known it had happened, but I hadn't thought of the pain this had caused--
"Do the technicalities matter? Stuff like this happens on both sides. The specifics aren't important, what matters is the idea."
The idea. The idea that there are casualites on both sides? No. There are casualites, but there are also families left behind. That was the point George had tried to make. These people worked for MNU, and did awful things, but they weren't bad. They just had bills to pay, mouths to feed. They helped kill poleepkwa, both indirectly and directly, for good reasons--as good as reasons could be--and we kill them for it. We still do.