Daughter of Time 1: Reader (3 page)

Then the sun darkened, and the rain poured down on us like syrup, and I watched like I might a horror film on TV the replay of my dog barking and running and falling over dead in the grass. This time I couldn’t see through him. But I knew. I knew what was inside.

And I knew I was a freak.

It’s hard to be normal when you don’t see things like other people. In my case, I saw things that no one else could see. Visions in Time. Not intuitions, not a vague sense of doom or excitement –
visions
. They began in dreams but soon came even in the waking day. Not only visions of the future – for a Reader, it’s actually a lot easier to see into the past. Visions of what was and sometimes, what was to be, came more and more frequently, disturbing my days and my nights, pushing me further and further from people, walling me off from the normal world. Believe me, when you have seen your own birth, watched your mother scream in agony as she pushed you into the world like some deformed lump of lasagna, it changes you. When you can’t tell anyone around you these things, not even your parents, you are trapped in a prison where you slowly form your own thoughts.
Different
thoughts. Thoughts that shape you inside and out.

And that is when you lose the ability to think like normal people.

By the time I was ten, I was one odd little girl. I couldn’t really relate to the kids at school or to any adults. All I had were my own thoughts and, of course, the visions. Like some ghostly companion, they were always with me, playing reels behind my eyes, movies only I could watch. Some boring. Some interesting. Some horrible. Things I knew were somehow real or that I feared would be real someday.

I became ostracized by my peers. My teachers couldn’t reach me. My parents became very concerned. Finally, they took me in for evaluation. A few examinations by psychologists, then doctors, and, at last, the neurologists. Brain scans.
Finally,
there was something concrete they could hold onto, something clearly wrong with me, something to explain all the weirdness and problems.

And something that brought me to the attention of those dark forces that really control the fate of our world.

4

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. 
—Theodore Roosevelt

If I could give you any one piece of advice that I think would help you in your time, I would say turn off your TV.

Unplug it, place it on a cart, and roll it into the river.
Never
watch it again. Take your video game console and controllers – build a bonfire. Don’t
ever
go online again. I’m completely serious. What I know and what you don’t, is that all our digital technology was not the product of our tremendous cleverness like everyone believes. No, it was a gift,
from above
. Or rather, a poison, a drug—electromagnetic narcotics for controlling their human herds. Call them high-tech cattle prods, if you want. To
Them
, you’re all just a gene pool with potential, kept docile and reproducing ignorantly while the greatest show on Earth called
human culture
plays out. One giant sham.

Some of you know it. Some of you with half-awake Reader potential. Some of you feel it. Some of you outcasts, those who never fit in and end up on the streets or in the mountains or in institutions—you knew all along much more of the truth than our comfortable and successful herds. You suffered that deep discomfort, afflicting all your thoughts and actions, that sharp sense that something is wrong, deeply wrong with the world and how it is being presented to you. The sense in the back of your mind that things
don’t fit
.

Well, they don’t. I’ll explain more as we go on. Meanwhile, pick up a book, go stare at the stars.
Think
. You’re a junkie, strapped into a pleasure tube – a pig ready for the slaughter, or worse. Don’t let them control your mind anymore. Advice from a former slave. Take it or leave it.

My journey of bondage was about to begin. The brain scans were very clear. Even at eleven years old I could understand. Also, there were vague visions, like half-glimpsed dreams. In the beginning, Reading the future is like that, more like
remembering the future
than seeing it. The past too is like a memory, slightly out of focus, sometimes wrong, but mostly right. The future, well, that’s like a wild dream. Ever woken up from a dream, the details like colors bleeding out from your mind, until several hours later, you can only hold onto the most basic and faded outlines? That’s a vision of the future. Most of them, anyway. Sometimes, like a horrid nightmare, the vision will be so strong you remember almost everything. Like a nightmare, these visions,
prophecies
if you want, will shake you out of your normal state of consciousness. It’s a psychic slap in the brain. But those are very rare. Mostly, it’s half-remembered somethings you can never quite place.

Those were my visions of my own future, of my illness, of the soon-to-be nurtured tumor in the middle of my head. The doctors were amazed I could still see. The mass was the size of a golf ball then – quaint to me now, really. Near the back of my brain, it was lodged, growing, between what neurologists call the occipital and parietal lobes. These are basically big slabs of your brain that do different things. The occipital lobe, at the very
back
of your head, processes visual information from your eyes (which are at the front of your head – God works in mysterious ways, believe me). The parietal lobe does a lot of things, like sensing where you are, navigating, working with numbers, moving objects. No, I’m not a doctor. What I am is a freak with a freaking tumor growing in the middle of all this stuff, so, well, it
matters
to me.

The tumor was mostly growing out towards the occipital lobe like some elliptical golf ball, crashing into all those cells that process information from my eyes. The doctors were amazed I wasn’t blind yet. My parents looked sick listening to all of this. I was half-scared, half-remembering some blurry future where all this stuff wasn’t nearly the worst that was going to happen to me.

“It appears to be a fast-growing tumor,” one of the doctors said. “Many children’s tumors are, growing quickly, the cells dividing quickly like the rest of the growing body, but even worse. This is very serious, and very difficult to treat. We recommend you send her to specialists. We can’t treat her here.”

So began the long search for doctors across the country. Nebraska has some good medical facilities in Omaha, but they still referred me to New York, to Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. My parents were on the phone for hours and hours to doctors and relatives in the area. By then we’d all seen enough doctors’ offices to last a lifetime. And all the time, the brain scans showed the thing inside my head kept getting bigger. We prepared for a long trip to the East Coast.

Then one day, just like in the dream, without a phone call or any kind of warning, three black cars with tinted windows pulled up to our farm. Out of these cars stepped the men of that nightmare that I relive over and over again. They came, they tried to convince my parents to release me into their “care,” and when my parents would not, they took me by force.

When I awoke from the blackness, I was being roughly unloaded from the car by one of the burly men in a suit, maybe the very one who knocked me unconscious. He threw me over his shoulder, grunting as he carted me towards a bland building covered in metallic gray like some enormous warehouse. In my foggy vision it seemed so unimportant, so featureless and unreal, yet it would be my home for many years to come. My prison. A place from which, as the man had promised, I would not escape.

5

Madam, I have come from a country where people are hanged if they talk. 
—Leonhard Euler

While I lived as their prisoner, before I was sold into slavery, I knew in my heart that I had no hope of escaping. I had no hope of living very long. The things they did to me, the conditions of my life convinced me that I had gone to hell, or hell on Earth, and that my time here would be the final years of torture before my death. Because I did not understand anything, had none of the knowledge that I would later slowly piece together, their purposes seemed meaningless, random and obscene – torment without any goal except to drive me mad, to tear all hope from the soul of a young child.

When I lay unconscious on the ground in the cornfields my dad had planted himself – that was my last day in Nebraska. I never returned. Now, returning is impossible. That day was the last time I would ever see my parents. At the time, I didn’t know what had happened to them. You might think that ignorance of their fate would have been a curse. I’m sure it would have. But it is also a curse to know exactly the fate of those you love, when that fate is evil. The past is not hidden from me, especially when it concerns me closely. It wasn’t a year before I had experienced a vision showing me their murder, the cruelty of the men who visited my house, how they disposed of their bodies without respect, dignity, or care.

I’ll spare you details. But I wasn’t spared. And even if I suspected, the visions mercilessly gave me no chance to hope or doubt. By the time I was twelve, I knew I was completely alone and in the hands of monsters.

By then my eyesight had started to go, but I was way beyond expecting my captors to care about that. As you’ll see, it was just the opposite; they wanted me blind. And they always got what they wanted. During my first year, as my vision started to fade, I was introduced to my new “home” and my new way of life. I learned for the first time how to live in constant fear. When I displeased them, they beat me or starved me for days. For the first few months, for even the slightest infraction of their strange rules, I was beaten. Again and again, until I became what they wanted – so afraid of pain, so living in fear of their cruel police sticks and electric wires that I became like some caged animal, totally responsive to their commands. A well-trained monkey.

Their rules were both simple and strange to me, at least at first. There were the understandable, if awfully harsh, rules about living – where to stand and sleep and eat, how to behave, how to answer questions and commands. Speak out of turn to another child – yes, there were many of us – and the stick might smash across your mouth. Out of your bed in the middle of the night? Maybe because you needed to stand, or pee, or think, or something? The cameras in the rooms would record it, and the next day you might be plugged into the wires, fire sent inside your nerves. Not enough to damage you. They didn’t want to devalue their product. But it was more than enough for their purposes.

The other rules were the scariest, because none of us could understand them in the beginning. There is nothing more frightening than being asked to do something you don’t understand and being punished when you fail to meet their expectations.

Many days we would be paraded out of our rooms and forced to march down long corridors that looked like hospital wings toward glass encased laboratories with rows of electronic equipment. They would hook us up to the equipment: large helmets with a hundred wires running from the top into computers. Our eyes would be masked by opaque glass in the helmets and our ears covered by headphones that blocked out all noise except the commands of the experimenters. Then they would ask us to describe what we saw, to find our way through labyrinths our eyes could not see. When we failed, they were displeased.

My heart bleeds now looking back at my twelve-year-old self, sitting utterly alone with a giant electronic helmet on my head, surrounded by people who killed my parents, who beat and tortured me, and who asked me to see the universe in a way I did not understand. I feel even worse for the less gifted children, who day after day stumbled and failed to progress, and who day after day were punished.