Chapter 73

Time: Sunday, April 3, 2019 10:25 AM

Aggie’s away team had left the Green Mall complex at 9 AM, and now after a seven kilometer walk along an optimal route, they were about four kilometers east and two kilometers south of home and less than a hundred meters from the three-way junction that separated Red Mall, Green Mall, and Yellow Mall territories. Aggie’s team had spent the last few minutes listening to Amber report on her successful but uneventful mission at Black Mall, and now Amber’s team was biking home. Emily and Mark were still online with Aggie from the Red Mall library, ready to offer advice if needed.

Alison looked at the building before them with a very skeptical eye. “This? We hiked all the way here to investigate this one building?”

Aggie shrugged. “I know it doesn’t look like much.” It was a triangular building, rather small, at least by the standards they had become accustomed to. The building was one story in height with its longest side perhaps fifty meters. It was wedged tight against the high perimeter walls that separated the building from Red and Yellow Mall territories.

Aggie pulled out her laser rangefinder and measured the length of the side facing them at thirty-five meters, which she dutifully reported to Mark and Emily. She also reported there was a transparent door leading to what looked like a small lobby. There were also a few lobby windows, and Aggie voiced the conjecture that they were probably the only windows for the building. Windows on the building’s two other sides would look directly into the sand and cobblestone and ivy buffer area of the perimeter barrier, and that was very rare. They had only discovered one example of that so far, at the southern tip of White Mall’s diamond complex.

Heather spoke up. “I don’t understand. Why did you leave this one small building unexplored?”

Aggie grinned. “It’s not as if we didn’t try. The last time my team was here, we were already passed our usual time limit. The sun was setting and our safety buffer was cut to the bone. Fatima ordered us home.”

“I made the right decision.” It was Fatima’s voice on the phone.

“Oh, hi, Fatima,” Aggie replied. “Yes, I agree. Are you with Mark and Emily now?”

“No, I’m at the Hilton. But I thought I’d listen in.”

“Sure, no problem. Too bad I can’t send you some video of what things look like here.” There was streaming video capabilities built into the Leophones, but so far nobody had gotten it to work.

“I should tell you,” replied Fatima. “In addition to activating the new phones, Akiko is working with Lynn on that right now.”

“Ah. Cool.” Aggie strapped the open phone to her shoulder harness and walked up to the lobby door with the rest of her team, reporting minor details as they went.

Time: Sunday, April 3, 2019 10:26 AM

It had been two days now since Ricardo had left the Black Mall home complex, and almost two days that he had been alone with Jessica. It had been a strange experience for him. Back at the home complex, he had been alone with her, but there he had much more control in how they interacted. At home, Ricardo carefully allocated interaction and isolation time. It all depended on the progress Jessica was making transforming herself into the person Ricardo wanted her to be. Here...

Here the circumstances were not nearly as favorable or controllable. Ricardo had not left Jessica alone in two days. He didn’t dare. Even if she obeyed his order to stay put, there was the danger of Ricardo walking a path that he would later discover to be irreversible. And Jessica herself, it was so strange. Late last night and early this morning, there had been several brief moments when Jessica’s behavior was extremely bizarre.

It never lasted more than a second or two. They would be walking normally and then Jessica would suddenly freeze, sometimes shaking, once crying out in panic, a deep haunting wail as if someone were tearing her apart. And then she would recover and be unaware that the moment of panic had even occurred.

Ricardo formed a theory of what was going on. Originally he had hoped to transform Jessica into a completely new person, but it was his suspicion now that he had failed. He had not changed Jessica’s personality. He had fractured it.

Jessica’s fall from power was a catastrophe for her. Her assumptions of superiority and ability to control her future cracked the day Ricardo killed Uno, and then shattered completely as she was raped in front of her boyfriend. She had been perfectly positioned for the fall. Ricardo had skillfully cranked up the pressure on her, causing her to live in constant fear that her sexual exploits with Alfonso would cause his death and her transformation into Ricardo’s hoof pussy.

On the day of her rape, the emotional distress split Jessica’s personality. The old Jessica was not destroyed, only suppressed. Ricardo had created a path for her to escape her fear by giving Ricardo absolute and childlike obedience. Jessica’s mind had accepted the offer by constructing a new personality as an overlay to her adult self image, smothering her adult years by building a new identify from the memories of her childhood.

Ricardo discovered a key piece of supporting evidence for this very early this morning. Part of Ricardo’s training for Jessica in the past week was to disrupt her sleep rhythm, and he had kept this up over the last two days. The schedule he was using on her was roughly twenty hours awake followed by a four-hour sleep period, with occasional one-hour naps when Jessica became too disoriented. Early this morning, at about 3 AM when it was time to wake her from a nap, he had pinched her nose closed to wake her and then asked her as soon as her eyes blinked open how old she was. In absolute honesty, the bewildered Jessica had replied nine.

Nine years old! Ricardo had driven Jessica to a time before her puberty. No wonder she had accepted the pigtails and kid clothing so readily. It was exactly the identity to which Jessica was trying to escape. And unknown to Ricardo, nine years old was a time in her youth when Jessica was actually a very sweet kid with rosy cheeks, a love for running, and with a great curiosity about the world. She would shrug off the occasional teasing about being the shortest girl in her class and instead pride herself in the care of her dog and her younger sister.

It was the last year of peace and normalcy in her life. The following year her mother discovered that Jessica’s father was having an affair, and things rapidly got very ugly. Four years of misery followed, culminating with Jessica’s divorced mother becoming an alcoholic and losing the family home.

And now it was nearly 10:30 AM, and in a half hour Ricardo would wake Jessica from another of her one-hour naps. Ricardo had picked a schedule that would give Jessica’s body enough physical rest but deprive her mind of dreaming sleep. He thought the disorientation would make it easier to mold her personality, and he had succeeded beyond his expectations.

Ricardo’s own dreams were strange. They frightened him. In his troubled dreams, he kept confusing Jessica with Amber, and he couldn’t figure out why. He had known both women since September. Neto’s girlfriend Amber he thought was rather interesting. Alfonso’s girlfriend Jessica he thought should be used as a piss mop. What quality did the two women have in common that Ricardo was confusing them in his dreams? The mergence made no sense, and the lack of an explanation was disturbing.

Ricardo sighed as he surveyed the small octagonal room they were in, with doors on six of the eight faces. Such a large and complex maze they were in. Keeping accurate logs of their travel was an absolute must. Ricardo glanced at their backpacks. They were full of gear he needed for domination, all the guns, and handcuffs, spools of wire, pliers, even a heavy spreader bar, all the gear he would never trust Jenaro or Hernando to carry. But that meant Jenaro wound up carrying all the food. Was that a mistake? Ricardo thought about the issue for a few moments, but couldn’t see what else he could have done.

He turned and took a hard look at Jessica’s face as she slept. Her face was very relaxed, the innocence of a child at sleep. Yes, his theory of a split personality was correct, he was sure of it. And as he stared at her closely, Ricardo noticed a flutter in her eyes behind her closed lids. And first the flutter was subtle and fleeting, but then it returned, stronger and more enduring. Jessica’s dreamed-deprived mind was striving for REM sleep in the short hour of her nap. Ricardo did not want that. So he positioned his face directly above hers, mouth above mouth and their noses almost touching. And the he pinched her nostrils shut.

In Jessica’s dream it was late summer, at the end of August. School would be starting in another week. Unknown to Jessica, she was visiting the Bromley Mountain Thrill Zone for the last time in her life. She was speeding down The Big Splash, an amusement ride billed as Vermont’s longest water slide. Jessica was sitting behind and holding her sister Trudy who seemed to be screaming and laughing at the same time.

And then unexpectedly, Trudy started to scream in genuine horror as their yellow raft hit a horribly tight and dangerous curve. The raft sailed up the side of the giant green slide and then jumped the track. Jessica and her hysterical sister were impossibly high, sailing in the air far above a parking lot. They were suspended in the air for a moment, and then they began to fall to their deaths. Jessica opened her mouth to scream with her sister but she couldn’t draw a breath. She gasped for air but nothing came. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe! Why?! She deserved one last shout against the injustice of her death, but she couldn’t breathe!

Jessica’s eyes opened in shock while her dream-deprived mind was still clinging to the nightmare. She was suspended above the parking lot, still falling to her death, but the enormous face of Ricardo was superimposed on her dream. In a dreamlike hallucination, his eyes seem to bore into her soul, and to her horror and seemingly against her will her own eyes and mind drilled back into his. Time itself seemed to stop.

Time: Sunday, April 3, 2019 10:29 AM

So it had come to this. Diego was standing in the hexagonal corridor at the southern vertex of his home complex, the very spot where he had been imprisoned just two days ago. But now there were two important differences. The first was that the servos had returned the area to a pristine state. No trace of his supplies or the dead-man switch that had chained him at the vertex location remained.

The second difference was that the door leading inward to the sand park and home was closed and locked. Again, it was no surprise. Except for the interior doors within their home, Diego’s group had known for months about the gremlin servos and how they would not tolerate unattended doors being wedged open.

Diego had eaten a hearty breakfast and then showered and left the home complex shortly before dawn, carrying two backpacks loaded with as many supplies as he could manage. He left the vestibule door propped open with the reasoning there was no reason not to, but he was under no illusion of the wedge surviving once the door was out of sight. Numerous tests in the past had demonstrated the diligence and promptness of the servo’s response to such attempts.

Diego walked around the perimeter track without incident for 2.4 kilometers, until he came to the southern vertex of the northernmost hexagon. He would occasionally glance out the clear windows as he walked. He thought it was remarkable how well the wall with the moguls on top was camouflaged by the grass. At the closest approach at the most eastern hexagon, Diego guessed the wall was a mere 800 meters away, and yet in was almost invisible. If he didn’t know of its presence through the binoculars, Diego thought he wouldn’t recognize its presence at all.