Chapter 234: Look Mom, No Hands!

Sunday, June 12, 2005 (Continued)

Upstairs Mom foolishly said, "I hope this is good, with all the buildup you've given it."

"What do you think Julia, will this be good?"

"Will it ever! They're going to be VERY surprised."

#7: <Excuse me for being evil, but I suggest a change to what we were intending to do. I think Mom just volunteered to be attacked by a couple of Killers and an Immobilizer. In our dimension Mom was certainly the most judgmental and difficult parent. Dad was relaxed and no trouble at all, and Prof and Vanessa were positively helpful when it came to our sex-life and everything else. What's say we teach Mom a lesson she won't soon forget?>

When we'd been planning what to do in this demonstration, the 3B guys had sent 3A half a dozen memory images of what 3B had done to their Dad, so 3A knew what #7 was proposing now. We'd rejected doing it to this dad because it'd been too scary, but maybe that was what Mom needed.

#3: <Oh boy. I hope Mom's the forgiving kind.>

"You don't have a weak heart, do you Mom?"

Mom suspiciously answered, "No. Why?"

"Because the next few minutes are going to be very, very scary for you. How's your heart, Dad?"

"Fine. What are you going to do?"

"You'll see. Sit on the bed Dad. Carol sit on Dad's lap please with Julia next to you. Mom, put this hairbrush in your pocket and we'll pretend it's a gun because you're playing the role of one of the baddies. I'll sit on this chair as if I was chained to it, because this demonstration is about what happened inside the basement while Prof and I were prisoners."

#6: <I'm getting cold feet over scaring Mom so much. She may not forgive us, like #3 was worried about. Mom's smart enough to work out afterward that we didn't need to be so cruel to her, and she may not be too impressed by our choosing to do that. We can impress her in other ways.>

#3: <I agree. I think "better safe than sorry" is the way to go, especially with Mom. Dad probably wouldn't mind being made a fool of by pretty lights, but Mom wouldn't take too kindly to the loss of dignity.>

#7: <Okay. I'll do it the easy way.>

"I've changed my mind about something. I was intending to show you how scary I could be. That's why I had Carol pin Dad to the bed, to make it harder for him to interfere. But I'm not comfortable scaring you that much, so I'm going to do this in a straightforward way."

Mom looked puzzled, "How could you scare anyone? I thought you were chained to the chair and blindfolded the whole time?"

"You're right about the chains. It was our being chained down the whole time that caused all the problems. Escape would have been easy if one of us had been unchained for just a few seconds, but the bastards wouldn't unchain us no matter what. Not even to take us to the bathroom, which was downright uncivilized."

Dad said, "I can see that you had a chance to fight them if you were unchained, but how could escape be easy if Prof was the one they unchained?"

"Not by fighting them, that's for sure; not a little, old, one-legged man like Prof. We weren't going to fight, not when I could do something much easier."

Assuming the hairbrush weighed no more than 0.2 kg (less than half a pound), my 50 kg of maximum force gave over 250 g's of acceleration. Allowing Mom an extremely fast reaction time of one-fifth of a second, the hairbrush could have been hundreds of feet away before she even started grabbing for it, so Mom had NO chance of stopping my taking possession of it. I had to pull it up a few inches to get it out of her waistband before I could zoom it away, but that took next to no time. I had the brush well away from Mom long before she started reacting.

She stopped trying to grab it when she saw she was staring down the barrel of a deadly, hovering hairbrush, then I said, "Bang, bang. You're dead, Mom. That was easy, wasn't it?"

I was cheating - or as I prefer to think of it, "simplifying considerably for the parents' sake" - by pretending I'd taken the baddies down by using their gun right from the start, and by using my new and GREATLY improved NP force. I've found that it's generally better to simplify things with parents, to avoid the problems caused by their fully understanding something.

Mom was the first to find her voice. With eyes wide and staring at the floating brush, Mom asked, "How are you doing that?"

"You really should be lying on the floor pretending to be dead, but I'll let you off. It's floating because I want it to. I can move things around with my mind. Look at Julia's dressing table, or vanity table, or whatever they're called."

Everyone looked at the Whatever-They're-Called Table. There's an enormous amount of junk on a girl's WTC- table, and it all floated up and across the room en masse, looking like a very impressive fleet.

"WOW! That's incredible," said Carol.

"Here, try this perfume Carol." I sent one bottle over to her, hovering it beside one of her wrists, held it firmly, and sprayed her once. Dad was caught in the spray too, but he'd survive. If he made a fuss, I'd shoot him with the hairbrush.

Julia was smiling proudly, but looking a little worried at seeing so much of her important stuff floating in the air, so I floated everything back to the vanity table (that somehow seems the best name for it). While I was doing that I said, "It should be pretty obvious how Prof and I won at roulette."

"But HOW?" asked Mom. Mom wasn't asking just about roulette.

I answered, "With my mind. It's almost impossible to explain to people how your mind works. If I threw a ball at you, could you explain how your brain worked out the trajectory of the ball, how it decided the best place to intercept it, which muscles in your arms and hands to move to get them in the right position, etc. You don't have a clue how you do that, and you could never explain it to anyone else. All I can say is that I have an EXTREMELY unusual and powerful mind, and it can do amazing things. For example, it can do this."

I created several different colored and sized light blobs, and had them fly around the room, not doing anything fancy with them, and not calling any of them "Killer". They were still pretty impressive, and pretty pretty. I kept them at a low level, so no one could see them in the window. I made a mental note to close the drapes shortly.

Carol said, "Wow" again. Mom and Dad wanted to know what they were.

"They're just pure light. When Prof and I were gagged I used these to talk with Prof." I demonstrated by spelling "Hi" with sixteen blobs, which was the previous maximum that Julia knew about. I wanted to keep most of my upgraded abilities as a surprise for her. Julia knew my study system now had eight screens, and that I'd NP'd her in the hospital waiting room, but not much more than that, and certainly not that I could fly her around now.

^-- I added, "They'll look better with the room dark." I canceled the "H", pulled the drapes closed using NP, then recreated the "H". I waved my hand through the blobs, causing my family a small surprise, but only a small one as they hadn't had time to get worried about them, especially without the "Killer" introduction. "Relax. They're just light. You can't feel them and they don't do anything to you." I broke up the greeting message, sending one of the blobs to be in front of Dad, Carol and Julia on the bed, and another one in front of Mom still standing in the middle of the room. "Julia will show you they're harmless."

Before the others had a chance to get very concerned, Julia put her hand into the blob in front of her, moving her hand around inside it. After a few seconds, Julia invited everyone else, "Try it."

They weren't eager. Mom and Carol wisely let Dad be the first volunteer. Despite the example provided by Julia, Dad cautiously extended a hand, edging the tip of a single finger into the blob. He paused to concentrate on the sensation. Feeling none he pushed his hand in a little farther. Paused again, then said, "I can't feel anything."

"There's nothing to feel. It's just light. It's exactly the same as if I turned the room's electric lights on. You wouldn't be scared of that light would you? Light is light; it's the same thing no matter where it comes from." I stopped myself saying something about it just being a specific frequency of electromagnetic radiation, because I doubted Dad would find the word "radiation" reassuring.

^-- While Dad, Mom and Carol were exploring the light blob in front of them, I continued, "I call these things 'Light Blobs'. They're totally a creation of my mind and under my complete control. I can change their color," I created a new one in front of me, and moved it through the visible spectrum; "brightness," I altered that, but not making my example blob any brighter than Julia had seen before; "their size, position, how fast they move (all with relevant demonstrations), "and whether they exist or don't exist. They're generally not much use, although they did make it much easier for Prof and me to communicate when we were gagged. When I wake up early in the morning and get out of bed to go studying, I use a dim one to light my way rather than turning on the room's light and disturbing Julia and/or Ava." I threw in the "Julia and/or Ava" comment to add a little reinforcement to Mom's training, but I think she was too distracted to notice.

^-- "I call my ability to float things around 'NP', which is short for 'Nipple Power'. That's a joking compliment to Ava. Whenever she's in this room and I want to turn the room's lights on or off, I squeeze one of her nipples." I held out my left hand's thumb and forefinger, pretending to squeeze a nipple repeatedly, at the same time as I turned the room's lights on, off and back on again, leaving them on as the drapes were closed and I wanted to cancel all the light blobs soon. I was amused to see that Carol found comments about squeezing Ava's nipples funny. I'd have to think of something good for Carol's soon-to-be-discovered-as-magical nipples to do too.

^-- "I teased Ava about her having magic nipples. She was VERY confused for a while, but now she knows I do it somehow. I renamed my ability Nipple Power in her honor, and so if we accidentally use the words in public no one will have a clue what we're talking about. So far Ava only knows that I can turn the light switch on and off, but she's proving herself to be very trustworthy so I'll slowly increase how much she knows. She's going to end up living with us in the mansion, so she'll see me doing all sorts of weird things. Have you seen light blobs enough, so I can show you the next ability?" In 3B-land, I'd gotten carried away one evening in bed and had used NP to squeeze Ava's nipples. Carol had been in bed with us and I'd made jokes about Carol's magic ears. None of that had happened here; this Ava only knew that her nipples turned this room's lights on and off.

"You can do MORE!" exclaimed a punch-drunk Mom. "These things are IMPOSSIBLE! People can't do this stuff. How can you be doing it?"

"These abilities might be impossible for other people, but they're quite easy for me. I can't answer your 'How' question though. You don't have the concepts or vocabulary. I know that's frustrating, but I can't help it. There's also no real point in explaining it to you, as I know you can't do it yourself. This sounds weird, but I can kind of 'see' how strong people's minds are in the way that these abilities need, and your mind doesn't have what it takes."

#8: <Not a good thing to say. Now Mom might suggest we just 'look' at Carol to see if she has what it takes. We don't want a definitive test like that. We need to fix that.>

"When people get into adulthood I can see that these abilities are impossible for them, Mom. That doesn't mean every kid can do them; it just means I can tell that every adult I've seen can't. I can't tell about the kids because their brains are more flexible, but obviously there aren't many kids like me, or probably ANY kids like me."

"That's for damned sure!" agreed Dad. "But what use is this stuff?"

"Using them is difficult because I have to keep them secret, but I can give you a few examples. First, I made eleven million dollars using NP on roulette. If I never did anything with NP ever again, that's a pretty good benefit just there. Knowing what a sports fan you are Dad, there are a lot of sports that I'd absolutely destroy. You saw how I could carry things using it, so I could carry a basketball to the hoop from anywhere on the court. I could score three-pointers all day long if I wanted to, although I'd have to make it look good to avoid being detected. I could also upset the opposition in games, so in football my opponents' long passes could all go badly off target, ideally toward one of my teammates so we could get lots of interceptions. You know I can bowl 300, you've seen how good I am at soccer, and there are probably dozens of different sports that I could be the world's number one at. I've no interest in doing that, but I could if I wanted.

^-- "And a third area that NP is really good at is one that I demonstrated to you guys earlier, but I'm pretty sure you were too distracted to notice. I'm very, very good at defending myself. I was chained to a chair so I couldn't move my arms or legs more than an inch, but when two experienced criminal men tried to kill me, they were the ones who ended up dead."

I could tell when Mom got it - her face turned white. Mom double-checked her horrific conclusion, "YOU killed them?"

"I'm afraid so. They were about to kill me, so I didn't have a choice."

"But that's TERRIBLE!"

"It was terrible that they left me no choice, but it was their fault for creating an us-or-them situation."

Mom still looked horrified. Not that I'd expected her to say, "That's all right then," but some easing of her initial reaction would have been good.

Meanwhile Julia had decided she was long overdue for some cuddling, so she was leaving her assigned place on the bed and making for my lap Julia gushed, "Well done, darling. You're my hero! You never cease to impress me."

Julia stopped talking to kiss me, which gave Mom the chance to say, "Are you INSANE! He killed two men! That's a terrible thing to do!"

I could see Julia deciding how to answer Mom. After a short pause, she pulled back from my face, waved a finger in front of my eyes like a first grade teacher, admonishing me sternly, "Your mother's right. How dare you kill two men. Next time anyone is about to murder you, I want you to sit there and let them. And don't worry if they're also going to murder my father or anyone else in our families. After all, we wouldn't want to upset your mother's delicate sensibilities. It'd be much better if you let them murder as many people as they want."

Mom protested, "That's not what I meant..."

Julia hadn't chosen a good tactic as Mom doesn't take kindly to being made fun of, so I quickly interrupted, "What would YOU have done in my situation, Mom? You're chained down and unable to move, and the bad guys are about to kill you and Prof. The only way to stop them is to kill them first."

"I wouldn't have gotten into that situation in the first place. If you hadn't gambled it never would have happened."

No one was impressed by Mom's answers. Even Carol rolled her eyes at it.

With considerable sarcasm, Julia said, "Gee, I would've thought the people most responsible for Mark and Dad being kidnapped were the kidnappers. But I'm obviously wrong because Felicity insists it's all Mark's fault."

Fortunately Dad finally stepped in, "Fely, Mark asked you what you would do in that situation. Why don't you answer his question rather than talking about some other situation." Mom didn't appreciate Dad's comment either, but she wasn't going to abuse him for it.

Suspecting Mom hadn't listened to the question properly, I reminded her, "If you were about to be murdered, would you kill the murderers to defend yourself and Prof?"

Mom didn't like either of the two possible answers, so she made up a third, "I'd negotiate with them. There must be a better alternative to people murdering each other."

#5: <Let's make a mental note not to get into a life-or-death situation with Mom. She really is quite stupid about these things.>

#2: <I would have said "naïve", but you're not wrong. The problem is, regardless of whether she's smart or stupid, she simply doesn't THINK; she's far too busy reacting emotionally.>

#8: <Which makes me worry about her reaction to Carol and us wanting to become lovers. Mom's going to automatically react emotionally, and who wants to bet it's not going to be with delight.>

#5: <We'd better make sure the genetic hypothesis is very well established before we point out the incestuous babies angle. Ideally she'll even think of it herself.>

#8: <I think what happened in our dimension was that Prof and Vanessa mentioned it to Mom and Dad first. Mom doesn't think before she talks to us because she's in automatic parenting mode all the time. I think she'd react differently if the suggestion came from an adult or two, especially if she respected them.>

#1: <Let's do it the same way 3B did then. Maybe we should have given Mom a scare with the Killer blobs too, because she needs to stop treating us like her little baby. Can we scare her in some way so she gets that message?>

#2: <What a pity she weighs more than 110 pounds, because it'd be great to pick her up by her ankles and fly her around the room upside-down. It'd be worth losing the surprise value for Julia's demonstration in order to give Mom such an unforgettable experience.>

#6: <We can tip her onto her ass easily enough, but that's a bit juvenile. We'd be better off trying to impress her with our maturity.>

#1: <We should show her our new computer system then, plus I've got a good idea how to answer her question.>

I clunked the cast on my right hand against the cast on my leg a few times, while holding up my left hand with the fingers pointing upward and spread a little, drawing attention to the missing finger by its glaring absence. "These injuries are the results of my 'negotiating' with them, Mom. THIS is the way they negotiated! Prof and I spread the negotiations out over two days by my absorbing punishment like this. I would've let them let carry on breaking my bones and cutting parts off me for days longer, but THEY decided negotiations were finished. How many times do I have to tell you that 'THEY WERE ABOUT TO MURDER ME'? What part of that sentence don't you understand?"

Even before I finished speaking I could see that they all got it. Julia was the first to speak, exclaiming, "You LET THEM do those things to you?" Dad, Mom and Carol echoed Julia moments later.

"I could've attacked them any time from the moment they first revived me on Thursday morning. I was willing to take their torture while being 'only' tortured was an option and there was a chance to be rescued or get away somehow, but when they were seconds away from killing me I HAD TO make a decision. So I will ask you YET AGAIN, Mom. And this time please do me the courtesy of actually LISTENING to what I'm saying rather than assuming I'm a stupid little boy who doesn't know what he's talking about." With a droning voice deliberately making a point out of my repeating myself yet again, I recited, "If you were about to be murdered after being tortured for several days, would you kill the murderers to defend yourself and Prof?"

Mom hesitated to answer. I gave her a couple of seconds, then said, "Bang, bang, you're dead. That was a scarily immature display, Mom. You denied reality, refused to listen to what I was saying, reacted emotionally rather than giving the situation any thought whatsoever, and when faced with a decision you refused to make it in time. You did EVERYTHING wrong."

Dad said, "You're being unfair, Mark. You didn't give your mother time to recover from the shocks you've given us."

"I don't think more time would result in Mom making better decisions, because she wouldn't spend it thinking. I spent a fair while downstairs explaining that Mom should not yell 'Are you insane!' at people. It's a very simple issue, so Mom had plenty of time to absorb it, yet after I pointed out that I'd had to kill the kidnappers, Mom yelled, 'Are you insane!' to Julia." To Mom I asked, "Why did you yell 'Are you insane!' to Julia when she praised me for saving her father and myself, Mom?"

"Ahh. She was praising you for killing two men. I didn't think that was right, but now I understand that you had no choice. So Julia, I'm sorry I yelled at you."

Julia answered, "That's okay. I know you were shocked."

I said, "I don't like to say it, but it's not okay. Julia heard me say that they were about to kill me and I had no choice. She understood the situation perfectly and praised me. You heard me say the same words, but you didn't understand anything at all. As soon as you heard me say I'd killed two guys, you immediately leaped to an emotional reaction, opened your mouth and spouted insulting garbage at Julia; without bothering to do any thinking whatsoever. Like I was telling Dad, more thinking time wouldn't help you, because you don't bother thinking. That makes you a serious liability in any unusual situation. And with me involved, damned near every situation is going to be unusual. I don't want to think of you as being a liability, Mom, but until you get your act together that's what you are. There are some very serious decisions coming up very soon for you and Dad, and I'm very worried that you're going to screw them up."

"Like what?" asked Mom.

"There's a decision right in front of you now. Currently the cops are running around trying to find the third man that I said shot the other two in an argument. Now you know that guy doesn't exist. Are you going to let the cops continue to waste their time, or are you going to tell them that I did it?"

"It was self-defense," Mom pointed out.

"It certainly was! They were about to start beating me to death with a length of 2-by-4 because that was more fun than simply shooting me." It was great seeing Carol's reaction to statements like that. She was itching to come over to me, but Julia's already occupying my lap left Carol frustrated about not being able to comfort me, although I was fine and it was her that needed the comforting.

"You should tell them then," said Mom. "They'll know it was self-defense. Those men had long criminal records, and you were obviously the victim, so I'm sure you wouldn't get in any trouble."

I asked, "What do you think, Julia: should Mom tell the cops I killed the baddies in self-defense?"

I removed the NP-fingertip I'd used to prompt Julia to keep her lips shut, allowing her to say, "Good God no! That'd be a DISASTER! We'd have to flee the country and go into hiding for the rest of our lives. Felicity, you've got to THINK!..."

I took over. "Mom, ordinarily I'd agree with being truthful with the cops, but you've got to stop thinking you're living in an ordinary family. The cops are the LAST people you should be honest with about me. How did I get the gun off the baddies Mom?"

"Oh," as Mom remembered.

"How long would it take before one of the cops realized that the President is surrounded by security guys carrying guns, and if I could take a gun off a kidnapper and kill two of them, then I'd easily be able to take a gun off a Secret Service agent and kill the President. Look at me, Mom."

^-- I floated the hairbrush up again, pointing it toward her head, saying, "I could walk right through all the metal detectors and other security systems they've got around the President because I'd later be using their own weapons against them. As you can see, no one can tell that I'm doing anything strange even when I'm right in the middle of doing it. As soon as the cops realized how dangerous I am, my life would be over. Maybe they wouldn't kill me outright, but I'd never be free again. I imagine they'd probably keep me locked up in case they wanted to use me. To get rid of the leaders of any countries that were being inconvenient for America, for example. And the obvious way to force me to behave myself would be hold my entire family hostage, so all of our lives would be ruined. So Mom, do you still think it's a good idea to be honest with the cops?" Julia already understood that scenarios like that were possible, but Mom, Dad and Carol had no previous idea. By the looks on their white faces, they had a very clear idea now.

^-- I didn't wait for their obvious answer, instead continuing with, "The thing that worries me about you, is that you don't think before opening your mouth to very loudly announce the first emotional response that occurs to you. If we were standing alongside cops when something happened, it's scarily possible that you'd unthinkingly cause a disaster. All your emotional responses are based on years of thinking that we're a perfectly ordinary family, but we're the complete opposite of that now. And not only could your thoughtlessness destroy our family, but it'd also stop me achieving whatever it is that I might achieve in my life. I've got no idea what that'll be, but Prof and Vanessa talk about it being on par with curing cancer. You work in the medical field, so how'd you like to be single-handedly responsible for hundreds of thousands of people dying needlessly because of one of your thoughtless emotional reactions?"

Mom objected to that. "That's laying it on FAR too thick. I got your point without the melodrama. I do understand what you're saying, and I'll do my best to be more thoughtful in the future."

"Good. Thanks. I'm sorry I laid it on so thick, but I'd much rather make the point too strongly than not make it strongly enough. I've still got a couple more topics to mention. The first is a way I can signal you. I do these with Julia quite often, and signaling was extremely useful with Prof when we were prisoners too. One tap means 'no', two taps mean 'yes'."

I tapped each of them on the top of the head once, paused momentarily, then twice more.

"You can touch us!" exclaimed Mom.

"Yes. This is what I jokingly call 'Nipple Power'; 'NP' in short or in polite company. I think of it as mental fingertips. I use them to carry things, pull drapes, flick light switches and whatever else fingertips can do, such as touching people. The one or two taps," I repeated them, "is what I'll do if I need to tell you 'no' or 'yes' without anyone knowing. Don't forget which way around they are because I won't be able to remind you at the time. 'No' is the smaller word, so it has the smallest number of taps. I'll try to tap you on the top of the head so you know what it's for, but in case you're wearing a crash helmet or there's some other problem, I might do it somewhere else on your bodies. Another signal I use with Julia a lot is to put pressure against her lips to ask her to be quiet.

^-- I demonstrated that on all of them. "I use that mostly when I'm teasing someone and don't want Julia to spoil it, but it might be useful in an emergency too. Obviously, if you're talking to a cop, Mom, and I do that to you, it'd be a REALLY good idea to stop whatever you're saying. If I can, I'll try to take over the conversation, and you should have a VERY hard think about what you're saying. At the risk of annoying you, this is something you need to take seriously. Once you get on your high horse about something, you're not good at listening to other people's opinions, and I can very easily imagine you deliberately ignoring my NP-fingertips against your lips because you're so sure you're right. Can you PLEASE not do that!"

^-- I quickly carried on before Mom could take offense, "I can use the NP-fingertips for all sorts of things. For example, if I grab your hand and pull it," accompanied by my showing all of them. "That will mean walk in the direction I'm pulling you. Or I might push your head around if I want you to look in another direction, or any number of other things. I'm sure you get the idea by now."

Carol exclaimed, "I CAN'T believe you can do this stuff Mark! It's magic, or a miracle or something..."

"If I needed a part-time job, I could do very well as a magician. Of course I'd need a pretty assistant that I could saw in half. You wouldn't mind me practicing on you, would you, Carol?"

"I'd like to lose some weight, but not that way! But I'm more worried about ME getting YOU in trouble. You shouldn't have shown me this stuff. I could say something wrong and get you into serious trouble."

"I'm not worried about your making a mistake like that. You're not a chatterbox or a gossip, you don't try to boast or show off, and you're a cautious, loyal person. I'm not going to tell Donna because she could get too excited and blurt it out. Mom's a worry because she gets so wrapped up in pronouncing judgment on our actions that she forgets to think. And Dad's safely quiet in family situations.