Chapter 431: 42,000 Marks; Special Abilities

Friday, July 11, 2008

As I had said I would, I convened a family meeting on Friday evening. Before I begin describing it, I will say that it was interrupted with variations on the same few questions over and over again. To save you from being driven as far up the wall as I was, I'll omit 99% of those interruptions. I will also omit the interrupting phone calls, especially for Carol and Donna. Fortunately they found the discussion exciting enough to let them get in touch with their masculine side, enabling them to unnaturally say, "I'm busy. I'll call you back later. Bye."

We gathered in the living room after Friday's dinner. I made sure the drapes were closed perfectly, including clipping the middle joins together and using a few pins around the outside edges. It was excessive as it's standard operating procedure for me to keep a sight blob on overwatch above our home, so I'd know if someone came close enough to see anything through the living room's drapes. My pinning the drapes was just to set the right tone for the rest of the family. I wanted them to take this conversation and security seriously. This dimension's Government would no doubt be as bad as the others that I'd experienced, so it wouldn't hesitate to break whatever laws didn't suit it. I expected to have a couple thousand minds in a few months, but until then caution would be a good idea. Even after then, we might still have to be cautious about a few things.

I started with an ability that wouldn't shock my family: my proximity sense. I stood blindfolded in a corner and had them send a random one of them up behind me, with me identifying who the person was every time. They didn't exactly jump up and down in excitement as a result of my demonstration, but that'd come soon.

I returned to the center of the room, closed my eyes, and had Dad throw punches at me. As Dad gained confidence in my ability to avoid his punches, his attacks became more real and I had to move much more to avoid them, so it turned into a demonstration of my gracefulness too.

Other than explaining roughly how it worked, that was all I did to demonstrate proximity. I deliberately failed to mention my ability to sense emotions. I judged that my family didn't yet trust me enough to be comfortable with my invading their privacy, and it would've been unpleasant to have them worried about being within six feet of me. Plus - not to put too fine a point on it - I wanted to keep invading their privacy so I could judge their emotional reactions to the changes I was introducing to their lives, especially to know if I was going too fast for any of them, and what Carol's evolving feelings for me were.

Dad and Donna were impressed by my demonstration, and had some questions about it.

I answered them, but with unsatisfactory answers, not being able to tell them how I could do it, and not agreeing to teach it to them either.

"Are you SURE you can't teach me?" asked Donna.

"It's not that I'm refusing to teach you; it's that I CAN'T teach you. You might as well ask me to teach a horse to play the guitar. It can't be done. I've got more abilities to show you yet and they're much more impressive than my proximity sense and being able to dance around Dad's attacks so gracefully, so we should move on to the next one."

I sat down in front of the coffee table. I'd already placed two writing pads on it with a pen on top of each. I said, "Mom and Dad, would you each go and get a book. Any book from anywhere in the house, preferably not out of my room in case you think I might've memorized it."

When they returned, I got Mom and Dad to each hold their book open at a random page in front of me, side by side but a couple of feet apart. Using a pen in both hands, I copied the books, while saying, "Notice that I'm now ambidextrous and that I can move each eyeball in different directions."

I gave them several seconds to appreciate that both of those statements were true, and that I was copying the books faithfully and legibly.

"I'm consciously reading both books at the same time and remembering what I'm reading. That means that I'll be able to do all my college reading and assignment writing in half the normal time because I'll be doing it in stereo."

There were a few mundane questions about what I'd shown them. Mom about educational aspects, Dad mostly about sports, Donna wanting to know if I could write her assignments at the same time as I was writing my own.

I answered Donna's question with, "I'm planning to give an impressive typing demonstration soon. After that you'll probably prefer that I type your assignments. I'll be happy to do that for you, provided you've already written the draft for me to copy. Naturally I won't actually DO your assignments for you, but I'm CERTAIN you didn't mean that."

Donna wasn't so certain that she hadn't meant that, but was certain that it'd been worth a try.

My existing demonstration having achieved its purpose, I drew a line under what I'd written on both pages as I said, "I'll shut my eyes now. Would Mom and Dad please turn to another random page somewhere in their books, and I'll write them down again."

No one was excited by that idea, as they doubtless assumed I'd be opening my eyes before I started writing. They were quite surprised when I didn't.

"I can't copy the book when you're waving it around like that, Mom."

"But your eyes are SHUT!"

"Do NOT shout! We don't want anyone walking past the house to know that I can read with my eyes shut." There was no one walking past, but that was beside the point.

"Are you peeking?" asked Dad.

"There's no deception involved. NOTHING that I'm showing you this evening is a trick. I can honestly do what I'm claiming to do, including reading with my eyes shut. My mind is now so powerful that I can suck the images directly into my brain. This demonstration isn't finished yet so please hold your comments until I've finished. Donna and Carol, would you please go to your rooms to get a random book each. Stay in your room, hold your book facing away from you then open it at a random page so you can't see what's on it. I'll call you after a minute. When you hear my call, come back here with the book carefully held open so you don't lose your place, and we'll compare each of your books to what I'll have written."

The one thing I did which was deceptive was to make Mom and Dad believe that I had to close my eyes to be able to see at a distance. I wanted my family to believe that this amazing new ability required my eyes to be shut as that'd feel somewhat less threatening to them. Later, when they were more comfortable with my abilities, I'd tell them that I'd gotten better with practice and didn't need to close my eyes anymore. It'd taken me a lot of work after my seven additional minds had arrived in this dimension, but I'd managed to reproduce the trick of having light blobs send their information directly to my minds, so I didn't need to close my eyes to use two sight blobs. A normal eight-minded Mark would never have been able to get that technique going himself if he'd heard about in on the grapevine, but having seven of my minds already experienced in using it made it JUST possible for me to get it going here.

I called the girls back and the comparisons were made. Bedlam erupted.

"SHUT UP!" I screamed. In shock, they did.

^-- I enjoyed accusing, "Are you insane! You can't scream out the things you were screaming. This house isn't soundproof so anyone nearby would've heard what you were screaming. For all we know, a couple of joyriders might've just crashed their stolen car and the cops are pursuing them on foot across our property." That'd happened a few months ago. "If cops heard what you were screaming and typed a report into their computer, this family would be in a world of shit. The CIA would stop at nothing to force me to work for them as a super-spy, including kidnapping all of you and threatening to kill you unless I cooperated with them. There are four of you, so they could afford to kill a couple of you to prove they were serious."

"They wouldn't do that," stated Mom.

"Are you willing to bet our lives on something you know NOTHING about? I've read thousands of pages from top-secret CIA files and that's almost certainly what they would do. In a few weeks I'm going to start causing major leaks from inside the Government, including from within the CIA, and you'll be seeing stories on TV about them doing that sort of thing on many occasions." Actually, there were VERY few documents about crimes as bad as that, but given what had been done to me in other dimensions I considered the exaggeration justified.

^

Vanessa thought the work of the Mark Anderson Foundation was very important, and my many unpleasant experiences certainly confirmed the Government is out of control and that it covers up all sorts of things that should be exposed and prosecuted in full view of the public. [[That's one of the main disadvantages of a democracy: because it's a popularity contest, politicians want to cover up everything the Government does badly that might reflect poorly on them. Consequently there's lots of bad government. Even worse, the secrecy encourages and permits illegal behavior, which is a very bad thing in something as powerful as a government. It's pathetic how many laws the Government has written to enforce good governance in corporate America, compared to how many laws it has written to enforce good governance in Government America.]] In this dimension, I've got a couple of plans that appeal to me for how to provide "checks and balances" on the Government. I'll recreate Majestic Countdown, although I intend to rename him "The Holy Ghost" as that seems more appropriate and I might as well claim the moral high ground right from the beginning.

I have a special plan for the CIA's Fort Dodge facility. As soon as I've got enough minds to do it safely, I'm going to conduct an armed raid on that lab using weapons and explosives stolen from a military armory. Mostly guns will float around shooting people, but I'll also use a couple of appropriately dressed manikins to let the lab's security cameras record a few frames of the attackers' backs before the cameras are destroyed. The attack will be during the daytime shift because it's the busiest one and I want as many of those people as possible to die from the firefights and explosions. I'll steal several vials of their toxic chemicals (poisons rather than diseases), and use one of them immediately against the Director of the CIA, and later against other particularly heinous Government criminals. Its use will confirm that items were removed from Fort Dodge by people willing to use them, which will scare the crap out of the Government and the country.

Then AGILE ("Against Government Illegality LEague") will publicly release its manifesto and many of the Fort Dodge records. Its manifesto will claim that it's made up of US soldiers and agents who're so disgusted by the Government's repeated criminality that they've decided to punish Government crimes, starting with the Fort Dodge raid and the killing of the Director responsible for illegally risking millions of American lives. AGILE will promise to continue to carry out operations against criminals that cannot be brought to justice in the normal way, as the Government controls the justice system. (Bioweapons research is illegal under US law, yet the Government spends hundreds of millions of dollars on it. Calling the cops to report a crime would be pointless.)

AGILE's attacks will continue and the Government will be in a terrible - i.e., wonderful - quandary. The act of having guards at secret operations might be what's destroying their secrecy if one of the guards is a member of AGILE, but you can't risk having secret operations without guards. Similarly, when AGILE ruins illegal CIA operations, every surviving employee will be suspected of being an AGILE double-agent, which will make the Government far less likely to use any of those people in illegal operations again. After I've done that a few dozen times, the Government's ability to carry out illegal operations will be severely curtailed.

To make the situation even worse, how can AGILE be investigated when the investigators might be part of that organization? They could not only hide the true AGILE, but redirect suspicion onto non-AGILE members, as will apparently prove to be the case because no AGILE members will ever be discovered. I'll have a great deal of fun with this game, especially with tricks like sending tape recorder type bugs stolen from the CIA into the Oval Office. When they're discovered, there'll be all sorts of shit hitting some very big fans, especially because the tape recorder type of bug will imply that the buggers have regular access to that office.

There'll be massive internal insecurity and paranoia, which should dramatically reduce the Government's willingness and ability to perform dirty deeds, without too badly impacting on its ability to perform its legal jobs. There should be some great public backlashes too because I'll be exposing all of those illegal operations. The public and especially the media is going to love AGILE. Whichever political party is in power at the time is going to HATE it.

^

I continued, "I would've thought that my careful pinning of the drapes and my previous request for you to stop shouting would've made you aware that I didn't want you screaming out my secrets at the tops of your voices, but as you seem to have missed drawing that conclusion let me emphasize it again: what you know can get us killed, so be FUCKING careful about mentioning my abilities.

^-- "Now everyone sit down and I will take questions from you one person at a time. There will be NO yelling, no interrupting, and no loss of self-control. I'm appointing myself the chairman of this meeting, and you will only speak when I give you permission to do so. Because you've been acting like unruly children, put your hand up if you want to speak."

They all had a great deal to say. They were freaked out, incredulous and excited, but fortunately they were also few in number so I was able to force them to behave in a ruly manner (or should that be ununruly? Someone should invent a reliably consistent language.)

I repeated, "No, there is no trick. There are no hidden cameras or any other sort of trickery. In case it crosses your minds to worry about it, I was not reading anyone's minds. That's why I got Carol and Donna to open the books facing away from them: to prove that I can honestly see things in other rooms. I've got a way of outputting and inputting light anywhere within almost five hundred feet of me. I'll show you what outputting light looks like because that's easier for you to see happening."

I demonstrated and described light blobs, first as a single spherical blob, then several differently colored blobs, then - for comic relief - I put on an amusing 'puppet show' similar to what I'd done in other dimensions. I even demonstrated heat blobs to them, but only as warm blobs to be non-threatening. Then I went on to explain that sight blobs were like light blobs working in reverse, and I talked more about them.

I gave many demonstrations and explanations, and slowly my family came to accept that they were real with Mom being the most difficult and taking the longest, as usual. Never mind the miracles that I was performing this evening, I thought the greatest miracle EVER performed was Dad's getting Mom to date him when they'd been teenagers. No wonder Dad had told us that it'd taken him a long time to convince Mom; she would have taken "playing hard to get" to an unprecedented level. [[I was asking them to accept something completely unnatural, so of course it wasn't easy for them; an even harder time than teenage-Dad would've had convincing teenage-Mom to do something completely natural with him.]

The subject of their questions changed from seeking proof of the ability, to bigger picture issues like: "How?", "Why?", "What does it mean?" They weren't happy with the answers they didn't get. The stakes were much higher now so Mom and Dad pushed quite hard for answers.

I upped the forcefulness of my refusal, "You can insist on answers all you want, but you're not going to get any more out of me than I've already told you. I'll give you an analogy: let's say that if my secret got out, a billion people would die. If I tell no one at all, I can guarantee those billion people are safe, but if I tell you my secret then not only am I increasing the number of people who know the secret by a factor of five, but I'm also sending the message that it's okay to tell other people, which would pretty much guarantee that sooner or later a billion people are going to be killed. I don't care how curious or concerned you are, your emotional need to know how I got my abilities pales into total insignificance compared to my desire to prevent the deaths of a billion innocent people. I'm taking this secret to my grave, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. One silver lining for you as parents is that I will NEVER be getting tipsy or taking drugs because I can't afford to risk losing my self-control. That's the only satisfaction you're going to get, so please stop wasting your breath on your repeated questions."

A minute later I was explaining what "analogy" meant because they couldn't understand how a billion people's lives could be at risk. Upon learning that those lives weren't really at risk, the "How?" questions restarted.

I stood up, asking, "Can I have your large suitcase please, Dad? I'll need it to hold all my stuff now that I'm leaving home."

"You're joking?" asked Dad. Carol was showing considerable concern, pleasing me immensely.

"What part of, 'I'm taking this secret to my grave' don't you understand? I've refused to answer those questions far too many times now, and still you're persisting with them. I'm not going to answer them and I can't live in an environment like this, so I have to leave."

<These parents don't respect us. We need to change that to make any headway with them.>

In the other dimensions that my seven imported minds had lived through - not counting Mr. No One even though he was here too, as the above internal comment shows - their families had learned about most of my abilities only after many months or years of seeing me excel at school and OSU, seeing me in highly successful relationships with Julia and Carol, seeing that I'd won $11 million from Binion's, etc. They respected me, so they respected my refusals to answer their questions. In this dimension my parents had no reason to respect me, my recently demonstrated fashion acumen not really cutting it. To be even more honest, these parents had many years of reasons NOT to respect me, so they weren't listening to my refusals.

So I tried a different tack, "You're trying to force me to answer your questions because you believe you're the only ones capable of making intelligent decisions about my life. You're treating me with disrespect and even contempt. You've failed to realize that my IQ has risen dramatically. I was able to discover Mom's insecurity over Dad's fidelity by putting it together from my memories of the very few clues Mom had given out. Carol told you about the comments I made to and about her friends at the pool, and you heard me say that I was able to make sight blobs work because my brain was powerful enough to suck the images directly into it. I have a VERY powerful brain now and a VERY high IQ.

^-- "I've told you that I'm intending to enroll in OSU next academic year. What I haven't told you is that I'm going to be enrolling in five or six undergraduate degrees: two Bachelor of Science degrees in Math and Physics, a Business Administration degree, probably Engineering Science and one or two of their biology oriented degrees. That's over twenty years' worth of degrees, and I will complete all those degrees in ONE year. I'm going to put the world's leading research institutions into an absolute frenzy over my genius.

^-- "I'm more intelligent than all of you put together, and I do NOT appreciate your believing that I'm incapable of knowing what's best for me. You have virtually no knowledge of the facts or issues relevant to my situation and are arguing only out of an insultingly unquestioned assumption that I'm incapable of running my own life. Mom even argued earlier for trusting the CIA with our lives, which is so dangerously naïve that it scares the crap out of me. There's absolutely no possibility whatsoever of my giving you responsibility for my Big Secret when you understand so little about how the Government operates. Maybe in a year you might've learned enough to make your opinions informed enough to be worth listening to, but until then I'm retaining sole responsibility for all the decisions about my abilities and their place in my life. And - as I've told you too many times already - I will NEVER, EVER be answering your questions about how I got my abilities. " [Except that I told them all about it a couple of weeks later, when I became part of the collective Mark Anderson godhood.] "Are you going to accept my moral, intellectual and legal right to decide my own fate, or am I leaving home?"

Mom and Dad apologized and backpedaled very pleasingly.

While they were vulnerable, I laid down some more of the law, "Of course you're allowed to ask me questions, but if I answer one with a refusal you are NOT allowed to endlessly repeat it. If you have a good reason to believe that my answer is wrong, then by all means explain your reason. If it's a convincing one I'll reconsider my decision. Endlessly repeating the same questions just because you assume I'm stupid is not acceptable. It's not even polite. You'd never treat any of your coworkers or adult friends that way, so stop treating me like an idiot. On the subject of keeping quiet, I have an interesting way of asking you to stop talking: I can do this..." I firmly NP-pinched everyone's lips together.

That surprised the heck out of them. There were grunts of surprise, some of them jerked their heads back, others' hands flew to their faces to feel what was happening.

I canceled the effects after only a second, which permitted them to unleash comments and questions.

I sat silently until they realized I wasn't going to respond, and their mouth-flapping stumbled to a halt.

I said, "It's unintelligent of you to persist in asking me such obvious questions. You already know I'm intending to tell you everything I can risk, so the only effect your questions have is to lower my opinion of your self-control, which will reduce how much I tell you. Carol's the only one who's acting sensibly. She's sitting quietly and letting me run my meeting my way, which proves that she's got more self-control than the rest of you and that she respects me and my judgment more than you do." Carol was being the quietest mostly because she's the most passive, but I'll grab any opportunity to build up Carol's self-confidence, especially if I can use it to train the rest of my family.

^-- Carol smiled happily at me while I let the muttered apologies die out, then I said, "What I did to your lips is another of my abilities. I call it 'NP' which is short for 'Nipple Power'. That's a misleading name because it's my mind that creates the effect, but we'll be sticking with 'NP' for a reason I'll explain some other day." I wasn't going to explain it now mostly because I was hoping to be able to not only explain it, but demonstrating the light switch toggling properties of squeezed nipples in a private session with Carol one evening not too far away. One of my minds was hoping for that VERY much!

^-- "Hold one hand out in front of you palm up and I'll create an NP-fingertip on your palm so you can feel it."

They were soon playing with an invisible fingertip each.

"I called it a fingertip because I usually create them in that shape. It's a convenient shape because it's easy to grip things with fingertips, such as pinching an annoying chatterbox's lips together. It's actually a forcefield that I can create in a variety of shapes and sizes. If you hold the one you're playing with gently, I'll expand it into a small sphere so you can feel it changing shape."

^-- They played with their NP-tennis balls while I said, "I can make dozens of those things, and have them perform a variety of tasks for me. When I'm lying in bed and I'm too lazy to get up to turn the lights off, I can use an NP-fingertip to flick the switch for me." I turned one of the living room's lights off and back on again. "Or if the TV remote is out of reach, I can use NP to fetch it for me."

"Oh my!" Mom exclaimed when the remote floated up off the coffee table and headed toward me. Everyone else's eyes were wide open in shock, as were their mouths.

"Are you doing magic?" asked Donna.

"There's no such thing as magic so I can't be doing it. You can do more things with your mind than a dog can, such as multiply numbers. And a dog's mind can do more things than a goldfish's, such as understand commands like 'Sit' and 'Fetch'. From goldfish to dog to people, minds can do more. I have an EXTREMELY powerful mind so I can do even more. I'm not doing magic; I'm just doing 'more'.

^-- "I've shown you all of my three major abilities: my proximity sense; blobs of the sight, light and heat varieties; and my NP ability. I've also got a few minor abilities that don't matter much, like moving my eyeballs independently and flapping my ears," I spasmed the muscles next to my ears, making them twitch rhythmically, getting a little laugh. I didn't mention the best 'minor' ability: Go-softs. It'd done more than any other ability to get my life onto a fantastic track in my other dimensions, and it provided me with the most pleasure, but it was a little difficult to make that point and I didn't want to agitate Mom even more by getting sexual.

^-- "Despite your not understanding much about the details, you understand enough that we can talk about the big picture. My ability to learn so incredibly quickly is going to make me the most famous genius in the world, even more famous than Einstein. Fortunately being a genius won't look like 'magic'. It'll be very strange that I got so smart so quickly, but people won't get freaked out by it enough that they want to burn me at the stake or dissect me in a secret Government laboratory.

^-- "The world can know about my genius but not about ANY of my special abilities. Between the enthusiasm religious nutcases have for believing people are devils that must be killed, and the Government's disgusting disregard for morality and legality, if any of us blab about my special abilities then all our lives would be in danger. That means that if Mom or Dad think I've misbehaved at some time in the future, then they keep their mouths firmly shut until we get home to discuss it in quiet privacy - because we CANNOT risk an argument in public, in case someone says too much in the heat of the moment. And as much as I truly do encourage Carol and Donna to boast to their good looking girlfriends about how wonderful I am, please don't try so hard to impress them that you mention any of my special abilities. Just tell them what a wonderful sense of humor I've got and that should be magical enough to impress them straight out of their panties."

I got some laughs from Dad, Carol and Donna, which hopefully proved my point.

Speaking of getting girls out of their panties, Carol's respect for me was climbing very rapidly, although it'd admittedly started terribly low. Because of my special abilities was the most obvious reason, but it wasn't the main reason. Carol is very aware of her lack of confidence with people, so she particularly respects people who have that confidence. She's also smart enough to detect when confidence is born of real skill rather than shallow arrogance, thus Carol's increasing respect for me was mostly because of my adult-level conversation, control of the meeting, and handling of Mom as if I was at least on an equal footing with her.

Carol wouldn't come out of her panties, or more importantly, out of her shell, unless she respects the person she's doing it for. That was another reason Eric had no chance of ever catching sight of any of her bases. Her opinion of me wasn't high yet, but the more she respects me, the easier it'll be for me to get her to follow my requests, which I'll make sure lead to her respecting me even more. She'll respect Julia for the same reason too once she sees Julia in action, and she'll respect me even more for choosing Julia as my girlfriend. Once I have Carol's respect, I'll have her obedience, then I'll have the ability to build her confidence until she respects herself. I've seduced Carol many times by now - six of my minds had each done it once and one of my minds had done it twice - so I knew her hot buttons inside out and the current seduction was going very much according to plan.

"Another important safety tip: NEVER mention my special abilities - or even say that I have special abilities - over the phone, in emails, or anything else other than in face to face conversations among ourselves in a very private place. The Government illegally records all sorts of stuff and it's the people who'd review those recordings that I'm most afraid of. There's a senior agent in the Department of Homeland Security in Portland called Robert Moran who has an insane paranoia about people having mind control powers. If one of you mention on the phone that I have unusual mental abilities then there'd be a high chance that he'd be the one assigned to investigate us. He's sent people to their deaths before because of his paranoid insanity, so if any DHS agents turn up and try to talk with me I'm going to assume my life's in danger and I'm going to fight them to the death. If I survive that, I'd be on the run for the rest of my life and you'll never see me again." Or not until I had a few thousand minds and I could fuck the DHS over so badly it was forced to leave me alone, but there was no need for me to mention that now. "In short: do NOT talk about my special abilities."