The Fregoli Delusion

by submission | Mar 24, 2017 | Story | 8 comments

Author : Philip Berry

From the couch, engineer Stanislaw Hast looked past the grey-suited, female psychiatrist and through the broad window. The star, a long dying sub-giant, threw a dusk of burnt ochre over the orbiting city, its rays painting the sunward face of tall buildings into perpendicular fire blocks.

“I’ll make it easy for you doctor. I know what I’ve got,” said Stanislaw, snapping back.

“Tell me.” Her words were smooth, professional, complacent.

“Fregoli’s. I looked it up. I see them in crowded rooms, in the metro, in the hanging parks. In many forms, disguised as men and women. But when I ask – how do I know you, where did we meet, why are you following me? – they look blank.”

“Fregoli’s refers to the belief that the same person is disguising him or herself in many forms. He was an actor on Earth, famous for his quick changes of costume. But you see many pretenders, not one. It is different.”

“No! I see common features in each face… they trigger memories, places, times… enough to convince me that I knew them once. I did know them. I am convinced.”

“But not the same person Mr Hast. And you have insight. You cannot be truly deluded.”

“They are playing with me. Pushing me to the edge of sanity. It is very real.”

The psychiatrist rose from her seat, stood by the couch and looked down at him. Stanislaw shifted uncomfortably.

“Mr Hast. There is only one constant in this… experience.”

“What?”

“You, of course.”

“Then you do think I am mad.”

“That is not a word we use. No, like many of your generation, you are just…tired.”

“Generation? I’m young. I feel good, physically.”

“But your sensorium… is tired. Do you even know how old you are?”

“Fifty-five.”

“No Dr Hast. You are eight hundred and twenty-two. You came here when the city was established. You are a founder.”

Stanislaw tried to swing a leg off the couch, but the psychiatrist held him with a casually extended hand.

“No. Stay. Listen to me.”

“You are the mad one!”

“I have the sad duty of holding your long and excellent life up for you to see. I am the mirror you have never glimpsed. Some of us believe you have been selfish. I disagree. I understand your motive. It is love, for the city you made. You wished to see it through, to ensure its safety.”

The flashes of history, the ancient odours, the familiar angles of light and shadow on old steel. All the deja-vu moments. He had been everywhere, seen everything. She spoke truth.

“But how have I lived… physically?”

“That’s the selfish part. You have moved into – possessed, essentially – a long series of innocents. The software you and your colleagues developed was sophisticated… it melded the two identities, maintaining the recipients’ sanity but preserving your essence. Time after time.”

“Who oversaw this?”

“Me and my type. There was a legal… arrangement. Unbreakable, until such time as…”

“…I began to break down, to taste the delusion. Why is it ending now?”

“You have wandered the towers, tunnels, tracks and skyways of this great city for almost a millennium. You have known every family from its establishment. You have grown with them, seen it all. When you recognize people, you are recognizing their ancestors, recalling ancient meetings, historic conversations in buildings that have been subsumed. Your memory is full. You who are the shape changer. You are Fregoli.”

“And now it ends?”

“Yes. We can let you go now.”

Numb

by submission | Feb 1, 2017 | Story | 2 comments

Author : Philip Berry

“Is it surprising, really? After what they did to you, that you can’t feel a thing.”

But I could feel. Too much. My skin was on fire.

“No Lana, I mean really feel. Perceive emotions. You can’t.”

But I could sense my own. Disappointment. Regret.

“Perhaps it will develop, like it does in a child. That’s what you are, in a way. The cold has wiped the slate of human experience clean. That reminds me, people used to put tech in the freezer to reset it when they forgot passwords. That’s what they did to you.”

He was smiling. I found his humour cruel. My face betrayed nothing.

“Who was it anyway? Who put you in the tank?”

I shook my head. I had no memories. Those too, had been wiped.

“You don’t know. Well I’ll tell you Lana. Your own parents. Why? This surprised me actually. I assumed it would be because you were dying, but it wasn’t.”

I touched a button and angled the head of the bed up. My pale gown moved over skin that was still over-sensitive. The nerves were proliferating and recalibrating after three centuries of stasis. Every touch was transmitted to my brain as a pain stimulus. I winced.

“More lidocaine? Let me turn it up.”

My counsellor touched the infusion pump.

“It’ll settle, the hyperalgesia.”

I tried to talk then, but the muscles of my mouth cramped. This reminded me of something. A pleasure, in infancy. A sweet pleasure. What was it? An ice cream, big as my face. I smiled, partially. My counsellor noticed moisture collecting under my eyes.

“You remember something! Excellent. Now where was I? Your parents. Actually your father. Your mother, according to the census, succumbed to the epidemic. She was working for an agency in Asia. So your father, watching the forecasts, seeing the viral front cross Europe and nudging the coast of France, decided to remove you from danger. Air travel was banned. A wall of drones was taking out the migratory birds. Universal septivalent vaccination was taking place, although the neuramidase targets were always behind the active mutation. So he put you in the tank!”

Images falling into place.

“Come on Lana. It’s all in there. I have other patients.”

The rim of moisture under my left eye formed a drop and fell.

“Nice.”

He touched a tissue to my cheek.

“Well I’ll tell you what I know Lana. We skimmed this from your visual and auditory cortices, the last images and impressions before you lost consciousness. You came home from school. Your father was standing in the kitchen. The radio was on. Reports of the first illnesses were coming through. Via a fishing trawler in Northumbria. They hadn’t foreseen that. It was in the cod. A whole village down. So your father took the step. You walked in, and there were three others, dressed in grey. Two women, one man. No words. One of them jabbed you. Bang. Asleep, Within an hour your blood was replaced with polymerised albumin and you were at minus 196 centigrade.”

I remembered. I was smiling when I saw Dad; I had good news for him, I’d been selected for the hockey team.

“He did it to save you. There was 75% mortality, more in the young. It worked.”

The counsellor stood over me, put his face near mine.

“Don’t hate him Lana. The grief killed him before the epidemic took hold. Anyway, my job is done. To get you to feel again. I think I have succeeded, no?”

He was right. I felt everything.

Bow Skills

by submission | Dec 28, 2016 | Story | 4 comments

Author : Philip Berry

My music teacher, Miss Herenka, gesticulated through the blue-tinged, sound-proofed glass. I watched her thin hands glide. Her voice came down from speakers in the circular ceiling of my training cell.

“Jenna come on! It’s not enough to go through the motions. Close your eyes, use the full length of the bow.”

I sighed. I gripped the bow more firmly.

“No. Soft hands! Tease the charge from each string. Find the frequency that maims.”

She could sense that my motivation was off.

“This simulator, I accept, offers little satisfaction…but in battle… oh, the chords will resonate.”

So passionate, this old musician. And I had to accept, she had seen it all. And survived.

“Death will dance forward. Together, Jenna, we’ll watch a black tango weave through the ranks, leaving doubt on every fingertip she touches.”

Yes. The power I could wield. I had seen glimpses of it.

The first school concert, high summer, out in the field. My playing caused half the school to collapse in a swoon. Three children and two parents died. I was taken to the mountains where I joined the Conservatory at the age of eight and entered higher training.

The nature of my gift was explained to me – the ability to match the frequency of the music I made to a person’s emotions… and more, the power to manipulate those emotions. As the first year progressed the broad strokes of feeling were dissected and re-arranged, through tiny adjustments in technique: the speed with which I sawed the horse-hair bow, the pressure of my fingers on the cat-gut strings, the way my body swayed. Soon I was able to give instructions, or orders. Prisoners of war were made to stand within earshot, and I watched them tremble. My orders could not resisted, because they were packaged in strong emotion.
My music had been weaponised.

Danny.

My first friend.

Miss Herenka sensed my sadness. Yet, monster that she was, she seemed to have forgotten his name.

“Oh Jenna. Your friend, the boy. I know you are sad. But you should have seen him last week. He requested the Eastern front, he knew we were weakening there. Dropped into the field, he didn’t even look up. His parents watched from the orbiter with me. So proud.”

I knew the truth. He had understood the child soldier’s fate, so he chose the most dangerous theatre.

“The chords, they were beautiful, entered their collective consciousness… and led the sixth army off the Galen plateau. Victory! After two years of bloody attrition!”

It was true. He induced mass hysteria and ran a feared army off the high ground. I had seen the war report. But it had not mentioned Danny. And he had not come back.

“His name will live long. You have that talent Jenna, more. I am confident in you. It has been privilege. Now, come out of there and follow me. The General is here.”

The time had come.

My parents.

Would they sit in the orbiter looking down into the fire-lit smoke? Would they see me standing alone behind the enemy lines, playing, playing, playing… hoping to find the resonant frequency before a patrol picked me off with a single bolt.

“Come Jenna. Come.” She brushed my head affectionately. I knew Miss Herenka was genuinely fond of me. A bond existed. This would make it easier, I knew, to throw out a few toxic notes just for her during the final performance. Relayed to the orbiter, they would enter her mind and avenge each child doomed by her lethal tuition.

I’ll huff and I’ll puff

by submission | Nov 16, 2016 | Story | 2 comments

Author : Philip Berry

Olwen, the expedition’s chief archaeologist, was the first to see it. A line of metal protruding above the sand. There was a dip by the windward edge, where eddies of air had begun the excavation. She knew that she had found the top of the ancient city’s outer wall.

A week later, following the installation of automated sand-movers, she stood at the base of a great pit, looking up at a fully revealed, vertical expanse of titanium. She knew, from soundings taken by detector drones, that the wall extended in a smooth circle along a perimeter of a thousand kilometres. The wall was a metre thick. The revealed portion gleamed, its shine preserved despite a millennium since its burial. There was more metal in this wall than could be mined from every planet and asteroid known within the galactic empire to which she belonged.

In the hard tent Benson, her deputy, explained,

“Titanium does not exist on this planet. This wall – it’s seamless by the way – was cast in zero gravity and dropped. Inserted onto the landscape. Solid. Unbreakable.”

Next day she approached the wall. There were abrasions on the exterior surface. Blast traces. Here and there the faint imprint of a blow, from a diamond-tipped hammer perhaps. But no breach.

Later, Olwen’s team found the remains of another half-way to the perimeter’s central point. They bored an access well with an ionising drill and reinforced the sides with a series string-fields. At its bottom was a crumbling wall, only the base recognisable as a man-made thing. Benson held a fragment up,

“We’ve run the analysis. Calcium silicates, alite and belite, iron, aluminates… lime in the form of volcanic ash…”

“Cement. You’re describing cement. But there are no volcanoes on this planet.”

“Guess they brought the ingredients in from off-planet and poured it here. And it’s five hundred years older than the metal. Looks like they traded up.”

“What destroyed it?”

“I think it’s an alka-silica reaction. There’s opal in here, it reacts with water, forms an expanding gel. Blow-
outs, craters. It happened from the outside. Someone worked out how to degrade it by drilling bore holes and injecting in the water.”

Benson’s comm unit buzzed.

“Madam, we’ve found another structure, fifty clicks from here.”

“At the centre?”

“Sounds like it. Could be the first settlement.”

They flew up the well on steel lines, leaving the team to continue their exploration in the well.

***

It took a month to reveal the delicate traces of the wooden wall. Olwen insisted on hand-held vacuums to displace the sand, or soft-surface trowels. This, the original perimeter, with a diameter of ten kilometres and a circumference of thirty, was barely discernable to the untrained eye. When the trench was complete Benson walked Olwen along it. They stepped cautiously alongside the black mark.

“What happened here Benson?”

“Fire. There are charcoal traces everywhere.”

***

Later, in the hard tent, Benson spoke quietly. He sounded scared.

“Madam.”

“Yes Benson.”

“I have a daughter.”

“I know.”

“There’s a story I read to her. Very old, very simple.”

“Yes.”

“It’s about three pigs, and a wolf. They each build a house, one of straw, one of wood, one of brick. The first two get blown down, and the pigs run away. The third resists the wolf’s efforts, and they lure him down the chimney into a stew pot.”

“Don’t know it. No kids. Your point?”

“That’s maybe what happened here. The metal held, but the people fled. They gave up.”

“And?”

“The wolf… he’s still out there.”