Apprentice

Ardath Rekha


 


Chapter Forty-one: Jarvis - Dissociative States

The captain in question gave Jarvis a sour look. "Meaning no disrespect, Sir, I wish you, had notified us back when you first learned Riddick was on the planet."

Jarvis sighed and glanced at Aspen. She looked slightly amused. He turned his attention back to the police chief. "If we had let you know and you had attempted to arrest him, Captain, how high do you think his body count would have been?"

Another sour look, but no retort. They proceeded to the station's conference room in silence.

He heard Aspen's quick indrawn breath as they entered and got a look at the three people inside. He managed to contain his own surprised response.

Oh good God...

A man and two women were seated together at the conference table. The man was small and overweight, with a face that seemed to spend all of its time in obsequious expressions and was perpetually ingratiating. But the women...

One was a petite thing, sweet-faced with blue eyes and short, dirty-blonde hair. She looked extremely familiar to him. The other looked very much like Jack Kowalczyk, physically. The nose and eyes were different, and the mouth was a little fuller, but he knew that if he'd passed her on the street he would have turned around for another, closer look, his heart racing.

He already knew that the two women were prostitutes. He already knew that Riddick, apparently, had spent time recently with both. Nausea rose in his throat. Now he remembered who the first woman resembled: Carolyn Fry, pilot to the Hunter-Gratzner, who died in the aftermath of the crash. Adroit questioning of the Muslim cleric had revealed that she'd been alone with Riddick when she died, although the holy man insisted that the planet's indigenous predators had killed her.

But had they?

This was horrifying. Riddick appeared to be acting out some bizarre sort of necrophilia with these women...

Both women were pale and looked deeply frightened. Jarvis glanced at Aspen and nodded. They were on her turf here. She nodded back and stepped forward.

"I am Dr. Aspen, and this is Lieutenant Jarvis. We are heading the task force investigating Riddick's activities in New Paris and on Troubadour. I understand that you may be able to help us?"

"Help you?" The counterfeit Jack exploded, her voice charged with fear. "We came here because we want you to--"

"It's okay, Karen," the rotund man interrupted soothingly. "They're going to help us. Don't worry. You're safe now. They just need to ask us some questions."

"We'll never be safe again," Karen replied, her voice almost a sob. The false Carolyn was staring at her hands, which trembled slightly.

Aspen moved to sit down at the table across from the trio. Jarvis followed her and took a seat beside her.

"Perhaps you would like to begin, Mr...?" She prompted, looking at the man.

"Francois Barbour," he replied, bowing his head her way. "I am manager of the Moulin Rouge."

Of course. What else would you call a brothel? Jarvis thought with concealed disgust. Bryan, you've fallen far and hard, haven't you? Is there anything left of the boy you were?

He already knew the answer to that. The last vestiges of Richard Bryan Riddick were long dead. The thing that remained in their place was a monster. He forced his attention back to the trio before him.

"The man we believe to be your Riddick began coming to our establishment more than four years ago. We would not see him for months at a time, of course, but it was clearly the man pictured in the paper. He told us his name was William Fry."

Jarvis made a quick note on his electronic pad. Used first name of mercenary who had custody of him on HG; used last name of HG pilot.

"Go on," Aspen prompted.

"He described the physical characteristics of the woman he was seeking. They were almost a precise match with Marnie, here. She can tell you more about what he wanted." He nodded to the blonde who so closely resembled Carolyn Fry.

She took a deep breath and began speaking. "The name he wanted to call me by was 'Carolyn.' He told me to call him 'Riddick.' We'd all heard of Riddick, of course, but we never thought he really was him..."

She swallowed hard, twisting her fingers around each other, knuckles white.

"He... liked to dominate. A lot of the things we did involved me being... caught alone with him in some small place. I was supposed to be afraid of him, but after we had sex I was supposed to tell him I loved him and that this time I wouldn't leave him. One time..."

She swallowed again.

"One time, when he was climaxing... he said to me 'Don't die, Carolyn. Not for me.' I asked him about it afterward, and he told me that the real Carolyn had died saving his life and that he missed her."

"So you knew that you were playing the role of a dead woman," Aspen said quietly.

Marnie nodded. Her eyes were glittering with suppressed tears. "It never occurred to me that maybe he'd killed her or something. I didn't know he really was Riddick..." She looked up at them, face full of vulnerability. Her voice, when she spoke again, was full of a desperate need for reassurance. "Did he kill her? Would he have killed me, too, eventually?"

"We don't know," Aspen told her gently.

"Because, when he showed up this last time, he was different," Marnie continued, her voice ragged. "He didn't want to do the usual things anymore. He just wanted to... to fuck me and leave. He wouldn't even look at me half the time. First night he was back, it was mostly normal, initially..."

She took a cigarette out of a small case and tried to light it. Her hands were shaking far too much and she handed it over to Barbour with a pleading expression. He lit it for her and gave it back to her. She took several long drags on the cigarette before she was able to continue.

"But about halfway through our first... encounter -- usually we'd have sex three or four times before he was done -- I heard him say 'go away, Jack.' I had no idea what it meant, but suddenly he was having trouble, which was a first for him. Usually he was so..."

"Virile?" Aspen prompted. All the Phase II Operatives were well-known for their intense sexual appetites.

Marnie laughed shakily. "Good word. Yeah, he'd never had trouble before. When he finally came... afterwards he wouldn't say anything to me. He just got dressed and left. Paid for the full night, but he wasn't even there for an hour. And after that he just got more and more... perfunctory. I finally told him I didn't want to see him anymore."

Jarvis blinked in surprise. Marnie noticed and glared at him.

"Look, mister, I know what you think you see here," she snarled. "A cheap whore, right? Spreads her legs for anybody with the cash? That's not what I do. We're licensed professionals at the Moulin Rouge. My clients pay two thousand New Francs a night for time with me and in return I make their fantasies -- whatever they are -- come true. Some of them don't even want to fuck. They just want someone they can talk to who doesn't judge them. I'm probably almost as good a psychologist as your lady friend there. And I have the right to tell any of my clients if I don't want to see them anymore."

Aspen gave him a look of irritation. He nodded apologetically at Marnie. "I'm sorry. Please continue."

She sighed in irritation. "That's pretty much it. I told him I didn't want to see him anymore and I figured I'd never see him again. But a few nights later he showed up and negotiated to spend his nights with Karen. When I heard that he called her 'Jack,' I figured that he'd just grown attracted to an actual, living woman, and I just didn't do it for him anymore. Karen can tell you the rest."

An actual, living woman, Jarvis thought with horror. Oh God. I wish to God that's what it had been...

Dr. Aspen made some notes in her book before she turned her attention to Karen. It took the younger prostitute a moment to find her voice.

"He was really nice at first," she said quietly. "He didn't even seem to know what he wanted to do. We tried all kinds of things, nothing too weird, the first two nights. He had this one idea where we took a shower together and afterwards he had sex with me in the stall... twice, actually. He was very... gentle, most of the time. But, like Marnie said, he did like to dominate. He asked me to wear these clothes, the kinds of things a teenage girl would wear, one who didn't have a lot of money, and he said that she dressed like that when he first saw her again."

A nauseating shiver passed through Jarvis. Just how sick had his boy gotten?

My boy is dead, he reminded himself. Bryan has been dead for years.

"The third night..." Now it was Karen's turn to swallow hard. "When he showed up I thought it was going to be really nice. He even gave me a gift, a bottle of perfume... Charmante, which costs a fortune. He said it was her favorite."

"Excuse me for just a moment, Karen," Dr. Aspen said. She leaned over to Jarvis so that he would be the only one who heard what she said next. "According to our investigation, Charmante-scented toiletries are what Angelica Porter purchased the day before the space battle. She spent about six hundred New Francs on a complete set of them."

He turned to her and murmured back. "Jack never wore Charmante, as far as we know. She couldn't afford it."

"Maybe she as wearing a knock-off version of it when they were reunited. Who knows?"

Jarvis nodded. None of this made the matter any less disturbing. He and Aspen turned their attention back to the pale girl across from them.

"I'm sorry about that, Karen. Please continue," Aspen said gently.

"Well, he had a new fantasy he wanted to try. He was going to frisk and strip-search me..."

Oh, God, Jarvis thought, his stomach sinking hard. Riddick had probably done exactly that to the real Jack when they were reunited. Somehow, during his search, he must have detected the implanted tracer. Jack had thought it was a hormonal regulator; she would have objected if he tried to remove it. Was that how it began? Did he decide she'd betrayed him when she tried to stop him?

He buried his face in his hands for a moment, pain overwhelming him. My fault, he thought yet again. He could actually see it in his mind, an already-humiliated Jack struggling against her captor, trying to reason with him, only to awaken the latent beast within...

"So we started playing it out, and I figured he might get a little rough because he told me I might need to use the safe-word. Usually I pick the word, but he insisted on choosing it and it was a weird one, too--"

"What was it?"

"Hunter-Gratzner," Marnie answered softly. "He had me use it, too."

Karen nodded. "Everything was going okay, and we were about to have sex, when the son of a bitch kissed me on the mouth! I don't let anybody do that except my girlfriend. That's her personal territory. And I'd told him he could never do that, and he'd agreed to it. I got so mad I hit him!"

She wiped at her eyes and sniffed. "I was so upset I couldn't even remember his stupid safe-word. He got excited after I hit him... he pinned me to the bed and fucked me really hard, even though I was yelling at him to stop, and he was loving it!" She wiped at her eyes again. "It was awful..."

Her breath hitched and she stared down at the table. Marnie's arm went around her gently.

Jarvis almost felt like throwing up. He could suddenly imagine that Riddick had done exactly that to the real Jack at the beginning of her ordeal. Karen had no idea how lucky she'd actually gotten in comparison. If Riddick had decided to relive the entire experience, she'd have had to be identified through dental records and tissue type too...

Next to him, Dr. Aspen looked extremely pale.

Karen finally got control of her voice enough to continue. "I threw him out when he was done, and Monsieur Barbour told him, when he came in the next night, that he wasn't welcome anymore." Her eyes fixed on Jarvis and Aspen, full of desperate pleading. "Is he going to come back and get us now? He told Francois to give us his apologies, but I'm so scared--"

"We won't let him get either one of you," Jarvis said firmly. "He's on his way to Earth right now. And I promise you that we'll make sure he can never come near either one of you again."

He'd make all the necessary arrangements. As much as he hated the insights they'd given him into Riddick's condition, those alone were worth the outlay for a state-of-the-art security system to keep the women safe. And if, somehow, Riddick ever did find himself drawn back to them, Jarvis would be sure to catch him before either woman was so much as touched.

"We appreciate the help you've given us," Aspen was saying. "As gruesome as it sounds, knowing that he has been sexually obsessing over dead women may well give us the key to his--"

"DEAD?" Karen gasped. "What do you mean? She's dead? But... he told me she was alive! He said he just couldn't have her! Oh my god, are you telling me he killed her?"

It took both Barbour and Marnie to calm her hysterics. Jarvis excused himself quickly, running for the station's men's room. He barely made it in time, vomiting his breakfast into one of the toilets. He continued to dry-heave for several minutes thereafter, his head spinning. When he finally emerged, Aspen was exiting the ladies' room, wiping at her own mouth.

"Tell me this is just a horrible nightmare," she begged him.

He groaned and leaned against the wall. "I wish it were. Oh God, I wish it were. You know what this means, don't you?"

Aspen nodded grimly. "He's gone dissociative. His mind is fracturing completely."

"He doesn't remember killing her. He tortured her to death and he has no memory of it. Oh God."

"We knew this could happen," Aspen said raggedly, leaning against the wall next to him.

"We knew there was a very slim chance it could happen. That's different," Jarvis insisted. "We have to let Baldwin know right away. The other operatives--"

"They may never have that problem; you know that! Don't forget that Riddick's brain underwent a very unique transformation that none of them experienced!"

He glanced over at her. "Do you still think that's the root cause of his problems?"

"I think it's very likely," she answered. "You know he was different afterward. His IQ jumped sixty points after he recovered. You tested him yourself."

"Yes, I did," Jarvis admitted with a groan. "But you know that IQ tests are often inaccurate... and he'd practically been off the scale even before the incident occurred. I just figured we were tracking some statistics that had been missed the first time--"

"Jarvis, you were expecting him to come out of the ordeal a vegetable, or at the very least with impaired cognitive function. Instead, his IQ jumped sixty points!"

"He was only seven years old! You know the tests are only partially reliable at that age!"

Aspen rolled her eyes at him and stalked away to the conference room. It was empty of the others when they reached it. She closed the door behind him and locked it before she turned around and glared angrily at him.

"Goddamn it, Jarvis, you need to stop this double-talk! I read the files! His foster father beat him nearly to death! When you were contacted and ordered to Earth, all of the EEGs showed that Riddick was brain-dead! You had to come to Earth because none of the subjects could be terminated unless you were physically present! And by the time you arrived--"

"When I arrived, the EEGs showed that his brain cells were spontaneously regenerating. He didn't even need life support by then. He woke up two days after that and knew who he was." Jarvis sighed. "I remember. You don't know how happy we all were..."

It was impossible to describe the sheer joy and hope everyone had felt at that time, nor the way it had been dashed to pieces seven years later.

"None of the other subjects went through anything remotely like that. And none of them went anywhere near as crazy during puberty as he did," Aspen whispered. "Whatever your beloved 'Charybdis Factor' did to his brain cells, that's what's responsible for his madness. I've been telling you that for three years now."

"I know that, Aspen. We were researching whether or not a treatment for ordinary humans could be made using the technology, to heal brain damage. We shut that inquiry down after Riddick went crazy. File FP74E. Look it up; you're cleared for it." Jarvis buried his head in his hands. "You know I agree with you, Martina. The whole Project should be scrapped. It should have been scrapped after Phase I went bad."

"What's the official death count these days, Jarvis? How many people have died thanks to this Project?" Martina Aspen sat down next to him, looking miserable. She was his fault as well. He'd brought her in three and a half years ago, to help profile Riddick and his involvement with Jack Kowalczyk. Now she was trapped. There was no way out of the Charybdis Project once it sucked you in. Like the whirlpool in the Messina Straits on Earth; once it grabbed hold of you, it had you until you died.

"Seven hundred forty three. That includes the subjects themselves, all forty-two of them who died."

Aspen laughed humorlessly. "How much higher does it have to get before the goddamned thing is shut down for good?"

"Minimum of nine hundred," he replied sourly.

"Where do you get that number from?" She glanced at him in surprise.

"Well, there are one hundred fifty seven of us with full clearance to the Charybdis Project. I figure that if it actually is ever shut down, every last one of us will meet with an untimely demise. Anybody lower down than the Board itself will be viewed as an unnecessary risk to Interplanetary Security."

They were silent for a long time, contemplating.

"So has any of this shit been worth it to you, Reg?" she asked a few minutes later, her voice sad.

"Oh yeah, sure. My wife and kids got sick of the way I was gallivanting all over the galaxy and stopped using the Conjugal Cryo-Chambers. Six years ago, Melanie finally got around to divorcing me so she could marry some guy her own age. She was three years younger than me when we met, and now she's fifteen years older than me. I'm a grandfather and I've never seen my grandchildren, and my daughters don't want me to show up. And the closest thing I've ever had to a son is on his way to Earth right now, and he's turned into a rabid animal. This Project kills everything it touches, Martina. I'm sorry I let it touch you."

"So what do we do now?"

"We go, and we report to General Baldwin what we've learned. And then, I don't know about you but I plan to get very, very drunk."

"You want company for that?"

"You're on, lady."

The two of them rose and left the conference room. Jarvis almost imagined he could see the swords floating above the both of them, waiting to fall.

 

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