Free The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Eight by Randall Farmer Page B

day.  We discussed his every weakness and mistake, in depth and in detail, repeatedly.  I made the sessions all the more painful and effective by the inhuman accuracy I used to read his thoughts.
    I never let Tom see even a hint of my raging emotions, because never, in no circumstance, was I going to screw this up. Darryl saw a lot of me during this period, and as the days passed he became so stressed and unhinged I had to take him off guard duty. He loved the attention, but in the way a person loves a drug as it kills him. I told myself that I shouldn’t use him like this, but when the heat was on me, he was the only one who would satisfy. I hoped he would last until I finished recruiting Tom.
     
    One day about two and a half weeks in, when hunger and sleep deprivation had worn him too far down to oppose my digging, I remembered those days in Keaton’s warehouse back in Philadelphia, when she would do the same to me. When she ripped my defenses apart in tiny sadistic bites. I felt a chill, but I ignored it. I had business here, and I would not fail with Tom.
    I took Tom down through a spiral of decay. Little things like sleep deprivation, hunger or pain forced him into little accommodations. Obvious, logical, intelligent accommodations, like obeying orders when the alternative was a boot in the kidneys. Or tiny weaknesses brought on by normal human reactions like fear or exhaustion. But those accommodations did a little damage to his will and his self-respect, and so gave me leverage for the next time, just a little lower, just a little farther down, all the while the constant misery and mockery and cruelty of his guards wore at his defenses like a file on wood. He grew to need those long conversations with me as his only connection to human sanity.
    He knew what I was doing. How I destroyed everything he had, and how I left him only one way out. My way. To believe the dream I offered him. He tried to fight me, but of course, all he had was his conscious mind to work with.  I held his unconscious, his emotions and all those vast depths of the human mind beyond his control. Therefore, he fought, and lost, and hated himself for his failure, and his weakness, and the desperate animal he became.
     
    The last tiny supports in Tom’s mind collapsed three weeks in, leaving him adrift in a sea of madness.  He no longer believed anything good about himself.  Nothing of his previous beliefs made sense; he had lost trust in everything he had once known.  He couldn’t even convince himself he was human any more.
    The human mind cannot stand such stress.  Just as a drowning man will grab hold of any hand that presents itself, so too will the drowning mind.
    I drank his agony down like the finest wine.  Ambrosia and the tantalizing sips of passion.  This wasn’t the hot quickie of the swift recruitment, over in a few hours, which I did nearly every day, following Keaton’s orders.  This was long and slow, obsessive foreplay, stretching out for weeks.  Tom became the measure of my life, the entire power of an Arm working on a focused purpose.  Little tendrils of pleasure and need wove their way through the cracks of my soul like roots of some deadly ivy through fractured rock.  Thoughts of him ruled me as much as thoughts of me ruled him.
    Folly.  I stood by, helpless and enthralled as the ivy wound its way deeper, until I wasn’t able to remove these changes without destroying myself.
    I dove into his recruitment willingly, allowing Tom to drown out the pain in the rest of my life.  Lori still refused to talk to me.  Gilgamesh hadn’t returned from Boston, trying and still failing to talk Lori around.  I had tried to entice Sky to Houston, but he still hadn’t perfected his metasense shielding, which we badly needed for so many reasons.  Hank fought paperwork and organizational duties and lost, unable to squeeze more than a few short hours of research into each week, all spent on me.
    Tom became my life.
    In