Don't it always seem to go...

The evanescing beauty of dusk is never quite as enamoring as when you know it will be your last. As I sat on a tree stump at the edge of a newly culled field; in the void of the Pennsylvania back woods, I thought of the sterility I had accepted and called to my being.

For weeks, my apathy had been growing and, as some young men do, I had begun to think that nothing in life was worth having. Death seemed to be the plausible response but I had the tenacity to fight the dying of the light because that was what was expected of me in my frame of mind.

I had ploded through the woods countless nights with the apathetic scorn of existence and, as my feet were pricked by the roughness of nature and my eyes met the scampering of mindless little cogs of nature's device, I swooned in thoughts of being bested by some nefarious hooligan bent on the destruction of all in his path or the preservation of his own existence. I felt the warmth in my spine and all around me. I saw visions of my monster swinging a knife at me as I laughed and lunged at him, doing as much damage as I could while narrowly avoiding death. I wanted death to be thrust upon me and I wanted danger in it. I wanted death to meet me face to face like an old nemesis come to tell me we could finally be friends.

In the endless darkness of the clearing beyond a fallen oak and severeal large shrubbery; not to mention half a dozen hydrangia and bushes with various names that began with, "poison," I invoked the angel of death as I shreiked, "come and find me you wretched bitch!"

The forest was silent but it had an answer and just as I sat down on a tree stump, she appeared before me from the limbs above.

"I am by no means death, son, but I believe I can help you."

In my head, my mind went over my recent exploits with accelerated furvor: women who could not excite my phalice, drugs that seemed to induce more boredom than they created beauty, silence immeasurable in tasks innumerable! In that moment my mind felt the anxiety and seemed to throb as if a din shook all thoughts to death.

"I hear your pain, Joshua, and I am here to answer your prayer."

I was speechless and seemed to be unable to speak even if I wanted to as if some preternatural power had grabbed my larynx and refused to let it vibrate.

"I am Anthiel and some might call me a sprite, others call me the accursed but my favorite title is merciful death."

Her features were soft and her skin as pail as a new bride's gown. Her eyes, however; those demonic eyes were the only life in this creature that stood naked before me. Those eyes glowed green as the trees and occasionally flashed red as satin. The strangest quality about her was one that could only be felt in the pit of ones stomach, not really a stomach pain as fear is; that mortification was plastered in the near frozen beads of sweat on my neck, but my stomach felt butterflies. The anticipation one feels right before they jump from a clif into the waves below or the quarry that welcomed them with the rush of existence. She was fecund with the thrill of life while being somehow infrangibly tied to the finality of death.

"You are at a crossroads, child and you have found the den of a god. I can give you the death you seek. I could even let you remain a child until the real death takes you from this earth enfeabled and broken and old.  The third option is you can grow. You can become as strong as I am or even more so, if you can successfully battle the horror of time. The choice is yours..."

As I felt the grip on my speech weaken, I interrupted her, saying, "Yes! Yes. I want your immortality! I want your merciful death! Give me your hatred, VAMPYR!"

"I see you've heard of me and think you know what I am but you have no clue what you will endure in the existence of endless nights and endless dungeons of immortality.  You may even be hunted, you will be tried and tested, you will not feel the exhiliration of a heartbeat anymore and you will not experience excitement the same way. Do you know what you ask?"

"Yes, I..."

"Silence! sub-primal creature. You will have a day after the bite until the poison spreads and you will be the form you are now, permenantly. After that, you will hide from the light of day for that which cleanses will kill you: fire, sunlight and god will be your enemy until you meet them with open arms and open heart. I will tell you what he told me before he cut the wings from my back and cursed me to feed off the blood of mortals forever, he said, 'Anthiel! You deny my divine plan?'
'Father! I beg you not to give free will to likes of man while your angels suffer slavery to him!'
'Your will is my will!'
'My will is to serve a merciful god and man deserves the mercy of servitude over severance.'
'Then you shall see what it means to be man! And you shall be forced to make decisions over life and death and will as I do.'
From there, a heavenly host destroyed my wings and cast me down to earth with a hunger, I had not before felt. When first I drank of man's blood, my species propagated and has grown or killed from 8,000 BCE on."

"I understand the burden."

With my comment she became enraged. She floated into the air and her hair blew back as she shook the earth and moved the wind with divine fury.

"Oh do you now? Is your tie to god gone? Does he not hear your mortal prayer? Be as I am and suffer! Suffer the pain of immortality without light!"

With that she bit down into my neck like a poisonous serpent, coiling her evil around me like some dark shroud. The pain was so immeasurable I passed out and when I awoke, I sat on the same tree stump, at the edge of a culled field in Pennsylvania. The evanescing beauty of dusk is never quite as enamoring as when you know it will be your last.

Pain Case

Part XVI

There's no place to run; no place to hide. At this point, I am pretty sure I am not under his or her control but rather, the cycle has finally come full circle. Here I am and into pain I was born and so into pain I shall end this. It's funny. In all this world destruction, not once has anybody looking in wondered, well where are all the nukes?

It's been 18 months of darkness and the world is all but a shell. I got on that plane to Moscow and it was one bumpy fucking ride. So here I sit; in Moscow on top of the ruins of Ostankino Tower, which is half its height but I'll bet you've never been 270 meters in the air without shitting your pants. I have with me a lit папироса, and a half a bottle of Grey Goose. Hey! Only the best for the end of all mankind, right?

чертовски человека don't deserve to live anyway. I passed through my home town to receive my father the other day and you know what they told me? He was in hospital that burned to the ground with him in it. It really has come full circle but my family is now all dead and my enemy is everywhere. The ground that I walked was my enemy so I climbed this tower to dangle my feet off and show this revolving сука that I am no longer attached to her scorched демонический skin...

Oh sure! she no longer needs me because it didn't even take all that much convincing to get my countrymen to start looting and killing each other for petty squabbles but at least I hear that Russia wasn't the only one. As I begin to laugh to the demons that wait in anticipation to make this place новые Ад, I think to myself how quickly Jerusalem fell when the horde of the United States crushed itself, Europe Crushed itself and the rest of the world crumbled. I wonder if there were any diplomats who escaped? In any case, none of it matters because Israel, is finally under the control of the Muslims who so desired it and most of them are dead and the rest will be dead soon. The whole damn world is dead and this is some чертовски хорошая водка!

In my rage, it has only amplified the murder and slaughter and destruction. It's amplified it worldwide. I heard there were 600 American survivors. haha! Not anymore. The world will not heal itself in her special vision of her own rebirth.

All of a sudden, in my head, I begin to see soft things, like children happily playing and fruitful countryside and my mama.

"None of it will work on me you crazy сука!" I scream to the dwindling fires of my homeland.

I think of the raw destruction I am about to cause and she knows it and tries to stop me wit everything she can. At last, she gets armed guards to storm the rotted and beaten precipice I so enjoyed but I don't care one tiny little bit.

I jump! The ground moves quickly toward me and for the first time, I feel her trying to manipulate me but where am I to go? I am in midair so that she can move my body to no avail because I am free falling until the brutal and painful ground rises to meet me.

"That hurt a lot, you rotten Свинья шлюха!"

I felt her grip on my mind, body and soul dispersing. I felt my strength increased. The Asian was right. Death is empty but my resolve was not. I could not feel good or bad about what I was doing because in all senses of the word, I should be dead. What I could feel was her feelings trapped within me trying to manipulate me when it was too late.

If the American had been here, he would have so enjoyed watching me seek out the world's nuclear weapon potential and launch every one simultaneously. I knew our world leaders would be too куриного дерьма to actually accomplish the task so it was clear I had to do it myself.

Mitsurugi the pawn may have stopped a few of them but it really didn't matter. He was not the only dead one now and his power of death held persuasion and amplification through earthly forces but he could not control the electronic signals of that many nuclear warheads post launch. The key was the nervousness of the earth and as she shifted, she left herself vulnerable and caused such a wild spin in her pursuit of me that she shook herself free of her bonds. The nukes fell and it was glorious as the surface of the earth began to break apart and the fire consumed what was left. It quickly went out but by then, it was too late. With my last few moments of life before the vast abyss of space shut me down and sent me to the blackness of death, I watched as my planet drifted out of existence and into the peaceful sleep she so desired for the "инвазия" of man.

"Goodnight, sweet..."

Pain Case

Part XV

It always happens

one does not appreciate

until it's all gone

I feel her within me.  The ancient people might call her Gaea but she is like the answer to my prayers.  In my ecstasy I can even feel the sensations that can only be described in books with names like Revelations.  God is an idea that I never met but she fills me with such resolve that all the death on my blades seems like moments of sheer bliss.

Before I sent them to foreign corners of the world and continued my march all the way until I reached the shores of Japan, I heard the American and the Russian talk of nothing except the darkness of the world but she would only let me see white.  To me, I saw nothing but the world as it would be when the disease of the flesh was gone.

There were others that saw the light as well.  Several Oculars from the Middle East and even he from Israel saw it.  The harmony was beautiful that the Israeli and the Arab joined hands to slaughter the disease of humanity.  We were no longer Israeli, Arab and Japanese, we were Oculars who became the Elementals in charge of protecting the entire planet from mankind's destruction.  They could not be trusted to do the right thing and they had obtained far too many free passes.  Now, Lady vengeance came with mercy for her destroyers to kill before being killed.

Not one who died by my hand died slowly.  I heard in Europe and the Middle East, there was a spike of violent deaths but we the Oculai killed swiftly and with justice as executioners for the crimes of humanity.  All were guilty.  There was no savior for mankind that vindicated them of what they'd done.  They did not sin against god, they sinned against their own home.  They sinned against Gaea.

In the midst of this insanity, I had lost touch with the Russian and this did not bother me as I had accepted his manor of cleansing.  He was of the darkness and of the pain.  He was the pain case that fought against the light.  He was the devil and he had come to punish, as I had come to show mercy to those he would strike down brutally by offering a quick death.

It all was so beautiful, at the end.  The world had all been cleansed and it got very quiet.  I remember as I heard the last few souls dwindling to their graves and the fires beginning to get sucked into her womb to give birth to 高天原 on earth, that stupid Russian had to do something stupid.

The sky went red and the sun became black and I felt her pain and panic.  I saw the ground start to shake and she began to move her arms too quickly for us to survive on her back.  Mountains moved and the sky opened up as I watched the moon break orbit and hurl meteors at our mother.  The seas boiled and 144,000 scattered across the globe ran violently like a biblical herd of swine.  Those of us who became hurt or even killed rose up again and again too quickly as the nanites in them were too weak to handle such rapid changes.  I felt the Oculai die and my heart sank for each one.  I saw the nuclear warheads but I could not stop them.  Her pain and panic in me as well as Sergei's pain was too much for me to bear.

I saw us part as the we were snatched from her bosom and she split apart as we were hurled into the depth of space and heard from no more.  In my last moments, I write:

To bid life farewell
one greets death as a stranger
Always has he watched

Pain Case

Part XIV

[I am the will of mother earth.  I will do to her what must be done.]

What am I saying?  I've had moments like this for weeks where I go into a tangent in my head about...

[All human civilization must be destroyed so that nature can reclaim that which has been destroyed.]

There it goes again.  I know my mind is weak but at the very least my heart should be enough to stop the visions in my head.  My emotions get the best of me, though.  I hear a pain in my head that's much stronger than any mere mortal scream.  It's the moan of the earth as her surface has been polluted, raped and destroyed.  She calls through my mind and says she feels the cold of space creeping towards her soft loamy skin.  At the very least I no longer here the crazy Asian's voice in my head but I think I'd prefer it to this painful sorrow.  I can't...

[The weakest of minds is the most easy to manipulate.  An American mind is hedonistic and thinks only about its own will to survive.  This is why I am so easily able to have him purge me of the termites that eat away at me and give the bare minimum in return.  This is why even before my conduit awakened, governments were able to get away with murder because they did the bare minimum to satiate the masses.

"You have a job, a roof over your head and food.  You should be happy."

This is the way that millions are manipulated into allowing evil to flourish.

"It may not be the best way but do you have a alternative solution?"

No, they do not; so they allow themselves to be taken advantage of.  I am not so easy and I have been waiting for this moment for a long time.  My conduit Mitsurugi; My transmitter Sgt. Ronald Moore of the US military; and lastly, my juggernaut, my executioner, my martyr, willing to die for his cause, the Pain Case, Sergei Ivanovich.  Without these men, none of this annihilation would be possible but with these three at the head of my army, I am unstoppable.]

"aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"  I scream out loud in a darkened house, the blood of at least 100 souls on my hands and clothes.  I feel such pain that can not  be quenched and because of it I fly into these rages as the messages like the one that just was run in my head like an infinite loop.  The only way to stop it would be a reboot but in our case, that would only bring us closer to the mother.  This is her pain, her vengeance, her retribution and as my country burns to the ground, I watch good men and women die in front of my eyes and some by my hands because I am no longer in control of my own self.

It's as if I'm being broadcast through and as I frantically search for some form of civilization, I can only watch the nothing through my own eyes; like a captain of a ship that is commanded by winds that blows it into enemy harbors, I can not retract my sails and am at the whim of the earth its self.

I've seen a couple of TV's that still worked but news stations from around the country and the world are all gone.  In 600 channels, that she gave me control long enough to look through, I found nothing but static on every one.  Even the South American networks are gone.  China, Japan, The Philippines, Europe, Africa, South and North America, Australia and the Middle East.

I saw an article two days ago of Jerusalem demolished.  I pray to God for my release from this prison but my mother will not surrender to my control except to search for hope in raw destruction.  That's it!  Hope.

She immediately knows my plan but I press through to search the TV channels of a local TV repair shop in San Francisco.  In my head, she shows me visions from around the world.  Even the most obscure places are destroyed.

Well, you got what you wanted, you evil bitch.  Humanity is all but gone in numbers and all that remains are the structures and civilization we left behind.  For a moment, I surrender; mind body and soul as she turns me from the shop and back to the work of slaughtering the left over human beings but I turn and throw myself into the window of the repair shop when her guard is down.

[His head separates from his body and his nanites and blood spill to the ground.  He lies in the rubble of what was once a street.  He passes into the nether as his body serves only to stop me from communicating with the 600 humans that are left who still walk the soil of the former United States of America.  This is the way you can escape me, children.  This is the way you can be free but which of the two of you wishes death?  Which of the two of you loves the world enough to sacrifice yourself to protect your newly earned pile of ashes?]

Pain Case

Part XIII

The days have gone by in a march that simply has no time or reason.  Mitzu-sama is now Mitsurugi the god!  With my supreme control, he is impossible to hack into and with his power of life after death, I wouldn't be able to hack him anyway.  We've been marching for 3 days straight, without sleep and those who die from exhaustion, he simply drops as his massive horde grows and he takes control of more people as we march and destroy all in our path.

I have a feeling that they've tried sending missiles our way, being that anyone who gets close to us gets enraptured, but missiles run on electronic guidance chips and Mitsurugi commands those too.  It is worse than the Gulag in the USSR.

The sky is always black like a dust storm that simply surrounds our march of destruction.  The only light is the fires that lap at the houses and skin of people who can't scream until they're already dead.  Mitsurugi gets greater power with each bit of destruction like he feeds off the chaos and violence.  Each pretty white picket fence that burns to the ground.  Each chaotic berserker that starts destroying their own house from the inside out, until the ones who aren't trapped in the wreckage, mangled and torn, join the march and start destroying other buildings from the outside in.

I have not seen the American since New York.  We have come to somewhere in Pennsylvania, I think, and I grow weary of watching Mitsurugi with no recourse.  At the very least, I am a bishop to their pawn.  Mitsurugi uses my speed and power to slaughter those who some how manage to resist.  The other day, I put my fist through a man, causing his heart to come leaping through his spine.  The American's tie with me is gone, his whimsical glee ripped from my soul like the jaws of life might remove a rib.  In all this, one might think I would have gotten my taste for torture back but what I saw in front of me now, disgusted me.  It was all me on this one.  This wasn't just torture, this was genocide of the human race.  In this moment, however, I realize what freedom is.

In Russia, I had freedom because I was a government built monster but that wasn't freedom.  Here, I had freedom because I made enough to keep my apartment and I had no boss.  That was freedom.  How many of these poor суки had a complete prison of a routine before they became the puppet of Mitsurugi?  How many of them missed the chance to live freely as I did before trading one prison for another?  The chances were missiles had been sent to Mitsurugi's location because I had glimmers in my head like waking nightmares of other places on earth burning.  In other places on earth I even saw those free men, women and children running through the streets bloodied, bruised, burning and dead.

In front of me, I learned pointless facts of life like how many pounds of pressure one needed to rip off a mans arm and beat him to death with it.

I look around me at the blackness and see people walking away as if they're free.  All of a sudden, I realize the numbers don't add up.  It's as if Mitsurugi's been letting people go but it's much more sinister than that.  In my head I do the math and watch a mental video that has been locked away until this moment.

[Hello Mr. Sergei,  My name is Hayao Mitsurugi and I am in command of your body and soul.  I thank you for your talents and abilities and thank your friend and the many others on earth for theirs.  Yes, there are others.  The first death gave me access to the full range of abilities that our mutual device controls but the second death... Well this gave me access to everything.  You can not imagine the way it feels to know each molecule and its genesis as they go on around you. you can not imagine the power to not only feel the heart beat of the world but the ability and desire to woo her as a lover.  Look at the blue house on the corner]

I looked towards the corner of the street and saw a blue house that looked almost purple in the orange fire of its mail box. As if I was watching lightening form inside of a cloud, I saw tiny blue sparks begin to form in the air and in an instant, a raw pillar of fire came billowing out of the earth like a tectonic plate had just, instantaneously, exploded out of the earth.  I felt the heat from where I was and fell to my knees in awe of his power.  He had managed to learn to communicate with nature its self and harness it's horrors.  From the looks of it.  Nature was невероятно сердит.

[I will destroy this world for her.  much of the globe burns already and through the ashes, she will rebuild.]

He ended his transmission but all of a sudden, I found myself marching towards a local airport to board a plane to Russia.

Now, I heard his voice in real time as if he spoke to me,
[I go with you everywhere.  I can find you anywhere on the planet for she and I are one.  We are all one.  Do not regret, when this is over, our kind will be all that remains and the scourge of humanity will cease to exist.  Go and cleanse your sins.  Kill those who did this to you and convert those who you will to the implant.  I will be with you always.  Good luck, my son.]

Pain Case

Part XII

The new sun rises

another day to ponder

the swift angel nears

Those who come to kill me are often boring to me because I can't be killed.  I can see assassins coming and I know my own kind like I have learned this new found respect for the word undead. In movies, a zombie was grotesque and not cognoscente of what he was or his world but I still recognize my world, I simply feel nothing for it.  I wish I could understand what feeling bored was but I feel no emotion at all.  I see tasks and I complete them.  I get very little joy out of anything save the slaughter of my enemies and even then, it's more of a remembered emotion than a granted one.

I am exhausted with this lifelessness and wish that all those years ago, I had accepted a partner to cut my head from my body so as to see my permanent death.  Death is all I want now and I await the person who can give it to me but nobody is powerful enough.  I had a German Oculous (The name I am now giving to our kind so as to know what to call them) shipped in for my final defeat but he was slain at the tip of my sword by having his head cut off.  An Indian Oculous had learned how to regenerate her head but somehow fell short when I cut her in half...

Some might call me evil but I am the culmination of pain.  Pain caused me to flee my country to build this army and as the soullessness withing me started to settle, everything began dwindling and disappearing forever.  Now, not even anger remains, only perfect resolve and the ability to see all electronic signals and people while calculating and listening to the heartbeat of mother earth.

I heard them from across town now as they boarded the train. They were rushing towards me with the intent to kill me and this time, I would let them.  It was my fate to end this way as it was my own hand that did it the first time, and now another with a Bowie knife intended to cut my through the heart and kill me the same way I had tried to do. Thank god for this angelic creature that would take me away from this life.

I had come full circle.  A man dies; he is reborn; soullessness takes its toll; his ruthlessness brings success; his ruthlessness brings empty success; soullessness takes its toll; he is reborn into emptiness; he awaits his death.  In my own way, I am what a recent letter called "a pain case."  It was from the two who come to see me now.  An American who must have thought he was quite cleaver thinking that it was great pain that caused me to be who I am.  If only they knew it was death and weariness.

They were close now, practically outside of my building and climbing the steps.  In my last moments, I knelt and with no passion, for I was dead, I said prayers to the Shinto deities that I might be granted a place by my ancestors once the living part of my soul was diseased.

The door burst open and a fire fight ensued.  My guards were not Oculai so they had no chance.  It was magnificent.  So much so that even though I did not change positions, I watched from an omnipotent stance as the two men ran up walls and dove from the ceiling, crushing and massacring my guards.  It was truly spectacular.  What a sight to see the progeny of the eye destroy like such vicious killers.

In fact, something stirred in me and I, all of a sudden began to feel great joy and delight at the deaths of my vicious body guards.  I felt it so strongly that before I knew it, I was bounding off the walls and slaughtering my own men and anyone I could find on my way down to meet my would-be assassins.  I hadn't felt this great since... I'd never felt this great.  I suppose I might have questioned it were I still afraid of death but I felt nothing other than this drive to go and meet them.

People were cut in half in front of me and my walls smeared with the blood of my mercenaries.  my swords took off like butterflies hacking people into bits as an arm flew towards a window and crashed right through it.  Like a late Goya painting, there were so many strokes of red and black and it all was simply 美しい!

Someone must have notified the police because I heard sirens below.  What fanfare!

As I neared the bottom floor,  I saw them with my own real eyes and I should have felt terror but I felt excitement and anticipation and all of a sudden I realized I was feeling what I expected them to feel: an anticipation of meeting me.  Before I knew it, however, the American was close to me and he stabbed for my gut.  Ha! What an 素人.  His aim was to stun me, to put me to sleep.  He wanted to capture me but I had feeling once more, if only for this moment and I grabbed his hand and shoved his knife into my heart.

As I lay bleeding incurably, I heard the two men speaking.

"Вы идиот! Даже мы не можем рисковать прямого ранения в сердце."

"I'm sorry! But I didn't do it, he moved so fast I could not help it."

The American hit me in the face and yelled, "What's the secret to unlocking our true potential?"

"Скажите нам информацию, прежде чем умереть!" said the Russian.

As I lay dying, I felt remorse for those I had killed and I felt fear for these boys knowing the truth.  They knew that I was an Oculous because of my weakened state but they could not even read my mind.  I would not curse them to what I had lived.

"私はあなたの魂、私の子供たちを救うために死ぬ。" I said as the blackness overtook me.

For a good while, there was nothing.  No time, no feeling, no dreams in this long, black sleep but they must have removed the knife because, like before, the nanites brought me back.

As I awoke, something had changed.  I was still without remorse as I had been before but as I stood, all those around me stood as well.  Like puppets, they seemed to mimic any emotion I had.

Emotion?  Could it be?  I had emotion again but they were my own.  My sense of keen training was back and I felt better than my days in Japan.  I saw the American and the Russian in front of me and could sense everything they felt and read their every thought.

I began to laugh in a loud maniacal roar and spoke, ""馬鹿！あなたは私にあなたの個人の能力を与えているように見えるが、私はまだ、これらよりもはるかに多くのです!"

I began to walk towards the door where the crowds and police awaited me.

"さあ！私の哀れ弱虫" I said.

[We obey.]

This was knew.  They spoke in my head.  Perhaps I could speak in theirs...

[We escape this country tonight and head to the far east]

[We obey]

As I looked out on the crowd, they all stood lifeless like they were in awe of a god.  I walked down into them and grabbed a megaphone as they all turned towards me and kept staring even as I climbed the stairs of my building to address them all.

With my head down and thinking of what I would tell the crowd, I finally thought of it and I looked up and out into them.

"従う!"

We go to the West

unto invasions Far East

my Japan is doomed.

Pain Case

Part XI

What have I gotten myself into.  This crazy Russian psychopath import has taken me into a new level of terrified.  I have dead hooker blood all over me and I have a sick feeling in my gut that I just killed an innocent human being.  It's not like I don't feel better than them because I am.  I can't die, I can't be wounded, I can't be feel the remorse the same way I did when I was human; the implant has changed me, that enough I know but this?  This was just nuts.

I can understand that his intentions were good but god if I'm not glad that his dumb ass is asleep on the floor in a puddle of blood right now.  He's like a little kid burning bugs under a magnifying glass.  These human beings are beneath us and we were created as their weapons but that doesn't meant that we need to forget the bottom line of who we are.

I think of her, who was not 30 minutes ago a beautiful, naked and perfect creature and he sits alone with thoughts of vengeance, torture and so much anger.  I dig into his head which is easier with the neural link we have, plus the fact that he's sleeping and see such horrible things.  I don't think he knows that if one of us is awake, he can see the sleeping one's dreams.  Hell, I didn't know it until a few nights ago.  Sergei had nightmares unlike anyone I had known.  In my head, all I could think in words was, "you poor, broken bastard..."  The guy had seem some seriously twisted stuff.

There were pimps, raping their whores and then sending them out bloodied to get raped by a john.  There were people, half dead from starvation dying in front of him.  I saw dead bodies being heaped up on trucks and people walking by as if no one had the time to care for those who'd passed.  The world moved so fast in his head and my heart sank time and time again from these retching images.  I threw up a couple of times but by the end of it, I could almost see him like a dog that's been beaten and frightened into a corner.

Over all?  This made me stronger.  The things that I had been learning about him in his slumber were far more dehumanizing than this failed experiment tonight could have ever been but I had no idea what was happening until it was too late.  He was born brilliant and I was not.  He was right about the nature of my country that it never thinks before it acts or questions what the fallout of the decisions happening around us might be.  Oh sure! There were those rich, spoiled assholes who followed all this hooey but how about the guy from the Midwest who goes to Alaska for BT because he wants to leave his state for the first time ever?  There's millions of us who don't have the time to care about the world around us and I suppose some might see us as naive and stupid but we are trusting, hardworking Americans who believe that loving your fellow man and a decent living is important.

I don't blame my friend for his violent and twisted nature; I blame the fact that he grew up without a single loving and/or nurturing influence in his life.  It's like all he's ever known is pain.  I chuckle just to think of it but I can't really call him a head case because his head hasn't been his own for, it seems like quite some time.  He's a pain case because that's all he knows and understands.  He knows how to hurt and be hurt and expects nothing else of the world and I imagine my pushing empathy onto him scared the living daylights out of the boy.

I've heard his thoughts and I know how he thinks of me though.  It's funny because even though we both think of each other as children, we're both more cognoscente than the other knows.  I think I probably surpassed his abilities about a week ago.  We were training and I deviated from his lessons and started to simply think like me.  Individuality gave me power over my device and that gave me such strength.  I think control gives him power over his but he doesn't realize it yet; or maybe he does.  I don't know, as I said, I get glimmers into his head when he's distracted and perhaps he get glimmers into mine more often than I care to postulate.

In any case, I will wait out the night for him to wake up but at first light, I'm gone.  I know where this Yakuza is and I'm going after him.  The plan is that we'll kidnap him for the answers that we want to know.  I will have no problem torturing him because our kind doesn't deserve to exist.  This much power is too much for a man and both of us, at least in our hearts, will always be men.