I could not control his thoughts, however, only his actions. His crude, hateful, pornographic thoughts cannot logically be blamed on me.
When he said “nice” once more, and when he obscenely licked his pale cracked lips, I bore down harder on him to shut him up and to remind him of his current station in life.
He cried out and threw his head back. He made fists of his hands and pounded them against his temples, as if he could knock me out of his head.
He was a stupid man. In addition to all his other flaws, he was below average in intelligence.
Clearly distraught, Susan hugged herself and tried to avert her eyes, but she was afraid not to look at Shenk, afraid not to keep him in sight at all limes.
When I relented, the brute immediately looked at Susan again and said, “Do me, bitch,” with the most lascivious leer that I have ever seen. “Do me, do me, do me.”
Infuriated, I punished him severely.
Screaming, Shenk twisted and flailed and clawed at himself as though he were a man on fire.
“Oh, God, oh, God,” Susan moaned, eyes wide, hand raised to her mouth and muffling her words.
“You are safe,” I assured her.
Gibbering, shrieking, Shenk dropped to his knees. I wanted to kill him for the obscene proposal he had made to her, for the disrespect with which he had treated her. Kill him, kill him, kill him, pump up his heartbeat to such a frenzied pace that his cardiac muscles would tear, until his blood pressure soared and every artery in his brain burst.
However, I had to restrain myself. I loathed Shenk, but still I needed him. For a while yet, he had to serve as my hands.
Susan glanced toward the door to the furnace room. “It is locked,” I told her, “but you’re safe. You’re perfectly safe, Susan. I’ll always protect you.”
ELEVEN
On his hands and knees, head hanging like that of a whipped dog, Shenk was only whimpering and sobbing now. Defeated. No rebellion in him anymore.
The stupidity of the man beggared belief. How could he imagine that this woman, this golden vision of a woman, could ever be meant for a beast like him?
Recovering my temper, speaking calmly and reassuringly, I said, “Susan, don’t worry. Please, don’t worry. I am always in his head, and I will never allow him to harm you. Trust me.”
Her features were drawn as I had never seen them, and she had gone pale. Even her lips looked bloodless, faintly blue.
Nevertheless, she was beautiful.
Her beauty was untouchable.
Shuddering, she asked, “How can you be in his head? Who is he? I don’t just mean his name Enos Shenk. I mean where does he come from. What is he?”
I explained to her how I had long ago infiltrated the nationwide network of databases maintained by researchers working on hundreds of Defence Department projects. The Pentagon believes this network to be so secure that it is inviolable to penetration by ordinary hackers and by computer-savvy agents of foreign governments. But I am neither a hacker nor a spy; I am an entity who Elves within microchips and telephone lines and microwave beams, a fluid electronic intelligence that can find its way through any maze of access blocks and read any data regardless of the complexity of the cryptography. I peeled open the vault door of this defence network as any child might strip the skin off an orange.
These Defence Department project files rivalled Hell’s own kitchen for recipes of death and destruction. I was simultaneously appalled and fascinated, and in my browsing, I discovered the project into which Enos Shenk had been conscripted.
Dr. Itiel Dror, of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Miami University in Ohio, had once playfully suggested that it was theoretically possible to enhance the brain’s processing ability by adding microchips to it. A chip might add memory capacity, enhance specific abilities such as mathematical co-processing, or even install pre-packaged knowledge. The brain, after all, is an information-processing device that in theory should be expandable in much the same fashion one might add RAM or upgrade the C.P.U. on any personal computer.