The Daemon, pt. 1: The Nightmare
It's inside of us
Previously: Years in the future, the grey-eyed girl lives in the Dreamworld, learning about her past. “Your former self was dangerous as fuck,” she is told.
○ Opening Era: Autumn, 2025, the Dreamworld
For the thousandth time, the grey-eyed girl raced across cracked earth. She looked over her shoulder in between breaths, holding a hand against the glare. The naked wheel of the sun scorched her arms and legs.
A dark shape with wings rose to blot out the light. The Angel of Retribution.
Lightening cracked against the sky. Its thunder was the angel’s voice. The voice named what she was: murderer.
For the thousandth time, she looked for an escape – a cavern, a dune, a cactus to hide behind. But the desert was flat.
She looked back. The angel was closer now, reaching for her with clawed fingers. It spoke: Murderer.
The girl tripped on a crack. The angel landed behind her. It removed its mask. The face was her mom’s.
“No,” said the girl for the hundred thousandth time. “No no no no no.” She crawled backward. “Kali!” she invoked the name of the goddess, yelling toward the sky. “Kali! Help me!
The sky did not answer. Instead, a panicked voice from the ground: “Little girl!”
The girl looked to her side.
Beneath a lifted manhole cover there gaped the whites of two eyes. “Come here!”
The angel strode toward her. She scampered away across the ground, cutting her arms on dry twigs. The angel shrieked and broke into pursuit.
The girl leapt. She landed in a man’s arms.
Above them, the manhole cover slammed shut.
● Post-Opening Era, many years later, the Dreamworld
—That girl…it’s me!
—Yes.
—That’s why this memory is so clear.
—That’s right.
—I remember this part of the story. I didn’t like it very much.
—The world has not been kind to you, cuchurrumin. I’m sorry.
—It’s OK, I deserved it.
—No, that’s not true.
—But it’s true that I was a murderer, like the angel said.
—Don’t think of it that way. You were a girl and it was an accident.
—But when I grew up I murdered even more people, and I also messed up the entire world.
—Ehm…well. That doesn’t mean––
—You’ll make me better this time. Isn’t that why you’re here? You can train me like my parents did, except you’ll be good, and so I can finally become good?
—I’m here to help you become whatever is most true.
—OK. Hey, who is that man? The one under the manhole cover? I think he was very important to me.
—He still is. We can remember the rest of it, if you want.
—Yes please.
—All right. Here’s some more:
○ Opening Era: Autumn, the Dreamworld
They were safe in the darkness. That’s what she hoped. But maybe she should ask to make sure.
“Are we safe?” asked the grey-eyed girl.
“Are we safe? Hmm, yes. I mean, I don’t know. I certainly hope so.”
The grey-eyed girl could not see the man. But his voice sounded familiar. It was British, and musical.
“Yes, I think we’re likely safe,” he said. “These are the tunnels under Oxford.”
“Oxford?”
“Yes…. Yes, I’m sure of it.” The man did not sound sure of it. “Don’t ask me how I know. I’ve been stuck in them for ages now”
“Mister?”
“Yes?”
“Oxford is in England. My father went there. There’s a desert above us.”
There was a pause.
“Oxford isn’t in desert,” she clarified. “It’s a university and it’s in England.”
“Right. Right! I should know! It’s where I met your dad. Strange, isn’t it? But I’m sure these are the tunnels under Oxford.”
Suddenly the tunnel was alight. The girl caught a brief glimpse of her companion as the subway’s headlights thundered past.
She knew his face but…couldn’t put a name to it. She’d seen it for only a flash. Still long enough to apply mom and father’s techniques to analyze the man. His eyes had been fearful – to be expected – but also penetrating. A man of fierce intent. His gray hair was swept back in a manner suggesting aristocracy; he was “posh”. He was also dressed in a lab coat. She remembered he was a scientist of some sort. A brain scientist?
“Hm,” the man said. “I don’t remember there being subways under Oxford. Do you?”
She shook her head in the darkness. She was certain that he didn’t see the gesture. But she was equally certain that he…felt it. Somehow.
He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Well. We better move along before that freaky angel figures out how to get down here. Don’t you think?”
“Yeah.”
They walked along the tunnel. There was no bend or turn. Occasionally a subway went by, bright and booming. They walked on and on for what felt like years.
Then a doorbell rang. It was coming from the wall of the tunnel to their right.
“I better get this,” said the man.
The girl knew she was not allowed to answer the door. Those were the rules. The rules that a man named Alexei had set, although she had forgotten who Alexei was.
Her companion pulled the door open. Apparently he was allowed to answer the door, even though she wasn’t. In the doorway was a silhouette holding boxes.
“Woah, dark in there!” said the silhouette. “Don’t you folks have candles or something?”
They shook their heads.
“Power’s out all over the neighborhood.” The silhouette handed over the boxes. “You folks keep safe now.” The door closed.
The girl and the man opened the boxes. Inside there were tin cans. The girl and the man peeled their lids off.
“Oh,” said the girl. “But I’m vegan.”
“Me too, of course, dear, but we must eat.”
They feasted on the sardines within.
The man stopped eating. “Astra? You know it’s me, don’t you?”
Suddenly her chest ached. “You know my name?”
“I was there when you were born.”
She didn’t want to remember his name. “You helped me somehow. You care about me, I remember now.” No, it was dangerous to remember. Alexei would punish her for remembering.
“I care about you very much, dear. Very very much.”
“Your name…is Cro—“
Another subway thundered past, revealing a figure hidden in the dark.
“Run, Astra!” he screamed.
The thing lunged for Crowley.
As she ran, she heard her friend fall. She heard him weep: “I didn’t want to abandon you, I didn’t want to!
Astra ran away. She ran back the way they’d came. The thing that had gotten Crowley was on her heels. She glanced back as a subway sped past. The thing held a supernatural weapon. The thing was her mother.
“No! Mommy, please.”
Astra ran. The echoes ahead of Astra changed. Somehow the subway tunnel was ending. But hadn’t she just come this way?
“‘Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us; it is a gift,” her mom recited.
It was Dante, part of the ‘world canon’ mom and father would read to her at bedtime.
Astra hit a wall. The tunnel had ended. She would never escape. Her mom would always find her.
“One day, my sweet, one day you’ll inherit the Project. You need to be ready.”
In the dark, her mother pressed the weapon into her hands. Above its handle, three gleaming prongs converged on a sharp point. A vajra, a symbol of the Project.
“I don’t want it!” Astra tried to press the vajra back toward her mother.
“Astra, careful!” Her mother’s grip slipped. The tip of the vajra went through something soft. Her mother grunted like a person lifting something heavy.
A subway went by. Her mother’s eyes were wide. The vajra had pierced her skin. Her mother let out a scream, but it was the wheezing sound of a starting motorcycle.
The entire tunnel lit up.
Except it was not a tunnel. It was a workshop.
Astra was sitting in a maroon lounge chair. Crowley was slumped in one across from her. Ripped Amazon boxes, cans of sardines, and empty water bottles covered the floor.
Astra jolted up, sending a can clinking to the ground from her lap. She was surprised to see that she was taller than a girl. In fact, she was not a girl at all. She was 31.
She looked down at her arms. They were longer than a girl’s, and covered with bright tattooed symbols. Sweat was still drying on her skin from the desert above the tunnel. No, not the desert. The desert was hallucinatory – there had never been a desert. There had only a radiator in the workshop that had been cranked too high.
Her mind jumped to the other imaginal mappings, from the dream world to the waking one: (The dark tunnel:) the power had gone out in the workshop…(the thundering subway:) because of a thunderstorm outside…(her mother’s motorcycle scream:) triggering the backup generator.
Hm, the backup generator….
Her and Crowley’s nightmare was shared through Psi – their enhanced ability to read the electromagnetic fields of one another’s brain and body. The generator starting up must have caused EM interference. It had been enough to break the nightmare’s coherence in her nervous system. For now.
Crowley startled awake. “What?” He looked at her and then around the room. “Astra where–– Where are we? My god, we’re…in the…in the workshop….” His words were becoming sluggish.
He put a daemon in us, she tried to say. But her lips wouldn’t move. She’d have to work on that in a moment. Thankfully, she and Crowley were still connected through thought.
“A daemon. Bloody Alexei. That bloody traitor.” Crowley’s eyelids drooped. He was falling back into the nightmare. “It still…still has me. Oh god. Astra. Oh god no….”
I’ll come for you Crowley, she thought to him. He wouldn’t receive her thoughts in words, but he’d still gather their meaning. Remember: it’s not real.
Crowley collapsed back into the couch. He was asleep.
Already she felt the nightmare-program regrowing itself in her solar plexus, just below her chest. That must be where Alexei had snuck his daemon in. Smart. The prick had installed the mental program through her peripheral nervous system. That way it would evade her conscious detection.
No longer. She began to quarantine the daemon with her attention as the thing spasmed the muscles of her abdomen. The situation was under control.
Daemon. A notable word, she thought, as she poured attention into the areas around the solar plexus. The term daemon bridged two language systems, both helpful for describing mental dynamics: computing and the occult.
She observed the feeling-texture of this particular daemon. It was struggling to break out of her upper abs, her muscles wriggling like worms under earth.
This thing was a semi-autonomous deep learning algorithm that ran on nerve cells rather than silicon. It was what chaos magicians called a servitor. Given its unelaborate texture, it must be one that Alexei psychoengineered in a top-down fashion. Such programs were relatively simplistic. Thus the daemon’s first move was predictable: to hunch her into a cowering posture. If she followed its intention, her posture would signal to the rest of her mind that she was powerless and afraid. She would be convinced that she was a helpless child.
The countermove was to make the opposite pose: to outstretch her arms toward the ceiling.
But her body didn’t listen.
The daemon was now wriggling down to her lower abs, taking over more of her peripheral nervous system.
Stretch my arms to the ceiling, she commanded her body.
Nothing happened.
She tried again. Instead, she fell back into the chair and watched her body shrink into a fetal position. It felt familiar, like coming home. It felt like being child again.
Because she was a child again. Astra was trapped inside the mental programs of a child. And that child had no intention of being a terrible, mean adult anymore – an adult who was always putting her in dangerous situations. It was much better to curl up into a tiny ball that nothing could harm. Yes, just like that. Just a tiny ball.
Next release: An inner battle rages on two fronts: between Astra & the daemon, and between Astra and herself.