The Chronicle of Belthaeous
by John W. Steele
Chapter 28: The Mind Meld
Nacroanus returned to his chair and gazed at the telemetry screens. He appeared to be mesmerized by the subtle energies expanding inside the Avatar.
He adjusted the length and the trough until the sine waves stabilized. His hands moved with the dexterity of a master pianist, and he rambled about my past while fine-tuning the instruments.
His detailed account about my childhood ignited vague and fleeting impressions buried deep in my subconscious. Shadowed recollection of my surrogate parents surfaced in my mind. I’d buried most of the memories long ago, and I marveled that it was only years later that I understood that these aliens were not my natural mother and father.
He talked about my childhood as if it was the plot of a sleazy pulp sci-fi novel, and he seemed to be more obsessed with coding commands on the keyboard. I didn’t like his shallow attitude and indifference for all I’d suffered.
“Knock it off, Adrian. You need to put down the Avatar for a moment and deal with me. If you won’t treat me with some respect, I’ll walk out of here right now, and I don’t care what you do to me. I need to know more about what happened.”
He stopped typing and rested his hands on the desktop. “Yes, of course you do. I apologize.” He gazed in my direction but avoided my eyes. “I never wanted it to turn out the way it did, but you defied everything we tried to program into you. You should have been born an organic portal freed from the burden of super-ego. We did our best to indoctrinate you, but the Light in you could not be extinguished.
“Had you been single-minded like myself, our power would have developed into a force so terrible that we’d have trod asunder any Aeon of Light we encountered. I did everything I could to impede the conscience from entering your psyche, but I now understand that a souled being cannot be separated from the Light by another. He must betray the Light of his own volition.
“I did not want you to suffer. Those of the Light are born to face enormous challenges. Many of them do not survive. Usually the mind can be compartmentalized early in its programming by methods Mammon has taught us. But you were different. We couldn’t break you.”
“What kind of methods?” I asked.
His face hardened like fired clay. “You cannot understand our ways. Do you think even a demon is entirely evil at birth? He must be programmed. Sometimes we use needles to stimulate the fetus while still in the womb. This is the will of darkness and a fine demon needs much dedication to reach its full potential.”
I thought about what he said. I wanted to pull my fixed blade and slash his throat. But Mammon’s methods did not explain the disclosure Adrian had made about my parents. I’d grown too familiar with his demented ideology, and he no longer intimidated me.
“I don’t want to hear any more about that!” I said. “What about my parents? I have no memory of you, and only a vague idea of the people you’re telling me about. For years I refused to think about my early life; it was too painful to deal with. But now I want to know, Adrian. I need to know.”
Nacroanus touched a button on the keypad, and the Avatar’s head twisted in a spastic convulsion. I stared at Belthaeous, awaiting the next scene in this theater of the absurd. But the Avatar channeled not a thought.
“When are you going to arouse from your trance, Rodney? Do you understand what we’re going to do? Can you truly grasp the magnitude of what we’re about to unleash in the world?”
“Stop changing the subject like I’m some hypnotized robot,” I screamed. “Answer my question. Who were those things I knew as my parents?”
He seemed amused by my forthright attitude. He pursed his lips and paused for a moment, then turned and faced me. “Why do you think you never felt any love for your mother and father, Rodney? It was all by design.
“Do you think I wanted to deliver you to them? The Council of Five commanded that I relinquish you to Enukai handlers for further programming. When I protested, they said it was for the best... You don’t go against the family.”
I remembered little about my parents other than their names and a few cloudy details of the painful period I spent with them.
My mother’s name was Zenda. She was a tall, well-formed woman with yellow blonde hair and a ruddy complexion. But it was her eyes that revealed the true character of her nature: cold, vacant eyes that seemed continually dilated as if they’d been doused with belladonna.
Even as a child, her gaze made me uncomfortable. Her eyes led directly to the dark, gloomy chambers of her psyche. There was no Light in her, and I now understood she had not a clue about any form of nurturing. The maternal emotional program did not exist within her.
Though she never hit me, I always sensed I meant less to her than a stray animal. And yet she beamed with pride when I showed signs of jealousy, selfishness, or cruelty.
But it was my father that taught me the truth about total control and domination. His name was Aza. He was a lean, powerful man with an angular body as hard as stone. Narcissism was the word that comes to mind when trying to describe him. He’d stare at his image in the mirror for hours without blinking. He claimed self-worship was the source of his strength and control.
There was little about him that could be called human. He knew how to torment with words, gestures, and intimidation. He’d mastered the art of concentration, and even a certain expression on his face created so much anxiety for me I’d wet my pants in his presence.
But that was not the sum of the trauma techniques he used to indoctrinate me into the Order. When the mood struck him, he’d beat me until I was black and blue with wooden paddles bound in leather. I remained in a constant state of anxiety, because I never knew when he would decide I needed a further dissociation, and his “instillations” were unpredictable and entirely spontaneous.
I once had a pet parakeet, and I’d grown quite fond of the tiny creature. One day, when I returned from pre-school, I found the bird crying dolefully in the cage. Someone had cut its legs off and they lay on the floor contracted and broken. I started to sob and ran into my father’s office to report the incident to him.
“Sammy’s hurt, Dad. We need to take him to a doctor.”
“That’s not necessary. The creature will die in due time,” he said.
“But how will he ever walk?”
“He’ll have to crawl, I guess. You need to understand our ways. You are destined to become a great asset to our cause. There is no room for a dualistic mentality in our design of reality. If you cannot accept cruelty in a creature of no significance, how will you be able to exploit life forms of a higher design? Humanity is expendable. We have no connection to any life form outside of our own. The only purpose of life beyond our family is exploitation.”
They sent me away to the Hargrove Military Academy when I was seven years old. I always felt grateful to them for that. Though I found the anal-retentive rituals of military life boring and monotonous, the Academy felt more like home than living with them.
A pang of emptiness pierced my heart. I thought about what I’d missed, and wondered what it might have been like to feel loved. I closed my eyes and rubbed my tired brow. “Screw them, Adrian. My life was better without them. They weren’t parents, they were demons.”
“I wouldn’t be too hard on them,” Adrian said. “Neither one of them had any connection to you, really. They were appointed by the Vulpeculans to indoctrinate you. Your biological mother gave you a body, but I passed on to you a soul. Somehow the Light found you despite all my efforts to compartmentalize your mind and condition you in our way.
“Zenda and Aza were merely handlers. Enukai portals we used to try and dissocialize you. But your will and your mind were too strong to break. If not for me, they’d have destroyed you.
“Your life unfolded by design, my son. Nothing in the world of matter happens by chance. We made sure you were well cared for, and we made sure you were never loved. Typically this is enough to weaken the positive energy and open the entity’s will to our design. But there is a stubborn streak in you, something we couldn’t have imagined.”
The revelation troubled me, but it answered a number of questions that had tormented me for years.
I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old. My father stood on the patio of our villa in Mexico. When I saw him, an urge I could not control flowed through me. I ran towards him, my arms open wide. I wanted to tell him I loved him, and I wanted him to hold me. I threw my arms around his leg and hugged him... Papa...
I remember his eyes: cold, dead eyes devoid of emotion or empathy. He peeled away my embrace and slapped me hard across my face. He spoke in an empty monotone. “The weakness of the Creator will not be tolerated in this house. Do you understand, boy? Love and compassion are the burden of the Light beings and slaves. You were born to serve Mammon. Your mind and body belong to Darkness. Never forget that.”
I never did.
Though only a child knee-high to the grass, from that day on, innocence vanished, and the world never looked the same again. Something inside me died, and I now realized I’d been searching for it ever since.
Life with my parents amounted to nothing but endless conditioning. There was no security. Even with material comfort and abundance, without love, there is no security. For years, I blamed myself for what they’d done to me. But Adrian’s revelation revealed the cold reality. It wasn’t me who failed to be worthy of their love. By design, it was they who had failed.
Adrian must have sensed my despair. He folded his hands and faced the monitor. “I know this is hard for you, Rodney. To realize that family, love, and trust have no significance when dealing with slaves and souled humanity. Mammon’s world is painful in the beginning. But, in the eyes of Mammon, human life outside the bloodline is purely biological. It is the consciousness imprisoned in the body that he wishes to possess. You must learn to accept that the theomorphic consciousness has been placed in our charge to serve us in any way we choose.
“Your parents were Fourth-Dimensional shape-shifting Enukai. They did everything they could to destroy the positive in you. For that, you owe them a debt of gratitude.”
“Debt of gratitude! They were selfish, cruel, cold-hearted ghouls. I hate their guts, and I always will.”
“Hang on to your hate, Rodney. Mammon always has a use for energy of that nature.”
I stared into space. Why was I created? Of what purpose is all this suffering? Why did the Light choose me for this mission?
I remembered the day the man in black drove me to the airport for my journey to Hargrove in England. My parents followed behind in another vehicle.
We stood for a moment on the tarmac. Before I got on board the jet, I reached out to touch my mother’s hand. We looked in each other’s eyes. In her face I saw only revulsion... a sense of failure.
Like a surreal portrait, the facade of her features vanished. There were scales, and slits in the corneas of her eyes. Her pupils morphed to black, ovoid blanks and her face grew firm with resentment. “We will be watching you always, Rodney. I will be watching you. Don’t disappoint us anymore, son.” They turned and walked away. I never saw them again.
I began to sob. “I wished they’d been more successful in cutting out my heart, Adrian because it’s always caused me more pain than it was worth.”
He sighed. “This is why we adore Mammon, my son. A heart is not worth the pain it must endure.”
Adrian unfolded his arms and stood up. He removed a Doppler-integrated vest from the mannequin. “Help me on with this,” he said.
The garment had been wired with textile electrodes and integrated electronics. We’d used it in the past to transfer somatic neurological information from the chimps, but I had no idea if it would be effective for the purpose Nacroanus intended to use it for.
“I’m going into the mind of, Belthaeous,” he said. “We can’t spend any more time on our personal problems. We’ve discussed the theory of psychic transfer in depth. I’m seventy-seven percent certain we will be successful. If we’re not, I’m as good as dead anyway. You know what to do. When our electromagnetic frequencies polarize, activate the orange ray in Belthaeous in its full amplitude. The rest is up to Mammon.”
We finished preparing the vest and Nacroanus seated himself the capsule of the modified MRI transfer simulator. “I know you can do this son. I know you would not destroy your own father.”
You’re not my father, you’re a monster. “I’ll bring you back alive, Adrian, I promise.”
He smiled. He knew.
“Try and remember, Rodney. Love is fragile and easily damaged, but hatred is unconquerable. That is why I serve Mammon. His motives are always predictable and trustworthy. Once he enters your awareness, you know exactly where he stands. You’re making progress already.”
I didn’t answer him. In another minute I’d send him back to Hell.
I reached for the canopy to close the simulator and he spoke gently to me. “Oh, Rodney, I forgot to mention something. Take a look at the telescreen.”
I looked up at the image in the monitor overhead. Heidi stood in the shower, her naked body glistening with soap and water. A dozen Enukai agents paced on the avenue outside her condo. Their black trench coats hung nearly to the ground, and their thick nerd sunglasses were strapped like goggles around their skulls.
“I’ve provided a little incentive to assure that you to do the right thing, my son. It would be such a pity to pluck a lovely flower such as her, and peel away its petals inch by agonizing inch.”
Adrian’s voice grew hard as glass. “At my command, you will transfer my psychic energies into the neurons of the entity Belthaeous.” He looked deep in my eyes, and I nodded my head.
I knew Adrian believed he could block the full spectrum of chakra energy from entering the pineal gland or he would not attempt this fool hearty endeavor. But I still could not see the science in this dangerous maneuver. From my limited perspective he’d not yet convinced me the chakras existed at all.
I walked over to the console and sat at the panel. My hand trembled and I grasped the dial indicator. By this single act I would be responsible for the total sacrifice of humanity to the demented demigods about to invade the heart of mankind. My hand tightened on the knob. Death to the world... life for Heidi.
The numbers unwound to zero. I twisted the accelerator to full amplitude. Hands of lighting erupted inside the chamber and Belthaeous quivered on the altar. My earphones crackled, and I lost communication with Dr. Nacroanus.
Adrian’s body burst into a violent epileptic seizure and he thrashed inside the shroud.
The Avatar’s face contracted to a mask of furrowed wrinkles and his eyes rolled into the back of his head. A cluster of blue veins inflated in his neck until I thought they would explode. A silver beam of radiance erupted from the crater in his brow. His mouth snapped open in a catatonic grimace and he cursed profanities at the top of his lungs. I feared he’d overpower the magnetic field that locked Adrian’s awareness in his nervous system. There was little time left.
Seconds became hours and the digital gauges seemed to oscillate of their own volition; teasing me with their own persona of artificial intelligence. At the designated density the panel lights erupted in a bombastic display of consent. I coded the sequence that reversed the polarity of the massive coils. The Archon’s face twitched and his head fell forward. A ribbon of blood trickled from his nose.
All was still and the scent of ozone hung heavy in the air.
With great trepidation I walked over to the capsule and removed the cowling of the chair. Nacroanus appeared to be sleeping. His vital signs were stable. I knew he’d done what he set out to do; another miracle to add to his repertoire of accomplishments. For the first time ever, I felt sorry for him. I wondered what he might have been had he decided to use his gifts for something other than the glory of his ego.
I rang the call bell and the Genibolic technicians stormed into the lab. They tended to Nacroanus and eased him from the capsule.
An oily feeling of guilt seeped into my bones. With one act of cowardice I’d bartered the future of souled humanity for my own selfish desire. The door had been opened and I refused to send Adrian back to Hades. Because of my weakness the apocalypse would erupt from darkness and consume the heart of humanity like a ravenous beast.
Nacroanus was right: compassion and love are a liability, an impossible burden. How did this world devolve into something so horrible? Why had Light become imprisoned in the filth of matter? In what future epoch lies its salvation?
Milton’s Satan had nailed it: to rule in hell is the only hope. Service to self is the way of the conqueror... the survivor. How could any rational person believe otherwise?
Copyright © 2014 by John W. Steele
