Doctor Cunningham

Jason woke up in a cold sweat, this time in the grounded reality he was familiar with. Since his parents tried committing him to the mental ward, he found himself staying in a crummy apartment downtown. He started attending community college and worked as a librarian assistant on the side. It had been two years since he successfully raised his brother from the dead, and his professors and supervisors were quickly becoming very concerned for his mental stability considering his behavior. Up until now he would freeze in place, staring at the floor and talking to himself. He wasn’t as in touch with his inner self until he had “The Vision.” He was harassed by a disturbingly sultry woman who he felt some connection to. She constantly flirted with him, insisting he ‘remember who he is’ and the such. He started connecting the dots between this woman, the weird cat girl in the book, and the voices in his head telling him that ‘he could cure all diseases’.

As time passed, he started believing them more and more.

There he was, resting his head on his cluttered desk in his messy studio apartment. As his vision returned to him, his hands tightened around a familiar heavy black book with golden accents adorning its leather cover. He ran his hand over the cracked gemstone embedded in the middle and stared out his bedroom window. Quietly, he started mumbling nonsense to himself as he scanned the twilit sky. He hugged the book to himself and slowly crept over to his bed. As he curled up on the far corner of his bed, a clawed hand reached out from beneath him and gently pulled the blankets over his shoulders. The boy turned his shaky gaze back towards his desk, inspecting the text books and papers strewn about. An empty ceramic mug lay on its side atop one of the papers, a lengthy report some 40 sheets thick. Dried stains ran from the lip of the mug across the cover page, stopping just short of the title: “Fire with Fire: Can One Disease Cure Another?”

Jason couldn’t stand the mess around him. He swallowed hard, his weak arms tightening around the book. “I will clean that up tomorrow morning. Yeh,” he muttered, drifting off to sleep.

He awoke the next morning with a yawn, greeting his shadow and the book and blinking to clear his vision. A gleeful, mid-high-pitched voice welcome him to the conscious world. “Good morning, boy genius!” squeaked a little sprite as she bounced out of the gemstone. Jason observed the gemstone’s transformation, a signal that the sun had risen. Where the gem was cracked and filled with a ghastly, dark hue with swimming shades, it was now a perfect, smooth and bright color with shades of blue and yellow dancing around inside. He grumbled quietly to himself as he glared up at the sunlight that found its way through his makeshift curtains. “I don’t want to go out, Kitty Cat,” he complained as he pulled his blanket over his head. “I feel horrible.”

“Nonseeeense,” the sprite chirped. “You should at least get some nummies in that tummies!”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Oh, come on! Up and at ‘em, cutie!”

Jason reluctantly slipped out of bed and rubbed his eyes. He sighed as he flopped into his computer chair, gazing at the scattered books and papers. It was time to get organized. After an eye-opening cleaning session (he finally found his glasses under a pile of “anatomy” books, dirty laundry, and medicine bottles), Jason limped to the campus library to work his shift. He clocked in as he normally would but wound up spacing out for minutes at a time. A lot of students asked him if he was okay, and it eventually got the attention of his supervisor. Lucia Bauer was an alumni of the college who was very interested in the work of marine biologist, Lily Sae. She worked two jobs in hopes of attending graduate school for the same field. She was usually able to bond with Jason about the wonders of the natural life around them, but now the young man was too distracted to talk to her. He did say hello when he clocked in, but after that she’d hear nothing from him except students bringing up a ‘weird, blank-faced ginger staring down the aisle’ or something similar. She decided to check up on him and paced around the library in search of him. As she glanced down the aisles, she fussed over what could possibly be the matter with him. She finally found him in the References section but almost instantly regretted finding him. He was still as a mannequin, his broad-eyed stare almost piercing through her. Suddenly he started vibrating as he shakily gasped for air. The poor girl approached him–slowly– in hopes of not disturbing him. She gently called out to him and waved her hands. “Jason? Hey, are you alright?”

No answer.

It was almost like she wasn’t present in the boy’s eyes. She tried again, slightly louder this time. At this point, Lucia was more bewildered than afraid. As she slowly closed the distance between them, she could make out a few more details: the dark circles under his eyes, the twitching left hand, the virtually colorless skin, the chattering, sharp teeth. His presence, usually gentle and underwhelming, became dark and looming, as if a different person had taken his place. Impossible, she thought, he still appeared to be kind and comforting. The aura quickly faded when Jason noticed her. He curled his fingers around the frame of his glasses and adjusted them, hastily straightening his messy hair (to no avail). He tripped over his words like he did his shoelaces, greeting her and apologizing for ‘spacing out’, as he put it. “There’s the Jason I know and love!” she exclaimed almost sarcastically, brushing his shoulders off with her hands. The boy nervously scratched his chin and coughed. “Y-yeah, I guess,” he replied dryly. If he wasn’t staring into nothing, Jason was a klutzy, albeit charming boy. He’d drop books, sneeze, ‘earn his stripes’ (papercuts), and walk into shelves, tables, and chairs. In spite of his many shortcomings, the young genius was loved by some and envied by others. However, with Jason’s recent behavior, even his admirers began to steer clear of him. He was more often than not staring through them or talking to the floor. Very rarely did he eat, but if he did he’d only consume exactly half of the meal before setting it down beside him. One of the students noticed the other half of the serving vanish. Jason didn’t touch it.

Outside of work, Lucia didn’t see much of the boy. Sure, he attended his courses and clocked in, but when she asked him what he was up to he could never answer. She finally managed to squeeze a conversation out of him at the end of the spring semester. While the two sorted and processed the plethora of returned reading material, Lucia broke the ice and coaxed the boy out of his comfort zone. “So, senior year, huh?” she asked as she loaded her cart. “What are you going to do this summer?”

“Hm?” Jason looked up from his computer. “Oh, me? I… I haven’t decided yet.”

“Well, maybe you’d like to go out, meet up with some friends? There’s a really good pizza spot uptown that I think you’d be crazy about.”

Jason didn’t answer her directly, simply stuttering the word “friends” under his breath. He had a vacant stare, but his shoulders were slumped and his demeanor shifted in a way that let Lucia know he was upset. She almost instantly regretted bringing up the topic to begin with, patting Jason on his back as she struggled to find words of comfort. “Oh gosh, I’m sorry,” she apologized as she turned away to grab more books and disks. Just when she started feeling her heart sink, the boy spoke up with a sickly, raspy expression of gratitude. “Th-thank you, though. You’re kinda the nicest person to me, even though you’re my boss,” he wheezed.

“Don’t worry about it, little guy,” Lucia replied. “I’m just really concerned for you. You’ve been getting sicker every day since you first started working here. You do great work, Jason, but– you’ve been really out of it. Are you sure you’re gonna be okay?”

“Pawsitive,” the boy teased as he lightly pat his cheek with his left hand. The alumni rolled her eyes, chuckling as she added the last few items to her cart. “Still a dork, even as a senior.”

Lucia advised that Jason take a medical leave, to which the boy agreed. He focused all of his energy on researching and refining his theorem after witnessing a student in the process of being deported from Rahet. He heard the words ‘Psionic’ and ‘Suoronos’ repeatedly. The look of disdain on the student’s face as he faced the officials was convincing enough to the curious boy, and he slunk back to his apartment to bury himself in his studies.

He hadn’t slept for nights on end. He spent hours poring over scholars’ journals, data, and a huge stack of miscellaneous books and articles. He’d mutter the word “Psionic” aloud and grimaced at the articles that glorified the inhumane ways the Psionics were treated.

“Psionic Syndrome…”

The gears in his head started whirring and he scribbled madly for hours on end. He wasn’t sure if the theorems and schemes he plotted were thanks to himself or the shadow from his dream, but he eventually arrived at the conclusion that he could in a sense “cure” Psionic Syndrome. Would Suoronos really take the bait? Would they let Jason infect the Psionics, unwittingly allowing him to perform the shadow’s modus operandi?

[They’ll fall for it. They’re so hopelessly fueled by hatred and fear that they’d deliver the oppressed to us on a silver platter.]

The deep rumbling of the shadow’s voice made the young scientist sick to his stomach. He lowered his head in confusion, salivating a dark-colored liquid as he mentally debated on whether he should agree with the demon or not. His lips quivered and he rested his head on the desk, panting feverishly. “But…but…” he whimpered and shivered violently, falling silent not too long after. This feeling, it…I… He grabbed at his head, pulling his hair in a frenzy. “I can save them. [I can…make the Wicked pay for what they’ve done].”

He started clawing at his desk, lifting his head to stare at the site that listed the many sins of Suoronos. As he read through it all again, his trembling grew worse and his mind grew foggier. The separation of children from their families, the enslavement, the violence and prejudice… Suoronos made out like Psionics were the monsters, when they themselves were the ones committing such atrocities. The youth was seething in a way that was completely unlike him, though his anger quickly melted and twisted into madness, into Hunger. He wanted to become the savior of the Psionics. He wanted to make them all into his happy children. With a deep chuckle, he wrote the proverbial music to Suoronos’ ears, a maniacal grin splitting his face in two.