Unity by Carl Stubblefield (epub read online books TXT) 📕

Mengele was too good, though. He knew how far to push and when to let up, so there was no reprieve for the captive.

For a time, Gus huddled far in the corner of his prison of pain, his mind doing its best to shield him from what was happening. It gave him brief opportunities to think despite the pain. Not for long, as the intensity waxed and waned, interrupting his ability to focus on any one thing.

In those snatches of clarity he would have brief flashes of the life before. He perceived his life as that of a stranger, in a detached and impartial manner. Before he could get too involved, Mengele would do something that would pull him out of his refuge, immersing him in white-hot pain of yet another unexpected source, until he could retreat back to his mental cell, where he would look back at this life that seemed less his the more he observed it.

In parallel to his current existence, he saw that he had always been one who fled from pain. It almost seemed ridiculous as he observed the types of things that caused old Gus to flee to other types of cells of his own design in the past. Cells of different types, but all created and maintained by his old self.

From this vantage, he saw how ineffective they really were, and how he had chosen this isolation. Part of him felt he deserved his present self-incarceration for reacting in this way so often. Another part saw it as the natural consequence of not treating a disease; it festered and spread.

Yet another musing revealed most of his life was a manifestation of his failure to make anything of himself, and the need to hide from the shame he felt. Everyone could probably see the corruption deep within him as he could from outside of himself, whether they could articulate it or not, and avoided him.

This could be why he had always been underestimated, ignored, and written off. That he had been weighed and measured and found wanting. He expected this realization to be painful but in this small detached space, it just was. He had lived a small life by and large, almost always choosing the path of least resistance.

He didn’t see himself always chasing pleasure, but he avoided pain like the plague, and it didn’t take much of a threat to activate his flight response when he looked at his life as a whole. This realization did not come all at once, but interspersed over many cycles of suffering and reprieve. Somehow, though, it was an anchor. Something he could focus on to help him withstand when amid the bedlam and symphony of pain.

At some point in the cycles, Gus’ mind fell to BoJack and Prime. The Oracle had said that he needed something from them. He was sure that he had missed the opportunity to take advantage of whatever keys they had to offer. But it was still something to focus on. A puzzle to unravel. A reason to withstand the void and not succumb to the darkness. Not quite a struggle or a resistance, but letting go of the reins he had so tightly grasped to steer away from every danger, perceived or real.

Both Prime and BoJack had been through suffering, of the type that far exceeded anything Gus had ever had to endure during his life before. Yet they were able to persist. He would have had no idea if he hadn’t breached their privacy and looked within them with Telepathy. As his mind brushed against this thought, there was a twinge deep within his core. This. This was important. He couldn’t fully grasp why it was so, but he knew it and shifted his floating awareness on this concept.

Again, the tide of torture dragged him away and he had to come back, grabbing glances at this idea whenever he could before he was taken again.

An indeterminate time later, he had enough clarity to return to his line of thought. How did they do that? How did they deal with their pain and suffering without wearing it on their sleeves, inviting the sympathy and consolation of others? He found that he could access their memories as if they were his own, at least the ones he had already viewed. He felt the despair and heartbreak.

How had he not noticed that before? Gus could not remember feeling the emotions on his first viewing of the scene. But they were there. They felt everything, but managed to stay stoic. His first inclination was to believe they were just stronger and he was weak, but as he revisited their memories again and again, he saw that this was definitely not so. Doubt, insecurity, and uncertainty were all there, in equal or greater measures to his own. Yet they overcame. How?

After a particularly brutal cycle where Mengele had burned Gus’ skin just to the edge of destroying the nerve endings, leaving them barely able to transmit pain signals—but only just—Gus retreated to his mind vault with more desperation than usual. This time he experienced a memory of BoJack where he helped the small girl. He hadn’t realized this memory was in there, but recalled BoJack mentioning it while they were in the forest together after the crash.

Despair and darkness flowed through BoJack during this time of tragedy in his life, and helping the small child was almost an afterthought. An action taken on autopilot due to his training. But it made a difference.

For once in the bleak wasteland of fate, something had happened that defied the ever-present entropy of pain and breakdown. Like a light in an engulfing darkness, BoJack had found something to change his perspective. He was still encircled by darkness, but he could see a step in front of him.

With that awareness came a hope, an expectation that he could find his way out of the labyrinth. Step. As he continued to hold the light aloft, he