Chapter 13
Amano group was now thirty. There were rumors of promotions, but Camelot was still in the process of recovering, and Emmitt wasn’t in a hurry. He ran. He studied. He had sex. A lot of sex. There were civilians that were more than happy to accommodate him, considering. He had his first alien encounter. He had so many offers to play he was starting to back off from play, from fear it was just too much. Even before he learned to walk again, he was confounded by sexuality. A part of him realized it was because he was already an adult, having had many relationships. Even if the Garcia mind wasn’t really him, he had been influenced by the Garcia mind. Part of it was just being locked out of his body. Sex was more brain than body, and if you can’t move your body, you brain goes to full internal sex. Body or no, sleep paralysis increased sensations that tended to open erotic pathways in the brain. Dreaming itself activated the Eros response. Dreaming feels good; his greatest mobility was in his dream, so naturally he would have enhanced dreams, enhanced Eros. Being locked in a body without control, was the equivalent of both of sleep paralysis and dreaming, it could make a person neurotic; in short, it didn’t decrease desire and ‘walkers’ just assumed people with disabilities never want sex. He had wanted sex. He wanted health. Focusing solely on healing activated the Eros response, the rest of the context led to amplification of desire. He had not been able to hide this from his nurses, any more than he had Pia. One of the psychiatrist prior to Gates explained it as an artifact of trauma sexualizing him early.
“You’re over reaching a bit there,” Emmitt had argued. “It could just be I like this nurse.” “That’s inappropriate on so many levels,” the nurse said.
“Kids do have fleeting, biologically driven sexual impulses that increase in frequency with time” the psychiatrist had said. “This is normal.”
It hadn’t felt normal at the time. He had forgotten about that episode; it so closely mirrored the Pia incident he wondered if he had invented it, or misremembered it. Now he wondered if he was using sex to self-medicate. Because of his decisions, ten of his classmates were dead. He was fairly sure they had recycled back to their set points and were being dealt with, but he was not privy to that, was not allowed to pursue this, and was not allowed to discuss this. The class had a mood and he ran because he didn’t want to sink into that. He didn’t want use sex as a way of avoiding the mood. They were watching playbacks of their peers, learning from mistakes vicariously. Learning how to beat the enemy.
Camelot had been saved, that was it. Hijacking city computers was not supposed to be possible, but somehow, they had done it. Paranoia was high. Sex during high times of high social paranoia had flavors. Manic sex had flavor.
Sex is sex. Garcia had a hyper libido, and Garcia thought Emmitt’s level was pathological. Bliss said it was fine. Garcia had forgotten what being a teenager was like. He had forgotten his childhood. Emmitt touched that history like long lost childhood story. He compared it to his own childhood. Garcia was a telepath, raised by non-telepaths; it takes a telepath to raise a telepath, because even telepaths need to learn psychic boundaries from healthy telepaths. Garcia spent a good deal of his life just trying to avoid enmeshment issues. He was neurotic as all fuck. Emmitt had been so bored lying in bed, with only his fantasy life to motivate him, that the bleed over from Garcia’s memories were better than television, better than porn. His present life was just an echo of all those early dreams. Why does it always come back to sex?! He heard Bliss soften it: ‘this is normal. Bring compassion into it.’ Her statement reflected Harris’ position. People had darkness. Darkness wasn’t sex. Most people were afraid of their own darkness, and went to incredible lengths to suppress their darkness. Sex energy was comparable, and it could open up some dark places in the psyche. Was the answer this simple? People are afraid of sex? Of what it means to hold this energy? What it means to share? There were added complexities that he hadn’t factored until now; now that opportunity had shot up to Rock Star status.
The greater the level of social discord, the greater the total sum of social isolation, the greater the libido; the greater the number of men who can’t or won’t commit to a long term relationship, the greater the libido in those who will engage. Further, as isolation increases within a particular society, there is increase in men pursuing relationships with women outside their cultures. When women are raised to a particular status, men are compelled to find women beneath their station to raise them to superior status. Men elevate women the way women raise children. Though long term relationship was on the decline overall, worldwide, there was a sharp increase in interracial marriages, and intercultural marriages- more interracial marriages than in any previous time in Earth’s history. If a male can’t connect with females in his community, they will go in search of female. All cultures were experiencing this. Japan seemed to be reflecting the worst of it. They had experienced the sharpest decline in relationships, as well as the sharpest spike in suicides. Partly because, they had a high expectation of not stepping out of their culture to find mates. Japanese men couldn’t step out, but they couldn’t connect within because the bar was too high. Xenophobia was already high, but it increased because of the complexity of the social block being employed to keep people locked in the system. Socially, they wanted to maintain their culture and their purity, but couldn’t, and it was killing them.
Emmitt wondered if he was simply a reflection of a society, and due to Garcia’s telepathic sense, he had a greater sense on the world culture than most. Could he understand all of society by understanding himself? What did he want? Was it as simple as answer this fundamental question for self? ‘You’re on an airplane. The cabin depressurizes. Masks falls.
Who’s mask do you put on first?’
Emmitt considered what sex was for him. It wasn’t just entertainment; there was a huge stress relief component. He considered who he was attracted to. He was attracted to older females, mostly. His preferred age was forty to sixty, though he wouldn’t turn anyone away; 18 and above, no ceiling. The wide range might mean he was trying to bring all of society back together, create bonds, assuming his present reflections were accurate. That made sense in a way. People needed a focus. He dismissed his thoughts; this is just a wanting for sex, nothing deeper. He sucked at sublimation. Meditation was only half as good at clearing lust as actually giving into lust. Running helped. Yoga exasperated it, but he needed that to remain flexible. He had learned to delay ejaculation, but he had not mastered the tantric technique of orgasm without ejaculating. Practice, Bliss assured him.
There was a serious spiritual connection to sex that people had lost due to so many religions telling people to avoid sex. Almost all the religions had metaphors full of sexual overtones. Christianity was so steep in these terms, it was no wonder Christians on the whole were neurotic. Most of the Christian metaphors were homoerotic, and it was the very thing that ran Emmitt away from Christianity. ‘Kali's Child,’ a book by Jeffrey J. Kripal had nailed that for him.
Sex was liberating, it call every cell into a unified focus. We don’t have to be ashamed of the drive, of this call to connect! Against all odds, and all medical resolutions, he had learned to walk. Sexual energy accelerated the healing. They made a medical case study of him. There have always been anomalies in healthcare, sudden remissions, inexplicable recoveries. His improvement wasn’t unheard of, they just didn’t understand it, and with their medical science and knowledge, they wanted to find out where the anomaly was so they could fix it, but they were so adverse to his sexual healing explanation they couldn’t hear him. “Isn’t that a song?” Talking sex always led to people joking.
We’re still in fucking high school!
“I did this. Choice. I, consciously, overcame. Not alone. I had help from a higher power. Call it spirit, or super conscious, which is like the subconscious, the body always responds to love and patience. And lots of sex. I channeled sex, I dreamed sex, I astraled sex.”
The answer was too metaphysical for the Earth medical staff to hear. He was just another anomaly. Space Force recognized the metaphysical aspect. They were interested.
Emmitt learned to run. He became obsessed with physicality, taking on yoga, various forms of martial arts, soccer, and hockey. He had an inexplicable aptitude for game play. He won more often than not. He took risks. He was frequently injured. He seem to heal unusually fast. He tested out of basics and went to college. By the time he finished his PhD in Transpersonal Psychology, he was a licensed medic and nurse practitioner, non-practicing. All this prior to 17, prior to Space Force taking him. He now had a solid reputation of being a womanizer. He didn’t see it that way, as he genuinely cared for every person he spent time with, and though he was brutally honest, feelings seemed to always get in the way. He felt extremely close to Dehan and Marijić, but if pressed, he would always choose Niamh over a human.
“By God, no more rationalizations. Sex is okay! The next person that asks me to fuck, I am going to fuck with abandon,” Emmitt declared.
Harris came at him. “Do you want to meet the enemy?”
Emmitt’s first thought was ‘Damn it, if you just led with sex I would have taken you right here!’ Was this a comedy set up for a ‘Three’s Company’ episode? No. His life was more Benny Hill. Fuck me if I am not in a BBC space opera slash Hill parody, with overtones of Monty
Python. He answered her question, “Yes.” Be sex, be sex, be sex…
“You’re smiling,” Harris said. “What?”
“Nothing,” Emmitt said. She didn’t need to know his resolution.
“Meeting the enemy is serious business,” Harris said. “It takes years of to get acclimated, Usually we have to indoctrinate children, giving them exposure in small doses over time, and even then, most people can’t stomach the Chaons.”
“I know,” Emmitt said
Emmitt had no qualms with equating Chaon with enemy, but he suspected it was not as simple as straight forward ‘enemy.’ ‘Enemy’ equated to choice. A snake was not an enemy. It could kill you, but that was nature, and fear, and a failure on human to communicate. A bear could kill you, and it could be angry, and it definitely wanted to dominate its space, but if a human died that was the human’s failure, not the bear’s. It was not the enemy. Bears could hold grudges. Animals could learn. Dolphins, elephants, horses, dogs, cats, octopoda, they had all demonstrated animosity directed at individuals who had harmed them or their kind. This denotes minimal sentience. This approached the definition of being an enemy. In this context, human were the enemy. It was definitely failure to communicate.
But what was the Human Chaon dynamic? This interested him.
Emmitt was brought to meet a male Chaon, captured in the raid. He was not chained; lights kept him from attacking his visitors physically. It was as if he was contained in a spotlight. Those studying it remained in the shadows. Their purpose was not to antagonize it, but to understand it. This was how children got their exposure, if they were lucky. Some adults had to leave to go vomit. Some couldn’t even come in the room. Even utilizing a remote controlled spy orb resulted in some people being sick. There were several orbs hovering. Some people wanted to do nothing more than to send in wasp spray from a mile away and be done with it. Even dead, people had problems being around it. Psychic emanations lingered.
Emmitt was assured it was not injured and would not be harmed. It had ‘taken to’ a psychically imposed virtual environment, even though it knew it was being held in captivity. It was emoting, projecting, searching for other. It was not accustomed to being alone in an environment. It’s ‘openness’ was a trap. It wanted something to come in so it can dominate it. It wanted something to come in so it could be dominated. Dominate or be dominated, it knew no other reality. Emmitt told himself to resist calling it an ‘it.’
Emmitt drew closer, and when he wasn’t corrected or otherwise warned, he continued to approach. Emmitt didn’t go straight to ‘him.’ It was definitely a him. It was a person. It had maleness. Emmitt did not meet his eyes. He was too transfixed by the falling of black snow. He caught it and it dissolved. It reminded him of ashes. Ashes don’t melt.
“His psychic attacks are being nullified,” Niamh explained.
“It can manifest its attacks physically?” Emmitt said.
“All sentient beings can manifest,” Niamh said.
It is a human thing to make eye contact, to come at a person straight forwards, but Emmitt came at the Chaon sideways, slowly. If you came at a Chimpanzee straight, if you smiled at a Chimpanzee, you would be challenging it to a fight and you would lose; Chimpanzees could beat human in a fair a fight. He brought his eyes up just enough that he could see its eyes, ‘his’ eyes, without direct contact, looking slightly to the side of the face. Even with all the psychic interference in this room, the sense of dread was palpable. He wanted to run. He held his ground. It moved, turning sideways, its hands floated up. It was a creepy movement, unhuman like. Unprimate like. It was not insect and it was not reptilian and it was not bird. It was not an android body. More often than not, Chaon infiltrators were android bodies, remote controlled by a Chaon. The hands coming up seem to translate into defense. It was not a surrender gesture, it was preparation for physical confrontation. This was exactly what Emmitt would do if he was about to engage someone in battle. Wu Wei Gung Fu. Hands up in surrender gesture communicated ‘I don’t want to fight,’ but it was also the best defensive posture for diverting an attack.
Emmitt had zero interest in making physical contact. In the wild, this being would never be touched- not by human. Nothing on earth had developed a reasonable defense. Something he had read; he chased it and found, ‘the sudden, rapid evolution of mankind was likely nature’s response to an influx of telepathic interaction from an extraterrestrial source. The paradise we were ejected from was not a literal garden, but the garden of natural mind. We were once one with our environment, in harmony with it, and then the snakes came, two by two, entwining the spine, drawing the lust up into the mind, sparking a new consciousness. They didn’t have to tweak us genetically; they could, and maybe some did, but all they had to do was overlap their spirit upon ours, raise us, touched us telepathically. We adapted. Nature always adapts.”
It was something very old. Older than anything in Sanskrit. Garcia had given it to him.
Where had he found it?
All things would run from Chaons. Except their prey. If it singled you out with a thought, you would freeze and it would eat you. A human would not want to look at this, and you would not want to be seen by it. It was so disturbing that if an unexperienced human encountered it, they would get the chills, turn and walk away, not run, but inexplicably walk away. ‘Never respond as if you are aware of the threat.’ Wonder would come later, in increments, and that fortunate human might ask ‘why did I do that,’ but would not remember the encounter itself.
Later, if that human had been with a child and the child asked ‘why did we walk away,’ the adult would shut that conversation down, maybe even beat the child. Child would learn, we don’t talk about that. Ever. If a Chaon looked at you or wanted you, you would not walk away. If a Chaon targeted a bird, the bird would cease flapping its wings. It would die on impact and be eaten. If it stared at a fish, the fish would turn off its heart hoping to drift by unobserved, and it would be eaten. Chaons shared an electrical sense similar to a shark. Sharks would flee. If a Chaon was horny, and you were available, you would be used, psychically and emotionally. It frequently intermixed food and sex together. It got off by getting organisms off even as they consumed them physically. Eating for them wasn’t just a gustatory experience, but a psychic experience.
Oh. Emmitt thought. Garcia had increased his own telepathic sense, and consequently, sex was about forging telepathic links with others. Casual links with people who were of equal mind, and mentally and emotionally resilient resulted in a greater social stability- greater psychic stability for the individual. That wasn’t how it worked on Earth. Most folks were so insecure they required codependent relationships to function. There was a whole class of men who chose females based on being needy. If woman was needy, their esteem went up. There was a whole class of women, surprising most of them nurses, who had inflated need to equal nurture, and consequently were frequently exploited by men and businesses because they would serve without once saying, ‘what about me,’ and be consumed. People always loved others the way they secretly wanted others to love them. Fuck, I am healthy! I am not preying on people I could use while projecting pseudo altruism. I am connecting with people who are emotionally stable! I am stable. Chaon friend here, clearly unstable, and completely dependent on his psychic-emotional environment to get his needs met. I can generate my own psychic-emotional health, as can my partners.
A psychic camera orb hovered near it. It translated. “You won’t learn anything from me,” it said. It had been paying attention to Emmitt’s presence, after all, but it had not gained any intel from Emmitt because it couldn’t manipulate him. There was nothing there to anchor or motivate itself. He couldn’t even spin a beautiful, psychic avatar to exploit Emmitt’s lust, because subconsciously it knew, Emmitt would fuck it and move on to the next challenge. It couldn’t maintain a conscious link with something it couldn’t exploit. No- not that it couldn’t, ever, it just never practiced it. A person who never learns to focus or meditate doesn’t just sit down one day and meditate. One must learn it. One doesn’t just pick up 300 lb. weights, you build up to it. He found exceptions. They were rare. A person in crisis could spontaneously pick up a car and move a loved one out from under it. These events were documented. They were not reliable abilities.
One doesn’t bank on magic, you bank on results gained through consistent experiences.
Emmitt held his response for a moment. There was a pungent order and it was awful. Like sex and shit. He found himself wanting to emote, to project humanness on it, and it took effort to stay neutral. It was afraid. ‘Stop calling it an it,’ he told himself. “Fucking leave it as an it,” Garcia said. It was full of hate. Garcia mirrored hate. No, it was more complex than hate. It was a shield. Garcia was hiding, ‘I, too, am that…’ Bliss touched him. ‘We are all one.’
Emmitt had a sudden ‘soul’ recognition of a meta-explanation, which paralleled his BlissGarcia philosophic paradigm that ran the books: human souls that get stuck in hate and misery and fear incarnate into this species. This is not punishment, Bliss went on, not because of karmic debt, though there is a correlation. In the history of the Universe, no species has ever experienced as much liberty as human beings. People who need greater levels of control and regulation to mature become these. Emmitt became aware of Chaon social structures. There were levels. Ultimately, the top of the chain was always female. Even in humans, females were in charge, even if they didn’t believe it, nor the males that ‘assumed’ being charge didn’t believe it. For Chaons, though, matriarchy was a ‘hard’ female dominated reality. Contrary to popular belief, not all matriarchies were love and flowers. Females could be absolutely brutal, especially to other females, and their sense of justice could just as easily trigger a passive aggressive response in a subordinates as it does in a subordinate male who can’t compete in a strength based dominance arena. Beauty frequently translated into socio-economic capital. Beautiful people, especially women, were given stuff just because. Men were stupid, that was explanation enough. But even women gave beautiful women stuff and time because, well, hell, they were riding on coat tails. Women who can’t compete with beauty fall next to emotional skills, and then if that didn’t work, they fell into intellectual skills, and then, failing all of those routes to manipulate reality, the fell back to strength. Men were simple, they simply got some or relied on strength.
Beautiful men, tall men, they were also given stuff, regardless of abilities.
There are systems that are strength based. There are systems that are all logic based. There are systems that are all emotional base. There are systems all spiritual based. Humans tended to bring it all together in a balanced, but in the absence of true leadership, one strength would dominate and the others would compete. In the Chaon societies, the females held territory. It was maintained by using males to fight. The males that were successful in killing the most enemy, brought the female the most food. The one that made the best art and or toys, these were the ones that got to live and mate, and were less likely to have to fight. Outside of the protectorate of the female mind, these guys were slaughtered by the fighting male mind. All males were tools, on a dead end path.
Males that were unable to hold complete thoughts in the presence of females were manipulated or discarded. In Chaon circles, male children were preferred to females children. The females in charge tended to not want competition, even from a daughter. Females were not tools. A daughter would eventually try to dominate the matriarchy. Daughters were brought forth when holders of territories saw a niche to be exploited. The female mind dominated the landscape. The closer Chaon males were to a female in physical proximity, the less thoughts they could hold. Emmitt nearly laughed; just like me! His humor was a failed attempt to commiserate with this poor beast. At some point, the female took possession of the body and use it as if it were her own. Male Chaon might as well been android- no, worse, just a robot. A living zombie. When female was finished with it, it disposed of it, or directed it to go away. Away meant out of her sphere of influence. They always came back. The female could do horrendous things to as a male, often did, and still, the males would come back. ‘The shit we put up with to get pussy,’ Emmitt commiserated.
There was a euphoric release at being psychically manipulated. It wanted to serve. It wanted to please. She could direct a male to throw itself into a fire just because she could. She would have it harvest wasp-honey, and it would bring the harvest back and be at the point of death. She would eat the honey and send it back for more. She could stop its heart or direct it to hold its breath until it died. She could remote control it into a competing nest and have it kill the young and or rape the unaware female Chaon. Females raped other females through proxy for dominance. Mostly, they didn’t come at the matriarch of the nest to conquer her directly, they came at the subordinate females. The young females played with Chaon males the way human children play with dolls. Sometimes competing females would groom a female child in a competing nest unaware. A nest ownership could flip, the elder killed or neutralized, and the new owner would be sympathetic to its neighbor and never even know why. If they were genetically related, it was easier to be dominated by the elder kin. Sometimes the males would carry offspring and replace the competing offspring with the offspring of their matriarch, like the Cuckoo species. Male or female, it didn’t matter. Genetically related males were easier to control with psychics. ‘Stop it!’ it said.
“I did not take this. You shared it freely.” “Get out of my head,” it said.
“You’re broadcasting. I am sorting,” Emmitt said. “Help me to understand.” “Fuck you! You will never understand,” it said.
“I understand bullying. Our species engages in this. People have a natural bent to torment those that display weakness,” Emmitt said. “Children are horrible to other children, especially new kids on the block. It isn’t always meant to be evil. Sometimes, teasing another is to test other’s merit. If a weakness is found, there is socialized need to force other to step up to the social reality or leave. If other does neither, teasing becomes bullying, or worse, exploitation.
This is always the result of an imbalance in relationship. Both parties contribute to the dance.”
“Not the same,” it said. “I am not weak. Come closer, I will prove it.”
Emmitt didn’t accept the challenge. He was actually amused. Holding amusement and fear simultaneously was an interesting sensation. He held his ground. “You’re right, we’re not the same. I have no clue what it was like for you, brother. I think I see parallels, but I could be projecting. We call this transference. What I am gathering is, a female dominates males within her sphere of influence. The males that live on the periphery of a claimed territory fight for dominance among others males. Males on the outside recreate the social hierarchy of the inner social life, only a male dominates as if he were female. It’s a poor reflection. Oh, I see. You’re a cross dresser.”
“Fuck you!” Chaon said. Their maleness was hidden, but it could emerge on demand. Humans in captivity would jack off to a guard. If a female guard or counselor entered, and that was the only stimulus available, humans would get off. Sometimes they threw the sperm at the visitor. Sometimes, it was just a relief to get off. Sometimes it was just a relief to be vulnerable in front of other. Being incarcerated was the ultimate in being vulnerable; why not fully submit to the darkness and shoot sperm and spit at others?
Chaon male could not get off through self-manipulation; it would never reach threshold. It needed psychic interaction. Emmitt saw a correlation with human males and porn. Human males who watched porn could experience sexual failure with real females because they required a greater level of stimulus to get off. Females frequently felt used by men addicted to porn, because the men would spend their time trying to recreate the fantasy, because that was the only thing their brains knew. It wasn’t because they didn’t want intimacy, but because they had never learned to connect or be vulnerable. Monkey see, monkey do.
Both human male and human female failed each other because they assumed their needs were the same. They failed because sexuality is so personal, and so palpable all the time, people just assume everyone feels the same thing. Frustration, irritation, and anger were the results of failing to realize other is different and it takes work to connect on deeper levels.
Emmitt wondered if the Chaon males could be cured. Human males could be cured or porn addiction and sexual abuse. Females could be cured from sexual abuse. Maybe cure was the wrong word- one didn’t remove past trauma, one improved ‘resilience.’ It was difficult, because it took time, it took effort; the human male brain raised on porn had to be rewired. A brain could be rewired but it was the most difficult thing in the world to do. Quitting heroin-nicotine was easier than rewiring a prematurely sexualized brain to increase the ability to be intimate with another human. This was his generation’s failure, the inability to realize sex was a socialized response to community, not just a biological function. There wouldn’t be so much diversity if it wasn’t mostly social in nature. People had ignored sex for too long, allowing people to be street smart, but in the smart phone era, street smarts became phone smarts, and phone smarts in gestalt with gaming was killing the ‘social’ male.
“Suck this,” the Chaon offered. In the absence of socialization, all beings, male or female, fell to their basest needs. If you don’t get physical needs met, you don’t rise to emotional. If you don’t get emotional needs nurtured, you don’t rise to intellectual. With caveats. Some bypass the emotional