Page 8 of Artificial Moon

“Are you filming me?”

“I am, yes. There are cameras throughout the room. Do you object?”

I dip into his mind, now moving through his thought processes, and I see a smallish strand of a thought hitched to a bigger thought. The smaller thought is entertaining the idea of using such videos to blackmail me, if need be.

“Ah!” he says suddenly.

“Ah, what?”

“I feel you in my mind, dropping down here and there. You’re reading my thoughts. You have no idea how much that terrifies and excites me.”

“You have a lot of secrets.”

“You have no idea.”

“Now, I have some.”

He turns pale. “Oh, my God.”

“I meant that rhetorically. I haven’t gone very deep into your thoughts.”

“Please don’t. I have made deals, done bad things, overheard things... many of which I need to take to the grave.”

“Understood.”

“So, should we come to an agreement?”

“We should.”

“We’ll quit filming you if you get the hell out of my head.”

“Fair enough.”

“Thank God. And I have your word?”

“You have my word.”

“Yes, yes, yes! I damn near had a heart attack.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Pretty bad. But I’ve never killed.”

“But you’ve seen someone killed?”

“I’ve seen bodies, yes. Horrible deaths. Some of my friends are not nice people.”

“World leaders?”

“And leaders of industry. I am not happy about what I have seen. I am traumatized, quite frankly. Can you sense that?”

“I can.”

“I only want to change the world, to take humanity to places it’s never been or seen. I never wanted to get involved in some of that craziness.”

“The craziness found you.”

He nods. “It’s the damn money. The perceived power. I almost made too much money.”

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