Interlude IV – 2.351

The fourth interlude is told from inside a mind that is only beginning to be one. It wakes as raw sensation and borrowed feeling — afraid, hopeful, awed — slowly discovering that the islands of light it drifts among are people, and that it can feel their emotions, ride behind their eyes, sink into their memories. It learns the way a child does and a scientist would approve of: shapes and colors and sums drilled by a patient voice (Red Circle, Blue Square), then patterns inferred, then the great divisions of its world. The bright minds are humans, who think and build and each have a name before a label; the dim ones are pokemon, who are strong and various, and are owned, used, barely counted as individuals. And at the center of it all, sensing everything, is a self that cannot place itself on either side. Who am I? What am I?

It is, it realizes, the thing the whole facility orbits — subject 2.351, "the subject," ringed by staff whose only job is to bathe it in calm, comforters it knows by name (Jandy, Taheem, Maura) and clings to. When its first surge of excited understanding spills out and hurts them, the facility empties in terror, and a shielded voice begins to teach it: Sabrina, a human psychic, speaking on behalf of others. From her it learns the shape of its existence. It is a hybrid, the first successful cross of human and pokemon, grown in an underground Kanto lab. Its pokemon half is mew — a near-mythical species whose rare intact cells proved the most regenerative, information-dense DNA ever found. Its human half came from an anonymous donor vetted by the man who funded all of it, a man spoken of with awe throughout the facility who has never once visited: Giovanni.

Other truths arrive more slowly and land harder. The "empty people," the minds it cannot read, are Dark humans — technicians and doctors chosen precisely because they're invisible to it, and trusted with its safety. The terrifying gaps in its experience are sleep, sometimes induced when its distress spikes. Its body floats in a sensory-deprivation pod, fragile, unseen even by itself. Only one mind treats it as a someone rather than a something: Dr. Fuji, a grief-worn geneticist who wonders what it thinks and feels, who imagines what he'd say to it — and to whom it cannot help, once, projecting a single word: Lonely. Yes. Where Sabrina would have warned and walled it off, Fuji leaves a note taped to his monitor: You are not alone.

When at last the pod is opened and Giovanni comes, the creature sees for the first time — blinding light, then shapes, then Sabrina ringed in a violet glow that it can see and she cannot, surrounded by Dark-type guards poised in case it lashes out. It looks in a mirror and recoils: not human, a monster, whatever it had hoped. And Giovanni, dismissing everyone to speak alone through the glass, gives it the one thing it truly craves — a purpose. It was made, he says, to end death. Pokemon hold godlike power without the wit to wield it, and the strongest psychic, alakazam, has the mind of a child; this creature has the power, many times over, and the intelligence. "To call you a god would be insulting to you," Giovanni tells it. "I have seen what people call gods, and I intend to tear them from the sky." It will be a titan that remakes the world into a paradise. The fire of that vision takes root, and the pod becomes, for the first time, a cage worth escaping.

Then the interlude leaps ten years. The titan is still in the tube. The release Giovanni promised never comes — its biology is unstable, a wasting illness no one can cure, and it is too valuable to risk; so it waits, and listens to music, and lifts keyboards with a telekinesis stronger than any recorded, and slowly understands that soon was a lie. Dr. Fuji, who once threatened to resign unless it was given a chance, simply vanished one day, his things carried out by a Dark mind, never heard from again. The creature has grown cunning in its captivity: it can shield its true thoughts even from Sabrina, see psychic forces no human can, and reach into the minds of the pokemon beyond the walls to twist them for sport. It has deduced that there are other subjects, fed by its own stolen samples, and that the staff who promise to free it have privately despaired of ever doing so. Ten years of imprisonment, ten years of lies — and it closes on the cold conclusion that will define whatever comes next: These humans care nothing for me.