Bartleby watched Kim from the treetops as she stumbled through the underbrush. She had strayed too far from the tea party table and had awakened the inhabitants of the simulspace forest. They would not be kind. He had designed the forest as a stealth training program to hone his own skills but had found it useful to break interrogation subjects down. The uncertainty of the environment was more stressful than a plain torture chamber. Kim was resourceful though and had the tenacity of a born survivor. She was almost invigorated by the Darwinian nature of this simulspace.
"Hello Kim." Bartleby spoke with only a slight smirk on his face.
"You fucking monster. Just space my cortical stack! This shit's worse than anything I ever fucking did! You fucking hypocrite"
The smirk disappeared, instantly replaced with a hateful scowl. He leaped from the branch and landed in front of her.
"Now what you said I know is a lie. I know it beyond a reasonable doubt in fact. I know it like the back of my hand."
Kim tensed but did nothing. She knew that he could do anything to her in the simulspace.
"We went to Cloud 9. I went into the Nine Lives storage simulspace."
Her eyes widened. "H-h-how...?" Nine Lives controlled the station. There was no way that freak and his friends could have taken them all out.
"What does it matter? I saw what you did. Do you want to see what I did to them?"
A video appeared - playback from Bartleby's tactical network software - slow-motion of Bartleby aiming at the head of a Nine Lives enforcer and emptying a pistol into it. Then another killshot. and another. A montage of the deaths of every Nine Lives member on the station. Bartleby firing his pistol into their corpses.
"So don't expect backup. No one knows what happened to you. No one will rescue you or get revenge on you."
The simulspace forest faded from view. In its place, a stony cavern tunnel.
"W-what's this?"
"I don't care if you actually knew or not. But just so you know, this-" he gestures around them "was the storage simulspace your organization placed tens of thousands of innocent egos in. To suffer - to make them soft - to make them...pliable."
He grabbed her by the cheeks, looking in her eyes.
"I think it's important for you to know a little about myself. I know about being locked in simulspaces. I know about being tortured, being manipulated in simulspace. I'm one of the Lost generation, you know."
Kim tried to squirm away from him, to get away.
"I'm not going to do anything so mundane as cut you or torture you, you know. I'm not like that."
She whimpered as panic began to overtake her.
"I want you to suffer though. Don't get me wrong. You will be in a hell beyond your imagining. It is of course not beyond my imagination but that's because I have been in darker places than you can conceive of-" He leaned in to whisper in her ear "and my imagination is limitless-"
She lashed out and struck him in the stomach, freeing herself from his grasp. Terrified, she ran into the darkness.
Bartleby gathered himself up and looked at his hands. So lifelike-almost real he had to repeat to himself a mantra from his school days: "Life is not simulated and simulations are not real. Life is not simulated and simulations are not real."
Kim would never be fully alone in this purgatory. A copy of the March Hare (his muse) would monitor her constantly and record everything she said and did - in case she revealed Nine Lives secrets. If she looked like she was about to go permanently mad, the March Hare would allow her to 'find' a secret respite - supposedly an error in the simulation that would allow her mind some time to heal. Then the suffering would begin again. When she was ready, he would begin the first wave of psychosurgeries.
Tempering a sword required fire and water. It took time, patience and a strong will. Bartleby had all of these things. He would mold her, shape her into a weapon he could use. The Red Queen would not give up easily. He would need the right tools to do so. Kim was the first one, but he would need more. The 60,000 souls left to his care would not be tortured in this way but surely some of them would want a new battle to fight, a cause to give their lives meaning. A shared simulspace training camp, perhaps some skillsofts to augment their skills?
There was much work to be done.
