Part 2 of 2. Please read part 1 here.
Desperate Times
“There are a number of Transformed reported in the more isolated communities too, but the numbers are skewing far lower”.
“So, what? What relevance does that really have?” Mary Anne pressed.
“Well, it proves she was right. Don’t you see?
Dr Lee was right.”
Play the Game Find the Fame
Shelley had followed the approved steps to becoming an influencer religiously, and all her efforts had been starting to pay dividends.
Like most psychopaths, Shelley was pretty useless when it came to hard work, but she could talk about herself endlessly for days, weeks, years, and was always happy to lay claim to the achievements of others.
Building a shrine to herself on social media, and sending it out to the world to be adored wasn’t work. It was a labour of love.
She never forgot to post consistently, and regularly drilled down through her a̶d̶v̶e̶r̶s̶a̶r̶i̶e̶s̶ peers’ time lines to see what was trending in their online world.
And like so many content creators, bloggers and influencers she favoured the use of a couple of sock accounts to boost her own account with likes and comments, particularly important when she was first gaining traction, and the algorithm barely knew she existed.
She also used alts one and two, to carefully throw a little shade on her competitors, and her third sock to throw a nasty little comment at herself every now and then to cause a bit of controversy, so she could rise above the attacks with grace.
It was a quandary. She really wanted more attention, but had to be incredibly watchful not to put potentials off base by having strong opinions on — well — anything.
Fortunately, Shelley didn’t really hold a lot of strong opinions on most issues, because she didn’t particularly care what happened to anybody but herself, but she carefully used pre approved symbols which were already proven to have plenty of billionaire backing and social clout - nothing that might be remotely controversial.
Lately, she had timidly started speaking up about hate speech, since that was the celeb cause du jour. “I mean, of course I’m favour of free speech!” she breathed, her perfectly tousled locks gently framing her symmetrical, well nourished and tended features.
She had posed herself in the botanical gardens, with shimmering water and a soft breeze as a backdrop.
“But surely we have to be careful? There have to be limits, right?”
Her big eyes grew sad and wistful in a perfectly rehearsed expression.
“Surely we can’t just anyone saying any mean thing they like?!”
Her forehead creased with the tiniest frown, all that the baby Botox would allow her to make.
“But I’m always willing to learn, please let me know what YOU think in the comments!”
“No, I’m not going to block her” she told her concerned followers in a gentle, thoughtful tone one one of her shorts, after sock 3 made a cruel comment about her perfect figure.
“I mean, body positivity is really important to me!” she chirped “And you all know about my own struggles” she lied cheerfully.
“But maybe she has her own struggles. We can’t know what anyone is going through. I can learn something from all of this! Always remember #bekind!” she signed off smiling sweetly and bravely at the camera.
Her growing fanbase cooed and fluttered and talked of her wisdom and forgiving nature.
“She’s just jealous Shell!” one of her fans exclaimed. She gave that comment extra hearts and kisses.
I mean, she was no Kardashian (yet, she mentally averred) but she was an influencer on the rise and if she kept playing the game she knew she could find the fame.
Honestly, she thought she might even have a shot at being an actress.
Well, at least she had thought so.
Until today.
Psychopathy as Normality
“We already know that the brains of psychopaths look different to a normal human brain. The structure is different. We’ve known this for a long time….
Why Aren’t Psychopathy Scans Required For People in Power?
Psychopathy Scans, Cape Fear and The Shawshank Redemption
Annabel was convinced there must be a way to correct what nature had allowed to atrophy. Not everyone with anti-social personality disorder, NPD, BPD, all the dark triad stuff could have been born that way. And even those who had — was it possible to treat lack of empathy like any other birth defect?
Could it be cured?
The numbers had been calculated long ago, the most knowledgeable in the field believed perhaps 1 in 100 people were psychopaths who walked among us — perhaps more in certain areas.
But there’s been such a massive leap you see! The psychopaths, the NPDs, BPDs, the dark triads, the people who just don’t care, won’t care, can’t care — they were flourishing!
They were WINNING!”
The spokeswoman leaned in, suddenly desperate to make her point, and her host flinched away.
“If society had always been filled up with so many selfish, manipulative, personality disordered, unempathetic and truly terrible people, we’d never have made it this far as we have as a species.
The truth is, governments are — were — filled— with the sort of people who bury the lead.
Billionaires, politicians, all the big organisations, the ones who make policy, rules, laws, all of them slowly but surely clogged up with people who not only didn’t care about the world wide disasters looming, the riots, the instability, the looting, the wars, the hate , the breakdown of normality — they seemed to be actively encouraging all of it.
And when you have a world run by conceited, selfish, vain liars, with no ability to feel love, empathy, decency or any sense of self awareness or personal responsibility, when you have an army of them out there running amok… when there is an epidemic of psychopathy in the real world…
It’s no exaggeration to say we were reaching the End of Days.”
“My brother in law pretty much liquified in front of his family and it sounds to me like you and your group were responsible for it. That’s what I’m hearing.” Mary Anne snarled.
“And some have said your Dr Lee got what she deserved.
What do you say to that?”
The shell-shocked audience moaned in affirmation.
Sibyl flinched, sighed, took another deep breath.
“So we’ve all known for over a decade that dark triad traits are on the rise. We’ve all known the link between that and the internet. We knew it was destroying the fabric of society.
But nobody cared. Nobody wanted to do anything.
Except Dr Annabel Lee.”
Get Your Kids Off The Internet
It’s Poison
“So you’re saying the internet caused, what?!” demanded.
“No, not caused. Psychopaths have always been among us, in small numbers.
But we’ve known for years the internet was destabilising society. We understood some of the mechanisms, but one of the most insidious was the way the addictive nature of social media and online forums had encouraged actual changes in the brain — narcissism, lack of inhibition, selfishness.
So many people, especially young people, who might — without the constant stream of poisonous online engagement from groomers, grifters and the totally unhinged — have been taught to do better, to lead decent, fulfilling lives, so many seemed to have lost all empathy, all ability to care, all desire to help their fellow human beings.
All humanity.
As well as everything and anything being normalised for clicks, likes and money making, there was a steep rise in hate from every section of society, real hate, attacks on women and children, robberies, casual hatred of any group that wasn’t your own.
These people — the ones who are now the Transformed — they were making the world ugly, dangerous and cruel — for fun. And millions were following their lead.
The filth, the cruelty, so many grotesque perversions, things you could barely imagine twenty years ago — all of it being normalised to dance music with a confected head tilt.
All the traits we used to shame people for displaying openly encouraged and rewarded online.
Humans are adaptable, our brains are malleable — our new, unstable society, one without boundaries, rules or any overarching — well, for want of a better word, morality — was causing material alterations in large swathes of the population.
And the reason for the massive rise in psychopathic, narcissistic and dark triad behaviour?
It turns out that when you feed humanity’s perversions you starve their decency.
In millions of human brains throughout the world, governments, groomers and grifters were suppressing…”
Sybil paused, Mary Anne stared expectantly, the audience were hushed and fascinated.
“The Empathy Node. These changes in the brain were all working towards suppressing the empathy node.”
“The empathy what?!” Mary Anne asked.
“It’s what she called it. Dr Lee.”
“It was an epidemic.” Sybil continued. “BPD, NPD, anti social personality disorders — all the dark triad stuff.
The brains of a whole generation, of the whole world were changing.
“It was an epidemic.” she repeated.
“We had to do something. We had to try.”
“I am so sorry. So sorry for your loss, for all the losses. But whatever Annabel did, she did it with good intentions, she didn’t deserve to be shot dead like a crook — like a common criminal!
She wanted to save us. She wanted to save us all.”
“Well you know what they say about the road to hell!” sneered Mary Anne.
“Your group, Desperate Times, are a rogue, rag-tag band of illegitimate scientists…”
“Now hang on…” began Sybil…
“So why the bible quote?!” Mary Anne snapped.
“If you’ll let me talk, just let me talk, I will tell you.” replied Sybil.
The host settled a little. Nodded.
Only Those People
“Given our time constraints, let me boil it down for you as simply as I can.
Our inspiration, our leader, Dr Annabel Lee, was herself inspired by the biblical quotation.
“They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any green plant or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads.”
Dr Lee wasn’t religious, but she had a cousin, a very bright woman who might have worked in the scientific field herself, but had chosen to become a nun. They spent long hours discussing theology and science and the intersection of both.
Those two disciplines, science and religion came to overlap in her mind. Annabel started to see…patterns.
She’d been immersed in her research, trying to really nail down the physiological differences in the brain between the normal and those now damaged and altered by the corruption soaked up by so many, especially our children.
And then she saw it. That self same quotation on Instagram, the one about the seal of God, after a long discussion with her cousin.
And that night, she fell in to a deep sleep, brimming with dreams. When she awoke in the morning…”
“So you’re saying she was some sort of — Messiah?!” exclaimed Mary Anne.
“She’d never have called herself that, but for us…
When Annabel awoke in the morning she said she understood. She understood the part that we must play.
“They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any green plant or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads.”
She understood, suddenly, that the word didn’t mean foreheads, not literally, not specifically.
The ancient Greek for forehead can also mean the space between the eyes and can be used to differentiate between the inside of the brain and the outside, the countenance. That’s what she told me.
It can also mean” Sybil paused, took a deep breath “the seat of consciousness. At least, that’s what Dr Lee decided.”
Her hands shaking a little, Sybil sipped at her water and then went on.
“Dr Lee had been carrying out experiments…”
“ILLEGAL and unethical experiments” the host suddenly hissed.
A slight pause. The spokeswoman nodded. It was true enough.
“Yes. Illegal certainly. Unethical, well almost certainly that too. But those were what led her to the critical discovery.
She’d isolated the difference you see.”
“The difference in what?” her bewildered host replied.
“In the human brain. The difference between the normal and the corrupted.
Annabel found it. She isolated the empathy node.”
Under the Skin
A timid knock came at the door of the granny flat.
Shelley hesitated. Who could she text for help? Nobody. There was nobody who cared about Shelley. Well, her mother claimed to, but nobody else. Nobody useful.
But she didn’t want to answer that door. She felt wrapped in dread, strange emotions and thoughts. She didn’t want to know.
She’d been tried to scroll her usual influencers, her usual sources, but all her favourite motivators, bloggers and TikTokers were disappearing, or had already gone dark.
One after another they were shutting down their feeds or simply not responding.
And that stupid quotation kept appearing, everywhere.
She clicked her own feed, her thumb forgetting its purpose, and suddenly the effort of controlling the phone became overwhelming. It slid from her hand to the floor.
Yesterday’s beautiful image, so perfectly constructed to look natural and impromptu stared up at her.
Her face. Her beautiful face.
Deep, deep down, on the very rare occasions that Shelley considered anything deeper than her eyelash extensions, she had wondered at how easy it was to influence people if you looked pretty and used a pleasing tone of voice.
It has flashed through her head a few times, when smiling blankly and thinking nothing pleasant, to be grateful that nobody could actually hear her thoughts.
Not that she was any worse than anyone else, she hastily reminded herself. Everyone thought like she did. She was sure of it.
Nobody was really, actually, nice or kind. It was all an act, a story people told themselves. A hashtag to gain traction.
At least, she’d always thought so. Today though, everything was out of kilter. Shelley was experiencing ideas, thoughts, feelings she had never felt before.
And she hated it.
Revelation Day
It came to be known as Revelation Day.
Desperate Times, on the instructions of the genius Dr Lee, had seeded the very clouds with the chemical compound that came to be known as Wormwood.
Genius or madwoman or both, she had found it, and was hell bent on delivering the cure.
There was one thing these people, these devourers of humanity, decency, humility, kindness, honesty and sincerity, one thing these world destroyers had in common.
And Dr Lee found it. The empathy node.
In millions throughout the world, the Empathy Node was either inactive, damaged or deficient — and those numbers were rising.
Using technology she had invented feverishly, often ad hoc and practically on the run, Dr Lee’s years of sleepless nights paid off.
She had pinned it down. A way to fix them.
“It’s in the Greek, you see!” she exclaimed to her adoring, trusting followers.
“That’s what finally made me look deep. Nestled down deep within the anterior insular cortex. Meta, you see — it means among, between, altered, changed.
And that’s what the bible quote meant.
They were trying to tell us!” She smiled, triumphantly. “They were given that wisdom and they passed it down to us! Don’t you get it?!
Perhaps they should have seen the hectic gleam of the zealot in her glittering eyes. But they only saw their beloved Dr Lee.
“They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any green plant or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads.”
“That’s what it means. The seal of God. It’s the ability to love and care for others, to show empathy, kindness compassion.
That’s what they’re all missing — these afflicted. The seal of God has been tampered with.
And I have found a way…”
She paused dramatically.
“I have found a way to reactivate it!”
Her laughter was musical and merry, and her followers joined her, gladly.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
They would be heroes. They would save humanity.
Together, they would heal the world.
Behold, I stand at the Door and Knock
The knock came again, this time more urgently.
“Shell? Honey?”
She heard her mother’s hesitant voice. “No, mum, don’t come in” Shelley tried to reply, but what emerged from her torn throat was halfway between words and a gutteral snarling.
She heard the faint scratching of a key and her mother walked into the room.
She looked just the same. Careworn, loving, and — Shelley noticed for the first time ever — pretty.
Not stunning, or flashy, but she had pretty eyes, a kind face. She looked — for want of a better descriptor — nice.
How had she missed this before?
Seeing Shelley’s ghastly countenance slithering and billowing before her horrified gaze, her mother started to weep.
“Oh my baby” her mother breathed “Oh my poor little girl.”
Shelley tried to walk towards her mother, but her gait was strange and awkward; she heaved herself onto the sofa, the one she had so carefully picked from a magazine just a few months ago.
“Mum, please!” She struggled to make herself understood through disintegrating vocal chords.
“What’s happened?! What’s happened to me!”
Gathering her courage, her mother at first hesitantly stumbled, then forced herself to totter towards the sagging, grotesque remains of her daughter.
“Just rest my love. I’ve called an ambulance already. We’ll wait for it together and I’ll tell you what’s going on.”
With a huge effort, her mother reached out to Shelley, touched what was left of her hand, and sat on the arm of the couch near her.
There they sat, her mother’s hand gently resting on Shelley’s deliquescing paw.
“Mummy…I’m sorry.”
The weight of an entire lifetime of uncaring cruelty was falling away from Shelley like a distant dream.
She felt something she had never experienced before. She felt shame.
“Oh my God, mummy, Anna, little Anna, I’m so sorry I laughed! Please forgive me! I didn’t get it. I just didn’t get it.”
Her slurring voice was grating, difficult to hear now.
“It’s not your fault baby girl. There is nothing to forgive. I love you.” her mother’s voice wavered. She glanced down at the remains of her daughter and her gaze flinched away.
“They were trying to help, I think, Shelley. I think they really were.
But there were…side effects.
Scientists, they call themselves scientists.
They let it loose on the world, some sort of concoction. They were trying to fix people like you Shell. People who couldn’t love or feel empathy.
But you see people like you are different in other ways too. There was a code, hidden in the RNA.”
Shelley’s mother was mostly talking to herself now, her daughter was focused only on the sound of her mother’s loving voice, viewing her profile through darkening eyes with a strange, warm feeling. This must be love, Shelley thought, this must be how love feels.
But she didn’t say it. She couldn’t say much of anything anymore. The words wouldn’t form, and it was so hard to stay focused.
“Wormwood activated the empathy node. But it activated the code too. It’s what stops random mutations, you see Shellbell. It’s some sort of evolutionary thing. I don’t understand it, I’m no scientist.
But they turned something else on when they turned on the Empathy Node.
Your dad, he was — well, he wasn’t a kind man. I always knew you took after him. But I’d hoped. Maybe nurture could win over nature…”
Her mother’s voice was fading, but her presence was comforting.
Shelley felt so tired, a great and weary weight pressed her down.
She let herself slip sideways, curled up around the remains of herself on the couch.
“I love you Shelley. It will all be ok baby girl. I’m here.” her mother whispered.
Taking a deep breath, her mother turned her eyes upon her daughter’s face, and tried to smile, a glimmer of a mother’s devotion. Her gaze shone with love and a terrible pity.
Shelley’s gaze remained fixed on her mother’s sweet and loving countenance, until the darkness came.
Together, they waited, as the sirens drew nearer.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The quotation by Eric Hoffer, which I chanced upon on Twitter, inspired this story, which pretty much wrote itself.
We are but conduits for the words.
A wonderfully written story that spawned much to think about.
Great story. It helps to know there are other people who worry about these things.