Desperation

The ceiling of Leela's bedroom was etched into her mind.  She had lain awake for so long poring over every detail of every millimeter of its surface, so nondescript and yet, for however long she had been laying awake unable to calm her mind, the ceiling dominated her attention.  Insomnia had become the common thread linking each of an interminable series of days stretching back as far as she could remember.  Vaguely, she recalled a time in what seemed to be the distant past of prehistory when she had been happy, she had Zhou, and Ryven had been a friend.  Now, Ryven was the dark star whose orbit her everything had fallen into.  He was the singularity toward which all the possible avenues of her life were inexorably drawn.

She had the technology she needed to trap this evil persona who had possessed Ryven in a digital prison.  Rather, she had the prison, a self contained memory bank in which he could be confined, its bounds finite and unbreakable.  That was the easy part.  Now she had reached the true core of the problem.  How do you separate a consciousness from a mind and yet keep another one intact and in situ?  How can you remove an entire personality without also removing the shared experience, the shared memory and knowledge of both?  Dr. Thomas was equally perplexed and twice as pessimistic about the entire enterprise.  As best she could determine, it would be necessary to create some sort of trauma, some sort of emotional crisis sufficient to create a radical schism in his mind.  The problem, of course, was that the Dark Ryven seemed sociopathic.  How do you create emotional trauma in someone who seems ruled entirely by something outside ordinary emotional frameworks.  Further, what could be traumatic enough to cut off Dark Ryven from the rest of Ryven's mind, but not also do irreparable damage to Ryven?

Leela rose and poured herself a strong drink from the bottle on her nightstand and downed it in one gulp.  She winced as the alcohol burned her throat, but relaxed as she felt the warmth of it spread through her chest.  She slammed the glass down on the nightstand with far more fury and desperation than intended.  She gasped at the pain of the shattered glass as it stabbed into her palm.  She gritted her teeth, both out of pain and fury, but calmed again at the sight of her blood forming a ring around the still intact bottom of her drinking glass.  Blood really was everything, in the end, wasn't it?  "New Eden runs on blood." She spoke out loud to the void.  She glanced around her spartan chambers, devoid of any adornment.  Every item had a purpose.  "New Eden runs on blood, is fueled by it, and would drown in it."  She was shocked at how macabre that sentiment was, but it fit.  Capsuleers, if nothing else, thrived on, survived on, and actively sought bloodshed.  And again, her mind went to Ryven. "GET OUT OF MY FUCKING HEAD!"  She threw the bottle and it exploded against the far wall.  She felt tears as they wormed their way down her cheeks and finally her fury broke and she threw herself onto her bed, sobbing, the despair finally taking over.

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Dark Ryven smiled at his handiwork.  Zhou was tougher than his usual prisoner, and Ryven knew that he had to navigate a narrow channel between the pitfalls of either not torturing Zhou enough for his captivity to be compelling for Leela or torturing Zhou to the point where Leela would simply refuse to cooperate.  Sensory deprivation seemed fitting.  The human mind, when faced with true nothingness, tends to try to fill the void.  Ever since the most primitive humans looked out into the darkness, he imagined the darkness looking back at him.  The unknown, the unsensed, more than any physical pain, would generate a preternatural dread and loathing of every second stretched out into eternity before him, with no end in sight.  With nothing to see, to hear, to touch, to smell, to sense, Zhou would have no concept of how much time had passed or lay before him.  Eternity was just a moment, and a moment eternity.  

The sensory deprivation tank was a simple device.  The victim was suspended in a gel with perfect neutral bouyancy.  Zhou's body was dressed in an insulated suit that released topical anesthesia to deaden the nerves in his skin.  His head was covered in a full helmet that supplied him oxygen but deafened all sound and blocked all light.  In essence, he was suspended, numb, blind, and deaf, in an absolute void of sensation.  Zhou had been there for ten days now.  Zhou couldn't hear the sounds of his own screaming.  The comms unit in Zhou's helmet, however, meant that Ryven could, if he so wished.  Now was one of those times, and the reason for Ryven's smile.  He sat in the control room for the sensory deprivation room, his feet propped on the control console, his eyes closed, savoring the torment in Zhou's tortured screaming, the long wail and keening of one without hope.  Ryven licked his lips.  The despair was delicious.