Here is a short story I wrote for my creative writing class last semester. Throughout the semester we would do short writing exercises in class. As part of our final project we had to expand one of those exercises into a short story of any length. This is what I came up with. I wrote the whole thing in a day and without much editing. It’s fun. Idk. I think it could be a lot better in a different format with heavy revisions but that’s not what you’re getting. Here’s what I turned in. This, along with the rest of my final project, received 100/100. Enjoy.

Lingering

Reporting: Whereabouts of Guardian Second Class Maleah Kempf

Name: Damian Ritter

Rank: Guardian Second Class

I have been asked to give my account of what happened to GSC Maleah Kempf. As I have repeatedly said, I will not tell you her whereabouts for her safety. But before I am tried and most likely sentenced to death, I will make this last confession. It is my hope that my words will be entered into the official record and prevent something like this from happening to anyone again. But I highly doubt it. I assume almost everything I write here today will be redacted and buried. That is why I am also sending copies of this to all major news outlets. And to my parents, if they are still alive. What follows is my account of my time in the corps. Guardian Corps, you brought this on yourselves.

This all started because of lingering.

When you access the mind of another – wander the corridors, peek into the various rooms – you can find yourself so immersed in their thoughts that you begin to make yourself at home. Spend enough time there and you become lost to yourself altogether. You never return to your own mind, a condition we call decampment. All guardians fear decampment. That is why we are rigorously trained in abstraction, a type of psychic distancing that takes years to fully master.

When you are conscripted into the Guardian Corps, you are given simple psychic tasks to practice at first, such as seeing – being able to see an object that is being shielded behind a barrier. It’s years before you are allowed to try breaching – accessing another’s mind. And this is done under supervision and with the other participant’s knowledge and consent. It has to be this way. Because being inside someone else’s mind is just as addictive as any illicit drug. Maybe more so. A breaching psychic not only risks decampment but also the mind they are accessing and the immediate high is too hard to resist without proper training.

However, no matter how many times you do it, or how good you become at abstraction, you will always have some lingering when you return to your own mind. Snippets of their thoughts and feelings. Flashes of their memories that can feel so real you start to believe they happened to you. Usually, you can shake the lingering within a few minutes. It might last for up to an hour. Rarely, but sometimes, it’ll last for days. Prolonged lingering is a cause for concern and has sent guardians to medical for observation. And for the wrong psychic lingering can become an addiction of its own.

I was conscripted into the Guardian Corps when I was three years old. I had already begun seeing on my own and when my abilities were discovered the corps sent officers to my home to inform my parents that I had been recruited into the corp. They were given ten minutes to pack my belongings and say goodbye.

All citizens are tested for psychic ability but typically not until they have reached school age. It’s a rite of passage for the primary grades. You learn to read and write, to do basic math. You’re tested for psychic abilities, you lose a tooth while playing during break, you color. Most children fail the test the first time. But they are tested yearly until around age nine when, experts agree, if psychic abilities have not been detected yet they are absent entirely. With the exception of Maleah, the other children recruited in the same year that I was were discovered this way. Maleah was four and had begun seeing as well. A babysitter noticed and turned her in. She was taken from her parents the next day. There were seven us recruited that year. The most the Guardian Corps had ever recruited in one year.

Maybe it was because we’d both been taken from our parents at such a young age or because neither of us had attended school, but whatever the reason, Maleah and I bonded and became our own little unit, separate from the others. Recruits from the same year are housed together in the same room. The Corps teaches that when we’re ready to defend our nation from outside attacks we will need to depend on each other. Strong bonds are encouraged. But Maleah and I struggled to bond with the others. We had each other and for a long time that seemed like all we’d need.

Mal and I easily mastered the simple tasks, much quicker than the others. This was another thing that separated us from the group. While they were still practicing seeing we were moving onto telekinesis, levitation, and suggestion. Our natural abilities outshone the others, and it wasn’t long before the rest of the group began to resent us.

Not having gone to school, we hadn’t been propagandized into believing the corps were the heroes of our nation. The other recruits had grown up believing to be chosen by the corps was one of the highest honors someone could receive. So watching two young naturals with little regard for the corps easily master the abilities they worked so hard to gain only caused them to hate us more. While the five of them grew closer and Maleah and I grew closer, the rift between us grew wider every day.

Breaching was not approved to be attempted until a recruit had mastered all of the basics and was at least fifteen years old. But an incident with the others in our group caused Mal and me to start practicing breaching in secret. We had already mastered the basics ten times over. But the age restriction kept us from starting the program. Maleah was thirteen. She still had two more years before they’d let her even attempt.

It happened one night after lights out. The others had just begun their telepathy training, which is different than breaching. With telepathy you simply send thoughts into another’s mind, you don’t enter it. We’d already mastered telepathy and so we’d often spend our nights silently talking to each other as the others fell asleep. We couldn’t stop ourselves from giggling out loud, however.

“Maleah, I swear to god, if you don’t stop that fucking giggling.” It was Lyssa. Lyssa was already sixteen, but she wasn’t anywhere near ready to try breaching. It seemed to frustrate her the most that the two youngest recruits outdid her in every discipline. That day she’d failed another test which might explain why she was so on edge and what happened next.

Maleah apologized.

“Sorry, Lyss. Won’t happen again.”

“Better not.”

“It won’t.”

But it did and it was my fault. I sent an image of a dinosaur with Lyssa’s face on it into Maleah’s mind and she laughed aloud. Lyssa sprung out of bed and physically launched herself at Mal, pummeling her repeatedly in the face. I threw myself at Lyssa, trying to shield Mal, but Lyssa was stronger than both of us.

Everyone was awake now and shouting for Lyssa to stop. Finally, Galen was able to pull her off of us. He forcefully walked her back to her bed and stayed with her until she calmed down. The rest of them went back to sleep. No one checked on Mal and me.

Mal’s face was heavily bruised and swollen the next day. So was my back. No one said a thing. Lyssa looked at Mal’s face and simply said, “Don’t you fucking say a thing.”

None of our teachers or commanders asked about the bruising. It wasn’t the first time we’d come to class in the morning with bruises. They knew there was enmity between us and the rest of the group. But acknowledging that and doing something about it could potentially endanger the program. There had been years, sometimes two or three at a time, when no psychics were recruited into the corps. Now, in one year they’d found seven. They couldn’t risk the program. Keeping five psychics together, advancing in the program, was far more important than protecting two misfits. Mal and I knew we could only count on each other. And we had to find a way to fight back.

We were both quite adept at suggestion. And we thought about using suggestion to influence the rest of the group to leave us alone. But we knew that was unlikely to work. All of us had been taught methods for resisting suggestion and even Lyssa was fairly skilled at it. Telepathy was out because they would detect it too quickly. After all, it is just a voice speaking in your mind. They would recognize it wasn’t their own thoughts right away. We finally landed on implanting. Implanting is a mid-level skill similar to suggestion but unlike suggestion, it requires the psychic to breach the mind of their target. Once inside, you implant a thought, like leaving an Easter egg. This works even if the target has resistance training because the implanted thought feels like it originated in their mind. Back in the physical world, the psychic simply has to trigger the implanted thought by saying a predetermined word or phrase. We began practicing breaching on each other the very next night.

As you can probably imagine, two novice psychics untrained in breaching practicing the skill secretly on each other did not go well. The concept was easy enough to grasp but executing it was difficult. And once we’d finally successfully breached, we encountered all of the issues I’ve previously stated. We risked decampment multiple times and were barely able to pull ourselves out. The high we got from breaching only added to the problem, causing us to want to breach as often as possible. But it was lingering that finally got us caught.

Mal had such a bad episode of lingering that I became concerned and forced her to go to medical. I had hoped we could play it off as something else, but the nurse recognized the look on Maleah’s face almost immediately. I begged her not to report us, but she had no choice. I was sure this was the end for Mal and me. I was wrong.

Though it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, when the corps learned that Maleah and I had successfully taught ourselves to breach and were able to pull ourselves out without the exhaustive abstraction training guardians receive, they decided the only logical next step was to fast track us in the breaching program. We would become the two youngest psychics to move up to Guardian Second Class in corps history.

Everything changed. We were moved to new quarters. We no longer had to worry about being bullied by Lyssa and the others. We were to be protected and mentored. We’d meet other GSCs and train with them. We were no longer just two misfits no one cared about. We were now the stars of the Guardian Corps.

Our training was accelerated, and it wasn’t long before we’d both mastered abstraction and the breaching process. The corps was, of course, thrilled and decided it was time for us to receive our first targets. Real targets.

Breaching requires the psychic to have some kind of access to their target. Otherwise you might wander into the mind of someone you didn’t know halfway across the globe and never return. Physical proximity was best. The corps got around this by giving guardians detailed information about their targets along with an image. This helped us find the specific mind we were meant to enter, even if that mind was in another country.

At first our assignments were simple enough. Our targets were low-level government employees in one of our allied countries. We were tasked with retrieving passwords. Get in, find the password, get out. Lingering was minimal. We didn’t know why we needed these passwords, but we felt proud of our work. We were doing something important, serving our country. It was the first time either of us felt any kind of allegiance to the corps.

After a while our targets changed. We were no longer targeting allies but enemies. Passwords were simply appetizers. Secrets became the entrée. Finding secrets in a breached mind isn’t as easy as you might think. People don’t want secrets to come to light so they bury them, even from themselves. We were spending more and more time in the minds of others, and it began to take its toll.

Maleah became more and more susceptible to lingering. When a secret was difficult to find it meant staying in the mind of the target longer, which typically led to longer episodes. Mal was spending more and more time in medical. Worried, I went to our commanding officer to ask if she could be put on something else for a while so she could recover. I have to admit Mal was better at breaching than I was. She was advancing quickly and they weren’t about to bench their MVP. The answer was a resounding no.

The day came when Mal’s targets outranked mine. She was moved to a new group while I stayed behind. We only saw each other at night. And by the time we were together she was so exhausted I just held her while she slept. Then one day she came and found me in the middle of an exercise.

I was wandering the halls of some bureaucrat’s mind looking for a mistress or embezzlement, something the corps could use against her, when suddenly Mal was standing there in front of me. She’d looked at my target’s information and breached her mind as well. Now, we were standing in some poor woman’s mind who lived thousands of miles away, having a private conversation.

“Oh my god, Mal, what are you doing here?”

“I’m sorry if I scared you Damian, but I need to talk to you. Privately,” she said.

“Ok? But couldn’t this have waited until tonight? This can’t be safe for us or the target.”

“No, Dame. It had to be now. Something’s wrong. I think I’m in danger.”

“What? What’s going on, Maleah?”

“I don’t know. But I found something out that I wasn’t supposed to.”

And then she was gone. She’d left the target’s mind just as suddenly as she’d entered. I disengaged the target and focused on Mal. Telepathy only works in short range but Mal had to be somewhere in the facility. I didn’t know where she’d been assigned but I could at least send her a message. No answer. If Mal had received my message, she wasn’t responding. I tried to home in on her location but I couldn’t pinpoint her. I was worried. I decided to try breaching. I wouldn’t be able to communicate with her directly while wandering her mind but I could try to implant a message with no trigger. But when I tried to enter her mind, I found the way in blocked. This meant only one thing. Maleah was being shielded.

Shielding technology is rare. And the process for its manufacture is such a closely guarded secret that not much is known about it. What is known is that only top government officials have access to it. Most of them wear specially designed shielded hoods. I had only run into one shielded mind before on an assignment. When I spoke with my commander about it I was immediately pulled from the assignment and forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement about what I knew. Whatever Mal had discovered was big.

I didn’t see her that night. Or the next day. She was just gone. I went to my commanding officer, but he refused to give me any information. I went through all the proper channels, but no one would tell me where my best friend had gone. I decided it was time to do something desperate. I needed to start breaching new targets. I needed to enter the minds of my commanding officers if I was going to find Mal.

I won’t detail for you everything I found here. All of that information is in a separate document that’s already been sent to the major news outlets. I will say my direct commander knew a lot less than he pretended to. In fact, all the commanding officers I breached seemed to only know a piece of the puzzle. Eventually I was able to put enough pieces together to learn where they were holding Mal.

They’d taken Maleah to a shielded facility, the only one of its kind. Whatever she’d learned was too important for anyone to find out. I wondered why they hadn’t just killed her if what she’d learned was that significant, but I suspected a psychic as advanced as Mal was too valuable to kill. What I needed now was a way to get in.

This meant gathering more information. I continued my assault on the commanding officers, breaching them as often as I dared. I had to be careful to also complete the assignments I was given so no one would suspect what I was up to. Each day for several weeks, I’d report to my commanding officer and receive that day’s target. I’d enter the soundproof cubicle I’d been assigned and begin my day. To anyone observing it would look as though I was breaching the mind of my target, when in fact I was searching the minds of the people all around me. At some point in the day I would spend just enough time in my assigned target’s mind to fake a report for my commander. But the rest of my time was devoted to learning everything I could about the shielded facility.

Because the facility was so heavily guarded, it was nearly impossible for anyone to break in. I knew there had to be a weak link somewhere though. I just had to find it. The guards and other staff at the facility all had psychic resistance training. They might not have been psychics themselves, but they were prepared for attack. It would be difficult to find a weak link among them. The answer came one day when I breached the mind of a shipping clerk. I was trying to learn more about the security level of the shipments the facility received. I discovered that once weekly a shipment of fresh food was delivered. Most of what was shipped in was controlled by the corps, but the food was supplied by a local vendor. And though the vendor had undoubtedly received resistance training as well, they were not part of the corps and would likely be more susceptible and easier to break. I decided to plan my attack for the next scheduled delivery.

The night of the next delivery I snuck out of my quarters. I had implanted a trigger in the mind of our night guard and used it to get outside. I’d never left the base before. I’d been a prisoner of the corps for thirteen years and I certainly couldn’t drive. So I suggested to another guard that he give me a ride to the vendor’s. We arrived at the vendor’s warehouse shortly after 2:00 a.m. I suggested he return to the base and forget the events of the evening. He drove away and I waited.

My intel told me the vendor would be loading their truck around this time. I just needed to get eyes on the driver and hope his resistance training was weak. I made contact and, to my relief, found that the driver was very suggestible. I was able to convince him that I was just another valued employee here to help with the delivery. At first, he found this odd. Typically, once the truck was loaded, he made the delivery alone. The corps would unload the truck while he waited. But I suggested that I was new and learning how the delivery worked in case he ever needed backup. He bought it and a few of my other suggestions. He gave me the uniform I’d misplaced that morning and helped me find my lost name badge. We joked about how forgetful I was. I had my in with the vendor. Now, I just needed to make it into the facility.

My first real challenge came when we arrived. My name wasn’t on the list. Or at least the name on the badge the driver had helped me find.

But he vouched for me.

“This is Luigi. He’s helping me today. He’s good.”

“He’s not on the list.”

“That’s because he’s new. I’m training him.”

“He needs to be vetted. We can’t let him in.”

“That’s bull crap and you know it. It says in the contract that we can bring in new employees to help deliver if we need to. Luigi here is needed.”

“I don’t know…”

I wasn’t going to get in. The driver was convinced but the guard wasn’t buying it. I decided I needed to try something risky. I projected an image of the guard getting fired because he wouldn’t let us in into his mind. If his resistance training was good he’d know that image had come from a psychic source and I’d be caught. If not though…

“Ok, he can come in. But he needs to be on the list next time.”

It worked. I was in.

We drove to a dock door where the truck could be unloaded. I just needed to find an excuse to get out of the truck and go into the building.

“I’m gonna stretch my legs a bit,” I told the driver.

I walked to the back of the truck and watched the corps unload. Then I saw my opportunity. A crate of oranges rested on top of a stack of boxes. I used telekinesis to make it appear the box had fallen due to poor stacking methods. Oranges spilled everywhere, rolling off the truck and onto the ground. The corps unloading the truck ran to pick them up. I sent the driver a message suggesting he wait there until I returned with another valued employee and slipped into the building.

Once inside it was easy enough to find Mal. We were both behind the shield now and I could home in on her location. I sent her a message telepathically, but she didn’t respond. It didn’t matter. She was alive and I could sense her now. I would find her.

I moved through the building as stealthily as possible. During my intel gathering I had come across a few partial floorplans lodged deep in staff members’ minds. I’d committed as much of the layout to memory as I could. I made my way to the room where they were keeping Mal hoping I wouldn’t run into anyone. After all it was the middle of the night and most of the staff would be in bed. I was surprised to find no guard standing outside of Mal’s door. When I went into her room I quickly discovered why. Mal was lying in a hospital bed, an I.V. hooked to her arm, keeping her sedated. Her other arm was handcuffed to the bed. They didn’t need to guard her.

I looked around the room for anything I could use to transport her. In an odd stroke of luck there was a wheelchair in the corner. I imagine so they could trot her out when needed. I unhooked the I.V. and helped Mal into the chair. Somehow, we made it back through the building without getting caught. The corps were finished unloading the truck when we arrived, and I was able to wheel her into the back of the truck and escape.

I was able to get Maleah somewhere safe. I won’t tell you where. When we were making our escape I managed to steal one of the hoods the corps was using on her. She will remain shielded for the rest of her life and you will never find her. She is recovering but it will be a long time before she is herself again. When she did finally regain her senses, she was able to tell me a bit of what happened to her. But you, Guardian Corps, already know what happened to her. It’s the rest of the world that needs to know.

When Maleah was moved up in the program, she was moved onto a project that had been going on for over seventy years or so. She was no longer targeting high ranking government officials. No, now she was part of a group targeting the civilian population of our own country. It was this group’s assignment to influence the population, spread misinformation, and keep the citizens fighting each other in culture wars rather than seeing what their own government was doing to them. Of course, Mal didn’t know this was what she was doing at first. She believed she was targeting our nation’s enemies. But when she learned the truth about what she and the others were doing she became deeply concerned. She went to her commanding officer and was given a line about keeping our nation pacified so that a civil war didn’t break out. She worried that what they were doing was wrong. She thought people had a right to know the truth about their government. She also realized, a little too late, that she was never meant to learn the truth about the project. That was the day she came to me and disappeared.

They threw a shielded hood over her head and rushed her off to the facility. They told her she needed some time to come around to the corps’ way of thinking. After all, a psychic as valuable as her would be a much better ally than enemy. In the weeks I spent looking for her, they were keeping her sedated for much of the day, then wheeling her into a room for reprogramming. She was psychically bombarded day after day. But her resistance training was strong, and she was able to stay herself for the most part.

After I got Mal someplace safe and learned the truth, I knew I had to do something. Guardian Corps are not heroes defending our nation from the psychic attacks of our enemies. The corps are the ones doing the attacking. They are the enemy. I came back to share this information with the world. It is my sincere hope that my trial will open everyone’s eyes to what has been going on right under their noses all this time.

You have all been lied to. They don’t want you to know the truth because then you might fight for your rights. Your right to healthcare, housing, food. If you believe the enemy is out there somewhere plotting against us, you won’t see the enemy staring you right in the face. You, the citizens of our nation, are the real target of the corps. They want you complacent and fighting each other. That’s the real goal of Guardian Corps. It’s time to wake up. Time to fight for our rights and stop trusting a system that is killing us. May my trial and death become the wake-up call of a nation.

End of Report.