The Core: The Dark Enemy

6. I'd love to change the world

Meditati knew that she had made a mistake, a horrible mistake, the moment that she heard Kevin tell her that he had seen enough. There was just something intimately off about his voice. The simulation sessions were only supposed to last at most several months but when Kevin dove into them, he seemed to thrive in the ability to live other people's lives.

The data that Meditati was able to gather was priceless regardless of the outcome. Any data that could ever be gathered on Kevin, the most powerful person to be presently alive, to Meditati's vast knowledge, was valuable beyond measure.

This might have been one of the reasons why Meditati ignored some of her limiters and decided to let Kevin go for as long as he wanted.

Who knew that the human would have an unlimited pool of willpower to draw from?

"I really hope that Tutor and George are calming him down." She said as she tested the limits of the containment cell that he had shoved her into. The containment cell, as she anticipated, was impenetrable with his use of swarm as a boundary between herself and the outside world. She had no idea how long she would be in here if they couldn't help to repair whatever damage her simulations had caused.

"All that priceless data on Kevin... and I might have wasted my chances at being able to use it to help him and his planet." She said as she replayed his last few moments before he ended the sessions.

There it was: the trigger.

"Ah, crap, I really messed up." She said as threads of Kevin's earlier childhood memories linked to the one that he decided to exit the session on.

It was the memory of the beggar who asked for alms under the overpass in Thailand. Now Kevin had first-hand memories of how it would be to languish, day in and day out, simply because his body hadn't been formed like it should have been at birth.

"That must have been a hard experience to live through," Meditati said before she checked how long he had chosen to sit there, only being taken home late at night.

Five months.

—

I lived for five months inside the last simulation, just trying to see what I could accomplish as a person living with serious physical disabilities. The simulation that I had been put into had been even more disheartening when it first started, beginning with me simply spending my days as a twenty-four-year-old guy still living with his parents and his hardworking older sister. The body that I jumped into lived with a TV remote glued to his one good hand when the simulation started. At least he had that arm and hand going for him. It was something that I could use.

I quickly weighed my options and ended up asking my new simulated sister for a favor. I had asked her to help me pack a little lunch that would last me a day and to drive to a well-shaded spot outside of Walmart so that I could ask people to invest in me. She was very resistant to it at first but finally relented after I told her what I was planning and how it might help her and our elderly parents in the end.

The sign that I had made was straightforward. It read "Saving up for college, any help is appreciated."

I was robbed within the first five hours of begging.

This turned out to be a bad turn of events for the person robbing me because they ended up on the news and in the hospital with barely a memory of what happened. Too many simulations of violence had trained my mind and body to act without thought once violence had been initiated on my person. Who cares that I was disabled? I still had a candy cane-looking metal walking stick that worked very well as a "What did I have for breakfast" memory eraser.