The Switch

Based on my experiments, every adult in town has about 3 to 5 pounds of EF in their body. Victor estimates that we’d only need about 70 pounds, along with the bones, to reform the body. From previous extractions, he already has about 8 pounds in total. So we would need a full extraction from 15 to 16 adult members of town. These can be any adults in town so long as they’ve lived here long enough to consider it home. I didn’t listen to Victor’s explanation of the metaphysics dictating that. If I think too much about…why we have to do this in the first place, I start feeling ill. I might abstain from eating meat after this, join up with the mad Adventists in Battle Creek and stick to turnips.

It’ll take months for Victor to pull this off at his current rate. He needs to start extracting more at every opportunity, but the more he extracts, the more time it takes and the more pain he deals. The timing thing can be worked around but nobody, not he or I or whoever’s under the pump, wants that much pain. Fixing a wrong with more wrongs is what got the pastor into this mess. Werewrightwork can’t prevent pain that way, at least as far as Victor knows. It just prevents the craft from causing pain. The funny little eucharist pump he uses isn’t quite werewrightwork, so he can’t cancel it out directly. There’s always the option of handling this with normal methods, but I’ve read that drugs strong enough to block out this much pain could kill a person. The body doesn’t like being unconscious longer than it absolutely has to.

What if I just…focus on eliminating just the pain from the equation? The pump is extremely painful when it’s active, but its actual damage to the body is minimal; my scars are already healed up. I just need to keep the patient from feeling anything for the duration. Sensation is the brain and the nerves coming from it, and the voltaic when we’re operating. If I could turn off the sensation but keep the parts that keep the body alive, that could work. Like an off switch.

Initial tests on the Switch were promising. I wasn’t able to isolate just pain, but I’m able to turn the sense of touch on and off. Plucked a feather off of Victor’s chicken without it noticing. Somehow this makes me more nervous than pulling someone’s ribcage apart. Victor had Mr. Fry come in as a the first human test subject - I knew he had some knowledge about this but I was surprised at how much he respects Victor - and there were ten minutes where I couldn’t reverse the process and he began to cry, I began to cry and Victor started hyperventilating. Harrowing experience.

I have to thank Mattie, though she’ll fuss about being helpful to Victor. If she didn’t let me help with the dictaphone, I don’t think I would have seen the method. Once you look at the nerves the same way you would a coil of wires hooked up to a battery, manipulating them comes a lot more easily. I already have ideas on how to shut off other senses, possibly even consciousness as a whole. I’m so excited that it’s hard to even sleep.

Mattie visited. Said she wants to mend fences with Victor. Victor doesn’t trust her, of course. but I did convince her to tell us both a bit more about Marshal technology as a peace offering. She has a marvelous device, beyond what I could have imagined, that can transmit signals and sound through invisible ‘electromagnetic’ waves. Imagine that they only gave her this so they could make sure she’s doing her homework!

She’s actually very close to finishing. She’ll be out by January, February at the latest. I guess I’ll also be leaving soon if this all works out for Victor. All I’ve wanted is to get away from this place, and yet it feels wrong to do it like this. I’d hoped they’d be proud of me.

This part is miserable. I work in science. I work in reality, in truths. I’m supposed to be bringing secrets to light, not hiding them myself. I don’t know how Victor can juggle so many of them in that cranium of his.

Refocusing. Electromagnet [sic] waves. If I can add a transmitter into the loop for the Switch, I might be able to connect to a person’s brain with minimal direct contact, possibly a receiver shallowly embedded into the spine. That would speed up the process significantly and, if I can get the full loop running, allow us to sedate someone remotely. Victor won’t let me even look at the Switch until he’s sure Mattie’s not watching; keeps checking hidden corners to see if she’s left anything to listen in with. I need to get back to it. It’s like an itch in my brain that needs scratching.

At least they both seem happy with me. Victor told me that, at this rate, I’ll have a dozen papers in Nature by the time I’m twenty-five, and Mattie agreed with him; first time they agreed on anything the whole time we were talking. I always believed that, but I think this is the first time anybody else has. I feel very…special. Two of the smartest people I’ve ever met believe in me. I have to be doing something right. This has to be right.

I did it. Oh God, I did it, I turned his mind off. I flipped a switch from behind the wall and the man was out. He was from out of town, so no testing how it reacts with the extraction device, but I did it! I did something Victor thought was impossible in a week!

I suppose it’s good that I could turn it back on. If I didn’t figure out why the frequency was off near the end, maybe he wouldn’t have woken up.

I went from spending months testing the basics of this skill to playing with life and death. Bad enough that I did it with a stranger but, goodness, what if I turn old Mrs. Walker off forever, consigning her cookie recipe to the void? What if I turn Mr. Barrows off and he can’t make sleds for the kids in January? I know everybody in town is…infected? Tainted? Complicit? But I don’t want them to suffer, not even for Victor’s sake.

I’ll double the testing on Lamech, and maybe some of our chickens too. Victor’s worried about Pastor Bean’s dinner invitation next week and doesn’t want to do the same trick he did when fighting the wizards. He wasn’t able to extract as much edenflesh as he injected into himself, even after multiple attempts at extracting it, and now that we’re trying to scrape every last bit, he’s concerned about losing even the slightest bit to his own body. Mattie said that multiple electromagnetic transmitters and receivers can function on the same frequency. If I can knock everybody at the party out, that’s our trump card. We might even be able to do some extractions while everybody’s out.

Our rooster is dead. Switch Lever Mark III didn’t kill it but paralyzed it from the neck down. Transmitter shorted out the spinal cord. I’d already spent the night testing, dawn was approaching and I didn’t want Father to find out, so I

What if I’m turning into a monster? Everybody thought Victor was up to something wicked when he first came to town. What if he’s been lying to me the whole time and he’s taught me to play god with people’s lives? What would we have done to that courier if I couldn’t wake him up or if he couldn’t move afterwards? People always thought I was too smart for my own good. Maybe I’m too smart for everybody’s good. Maybe I should

I took two days off from testing. Rather, I passed out midway through writing my notes and could barely stay awake long enough to do anything else. Luckily my parents were busy helping the Beans prepare for the dinner, and just assumed I was sick. They weren’t really wrong.

Went to see Victor. I just meant to update him on my status, but I sat down and I just felt all my worry pour out of my mouth. About leaving town. About my experiments. About the danger I proposed. He pointed out that I probably could have fixed the chicken’s neck with some copper wiring, but that I was clearly exhausted and probably wasn’t thinking straight, that I was pushing myself after going through an incredibly painful medical procedure, that we had no idea what living without edenflesh for the first time since I was born was doing to me psychologically. He even apologized for asking me to try and upgrade the Switch for his purposes in such a small amount of time, offered to try and work around Bean some other way while I keep testing.

Maybe…Mattie might’ve had a point. He’s been trying to claw his way out of town like a trapped rat for the past three weeks but he’s willing to stay longer just because of me. Because I couldn’t keep up. Couldn’t agree to it though. I’m just…scared. Scared of what’ll happen if I screw up the Switch, scared of what’ll happen if Victor accepts the invitation without it. Maybe he’s be safe if he just stayed home, made up an excuse. But knowing what Bean was willing to do to execute his mother, I don’t know. Maybe he’s planning something that’ll be just as bad if he doesn’t arrive. I’m supposed to be his trump card and all I could do for an hour was just sit and drink tea, watching the ripples every time he dropped a bit of sugar into it. Useless.

Ripples. Water ripples, like a frequency. Werewrightwork functions on symbolism. If I can match a frequency, maybe I can transmit to whatever’s holding it? Edenflesh vibrates; that’s why it makes that sound in glass. Does it also vibrate in the human body?

It works. Sort of. The Mark IV works less like a switch and more like throwing a rock in a pond. It sends out ripples on the same frequency as the edenflesh and through that, it reaches the mind and disrupts it. Anybody who doesn’t have edenflesh in their body should be unaffected: I’m fine, Mattie doesn’t treat herself like a local, and if Victor can’t extract any edenflesh from his body, he should be fine as well. I don’t have enough time to test it properly, but without the transmitter being in play, it’s far more likely to fail entirely than paralyze anyone, and if it does paralyze anybody, we can fix that. I can rig the previous models to echo the effect, receiving and transmitting, which should cover the pastor’s entire house.

Told Victor. Worked out the final details for tonight. We’ll wait for the evening when the children are asleep and the adults are drunk; unconsciousness won’t be surprising. We ask Mattie to make sure nobody stumbles upon us, and hit the Switch. If it works, extract the edenflesh, Victor does whatever he needs to do to find her bones, I leave a note for Mattie, pray she forgives me, and we escape. If not, fix any harm done and make another plan, have more time to get Mattie on board. If Bean tries anything, we hit the Switch early, and improvise.

The rest of the town, my father will keep them safe. Mattie, the Marshal will take care of her, I know. Victor’s alone. If anybody has to protect him, it’s going to be me.