LJIdol 9.31 - “The future outwits all our certitudes”
Gabby was supposed to be her father.
Not literally, of course, but she was the only child and her father wanted passionately that she take over the family business and run it as he would have.
Exactly as he would have.
But there was a problem and that problem was that, simply, that there was no way to make that happen. David, her father, had read books on parenting styles which were supposed to reliably instill children with the parents' moralities but a quick search of the results of this found it to be far from foolproof. Indeed, there was a not-insignificant chance that it would lead her to hate him and he dreaded to think what that would do to his legacy.
What would happen if after he left the business to her, she changed her mind? What if she changed his long-standing policies on labour or pay or benefits? Even if he left some sort of orders in the bylaws of the business or a whole book which detailed the sort of thing he would do, the bylaws could be worked around, interpreted in a way that was not how he would do it. And this wasn't even taking into account the potentialities of new, strange advances in the future. Gabby's decisions might be different from what his were, might be wrong.
It was unacceptable.
Unacceptable.
Which was why, after a night of heavy drinking, brainstorming and contemplating the irreversible fact of his aging, he stumbled upon the idea of black magic.
It was a strange idea, true, but as long as there was an unknown quantity in the mix to which no other solution had been found so he thought that he might as well look to unorthodox solutions as the more common ones had borne no fruit.
Truth to tell, it wasn't all that difficult to learn the stuff. There were whole stores dedicated to teaching people magic, just packed wall to wall with books on the subject and other sorts of related paraphernalia. Sure, most of it was just hippy bullcrap about harmony and crystals but a lot of it? A lot of it was about applying your focus and your will to the world.
And, well, David had no small skill at that already.
It started small at first: a carefully-worded memo coinciding with a favourable vote from the board, a whispered word and a careful hand gesture at a school board meeting saw his daughter's school cutting art and sports budgets to turn away from frivolous things and focus on STEM and other business-related subjects. They were things which weren't probable but which he couldn't be sure he was causing.
So he went deeper.
Things which were less likely began to happen. He burned and effigy of the logos of one of his competitors and soonafter they folded catastrophically. A couple dolls tied together and a politician whose policies would have put obstacles in the way of his company's growth was found necking with an intern who was absolutely not his wife. A rival voluntarily committed himself after he placed the man's name into a circle designed to induce unending nightmares.
He summoned up the shadows of long-dead mystics and minor spirits for advice, paying the latter as they asked and the former in time away from the fearsome land of the dead. With their advice, he pieced together what needed to be done: her wanted her mind in business to be his but he didn't want to live as her: he had no desire to be a young woman or live out a young woman's life, he just wanted his legacy to be attended to as he would have attended to it.
It wasn't that he wanted to do her injury, he just didn't want her to do injury to his business.
So, under the council of John Dee, Dr. Heinrich Faustus and evil the mysterious and much-storied Simon Magus, he crafted a spell to make a copy of himself and attach it to every part of Gabby's mind which was related to business in general and David's company (soon to be hers) in particular.
All that was necessary was taking a little time away from the magical studies to do what he would have liked to be doing anyway: spend a little time with his daughter. Over the course of a week, Gabby and he took their meals together as they so rarely did. Gabby was overjoyed, of course, to reconnect with her father and David? Well, David simply chose his words particularly carefully and like the witches of old, cast spells over the meals he made.
On the seventh night, after the meal had finished (he was sure to end the meal with a very specifically worded phrase each night before he cleared the table), he felt... something.
Then he collapsed to the floor, dead as a doornail.
And then he woke up.
Sort of.
"Sort of" in that it was not, exactly, David himself who woke up; David was dead. But in every way which counted, the things which were not David's meat roused themselves.
It was 12:01am Gabby's eighteenth birthday. He didn't recognize the house but he recognized the feeling of his sister asleep on the first floor. He didn't know how he recognized it but he did. David realized, numbly, that he should be afraid. He couldn't feel his heartbeat, he didn't feel air in his ears, didn't have hands with which to touch things. He should be afraid. Weeping. Screaming. But it felt somehow natural. Felt somehow correct.
"There you are," came his daughter's voice. He felt it... it was hard to say where he felt it. He had no vocabulary for where he felt it but he did. It wasn't the vibrations of air through a throat and into an ear but something vibrating along his consciousness and he turned and he saw her and, somehow, she saw him.
"Gabby," he said, trying to reach out. This was a bad move. There was a surge of violent red pain that coursed through him when he extended himself too far toward her; he recoiled back to where he'd been before, unsure what else to do. "What's... what's happening?"
"Just what you wanted, father," she replied, "Today your company becomes my company and just like you wanted, you're coming along for the ride."
David reeled a bit before a surge of something like pride coursed through him, "Am I? You're accepting my help?"
Her laugh was fearsome to him. With his new sight, his new feelings, he could almost taste the bitterness in it, the cold hatred. She gestured to a pile of books at her side, books fair wafting with old echoes of his dabblings and flesh, "No."
He twisted about in place, the shock of, well, not being dead wearing off, making him more aware of the circle beneath him which bound him in place, much as he'd bound Dee, Faustus and Magus when he was alive. "Then... what's going on here? I. I should be... you shouldn't need to conjure me up. I should be..."
"What should you be, hm?" she snorted and held up a piece of paper with something written on it.
He couldn't say what it was but it hurt him to look at it but he didn't have a body or a face and he couldn't turn away, couldn't turn away or run and slammed himself into the far side of the circle and it hurt and
Gabby let out a slow, shuddering breath and turned the paper away from him, a cold smile on her lips. "Did you think that I wouldn't... wouldn't notice a bunch of books coming into my house? Wouldn't notice you suddenly taking a liking to burning things? To drawing on the floors? To talking funny for no apparent reason? Did you think I wouldn't notice how suddenly everything was going your way and couldn't hear you when you spoke out loud to nothing at all about how you could rewrite my brain?"
The thing which was and was not David tried to find words. "It... it wasn't like that, Gabby, I just wanted to ensure--"
"Your legacy, yeah," she drawled, her fists clenched. "But funny thing? You work ten hours a day. School only takes six. And the people you conjure? They don't have loyalty. They'll teach anyone who asks because it's better than where they are the rest of the time. Going back there... they'll do anything, teach anyone just to stay out of there just a few seconds more."
"I was only going to do it about the company, sweetie. Only about that, I prom--"
"Silence."
The word reverberated in him, through him, around him, striking him dumb. His mind was screaming for a chance to explain but whatever mechanism he now spoke through would not operate.
Her eyes were cold as she stepped right up to the edge of the circle and he saw some of her mother in there, yes, but more than that, he saw himself as he must have looked to his employees, to his rivals, to the Presences who had advised him. The jaw was different, as were the cheekbones but the nose was the same and her eyes were an inferno to his strange new senses.
"I would have done my best to make you proud," she whispered--he would have preferred her to yell--"I wanted nothing on this Earth but to show you that I knew how to run the company. I just wanted a chance to get in there and try and maybe make mistakes and learn from you but it just wasn't enough to be like you." The tears from her blazing eyes were no less aflame as she spoke, "You..."
She fell silent for a moment, wiped at her face and took a deep breath. For a moment she closed her eyes and he saw the licks of flame in her tears spread into her aura and it went up as if the stuff of her soul was gasoline, an inferno that only he could see.
"You thought I was caught in your spell, father. But I saw what you were doing every step of the way. I cursed you, but gave you every opportunity to turn away. Your hands betrayed you when you wrote every spell you tried to put on me, your ears and lips betrayed you when your invocations went into the first meals you'd cooked for me since I was ten. I would have forgiven you so much if you'd only wanted to start taking meals with me..."
He writhed in place and tried to think back over it all and now the eyes of his memory--eyes which needed no brain nor light to see--saw it all. Saw himself putting the wrong concoctions into the food, saying the wrong words, forging the wrong connection. He made begging gestures, gestures of supplication, trying to exude a desire to speak from every pore of his not-a-body.
"Speak," she whispered and he was sore afraid because in his non-eyes, she was burning white hot and he feared what her touch would do to him, "And speak truth."
"What... what about the company? I'm dead but please... tell me you'll run it well!" He'd not meant to say that. He'd meant to ask her forgiveness, to assure her he'd try to be the father in death that he was not in life but the words would not make themselves heard to her.
The flame grew brighter as she smiled and the flames licking her lips were the colour of years and years of cold hate.
"It's mine now," said his daughter who was like a sun to his eyes, who was filled with anger and power he had never dared to touch. And yet her words were quiet, measured, as carefully chosen as all of his own dabbling magic had been, "I'm going to sell it to an idiot for a king's ransom" she promised, "And if it's not consumed and forgotten inside of five years, it'll only be because it has become a colossal failure." The sun touched its chest then, "I will be the only legacy you leave, father."
The flames died down then and she was just a girl again, a girl whose only parent in the world had betrayed her and died when he might just as easily done anything else. He saw that his legacy could have been one where he was remembered fondly, where he was lamented and missed.
Instead...
She let out a sigh that was filled with powers he could not name and implications he did not wish to consider.
"I'm going to be sure you're there for it all," she continued, suddenly sounding tired, "You're going to watch me get rich while you lose everything you ever worked for." Her eyes caught fire again and he wished again that he was alive that he might have wet himself because without his body to push the feeling out of him, he was unable to be rid of the fear the look inspired.
"And then I'll send you wherever it is that Faustus and the rest of them go."
Not literally, of course, but she was the only child and her father wanted passionately that she take over the family business and run it as he would have.
Exactly as he would have.
But there was a problem and that problem was that, simply, that there was no way to make that happen. David, her father, had read books on parenting styles which were supposed to reliably instill children with the parents' moralities but a quick search of the results of this found it to be far from foolproof. Indeed, there was a not-insignificant chance that it would lead her to hate him and he dreaded to think what that would do to his legacy.
What would happen if after he left the business to her, she changed her mind? What if she changed his long-standing policies on labour or pay or benefits? Even if he left some sort of orders in the bylaws of the business or a whole book which detailed the sort of thing he would do, the bylaws could be worked around, interpreted in a way that was not how he would do it. And this wasn't even taking into account the potentialities of new, strange advances in the future. Gabby's decisions might be different from what his were, might be wrong.
It was unacceptable.
Unacceptable.
Which was why, after a night of heavy drinking, brainstorming and contemplating the irreversible fact of his aging, he stumbled upon the idea of black magic.
It was a strange idea, true, but as long as there was an unknown quantity in the mix to which no other solution had been found so he thought that he might as well look to unorthodox solutions as the more common ones had borne no fruit.
Truth to tell, it wasn't all that difficult to learn the stuff. There were whole stores dedicated to teaching people magic, just packed wall to wall with books on the subject and other sorts of related paraphernalia. Sure, most of it was just hippy bullcrap about harmony and crystals but a lot of it? A lot of it was about applying your focus and your will to the world.
And, well, David had no small skill at that already.
It started small at first: a carefully-worded memo coinciding with a favourable vote from the board, a whispered word and a careful hand gesture at a school board meeting saw his daughter's school cutting art and sports budgets to turn away from frivolous things and focus on STEM and other business-related subjects. They were things which weren't probable but which he couldn't be sure he was causing.
So he went deeper.
Things which were less likely began to happen. He burned and effigy of the logos of one of his competitors and soonafter they folded catastrophically. A couple dolls tied together and a politician whose policies would have put obstacles in the way of his company's growth was found necking with an intern who was absolutely not his wife. A rival voluntarily committed himself after he placed the man's name into a circle designed to induce unending nightmares.
He summoned up the shadows of long-dead mystics and minor spirits for advice, paying the latter as they asked and the former in time away from the fearsome land of the dead. With their advice, he pieced together what needed to be done: her wanted her mind in business to be his but he didn't want to live as her: he had no desire to be a young woman or live out a young woman's life, he just wanted his legacy to be attended to as he would have attended to it.
It wasn't that he wanted to do her injury, he just didn't want her to do injury to his business.
So, under the council of John Dee, Dr. Heinrich Faustus and evil the mysterious and much-storied Simon Magus, he crafted a spell to make a copy of himself and attach it to every part of Gabby's mind which was related to business in general and David's company (soon to be hers) in particular.
All that was necessary was taking a little time away from the magical studies to do what he would have liked to be doing anyway: spend a little time with his daughter. Over the course of a week, Gabby and he took their meals together as they so rarely did. Gabby was overjoyed, of course, to reconnect with her father and David? Well, David simply chose his words particularly carefully and like the witches of old, cast spells over the meals he made.
On the seventh night, after the meal had finished (he was sure to end the meal with a very specifically worded phrase each night before he cleared the table), he felt... something.
Then he collapsed to the floor, dead as a doornail.
And then he woke up.
Sort of.
"Sort of" in that it was not, exactly, David himself who woke up; David was dead. But in every way which counted, the things which were not David's meat roused themselves.
It was 12:01am Gabby's eighteenth birthday. He didn't recognize the house but he recognized the feeling of his sister asleep on the first floor. He didn't know how he recognized it but he did. David realized, numbly, that he should be afraid. He couldn't feel his heartbeat, he didn't feel air in his ears, didn't have hands with which to touch things. He should be afraid. Weeping. Screaming. But it felt somehow natural. Felt somehow correct.
"There you are," came his daughter's voice. He felt it... it was hard to say where he felt it. He had no vocabulary for where he felt it but he did. It wasn't the vibrations of air through a throat and into an ear but something vibrating along his consciousness and he turned and he saw her and, somehow, she saw him.
"Gabby," he said, trying to reach out. This was a bad move. There was a surge of violent red pain that coursed through him when he extended himself too far toward her; he recoiled back to where he'd been before, unsure what else to do. "What's... what's happening?"
"Just what you wanted, father," she replied, "Today your company becomes my company and just like you wanted, you're coming along for the ride."
David reeled a bit before a surge of something like pride coursed through him, "Am I? You're accepting my help?"
Her laugh was fearsome to him. With his new sight, his new feelings, he could almost taste the bitterness in it, the cold hatred. She gestured to a pile of books at her side, books fair wafting with old echoes of his dabblings and flesh, "No."
He twisted about in place, the shock of, well, not being dead wearing off, making him more aware of the circle beneath him which bound him in place, much as he'd bound Dee, Faustus and Magus when he was alive. "Then... what's going on here? I. I should be... you shouldn't need to conjure me up. I should be..."
"What should you be, hm?" she snorted and held up a piece of paper with something written on it.
He couldn't say what it was but it hurt him to look at it but he didn't have a body or a face and he couldn't turn away, couldn't turn away or run and slammed himself into the far side of the circle and it hurt and
Gabby let out a slow, shuddering breath and turned the paper away from him, a cold smile on her lips. "Did you think that I wouldn't... wouldn't notice a bunch of books coming into my house? Wouldn't notice you suddenly taking a liking to burning things? To drawing on the floors? To talking funny for no apparent reason? Did you think I wouldn't notice how suddenly everything was going your way and couldn't hear you when you spoke out loud to nothing at all about how you could rewrite my brain?"
The thing which was and was not David tried to find words. "It... it wasn't like that, Gabby, I just wanted to ensure--"
"Your legacy, yeah," she drawled, her fists clenched. "But funny thing? You work ten hours a day. School only takes six. And the people you conjure? They don't have loyalty. They'll teach anyone who asks because it's better than where they are the rest of the time. Going back there... they'll do anything, teach anyone just to stay out of there just a few seconds more."
"I was only going to do it about the company, sweetie. Only about that, I prom--"
"Silence."
The word reverberated in him, through him, around him, striking him dumb. His mind was screaming for a chance to explain but whatever mechanism he now spoke through would not operate.
Her eyes were cold as she stepped right up to the edge of the circle and he saw some of her mother in there, yes, but more than that, he saw himself as he must have looked to his employees, to his rivals, to the Presences who had advised him. The jaw was different, as were the cheekbones but the nose was the same and her eyes were an inferno to his strange new senses.
"I would have done my best to make you proud," she whispered--he would have preferred her to yell--"I wanted nothing on this Earth but to show you that I knew how to run the company. I just wanted a chance to get in there and try and maybe make mistakes and learn from you but it just wasn't enough to be like you." The tears from her blazing eyes were no less aflame as she spoke, "You..."
She fell silent for a moment, wiped at her face and took a deep breath. For a moment she closed her eyes and he saw the licks of flame in her tears spread into her aura and it went up as if the stuff of her soul was gasoline, an inferno that only he could see.
"You thought I was caught in your spell, father. But I saw what you were doing every step of the way. I cursed you, but gave you every opportunity to turn away. Your hands betrayed you when you wrote every spell you tried to put on me, your ears and lips betrayed you when your invocations went into the first meals you'd cooked for me since I was ten. I would have forgiven you so much if you'd only wanted to start taking meals with me..."
He writhed in place and tried to think back over it all and now the eyes of his memory--eyes which needed no brain nor light to see--saw it all. Saw himself putting the wrong concoctions into the food, saying the wrong words, forging the wrong connection. He made begging gestures, gestures of supplication, trying to exude a desire to speak from every pore of his not-a-body.
"Speak," she whispered and he was sore afraid because in his non-eyes, she was burning white hot and he feared what her touch would do to him, "And speak truth."
"What... what about the company? I'm dead but please... tell me you'll run it well!" He'd not meant to say that. He'd meant to ask her forgiveness, to assure her he'd try to be the father in death that he was not in life but the words would not make themselves heard to her.
The flame grew brighter as she smiled and the flames licking her lips were the colour of years and years of cold hate.
"It's mine now," said his daughter who was like a sun to his eyes, who was filled with anger and power he had never dared to touch. And yet her words were quiet, measured, as carefully chosen as all of his own dabbling magic had been, "I'm going to sell it to an idiot for a king's ransom" she promised, "And if it's not consumed and forgotten inside of five years, it'll only be because it has become a colossal failure." The sun touched its chest then, "I will be the only legacy you leave, father."
The flames died down then and she was just a girl again, a girl whose only parent in the world had betrayed her and died when he might just as easily done anything else. He saw that his legacy could have been one where he was remembered fondly, where he was lamented and missed.
Instead...
She let out a sigh that was filled with powers he could not name and implications he did not wish to consider.
"I'm going to be sure you're there for it all," she continued, suddenly sounding tired, "You're going to watch me get rich while you lose everything you ever worked for." Her eyes caught fire again and he wished again that he was alive that he might have wet himself because without his body to push the feeling out of him, he was unable to be rid of the fear the look inspired.
"And then I'll send you wherever it is that Faustus and the rest of them go."