Psion Read Online Free Page B

shut if I didn’t quit howling about it. After it was all over, they finally let me eat, in the hospital cafeteria. I ate until I got a bellyache, and fell asleep while they were telling me they’d told me so.
    The tech named Goba and a shifting handful of others took over my life after that. They told me when to eat, sleep, and wash; they gave me the food I ate and the clothes I wore and even the bed I slept in. My life was jammed into a coffin, a soft suffocating prison where every waking hour they were beating on the doors of my mind, trying to get me to answer, to come out or let them in. Nothing like it had ever happened to me before: no one had ever had that kind of control over me. No one had ever told me when to breathe, or had even cared if I kept breathing at all. The techs didn’t really care, either. I was a psion, and they weren’t; they didn’t even like psions-nobody normal liked a freak. They didn’t like this job or anyone who made them work at it. But it was their job, and they weren’t going to fail because of me. Goba told me they were going to make me into a telepath if they had to crack open my skull to get what they wanted; after a couple of days I started to believe him.
    A telepath was what I was supposed to be: a mind reader. Goba told me that the first day. He’d explained it all to me very slowly, like he was talking to a burnout, while I stuffed myself full of cafeteria food. There were other psionic “talents,” too: teleportation meant that you could move your own body from one place to another instantly, just by thinking about it; telekinesis meant that you could move objects the same way; pre-cognition, the wildcard power, showed you flashes of the future-or several futures-and left you to sort out the clues that led to the true one. Some psions could do more than one of those things. I only had one talent, telepathy. One too many.
    They spent days hypnotizing me, putting my mental guards to sleep while they probed around in my brain with machines I never wanted to know about: finding areas of resistance in my mind and walling them up, drowning the fears, finding my telepathic sense and dragging it out into the open. I woke up after every session thinking everything was fine, because that was how they’d programmed me to wake up . . . but always I woke up soaked with sweat, raw-throated or red-eyed or with a headache the size of a sun. And then they’d throw me into a hundred different exercises that were supposed to loosen the tension that still held my mind shut, to force me to follow and control the strands of my thoughts, to feel the power move and reach out with it. I had to tell them things like what picture they were looking at when I couldn’t see it, or what they’d eaten for breakfast, or whether they were telling me a lie.
    They always told me whether I was right or wrong, but I didn’t need it. I knew when something happened in my head that had never happened before; I felt the alien energy making static behind my eyes, a formless force stirring in buried rooms of my mind. But I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t shape it into anything like a thought message to project into someone else’s mind. I couldn’t even focus it clearly on somebody’s sendings, no matter how much feedback they gave me.
    Because from the first time I felt the psi power wake and stretch inside me, I hated the feel of it; and no matter how often they put me to sleep and made me swear I didn’t, that never changed. It was like being forced to do something I was ashamed of in public, over and over, with all of them watching; being smeared with their disgust every time I brushed against their minds: psions were scum, psions were a threat to every decent human being, because they had the power to invade another person’s life. Psions were freaks and they all knew I was one. . . .
    Whenever I got anything right, I figured they ought to be grateful, under the circumstances. But usually they only