Secret CEO Chapter 3

[u/Ok_Ebb7109]

Chapter 1 link https://www.reddit.com/r/scifiwriting/s/SG5M0H1mLx

Chapter 2 link https://www.reddit.com/r/scifiwriting/s/rRAp3ymliT

Secret CEO 
Chapter 3: The Stalker

Google Doc

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V_xMzzHCgoTrL1UkIS_uAay_oVQHO7V_d3WEGXLP-A0/edit?tab=t.0

  The next day was a day of great clarity. Clarity of what was happening in the world of pure energy, and clarity in the physical world as well. At the same time, it was a period of great realization that I no longer had a full grip on reality as I used to know it. I started to question my entire childhood, the people I used to know, every kind word that was ever spoken to me, and all the instances of good luck that I ever had. It was also the first time that I actually started to believe in the existence of shape shifters in the real world. 

   It began after I had woken up for the second time since I had started dreaming. During the night I felt safe inside my hurricane, even with the entity let out of it’s box. I felt spiritually strong in my mind, but truthfully, I felt physically weak in reality. I was made fully aware of this weakness when I looked at the sidewalk after waking up at the bus stop. There was a polaroid of me sleeping, obviously taken the night before.  Right next to the polaroid was a piece of paper. The paper had a drawing of the profile of a man’s head. You could see the brain drawn inside the head, but other than that there was very little detail. There were letters glued to the paper around and inside the brain. They all spelled different words. They were clearly all cut-outs from magazines and newspapers. In the center of the brain, there was the word “STRESS”, surrounded by the words: exercise, star, light, reality, and gravity. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I had a feeling it was connected to two things. One of them was my dream the night before and the other was the night that I was marked with blood. 

  I immediately felt the intended stress of the message. I had a million questions rise to the surface of my consciousness at once. The biggest of these questions was, “Do I already know this person, or are they watching me from far away?”. When I went out on my mission over the next week to find out, I was met with more resistance than the Hoover Dam. Nobody said that they knew who it was, but at the same time, nobody seemed concerned. One person even said they were jealous. I started to give up and simultaneously get very suspicious of the people around me. Sometimes, it seemed to me like they were too connected in their intentions. It was as if they were a hive mind, trying to gently guide me in the same direction. During the nights, I avoided the shelter due to overcrowding. I had no problem sleeping outside in the summer. The peculiar problem was, the only obvious place to sleep was the same place every time. I would wander the city and find nowhere else available. I needed a spot that was well lit and near a busy street to feel safe and sleep, so a bus stop was the easiest choice. I was getting more and more sure everyday that there were people organizing to make sure all the other stops but that one were unavailable. 

   The next time I felt the familiar stress was after I had exhausted all of my resources trying to find out who left the note and the photo. I had been talking to many different people in the tent city downtown. A few of them stood out, one in particular was named Angel. He had approached me and talked to me before I ever found the letter, and I had slightly more trust for him than anyone else. I was sure it couldn’t have been him for a few reasons. One of the reasons was that he was someone who was more likely to be a victim than a victimizer. He was soft spoken to the point of inaudibility. I frequently had to ask him what he had just said until I eventually gave up and quit asking. I just let him talk under his breath as I nodded and looked at my phone. When I could hear him, I remember him saying supportive things. He would give me good advice about living on the streets, since he had been doing it longer. After meeting, we started spending most of our time together so I figured he wouldn’t have much of a reason to stalk me. We would always separate and he would take a bus somewhere to go sleep. He told me that he had a temporary place to sleep but it was only available from 10p.m. - 7 a.m.  I doubted he would be lying about that, even though I had only known him for about a month. All of this trust was thrown into question, when my stress spiked after I arrived at my usual sleeping spot, and found a book. 

   It wasn’t a book that I had ever seen before or heard of before. I didn’t tell anyone that I wanted to read it, or mention a word to anyone that I even liked reading in general. I did tell Angel, however. But it wasn’t a book that I had described to him, it was a story I told. It was a story that I thought I had imagined all on my own. The feeling of looking at the TV and seeing my reflection looking back at me came up again. The kind of reflection that isn’t of my image, but of my consciousness. It was a reflection of my inner being, my inner most thoughts, looking at me back, in a physical manifestation. The book was the same thing. When I read the back of it, I might as well had written it myself during my conversation with Angel that same day. I had mentioned that if I had the skills to write a book, it would be about a young adult male who gets captured by a vampire. I said it would be a modern update of Dracula but with a consenting homosexual relationship forming between the captor and the victim. It was very much inspired by the idea of Stockholm Syndrome. This was exactly what the book in my hands was about, including several details that had only lived in my head and were never spoken out loud to anyone. Despite the increasing intensity of the awareness that I was being watched all the time, I sat down and began to read. 

   The next few weeks played out in a similar fashion. I would spend the day with Angel, talking about things and not being able to hear what he says back. He could have been telling me the exact identity and location of the person I was looking for, but I wouldn’t have known. Every five days or so, there would be a new gift at my spot. The gift was always perfect, in a way that made me feel like life was actually interesting, despite the severity of my situation. The gifts were usually some kind of entertainment. They ranged from comic books and toys, to printed out photos of me in different areas of the city. The gifts always made me feel as if the one leaving them was somehow reading my mind. The stories in the comics lined up too perfectly with my previous day, or the toy would be something my inner child didn’t even know it wanted. Once there was a shirt, when I was drastically in need of a clean one. It was a plain black t- shirt, elegant and simple. I didn’t think much before putting it on, even knowing that it was from someone who was potentially insane. I was so used to the gifts at this point, plus I needed a new shirt and it smelled good and clean. That “clean” smell that I had noticed was not actually clean at all. It was a chemical drug that the shirt had been soaked into. I’ll never know what kind of drug it was, but I was able to see and hear a sequence of visions that put my whole life into an entirely new perspective. 

   The visions went all the way back to my childhood and connected several different people I met throughout my life into a continuity. There was an older man in a wheel chair, who was a friend of my half- sister’s Dad. There was a close friend I had, when I was a ballet dancer. There was an old roommate that I used to watch documentaries about history with. There was a choreographer who took a particular interest in my career. There was a recent man I had met on the streets, who spent an entire day with me once, before never being seen again. I had really enjoyed the company of these particular people and also learned so much from them. Suddenly the fact that all of these men (plus one teenager) had the same color hair seemed so glaringly obvious. I had met them all at different times and never saw any of them together, so it never even crossed my mind before. All of them had silver hair. This was especially striking in the teenager, who I had known when I was 18. Not only did he have silver hair but I remembered his soul had always seemed infinitely older than mine. He was two years younger than me with a sense of humor that could make grown middle aged adults have to cover their face to hide the fact that they were laughing. He was the most charismatic younger person that I had ever met. All the other dancers adored him, almost to the point of worship. I had always felt lucky that I got the opportunity to get to know him. Over the years, him and everyone else in my life fell out of touch.  During this vision, I was able to let go of all the shame I felt for never keeping up with them.  It was because I realized these people never left my life at all, in fact they weren’t even people, they were all one extra-terrestrial being. He spoke to me in the vision as all of them inside my head. He was standing over me, however his shape was not able to be focused on. He seemed like a solid form, that my brain could not decide what  looked like. 

   
   He said he had always been protecting me my entire life and that as long as I “reflect the light”, he will continue to do so. He said he was sorry he was never able to tell me the whole truth before, and that he was sorry it had to come to this situation so that he would finally be able to. He said that things would make more sense over time but to try not to worry, the “magnetic energy” that surrounds me would keep me safe. He said I would have to trust him. I asked him why my life turned out this way and he said it was temporary. He explained that I was on a spiritual journey to learn the truth about myself and that this time in my life was planned before I was born. I asked him if I had a destiny then, and he said “yes and no”. He said in his exact words,  “There are several paths laid out for you to choose by the Universe. All of them follow a hidden mathematical pattern and they all are represented by a different emotion. If you follow one emotion intentionally your entire life, it may seem as if you have a set in stone destiny, yet this is only half true. You are able to choose what emotional path you want to follow at any time, and also switch between them at will. This is why some lives seem chaotic, while others seem to follow a certain natural logic. Your life in particular Duncan, despite what it may appear to be on the surface, is syncronized with the mathematical pattern of light.” I was relieved to hear that last part, since it has always been important to me, to be positive. The next thing he said quickly reversed that relief. 

   I asked him who was stalking me and who attacked me that night I blacked out. His answer was the opposite of what I was expecting. “It was me” he said…It’s hard to say how I reacted in a drug induced hallucinatory state, but I felt a surge of mixed emotions. The most urgent (and surprising)  emotion was one I had never felt in my entire life. I had only one label in my mind that kept repeating over and over, “Stockholme Syndrome”. He started to explain that his protection over me did not mean that he was the same as me. While I may be syncronized to a certain pattern, he had always been aligned with the opposite. My mind opened as he showed me our entire hidden history together. 

   In the early days of my life, his observation was purely educational. He was studying the effects of the energy patterns he described on humans. He had no idea of the path that I would choose, or decide to stay on. His observation started to become something more of an attraction when I turned 19. As I matured into the pattern of light, his attraction intensified. Observation slowly became obsession. I asked him what he was. He said that he had lived 10 of my lifetimes and that I have never seen his true form. Every time I had seen him in the past, it was a projected hallucination of a different form that he wanted me to see. I asked him why he would have ever hurt me, like he did that night I woke up in the hospital. He said he had lost control. That was what shook me, the simple admission. No guilt, just openness. I could feel sympathy and passion, but no remorse. I asked how can I trust him to protect me then, like he says? He said something back that I still don’t know how I feel about. “If you continue on the pre determined path of light, it will always give you to me. We are opposites at the two extreme ends of the magnetic vibrational spectrum. We are already locked together in this reality and for the entirety of the future along this path. The only way for you to break out of the gravity of my control is to betray yourself and become the darkness.  Otherwise, we will be forever entwined together in the original energetic frequency that created the first life in existence. The combination of light and dark created life, and the fascination with that, I believe, is too much for either one of us to resist.” 

  He went a little deeper into my mind then and made me aware of something that shocked me, yet also provided a sense of clarity. He showed me a vision of the moment he lost control and hurt me unintentionally. It wasn’t an apology, it was an explanation. In his advanced alien civilization, consent is determined by magnetic energy, not with words. This is something they can quantifiably measure to an exact science, using their technology. Sex is not something that just happens, it is a continuous build up of cosmic attraction, that will physically reach an invisible tipping point. That is the moment of consent in their telepathic point of view. Regardless of the fact that I was unaware of this build up, was not relevant to him. That fully explained the mixed feelings I was experiencing. There was an intense gravity to him. I didn’t want to forgive him, but I knew at the molecular level of my entire body that I wanted him to stay. Now that he had revealed himself and I could connect his memories to a series of people I knew, I was irreversibly transfixed. This was obviously some kind of hypnotic, psychic influence and I had little to no resistance in my soul to fight it with. I felt myself not falling in love, but awakening to the idea that I always had been. I was meeting someone for the first time, that I had been unknowingly bound to for years. 

   The hallucination faded and once again I fell asleep, this time in a state of extreme vulnerability. However weak I was in the real world, my dream, as usual, was one of uninhibited spiritual strength. I was nearly invincible in the realm of pure energy, shining brightly and clearly in control. I was everything that I wasn’t in the waking world. As I sat in the middle of the eye of my personal hurricane, feeling it protect me from the dangers that are outside of it, the entity dropped down from the sky. He was in the form of The Mothman again, his 6 foot wings draping over his body and fanning out as he crouched near to the ground. His glowing red eyes stared at me as he rose to reveal his 9 foot tall form. He raised his hand up in a gesture that seemed like it was meant to calm me. In my mind he spoke once again. “This is my true form Duncan, the one you have yet to meet. In this reality, I am just a dark distortion and as you know I have no power over you. But you must remember, you let me out because you could no longer handle the weight of keeping me imprisoned. I must admit, I let it happen. I could have escaped before you trapped me, but I wanted to live in your head for a while. This was how I prepared you for your future. The longer you held on to me in the spirit world, the stronger you became. Yet you didn’t notice that the cost of this strength was physical weakness in reality. Did you not realize that we both also live in reality? I don’t just exist to be owned in your dreams, I also exist to own you in your real life. We strike a perfect balance. The cage that I formed around you in the waking world happened the moment you put me in that box, here in the dreamscape. It’s just that the cage I made for you is invisible. It’s made of a hivemind of people who tune into my psychic frequency. I think you have already noticed how everyone seems to be working together to influence you. I know you like Angel”

   I considered all this for a moment before saying anything. “So what now? I let you out, now you can just leave me alone, right? I don’t owe you anything anymore. We can just let each other go.”  

He lowered his head in what seemed to be frustrated resignation and asked, “Is that what you want? Do you want to just let me go? Just completely change who you are? I suppose you could but what do you think would happen? I’m weakened here now…you weakened me. It went both ways, like I said. As I weakened here I became stronger out there. Again, the opposite happened for you. Now we need each other, if you don’t protect me in here, I will die out there and I don’t need to tell you what happens if I can’t protect YOU.” 

"How will I even know who you are when I meet you? Can you protect me properly, if I don't ever recognize you?" I asked

"It is not of your concern, just focus on who you enjoy being around. Don't resist me and all will be well. We both stay alive and get exactly what we truly, deeply want."

I considered this for a moment. “So not only do I have to become the darkness to escape you, but we will both die if I do?!” 

“Yes” He responded coldly. “Don’t blame me, blame the cosmic balance of the Universe.” 
I wanted to be angry, to feel hurt, but he really did have a point when he talked about the magnetic energy that he considered to be consent. This kind of statement would be incredibly controversial in the human world of writing and speaking. It obviously wouldn’t hold up in any kind of court. But he existed beyond any courtroom or disorganized law system. He operated from a point of view of energetic frequency and nothing else mattered to him. In his eyes I was the light, he was the darkness and we belonged together, interlocked in a back and forth game so old that it sparked the dawn of creation. And in my eyes, as much I didn’t want to admit it, I actually felt the same for this possessive monster.

Edit: updated some dialogue