A Midnight Mind

Chapter 20: Scrubbers

For the next half hour, Neil provided a summary of what he knew, and his theories on what the dream man could possibly be. They concluded that the dream man was visiting three, possibly four of the victims. Ethan described everything that happened between him and the dream man when he encountered him in the train, which confirmed Neil's suspicion that the dream man was, in fact, attacking people, and likely causing the deaths. Further, that the dream man existed in the Worldmind, and not regular dreams, like most of the victims thought he did.

Since none of the victims were active in the Worldmind, they were either latent--unaware of their psychic potential--or wholly non-psychic. However, since three of the six people who have been visited so far have been latents, the rest were likely latents as well. That the dream man didn't go after Ethan once he became aware of his ability meant that the dream man was perhaps unable or unwilling to target aware psychics.

Ultimately, Ethan and Neil agreed that the dream man was pulling latents into the Worldmind and attacking them, causing them to experience brain death as a result of their psychic projections being functionally destroyed. As for why he was doing that to people, they could only guess. Neil suggested that he might be trying to eliminate future psychics, but Ethan was having doubts about that after remembering the way the dream man was begging for help.

"What if he's really in trouble?" he asked. "He certainly looked like hell."

Neil shook his head. "Come on. He's been attacking people. If a random guy started strangling you and screaming 'you have to help me!' you'd just assume he was nuts."

"So you think he's just crazy? That's it?"

"You'd be surprised how many psychics have a screw loose. I mean, there's something different about our brains that gives us our psychic potential. For some of us, those differences are more... obvious. From what I hear, nine times out of ten, a rogue projection isn't someone intentionally abusing the Worldmind, but actually a mentally ill psychic who's not fully aware of his actions."

"Wow. Okay, so if you're right, what do we do to stop him?"

"We'd have to find his physical self. Get him some help. Worst case scenario... we hand him off to the Scrubbers."

"...The janitors?"

Neil rolled his eyes. "No. Scrubbers are--I mean, I've only heard Ms. Stafford mention them a couple times. They're called in for major psychic crimes, and I think murder more than qualifies. Basically, Scrubbers scrub clean the rogue projection's memories. I don't mean they fade them away, only for them to come back later. They actually find and remove any and all memories that makes the rogue aware of their psychic potential. Effectively, they turn them back into latents."

Ethan gulped. "That's pretty intense. But... the rogues, they're not exactly punished, are they? I mean, they are, but they don't even know they are."

"To me, that's what makes it so terrifying. You've only been an aware for a few days, but for those of us who have been aware for months or years? That's huge amounts of time suddenly going up in smoke. Anything you've ever thought, felt, learned in the Worldmind? Gone. And not just that, but you're wiped of associated memories, too. Any time you talked about psychic stuff, any psychic friends you have, you'll forget about them. If a song reminds you of the Worldmind, you'll forget the song. It's like your brain will suddenly have all this empty space in it, and you won't even know why."

Thinking of it that way, Ethan could see why Neil was so scared of the idea. Just knowing that Scrubbers existed and that surgical memory wipes were possible made Ethan vaguely concerned that it would happen to him.