The Editor, Part II

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Content warnings:

• Ergonomic chairs

Pain was sitting at his grand desk in his even grander study, drooling over the sensation in his head. It was a familiar feeling, but every time he had it, it was always a bit different. Sometimes it was hot and sticky like fresh caramel, other times it was cold and biting like a scalpel. Yet every such feeling has a common aftertaste of blood-chilling dread.

Now, as Pain let this new sensation consume him, as he let the dread pour into the depths of his being, making every hair on his body stand at attention, making his lips curve into a wide grin, making his eyes roll into their sockets, he remembered why he was doing it. This feeling of dread was pure ecstasy, and he lived to bathe in it!

On the wooden desk in front of him was a rather big, old-fashioned-looking compass in a black, metal casing with silver engravings. Its fancy silver needle under sapphire glass rotated wildly in every direction, slowing down at times and speeding back up. Its ebony scale had silver markings that weren’t showing North or South. Indeed, nobody knew what the extravagant silver letters meant, for the language was ancient and long-forgotten. Yet, the compass still worked, doing its job perfectly every single time. Except for today.

As his brain got numb to pleasure, Pain let out a huge sigh, wiped off the tears of joy, and was able to once again focus on his compass. Usually, when he sensed a new Blessed awaken, he’d grab this instrument, so it would show him where his new target was. But this time, when Pain held the compass and focused on the feeling of the new Blessed, the needle kept rotating.

He couldn’t let it slide. All Blessed were his! The world shouldn’t know about their existence, so all of them had to be locked up in Pain’s dungeon for him alone to exploit.

Some of them could manipulate the bodily functions of humans, making their hearts beat faster or slower. Such Blessed were too dangerous to leave alive, so Pain killed them the moment his compass led him to them. Other Blessed possessed useful Gifts, such as seeing the past, mind-reading, or cooking. No safe or bank account was secure if you could simply watch the owner type in the password a few moments earlier. No secret was safe if your mind was an open book.

Exploiting the Blessed with such Gifts secretly made Pain as wealthy as he bothered to become. It paid for the dungeon, too. Each new Blessed in his collection was an ecstasy. He hunted them down, captured them, mated with their bodies, letting the feeling of dread swallow him whole, but then, the feeling always got old, making him search for a new Blessed.

There were no other options, it seemed. With a sigh, Pain stood up from his grand yet ergonomic armchair, and picked up the compass from the desk. If it didn’t work here at his study, maybe it would work at some other location? Maybe something was interfering with its Gift? It was time for a worldwide trip, and he was going to enjoy himself. The hunt itself was sometimes as sweet as capturing the new Blessed and mating with them. Whoever this new Blessed was, he, Pain, would find them and make them his.

~*~

Emil was going through the list of names. All of them were different people from different countries and of different nationalities, but they all shared the same fate: they were missing. It was fine to sit on a rather ergonomic chair in a well-lit office paid for with the government money, mulling over the possibility of a connection between these disappearances. But it was no possibility, it was certainty.

He couldn’t sense people the way Harvester most likely could, but he could feel the echo they left behind. By touching personal belongings of the people in the list, Emil knew for a fact that they were Blessed. And since all of them have disappeared, someone was doing it deliberately. Harvester, whoever they were, wanted these people for themselves.

The key to finding them could be as simple as stumbling upon one personal belonging. Just one! If the owner was a Blessed who wasn’t abducted like the rest of them, then the owner was either Harvester themselves, or it was an individual soon to be abducted by them. If Emil could stumble upon such a person, they could be used as bait for Harvester. But if the bait attempt failed, it could make Harvester even more careful, maybe eliminating all possibility of finding them or their current victims.

The disappearances had to stop. So, despite the risk, Emil kept traveling everywhere he could, protected by Emilia and sponsored by the government, touching the belongings of the people who had gone missing. Most of them were completely ordinary, as much as unique human beings could be ordinary, but every once in a while, he felt an imprint of a Gift of a Blessed upon the object. The list grew, but they weren’t getting closer to finding Harvester. It was like they suspected that Emil’s Gift could exist, and so they were acting very carefully. Having a smart and careful enemy was frustrating. Why couldn’t it be like in the movies?

Emilia was half-sitting on a sofa in the same room, occasionally looking towards her brother, but mostly just reading a novel. As long as she was near her brother, Harvester could not sense his Gift. Regardless, it was a drag. Travelling all over the world was fun and educational, but she wanted to date, to have privacy, and to live her own life that wasn’t so close to Emil. But she also loved him. There was no way she’d leave him open to be sensed and either captured or killed by Harvester.

She sighed, looking at Emil again. What was he hoping to see between the lines of that list of names? Every analysis the professional investigators made turned out to be a bust. The only thing known about Harvester was that they could sense the Blessed from a distance. It was unknown if they collected their victims for personal use or if they killed them somewhere private. If they actually used the Gifts of their victims by using torture, drugs, or some other means, nobody knew how powerful and dangerous Harvester could be.

So, there weren’t many options left for Emilia. She didn’t care about the abducted people, their families, or national security. Perhaps there was a time when she did care, but it was some time ago. Now, she just had to protect her brother, and if it meant giving up many of her freedoms, then it was the load she had to bear. Emilia just hoped it would all end soon.

~*~

Sitting at her desk back at her cozy home, Lilia re-read the answer from the author of the article about horse racing three or four times. His mind was overwritten the same way the majority of the world was. He didn’t remember writing anything about normal horses. In his mind, the article was always about the stupid ones. He attributed the fact that Lilia was able to revert the change to a glitch in the Onlinepedia. Something happened to the servers, which made the website think there was a different version of the article, when, in fact, that version never existed.

Indeed, it was possible that Lilia was going crazy. It was possible that Edik’s confusion was a coincidence, and her memories were constructed by her brain. There was a way to test it. If she made a change, but the word stayed the same, it could mean she didn’t actually have the power over the universe. Indeed, her hitting the Revert button didn’t work, so maybe she had no powers. Yet, just one test wasn’t enough. If her power had limits, then simply failing to change the reality could mean that she merely found those limits, not that she was crazy and never had any powers to begin with.

What else could she try to change? What needed to happen to make the universe a better place? There were so many candidates, but one of them attracted her attention.

She contacted one of the main editors of the Onlinepedia and asked for her permission to delete the article about war. The justification was that Lilia wanted to see and record the world’s reaction. In the era of “modern art,” any action could be called a “performance” and any reaction to that “performance” could be claimed to be exactly what the “artist” was hoping for. Indeed, the editor was thrilled to be a part of this. After all, the article could be easily restored after a while.

If there were no article about war, then no wars would have ever existed. Historians knew some of what happened even in prehistoric times, so the deleted article about war would mean that it could only have existed so long ago in so few places that no evidence survived.

So many lives would have been saved, so much pain averted, and so much technology never invented. Indeed, it was possible that the second she hit the button, her computer would disappear. Yet, she alone would know that something changed. One could not miss cars, antibiotics, or vibrators if one never knew they existed. She already did a highly unethical thing by changing people’s lives without their consent when she edited the article about horse races. Adding another unethical action to her karma was child’s play.

Lilia sighed heavily, feeling already familiar race of her heart as her mouse pointer hovered over the red Delete button, then pressed it. The Onlinepedia asked for confirmation. With numb fingers, Lilia typed, “Yes, I truly want to delete the article named War.” The website told her that another editor had to confirm the deletion as well. Seconds passed. The digits of the clock on her screen changed. More seconds passed. The website reloaded, showing the article in gray.

Lilia looked around. Everything in her small apartment looked the same: the rug, the paintings, the old wallpaper and furniture, the new computer. Her hand reached over and opened a few drawers. Her vibrators were still there, as well as empty boxes of some medicine.

Her fingers typed search queries, and the answers made Lilia let out a long sigh. Nothing changed. All other encyclopedias described wars as if nothing had happened.

Okay, what else could she change? Something that probably wouldn’t be detrimental to the world, but important enough to be shown by the sources.

Okay, let’s make it so the knights were only allowed to wear their swords on the left side of their bodies. And make chocolate chip cookies illegal in all countries but Belgium. And stop people from calling the oat “juice” milk. And outlaw ergonomic chairs unless they were yellow…

The more articles Lilia changed, the stupider the very idea became. What was she doing? Why? Wouldn’t it be better to just continue to live her life and see what happens? If she indeed could control reality, sooner or later, she’d learn.

With a bad feeling in her mouth, she changed the last article by turning blue the petals of some flower she had never heard of, turned off her computer, and went to bed. Tomorrow, she’d know what to do. Or at least she’d stop caring that much.

~*~

As the night was in full power, a guard was making her rounds at the local botanical garden. Not a soul was around here, only countless types of flora, lit by the moonlight. What a boring job it would’ve been if not for modern technology. A podcast in Japanese was playing in her earbuds, and a textbook for the language was waiting for her in the guardroom. She never noticed how the petals of one of the flowers turned blue. How could she? They were always blue after all…

The End of Part II

Anton Anderson, 2025

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