The Drug of Fear

We don’t work hard enough at the basic human qualities. We must remind ourselves what the simplest and most basic words mean — words like honesty and truth. We have too many complicated pieces of machinery, computers, and we’re trying to outsmart life with their help. All we think about is how to get on best and how to get more for ourselves. We’ve gone too far in that direction. We’ve lost our sense of balance.

Lech Walesa.

Quoted in The Book of Lech Walesa.

A man moved through the verandis fields, his hand gently touching their stalks as he made his way through.

He had walked these very fields a hundred times before. The motions had begun to feel like some dream from which he was destined to never wake. Sunlight streamed off the multicoloured plants as if they were themsleves reflective of its rays, like natural mirrors where the image of the world and the person within were twisted by fear. A breeze caressed the fields and they responded with their natural dance, swaying to the left and the right. He was familiar with this world of created fear, of hidden darkness and shadow. This had become his life, and the feeling was as intoxicating as it was sickening. He found power here in peoples’ weaknesses; in not necessarily the thirst for fear so many knew, but in the need to feel alive.

Adam Garcia paused and signalled behind him for Jeremy to stop. They had reached where they wanted to be, though this area of fields did not look noticeably any different to the rest.

He turned to the boy beside him. "You’ll start here," he said. Then he took one of the four baskets Jeremy had been carrying, each with their three separate dividers. "Fill one of these baskets to the top, then take the next. Most days you’ll make a good half-dozen of these trips. When you’re done I’ll show you the processing plant for the verandis fruit and how we perform the synthesis."

Jeremy nodded slowly, listening. "There are three kinds of verandis fruit. Is that why there are three divisions to each basket?"

"That’s right. We don’t want to mix them together. The juices of each fruit are what give the drug a different strength," Adam said. "Green verandis can give a mild sense of fear, a quick thrill. The red fruit gives a much stronger effect, like the power held in the worst of nightmares. Subjection to blue fear, pure fear, can be enough to drive people insane it’s so strong. It completely overwhelms a person. It’s used for… information extraction in some instances by the military." He pulled a face. "Torture."

"I don’t think I have ever really understood it," Jeremy said hesitatingly. "Enduring a high of panic, fear… it must be horrible. What do they find in it that makes them feel alive?"

"It can be hard for any Sekotian to understand. Their lifestyle is very different to our own," Adam said. "But they find adrenaline and with it a sense of escapism. Their world is one of repressed feelings. Verandis can awaken them to themselves, to the truths existing inside them they have forgotten."

Adam knew what he said was true. The problem with most people in this world was that they lived solely in the moment and were self-involved.