Challenge #01972-E148: Secret Curse
Earworms, those inane or catchy little tunes that play endlessly inside your head. Good defence against telepaths though. -- Anon Guest
If there was a worse curse you could give to a human, Rache couldn't imagine one much worse than telepathy. Sure, people could look past ugly. They could ignore venomously mean and frequently did. They could, eventually, believe that disabled didn't necessarily mean worthless. But telepathy? That was a living hell.
Human minds are chaos. There's conscious thought, subconscious thought, and the idle parts of the brain that just spend all their time free-associating everything with everything else. Some are creative, on top of this, and they are constantly doodling around with whatever idle thought has gained their kitten-like attention at the moment.
Imagine standing in a queue with someone who's writing and rewriting the same porn scene inside their head for twenty minutes. You wouldn't argue with someone who could pick that up. But worse than that, in an entire field of worsts, were the earworms. Humanity made bank off of songs that could never get out of someone's head. And their endless loops were endlessly annoying.
Shiny, shiny, rap down behind me. Shiny, shiny, sha-na-na-na... competed with We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine... and the occasional weird one like, Hello, goodbye 'twas nice to know you. How'll I live my life without you? That I'll never know...
It was like living in a dorm full of angry teenagers with their chosen music on full volume because nobody else would turn their music down.
And once in a long while, there were those who made up their own video clips. They were... well... they were weird, it was true, but they were a sensory treat. At least for Rache. And since Rache instinctually wanted to get away from everything and just bask in their imagination for a while... it was hard to get someone to agree to that.
Getting away from it all included getting away from any means to create the things in the creative one's mind. At least, not unless one has the wherewithal to create a cabin miles from anywhere with everything a modern creative soul needs.
Fortunately, working as an intern in a trading company gave Rache plenty of what one might call insider information if anyone else knew what she could do. She could get ahead of the pumping and dumping of certain stocks before the men she fetched coffee for could possibly put their plans into action. Especially because she caught their thoughts before they could articulate them to anyone in charge.
She was fired in the end for being a "lazy millennial" always on her phone, but she had her retirement plan firmly in place. A little place that was off the grid and self-sufficient. With her special someone, and a very useful car that would be powered by fresh, natural photons. And a beehive. Because bees provided the right kind of white noise, and good honey.
And one other slight advantage. She knew the girl she kind'a liked also kind'a liked her. And the only obstacle in their way was finding a time window to go out and do stuff. That, and finding a way of not tripping over her tongue.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / Elenathewise]
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