No, I didn’t think you did.

Maybe there was a time when I could believe in the goodness of mankind. Maybe there was a time when I could say I was one of the ‘good guys’, could say that there were people in this world worth saving.

Spending your whole life hearing the thoughts of others changes that, though.

Most of it’s just boring. See her? Yeah, that one, the brunette in the jeans with the holes in the knees. Do you want to know what’s going through her head right now? She found out yesterday that her best friend has a crush on her, which got described as ‘love’. The kid’s sceptical about it—she doesn’t believe that her friend is really in love with her, just thinks so. She’s agonising right now over whether to act on it or leave it alone, since she’s worried it’d ruin their friendship if it didn’t work.

Weird thing is, though, that’s she’s not agonising over the fact that her best friend is also a girl.

Oh, don’t look so shocked! There are such things as lesbians in the world, you know. That girl disdains the concept of ‘bisexual’—she thinks it’s a cop-out—but can’t decide whether she likes guys or girls better.

But she’s normal. Civilisations’ definition of normal, definitely not normal in the sense of the same as the rest of mankind. No deep, dark secrets lurking around in there, besides the occasional illicit porno that she’s read. A low sense of self esteem, but then about eighty plus per cent of the people here have that.

Not everyone’s like her, you know. When you get right down to basics, humans are animals. We’re predators. We are at the top of the food chain and we suppress our natural instincts to better fit in with ‘civilisation’. We pretend to disdain such basic things as anger, violence, murder, and sex, when it’s as normal as breathing. Us humans have eyes on the front of our heads so we can hunt prey, and then we get all high-and-mighty and shocked about it when someone gets beaten up, or someone gets murdered. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution proved one thing right and proper—strip away all façades, all knowledge of proper behaviour, and humans are animals. We’re primitive, violent, and just plain bloodthirsty. We lecture children against picking on the weak kid in class, but children are clay whose mould has just begun to be shaped and set. They’re the closest humans get to our natural state.

But once you get old enough, you have it trained into you that such things as picking on those weaker than you—setting the pecking order, like even chickens do—is wrong. Bullshit! Trying to pretend that humans are above evolution, above the food chain, above every damn thing that made us what we are today is wrong. I’m not saying civilisation is a bad thing entirely, it just gives plenty of opportunities for the psychos and villains of today’s world to appear.

Huh? What do you mean, what do I mean? Okay, look at it this way. Every single human in the whole fucking race is repressed. Every . . . last . . . one. But you know what happens if things get repressed? They start to fester in your mind. They grow, and grow, and if you’re not careful they take over your brain and control your actions, but they’re not the natural instincts any more, they get twisted. And society is so obsessed with sex, guess what they get twisted into, nine times out of ten? Civilisation itself is to blame for all of its evils. We were better off swinging from trees.

I’ve always heard voices in my head. At first I thought everyone heard them—my parents just thought I had an active imagination and lots of imaginary friends. I knew better. I could hear what they thought about each other, what the thought about me . . . what everyone thought.

When I was old enough to play outside alone for more than two seconds at a time, I noticed this one man watching me. He lived just down our road, and my mother told me he was ‘Nice, just a little reclusive’. Bull. I didn’t understand what he was thinking when he looked at me, but it made me very, very nervous. I always made sure I was never anywhere alone with him—I’d even run if he came anywhere near me. I didn’t understand what he wanted to do, I just knew it was bad, and that he’d done it before. One kid he’d done it to before had killed himself, it was a legend on our street. I didn’t want to end up like that, even though I wasn’t supposed to know what ‘death’ and ‘suicide’ were at that age. Concepts are hard to avoid when you can hear everyone think.

It wasn’t until after I was out on the streets on my own that I realised what it was the guy wanted. And that he wasn’t the only one. Everywhere I looked, in every place that could be considered a sanctum, there was someone who entertained, if only briefly, thoughts of me. I even went to a church to seek guidance, and all the priest could think about was me tied up and spread out under him.

And you know what? You tell a kid something often enough and they’ll believe it’s true. They’ll believe it’s expected of them. And when I thought about it, I realised I had to be the odd one out, that I didn’t like the idea of someone doing that to me. I had to be the weirdo. I had to be the abnormal one. If most other people thought it was fun, thought it was great, then it had to work the other way around, too, didn’t it? The person it was being done to had to like it. The people with S&M backgrounds I came near to confirmed that perception. Of course, the being dead bit of some of them didn’t appeal to me, but I knew where people’s weak points were. I knew how to defend myself—where to strike, and how hard, to cause the most pain. How could I not? I’m a telepath.

It wasn’t until I was too deep in that world to ever get out that I realised this was not what people expected the world to be like. That people wanted a fairy tale world where everyone was nice to each other. Wake up, kiddies, the world’s full of backstabbers.

I don’t think I’m entirely sane, not any more. If I ever was. I’ve lived most of my life around the rapists, the murderers, the power-hungry, the insane, you name it, I’ve met it. And as my talent kept getting stronger, I couldn’t keep my thoughts separate from everyone else’s. They bled into me, became part of me, warped me. I’m influenced by the thoughts of everyone I hear in my head.

And right now, that’s about eight thousand people.

You know what most of them whisper? The normal ones, with legal jobs, and wives and husbands and kids and families? They whisper hate. They whisper anger. They whisper lust, and rage, and violence and cruelty and prejudice and loathing and resentment and frustration and. . . .

God. . . .

It never stops.

It’s like having hundreds upon thousands upon millions of impulses to kill, hurt, maim, rape. . . . And I can’t block them out. And I . . . I’m not strong enough to resist. I never was.

But you know what the worst thing is about all this?

I can’t remember my name.

My real name, the one my mother gave me. I can’t remember who I was before this gift got out of control and ate my thoughts and my life—all I am is a product of mankind’s darkest impulses. They swamp me daily and nightly. If there ever was any hope for my soul it’s gone by now. All the worst thoughts and impulses of mankind float to the top of their minds, the surface debris, and that’s what I could never filter out.

I am . . . everything mankind has made itself to be.

I kill.

I maim.

I toy.

I don’t know who I was.

But I know who I am.

I am Schuldig.

Mankind's guilt.