"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!! NOOOOO!! AAAHHHHH!!!!"

Oh, fuck. Not again.

Highly annoyed at this second invasion of sleep, I got out of bed, gritting my teeth. Gah, but I've already given him a command not to do that! What the hell could I tell him? Maybe something else, something to make sure he just doesn't..

I opened the door to his room and he immediately shrunk back from me, terrified. He was crying and shivering, as if beaten or whipped, and my annoyance immediately faded away into sympathy. Holy crap, why's he so scared of me now? Does he really think I'm going to.. no, wait. He thinks I already did. He was squeezing his eyes tightly shut; I walked around to the other side of the bed and gently placed my hand on the top of his head. He opened his eyes, still afraid.

I found the right words instantly, and asked them gently. "Billy, what was I just doing?"

"Howard, you were just..", he started, and then differentiated between his nightmares and reality, his fear-gripped body loosening up. "Wait.. no. You were just sleeping. So was I.. I screamed again, didn't I.. oh man, I didn't mean to do that..", he sputtered out, apologetically.

I almost asked him what he dreamed I had been doing, but realized I didn't want to hear any of it, apologies for something that can't be his fault or the details of whatever horrified him so much. "Billy, shush. You can talk again when the sun comes up." I immediately knew what to do about this and how to get it. "If you keep screaming at night, I'm just going to get this room soundproofed. Just relax for now." On impulse, I squatted down next to him and held him a bit. I hated this. I didn't want him scared. I wanted him active, armed, and kicking ass. There are so many things I've done by myself that I can do with him, so many things I've never been able to do before that he'll be so useful for, both in these tests and when I become Dominator. Seeing him in a quivering ball is like finding your gun stuffed with clay, only it's much worse because he's my beloved, engineered friend.

I could have climbed in with him, but didn't- I took my arm off him and quietly walked out, closing the door behind me. The worst fucking part, I realized as I went back to my bed, was that there was nothing to be done about it. Look for the reason why? I already know the reason, it's some sort of side effect of the implants, and even if I could afford to remove them he'd be killed. Drugs? On an engineered? His nervous system would freak out even worse, except for the one chemical.. what if he got it every night? That's no solution; prohibiting him from dreaming will almost certainly be even worse in the long run. I felt as impotent as a medieval king against forces I couldn't control, and that frustrated me immensely. I'm the Inheritor of massive power, I'll have several facilities full of advanced science, and I know damn well that nothing they can do can solve this little problem of my priceless servant screaming himself to tears from horrors I might not even be able to comprehend awake.

I fell asleep.

The next day was the same as the one before. Damn, it's already getting repetitive. Do these mental exercises of ultimate annoyance, eat these shitty potatoes. For a whole fucking month. This sucks. The runs, fortunately, were being done by Billy this time. As I worked on an extremely complicated (just for the sake of it, really, it wasn't even that hard on an intellectual level, just really large and with a lot of variables) problem completely requiring Illuminated knowledge, he came back from the first one with a small smirk on his face.

"Howard, you know what?", he asked me on the way in. "We didn't have to do that whole wig business after all." Oh?

"Why not?"

"Wouldn't it have been simpler and easier just to cut your hair?" Hell fucking no.

"Blasphemer.", I replied, smirking, and went back to my problem.

Later, it started to rain. Lucky him; he gets to run in it. I don't mind being outside in rain, especially when running around. The peasants did mind (why? You're not going to get hit by lightning with my mansion around, and it beats the constant sun) but between the Enforcers, Billy, and Sarah, I knew they'd be swiftly encouraged to get back to work. The test designers wanted to make those damn normals my problem, but I was determined to make them someone else's.

It's one thing to be able to tell an Enforcer 'Do it' and it being done. It's quite another to tell an actual implanted person to do something, especially one I care about. Billy was spending most of his time looking up stuff anyway, still commanded to do it. Although I did have Billy for companionship several times and wanted to play with him more, I had to leave him alone most of the time so he could learn- he needs to be caught up, and he knows it. I did have Sarah, though. I knew all the details of sex, and I knew I hadn't reached anything approximating puberty yet, but that didn't stop me from realizing how beautiful she is. She was nice to hold onto and talk to, although her conversation is almost always dry and direct; on Billy, she simply said "He's you with no Illumination and implants." She's skillful and intelligent, but.. 'Enforcer-like' probably isn't the right word, but it'll do. It's to be expected. She's a trained agent, the best assassin in the world, and I would never want her to act like anything else. It doesn't stop me from loving her, though.

Eventually, night rolled around, and I had to get some sleep. Please, Billy. Don't scream. Don't even have a nightmare. Such things would be pointless to say, obviously, but I thought them anyway.

Yeah, like Murphy would pass by that easily.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!", I was awakened by, and before I was even awake I knew what happened.

"Fuck.", I said, as the screaming continued to go on. Holy shit, he's still doing it? I walked into his room and it was even louder as I opened the door. "Billy, stop screaming!", I told him, but he couldn't hear me. He looked at me curiously as he yelled, as if his brain didn't know what was coming out of his mouth. Let's try this again. "BILLY! STOP SCREAMING!", I shouted in my tone of ultimate authority, and he closed his mouth with a snap and hummed for a split second, finally stopping the air over his vocal cords.

"Dammit.. is that ever going to stop?", I asked, annoyed. "You sounded like you were dying in here!"

"Probably not.", he replied. At least he wasn't terrified again.

"Ok, that's it, soundproofing comes tomorrow evening, or you're sleeping on the other end of the island.", I said in a low voice. "And Billy.. just what was the nightmare this time?" I had to know. It probably wasn't me.

"Well, I was hearing this horrible laugh from some kiddie show, and then I saw this monster reaching out to hug me.. it was Barney the Dinosaur." Holy crap! I restrained myself from laughing until he was finished. "I shot five atomic shotgun rounds into him, but it didn't stop him any. Then it reached out and hugged me and I had to hug it back, and I was actually made to act like I was a little kid who liked it.."

I laughed and laughed, bending over and laughing some more. As psychological defense mechanisms go, this has got to be one of the funniest. "Billy... monsters, demons, sadists, unnamed horror, snakes, even me, I can understand easily." Well, especially me. "But BARNEY?! That fat happy piece of Illuminated kiddie-control inspiration is giving YOU nightmares?! If.. haha.. if I grew coke on this island, I'd figure you snorted some." I was joking, obviously. It wouldn't affect him anywhere near the way it does normals. I decided to try a new command. "Now don't try- but don't try not- to get back to sleep." Let him just lay down and get some rest. I did the same, falling back on my bed and losing consciousness almost instantly.

I woke up as usual, went downstairs as usual, and did similar shit, different day. I didn't dare keep exercising or playing even when bored- I needed to save the energy. Frustrating as hell for someone like me.

Later that day, I taught Billy some basic Latin (if he wasn't engineered, this would be a Sisyphean task) when the agents and Enforcers were working on his room. I don't think about them very often, but I really do appreciate their near-complete silence when ripping metal off walls.

The peasants just don't belong on my island, in so many ways. That self-sufficiency crap Daddy was spouting was just that, crap. This place won't be self-sufficient in a month, or ever, for that matter. I thought it was some kind of tradition, a show of power, to know that a Dominator is perfectly capable of running his own home without outside interference. He couldn't tell me about the tests directly, but apparently he was allowed to tell me that there would be some local agriculture, but he didn't tell me it would be like this. And as for the trees not being more than thirty years old, I'm certain that it's either a total fabrication, or simple misinformation- not false, simply misleading. The trees were probably cut down back then for another reason. And it was a planned lie, a lie that they sat down and thought and talked about, a lie I was sure never to catch, hopefully the final lie- no one lies to a Dominator without risking death. But they could conspire against me if it meant that I would have what they considered to be a fair chance at the first test.

And this first test, although I was starting to get used to it over the next few days, was a product of utter insanity. They could have engineered these plants much, much better. They purposefully created them to be high-workload, with specific instructions on growing, quite intolerant of variation (fortunately, the rain here didn't seem to hurt them any), all for one specific test for one specific person. I could not let the peasants rest for minutes when they had to be working at a specified time- thankfully, Billy and Sarah know the exact regimen. I remember a certain phrase from some sequel of The Man-Kzin Wars: 'Young Heroes are kept on an insufficient diet, to increase their aggressiveness.' Well, if they want me aggressive or just plain angry, they've got it. I can only guess as to what kind of fortitude the second test will require, but if it requires violence, my current bloodthirst will be more than enough.

One of the puzzles I did wasn't on the computer at all; it was physical. Complicated as hell, large, and made out of everything, and I defeated it in fifteen minutes (it actually required me to put a fist-blade into a certain part of it to pop something else) whereas a normal might have taken hours, even days, time I obviously don't have. When I'm not busy, I wait, I brood, play a couple of games, and worry. I wanted to play with Billy more, but I knew I had to let him learn. And I have to save my energy anyway. Oh well. If I don't let any of us get killed, I'll have forever to play with him in. Just thinking about that made me smile in spite of the various problems and their accompanying frustration. I'll have Billy and Sarah as my friends forever.