I had also not forgotten about rescuing Daphne Laframboise. But for this project I couldn’t draw on the resources of my inner army – not so directly, anyway.

This was an off-the-books project that I tinkered with when my flying head grew tired in the late afternoons. Abe Bergman and Daniel Fairstein were informed, and discretely given more security – and given restrictions on their movements. Manifesting in my own mindscape in my silver-weighted suit, I made my place: we had our Area 51 lab space adjacent to the lair of Snuffleup. Fairstein’s imaginary friend was even bigger and more grotesquely multifaceted, a bus-sized blob of mish-mashed faces and figures spawning and unspawning upon its back. Oily rainbows snaked between them as the intermediate flesh, and less human tentacles and maws quivered below so the thing could crawl and grow.

At the very least, we needed to prune this damn thing. It was constantly feeding off the unorganized memory-scrap of my hires, specifically their childhood fantasies and dreams, and though Nocome had avoided it like the plague it didn’t seem to have much will of its own beyond the desire to grow bigger. I wondered if this was a psychic version of cancer to punish my overeating.

“First, we must see if Snuffleup will stand to be clipped. Then we see if those clippings can survive independently.”

Mr. Bergmann had his operator-voice on, his normal fidgeting totally gone. “As expected, there has been a disappointing lack of volunteers for a rescue mission. You want to create a rescuer tulpa, I presume?”

I had more ambitious plans than that, but this would be the start of it.

“Yes. But I don’t blame them for thinking of their own skin – it’s what I’m doing constantly. I hate to imagine what Daphne is experiencing right now, if she is even conscious.”

The Fairstein boy shuddered at that thought, but pouted when I talked about cutting up Snuffleup. He was always wearing a soccer uniform in the mindscape because he was throwing himself enthusiastically into all the sports that had been denied to his crippled body, and playing soccer with Alexanne Floros was his favorite activity at the moment.

“Let me do it,” he nevertheless said when I showed them the pruning sheers.

“That thing,” Mr. Bergmann said cautiously, “probably has no memory of you, if it even has one mind.”

But in the end it turned out that Daniel Fairstein was the only one who could prune Snuffleup without getting a deep growl from all its teratogenic mouths at once. The core was still Buddy.