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((The Mon/Wen/Fri Double -- page 1 of 2))
In a way, Morgunov was proud of him. The world hadn't started calling his sly boy the Devil's Knife for nothing.

Of course, Jercash probably didn't think that he could see any of that.

But he could.

Morgunov could always see.

If anything, his problem was that he could see too much.

It had always been that way.

There was a time, long in the past now, when he had hated that part of himself. When he had wanted to be normal. To have a regular brain like everyone else. The world had certainly tried its damnedest to make him feel that way in his youth. Adults didn’t like being seen through by a child, nor told what to do, even for their own betterment--even if they could tell that it was for their own betterment.

But perhaps that was merely human nature. Compulsive independence, even against demonstrable truth. ‘Twas a matter of pride, he supposed.

It too often was.

Those times were so distant to his mind now that they felt almost as if they had happened to someone else--and indeed, he sometimes questioned if they did.

The mind was a funny thing, wasn’t it? There was no more powerful object in the known universe than the human brain, and yet it was still so prone to errors. The philosophical problem of the unreliable narrator: summarized. How can a man trust his own thoughts when he knows his mind to be so deeply flawed? How can one think correctly when the act of thinking itself might be incorrect?

It was a dilemma that had always fascinated him--even to the point of dabbling in the treacherous technology of cerebral enhancement for a while--but he had yet to find a satisfactory resolution to it.