But you’re aware that other people dont believe that beings such as these exist.

Define exist.

Sorry?

I’m not really concerned with what other people believe. I dont consider them qualified to have an opinion.

Because they havent seen them.

Well. I think that qualifies as a logical dead end. What do you think?

I’m sure you know that hallucinations on the scale at which you describe yours are vanishingly rare. More than one counselor has suggested that you were making them up.

Making them up.

Yes.

That comes off as a rather odd locution, doesnt it?

That you were making it up that you were making them up.

Yes, well. They’re not entitled to an opinion either.

The counselors?

The counselors.

Maybe not. When did this business start? At what age?

Do you think that I present as a florid psychotic?

No. I dont. But then of course you dont like to be tested.

No. Do you?

No. Unless I think I’m going to do well. But you think that tests in general are what? Misguided? Invasive?

Let’s just say that I dont like them.

But you took some of the tests. You made a perfect score on the advanced Raven’s.

It’s been done before.

Not in the time in which you did it.

The initial questions are pretty stupid. You just fill in the figure that’s missing. It’s only compound in a fairly primitive way. The problems get more difficult but they’re not really different. Besides, no matter how complex the figures become there are still no more than six rules.

At the end of the test you sketched in a couple of three-dimensional matrices.

Lattices. Yes. One of them was geometric and the other was computational. They werent that difficult. But I thought they looked promising. I saw that they could get pretty gnarly pretty quickly. If you didnt get the dimensionality right you couldnt follow the progression. I never heard back from them. But it was my sense that if people could ace the tests you’d come up with then you probably needed tougher tests. I thought you wanted to talk about the horts?

About the what?

The horts. The entities. Horts as in cohorts.

Is that a word? Horts?

It is now. I suppose the closest word to it would be orts. In English a piece, in German a place. Anyway, at what age. To your question. At the onset of menses I think it says in the file.

I just wondered if that was correct. That’s rather early.

You could even call it precocious.

I hope you’ll excuse the question but at what age was this?

Twelve.

Schizophrenia typically doesnt occur in females until the late teens or early twenties.

I’ve never been legitimately diagnosed as schizophrenic.

No.

Maybe they’ll devise a test for general weirdness. Whatcha think?

You took the MMPI here. Two years ago.

All right.

Speaking of general weirdness. You were classified as a sociopathic deviant followed by a number of other rather unattractive adjectives. This was on scale four. Did you know the Minnesota test?