Chapter 22 : The One With the Cult! (Patreon)

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The Sage of the Mind: Chapter 22

Manhattan [November 2008]

–Axle Riddle–

Ah, this was so frustrating, he thought to himself as he angrily munched on the most delicious sandwich he could find, drawing looks from the passersby, not that he cared one bit about them.

He had recently learned about something concerning. It was a cult named the Congregation of Problems.

Ah! What a corny name. It was something of a cult that gathered around a set location in Central Park. Even the Mayor had tacitly agreed, leaving them alone despite them creating a huge ruckus every single day.

The premise was that people had noticed that he would listen in on people’s conversations if he was called enough times. Now that was simply not true. 

His second brain, as he had taken to call it now, was scanning the entirety of the city and the people at all times which meant that whenever there was an issue happening that needed his attention, his name automatically came to people’s mouths. Coincidentally that issue also immediately catches his attention so that he can solve it post haste.

Now, people somehow got the idea from that, that if they gathered in a specific spot and narrated their problems, he would listen and respond, by solving their problems for them. As if he was their god and they were his believers, for whom he was obligated to solve some of their pains.

Obviously, he had rejected the earlier claims of that being his official church and him being a god, rather Violently at that but…

But people could not rationalise his existence without liking him as something like either a god or a devil. Somehow, he had surpassed the realm of humans in the minds of the vast majority of people and that was how the Congregation of Problems came to be.

People came, people narrated their problems, and he scratched his metaphorical brain, as to how to convince those people that he could not make his girlfriend or boyfriend to come take him back. His powers did not work like that.

That was how it had been happening for the past two weeks. Then the worst thing happened at one of the early morning congregations when an elderly gentleman collapsed while taking his grandson out for a walk.

He had been focused on the congregation when he sensed that happening so he immediately flagged the location to the nearby 911 call centre.

Oh yeah, they had come up with a creative system for him to warn the authorities for emergency services at whatever location he wanted to call them to, without him exposing anything of note at all. They had installed a giant life-sized model of Manhattan in a call centre nearby.

Then all he had to do was concentrate on the model and then pin the specific location and the pins were of different make as well. He had then pinned the location with the ambulance model and set about trying to keep that grandpa alive. 

With his limited knowledge, he saw that the grandpa’s heart had stopped beating somehow, and not knowing what to do in that situation, he had just manually made it beat. That was apparently the right thing to do because, after a few moments of him doing it manually, the heart began doing it automatically.

The pained breathing attempts also stopped but he kept watch on the grandpa until the medics arrived and wheeled him away. He had resisted the urge to just move the grandpa straight to the hospital because he had seen the ambulance charges that hospitals charge to patients but the grandpa was wearing a Rolex and diamond rings so he let them go as the paramedics were more knowledgeable than him in that regard.

Now, that incident was averted and that old man woke up to live another day, he had checked, but the thing was that the entire thing was observed by the cult that had begun harassing him. It didn’t help matters that the paramedic was far too chatty for her own good and just blurted out the system he had negotiated with the city administration to better get emergency services to places they needed to be.

So far, he has saved over 30 different people from strokes, heart attacks, and concussions in he either took them straight to the hospital or brought the paramedics to them, depending on the severity and his know-how. He had to resort to reading elementary medicine books to learn how to keep people alive until help arrived, which was thankfully, not far away, and even if it was, he just lifted the entire ambulance and brought them straight to his location.

Ironically, one of the drivers just fainted and he had to check in on him as well, to see if he too had a heart attack due to the sudden change of transport lane. 

Anywho, that act of saving someone cemented this idea in the brains of the people looking to him for support, that he was some sort of being higher up on the chain than humans. That had been a particularly hard pill to swallow. 

He was very wary of something like that blowing up out of proportion, complicating things even further. Religion was something that was always a very sensitive and personal issue and that was something he was not going to touch with a ten-foot pole made up of pure Vibranium.

No, sir. 

He was just here to grow strong, save his skin, save a couple of people along the way, and then retire to a nice countryside farm where nobody knew him. That’s the dream.

He tried to shut that thing down without hurting people’s feelings by complaining to the Mayor about the public nuisance they were creating and as it turns out, the Mayor was totally on board with anything that could create tourism, as if there was any dearth of those.

The Mayor was a capitalist buffoon and he could not be blamed for that. It was bringing in good revenue for the city but it felt….wrong. To take advantage of people who he would have helped anyway. 

Since he could not turn those people away and he was indirectly bringing in a ton of revenue for the city, he had made a deal with the Mayor.

He had always felt the hunger and diseased state of the homeless population of the city. It was a problem but also a symptom of a much larger problem that could not be tackled at just a city level so, he had always hoped to at least reduce their pain and do something so that they get the adequate care that they so direly needed.

So, as part of the deal made with the Mayor, six kitchens, all on the periphery of Manhattan, since the real estate here had become so expensive, were established to cater to the poor. Completely free, 24/7, open all year round, serving hot food to anybody who would come.

Also offering basic medicine along with primary care sponsored by something that had funds “donated” from the various illicit businesses that still happened around the city.

See, he had made sure that hard drugs like cocaine were completely eradicated from the city. He had made sure to remember the texture and looks of it on a nanoscale, allowing his second brain to automatically filter that out. But he had let drugs that appeared in nature continue to appear in the city.

So, things like weed, alcohol, and cigarettes were still commonplace. Of course, that didn’t mean that he would allow rampant distribution of that as well. And obviously, the first sign of violence would have all the parties violently ejected from the city and straight into police custody.

Sometimes, it meant that rich people were stopped right in their tracks, as they sometimes carried hard drugs. He had to actively train his second brain to distinguish between drugs in the pocket of a person in a car and drugs being carried in a bag that a person was carrying while walking in his street.

That was one of the things that he had discovered about his powers. His second mind, as he had come to call it, didn't always have the necessary context that he did. So, he had to actively nudge it sometimes, so it made the right decisions.

“Hah, troublesome,” He muttered to himself as he kicked a stone as he walked back to his apartment. Damn, when will this end? He didn’t want to become some sort of deity to these people.

In the first place, he was going to hightail it out of society the first chance he gets, once the Invasion is done.

What would happen when he disappeared? He didn’t want such a public-facing role all his life.

No, he had dreams of having his own private island where he would farm and do all sorts of stuff that he would figure out then, preferably with a shit ton of money. IT would be heavenly to enjoy that money with his loved ones, whoever they may be.

Whistling, he put his hands in his pockets as he hailed a cab. “Taxi!”

He smiled as he saw one of the cabbies spotting and stopping for him. He put his arm down and was about to step down from the curb when something entered his range.

Something strong.