My roommate is a telepath, and I think they've been reading me without my permission. Their behaviors been really weird lately, standing in the middle of a room staring at me, leaving the apartment whenever I come home in a bad mood. It hasn't been all bad. A couple times they've left me breakfast or done my part of the chores when I've had a tough day.
I asked them if they were reading me and told them that I'm not comfortable with someone in my thoughts. They haven't spoken to me since.
Do you think I offended them? Is there anything I can do to maintain my privacy without making this relationship worse?
- Reluctantly Open Book
Dear 'Open Book',
What is with all you idiots living with people who cause problems? Changing your locks won't work on a fucking telepath. So easy to see that coming. Move or deal.
Is your roommate certified? Part of keeping your cert' is not breaking the fucking code of fucking ethical conduct. Call or text the cert' tipline. A scanner gets sent out to stalk the 'path. A miner pries them open if they're a fucki g B or A class. Tipping's as anonymous as anything with a fucking nosy 'path. Might end up with more crap to deal with.
Do you have any suggestions for how to tell my kid that they're like a son to me without getting accused of going soft? I have a reputation to maintain, you see.
Faking it until I make it,
Zani
Dear Zani,
Hire a telepath to project it. Not me, someone else. Make sure they've got their certification and they sign an NDA. Unless you're worried about the kid thinking you're a pansy? No fix for that one.
The telepaths took over my thoughts again, so I'm returning with another weekly worldbuilding about all their subtypes. I am too lazy to go look-up what number I was on the last time I wrote a Weekly Worldbuilding at the moment. I might fix the number at some point.
One Disclaimer before the babbling starts: I am going to be plowing through stuff that I consider spoilers for my short story, Silent Halls, here. I'm putting them below a keep reading, If you want to read that story without outside influences coloring your perception of the characters you should stop there.
Telepathy at baseline has some basic components to it: 1) Reading, 2) Projecting, 3) Shielding, 4) Range, 5) Subject, and 6) Target. Not all telepaths are good at all of these things. I'm not going to go too far into subject itself because that's pretty much the only defining feature of the Tree Huggers (people who read plants), Zoo 'paths (people who talk to animals, which has a lot of different names, many of them unfortunately derogatory), and the Specialists (people who are limited to specific types of people).
Reading and projecting are considered basic enough telepath skills that the telepath specialized schools are divided into people who can do both reliably (Thought) and those who can't (Voiced). All the Thought classes are taught without speaking out loud, and they require class participation to be in telepathy too. If you can't keep up, it shows in test scores.
Which brings me to Cameron, who is originally perceived as a dumb jock who only knows how to do one thing. He is in thought classes by the skin of his teeth. Cameron is a Shielder, which means he is very very good at keeping other telepaths out of his thoughts. Just like reading and projecting are considered basic skills, so is shielding. They all try to learn how to do it. What makes Cameron different and specifically classified as a Shielder is that he is able to shield other people's thoughts too. He is exceptional at the number of people, the size of the bubble he can construct around people, strength, and concentration. However, he is not good at reading or projecting his thoughts. Cameron can still do it, but is slow and piece meal, completely impractical for an actual telepathic conversation. This is not unusual for Shielders, which not many people realize with how uncommon shielding is as a subtype. Reading/projecting and shielding require opposite mindsets. The telepath has to be open and flexible for communication and closed off for shielding. Asking a Shielder to read is likely asking a left handed person to use their right hand. Some people can do it, but that doesn't mean they'll be good at it or feel comfortable.
Range is a limit to how many people a telepath can read and project to at one time as well as how far they can affect. It is takes a lot of skill for a telepath to be able to reach big groups of people at one time. Doing it over more than a few feet is beyond most people's limits. If a telepath can reach crowds at a distance, they're considered a Broadcaster. Most Broadcasters cannot read as nearly as many people as they can project to. A Scanner is the opposite. They can read and sort through a lot of people's thoughts simultaneously. This one isn't a true sub-type as a lot of telepaths can learn to do this or at least learn to read fast enough there's very little difference to reading simultaneously.
The telepath's target is where most of the different telepath subtypes come from. It is also where the spoilers are kept, so
A target is the kind of material a telepath can pick up and what they can do with it. Basic telepathy is picking up thoughts as they occur to a person and projecting a telepath's own thoughts to their subject.
A Director like Dahlia is someone who is very good at imagining senses and putting them in their subjects' heads in a way that blocks out the subjects' own senses. They're illusionists.
On the other side of the spectrum is Jack's friend Tim, who can pick up only the senses of someone else. He can't read someone else's thoughts, so he's stuck in the Voiced class even though his ability is better at picking up minutiae and a longer range than a lot of the kids in Thought classes. Tim basically is so good at reading sense, he can sit in someone's head like he's sitting on a patio with a glass of ice tea just to watch the weather.
Then there's Empaths like Ruby. Ruby is another student who really shouldn't be in Thought classes because she can only read people's emotions. The exception to this is people whose emotions she knows extremely well like family and childhood best friends. She can read and project to them through the emotional connection. This is why she and Dahlia are joined at the hip. Dahlia reads the teachers; Ruby reads Dahlia. They go in reverse order when Ruby gets called on. She has to talk like an ordinary person when Dahlia is not available for interpretation. However, because all of her telepath conversations go through her cousin and she happens to be a pretty girl who likes fashion, Ruby comes across as a stuck up popular girl. A lot of her classmates are under the impression that she doesn't care about anyone's feelings when that's pretty much the only thing she can care about.
Neither of them is able to manipulate someone else's thoughts. That's not something a telepath can learn. The subtypes that fit here are always true subtypes that are born with the ability to do what they do even if it takes a while for them to discover they can. Stunners and Cleaners are some examples of telepaths who can manipulate. Stunners have no finesse. They knock out people and keep them unconscious. Sometimes they end up damaging parts of their subjects' psyche when they hit too hard. Sometimes they shatter people. But, Stunners are considered invaluable resources for controlling a population of people with abilities.
Cleansers usually end up in mental health roles when they're not involved in shady activities. They can erase painful memories and help piece other memories or parts of the brain back together if the brain damage isn't too bad.
Now we need to talk about Jack. He is the one kid in Voiced classes that could be in Thought if he wanted to be. Jack's a Mind Miner. He has access to everything. Jack gets surface thoughts. Jack digs memories up out of places they've been forgotten. Jack can drag a person's subconscious conscious. When he's really after information, he's not gentle. It is scarily easy for Jack to break people and leave them in pieces no team of Cleansers can put back together. Jack is capable of communicating like any other telepath with reading and projecting. However, he does not like to because in order to do so he has to completely open up the person he's reading and himself. It's a lot of work and then he ends up knowing more about people than he wants ( he does pick up on everything) and his own stuff he wants to keep personal slips through. Most of what he projects is just images since it's easier to send the one message and then close himself down again than to keep sending one word after another. Jack's images are just as creative as his insults, so a lot of information gets conveyed. Mind Miners are rare. Mind Miners like Jack, who can on occasion read multiple people at once and bash mental shields into figurative dust, are nearly unheard of. The Jack and Cameron team up is basically a telepath tank but worse.
I love the nuanced telepath so much. Please yell at me about telepaths. I would love that so much. Or yell at me if you want me to talk about a different kind of ability. There are so many that cause such fun problems.
I'm working on a special project that I'm hoping to have ready in time for Halloween. As such, I have been living with telepaths in my head 24/7 for several weeks. Now, I am releasing them to spread the frustration joy to the general audience.
I have talked about telepaths before specifically here, and they get sprinkled into my Weekly Worldbuilding posts a lot. Somehow, there is still more information that I haven't compiled. Briefly the telepath schools have been discussed. This week, I need to explain a few details of telepath school (I also need this to be short so I can get back to the 9k words of Halloween surprise project that need to be rewritten).
In the bell curve of telepaths ability strength, the middle 80% or so attend Telepath Technical Institutes starting in middle school. These are the specialized schools for training students with abilities that fall into the general "telepath" category. The stronger go to boarding school. The weaker, less problematic, go to normal mixed public schools. However, this creates two unique problems for telepaths at Telepath Techs. 1) They spend 90% of their formative years only interacting with other telepaths 2) Not all telepaths are able to read minds and project thoughts
I can hear the question, doesn't someone have to be able to read minds to be a telepath? No, it is a general category to classify abilities that use one person's mind to affect another. Why group all the telepaths together then? The general needs for training and basic support are applicable across this large generalization. The biggest difference in training the different types of telepaths is what created the Thought and Voiced class tracks. At its baseline, this is just supposed to be a simple division to encourage immersion practice for telepaths that can both read and project. For kids who are able to read or project to some teachers, but not others (like those that have abilities that only work on the same gender), they may be in a mix of Thought and Voiced classes.
What this division ends up doing is causing a sense of superiority between kids in Thought and Voiced classes. The perception of the students--and the majority of the teachers--is that the kids in the Thought classes are smarter, stronger, or generally more put together. After all, if they applied themselves more anyone should be able to read enough to follow a simple high school class. This is not true considering there are some types of abilities that fall outside of this as a possibility at all, like the Tree Huggers who talk to plants, or require circumstances that are not practical to high school like Empaths.
The other problem, possibly the more long lasting problem, is the lack of interaction with other types of people. Telepaths end up cloistered with people who never have to use their voices in the course of a normal day. This has implications in many different parts of their lives from things like a very specific set of slang or a particularly accented speaking voice to a blunt manner of communication that carries through even when they're talking to people who can't read their every thought. The tendency for telepaths to only talk to each other mind to mind, even in larger groups, can lead to pretty quite telepath heavy spaces.
In lieu of my brainstorming list this time, I would like to suggest that the Halloween surprise project will have more tiny tidbits of telepath for your general enjoyment. Adding in more now would be spoiling the surprise. 😜
I said a couple weeks ago I was running out of ideas for Weekly Worldbuilding posts. Past me was mistaken. As of now, there are at least 6 more topics waiting in my drafts. So if you like these, that's good news! If you don't... ...sorry?
Anyway, this week is a heavy topic. The economy, jobs, and wealth. However, it's going to be a lot of rambling since I can't keep money things straight and orderly in my head.
Abilities make the biggest difference in terms of wealth. This isn't because people with abilities are always paid more. They self select jobs where their ability will be rewarded with a bonus. A strong man isn't special if he's just another pencil pusher at an accounting firm, but a construction company will pay at least 10% more to get him to haul steel beams around. A powerful telekinetic at a job site like that, especially one where a crane is usually needed will make at least 20% more.
Superheroes aren't vigilantes in this setting. They're also not referred to as superheroes. What we would think of as a comic book hero is just someone who has both a bounty hunter's and private investigator's license. Most people don't want both. Most people don't have the skill set for both. Finder, for instance, only has a PI license. This means he's can't legally detain anyone or start a fight. A bounty hunter really just fights and captures people who law enforcement have already identified as criminals, no batman detective breaking and entering activities.
People without abilities compete most equally against people with abilities in the realm of business and finance. Sure being telepathic might give an individual a leg up on the competition, but at the highest levels, people know how to shield their thoughts from telepaths. Someone good at their job can read their business and predict trends just as well without an ability.
There are a lot of jobs for telepaths, especially in law enforcement and education. There's an entire section of the school system that teaches telepaths almost exclusively. Of course they need a lot of teachers to monitor their telepathic students for cheating. Academic integrity enforcement is one of the easiest jobs for a telepath with the right skill set to get. They don't have enough people to fill all the positions available. Telepaths in law enforcement make a surprisingly high salary for a public worker. They're needed for the swat teams. Not hostage negotiation, but criminal suppression. For violent criminals with superhuman abilities, they can't always be subdued with physical force or tazers. The next options are either tranquilizers, which don't work on certain people, have limited range, and get expensive for the really fast acting strong stuff, or a telepath coming in and forcing someone to sleep or stop moving. They're not the last resort, people can still learn how to shield themselves from telepath suppression, but the telepaths are the last line between a person and the cops using lethal force.
Overall, wealth is not easily predicted by whether someone has an ability or not, despite how it appears. There are a lot of hidden costs associated with having an ability. That strong man has to fix a lot of holes in his house when he forgets throwing the remote on the couch will launch the remote into the ceiling. Clothes get expensive when you're a pyrokinetic who doesn't want to risk walking around half nude after they set themselves on fire accidentally. There's also health care expenses that are side effects for a lot of abilities. Normal people tend to forget about these things if they don't live or share finances with someone with an ability that has to take all of this into account. Sure some people with abilities get paid a lot more than some normal people. It's just a lot harder to tell where someone is financially just by their job.
Still Brainstorming:
Other jobs that require people with abilities
The witch incantation industry
Do the fae care about money?
The limits of PI and bounty hunter licenses
The role of college and higher education in getting a well paying job
Is intelligence more important than fine ability control in education?
Superhero writers (and probably a whole lot of fantasy authors), how do your telepaths work? How do you describe what they get off of people when they use their powers?
Let's make a big collection of telepathy interpretations and geek out!
(This post was shamelessly inspired by @sunset-a-story recent description of their synesthetic telepaths.)
