I've recently made it my personal policy to, whenever I meet someone new, scan their mind and their aura and immediately assign both to memory. It's gotten to the point where I can identify familiar auras out of a crowd of dozens or even hundreds of strangers. At the Temple, they taught us that when scanning a stranger's mind, it is unethical to read anything except their most basic information, such as name, occupation, maybe their age and family connections, that was it. And that we should not go any further unless we knew exactly what we were looking into. At first we didn't believe it, they told us stories about Shifters who had been driven to insanity and even suicide from seeing some of the more unpleasant contents of someone's mind, and in our childish arrogance, we thought they were just exaggerating. However, experience quickly taught us how right our teachers were. Ask almost any Shifter you come across and they will gladly tell you what kind of sick and twisted things these seemingly ordinary people think about.
The one thing I have been careful about from the start is how deep I actually try to dive when mind-scanning. For years, the human mind (vastly different from the 'material' brain) has been characterized as a computer or a filing cabinet, or in some cases, an office full of avatars who resemble the owner of the mind. But that's all wrong, the mind is more like a gigantic stack of papers which are constantly shifting and rearranging themselves every hour of every day. The papers at the very top of the stack contain the basic information that you're usually looking for, but if a Shifter is looking for something like a repressed memory or a dark secret, he or she has to sift through the papers until the desired memory or thought is found. The problem is that the more the Shifter looks, the more papers they sift through, the greater the risk of them causing permanent damage to the subject's brain. As far as I know, I've never turned a person into a vegetable or anything like that, although I do remember accidentally giving an old friend reoccurring migraines for about a month. We don't talk much anymore.

Kat, my girlfriend, startled me a couple of days ago when she mentioned that she could tell when I was reading her mind.
“It's like a tickle in the back of my head,” she told me as I stood in front of her with my eyes wide and my mouth hanging open, “at first I thought it was a clot or something weird like that, then I realized that it only happened when you were around.” The next chance I had, I went to the Temple and asked Master Samson how this could have happened. He explained to me that humans could, and often did develop an ability to detect when their minds were being scanned after repeated scanning. I asked if she might develop a resistance to the scanning, and he said that it was possible, but unlikely. This was a very good thing, I don't see the point of even having a girlfriend anymore if you can't always know what she's thinking. Take last week for example, when she told me, right in the middle of a crowded Chinese restaurant, that she and her last boyfriend had once had sex four times over a six hour period. I thought that was unfair of her to tell me something like that since we had already been going out for two months and hadn't had sex once. The thing that made the announcement, at the very least, bearable, was that I already knew about it. You see, I felt that it was my duty as her boyfriend to know how many boys she had slept with before me (three), and how many times she had done it with each (twice, once, and six times, respectively). It's an unpleasant, but necessary piece of information to have, like your GPA or your bank balance. But the thing I find the most frustrating is that I could very easily use my abilities as a Shifter to my advantage and simply psyche her out of her pants, the guys at the Temple call it brainfucking, a last resort tactic which is generally looked down upon. I'm not that desperate... yet, but I'm running out of patience and conventional methods. I've thought about scanning her former boyfriends to see if I can get some clues, unfortunately, one of them is dead (car accident), another in rehab (meth), and the third is attending college (University of Southern Louisiana).
I got really close last week, we were sitting in her room, on her bed, listening to her iPod. Limp Bizkit, I hate Limp Bizkit, I'd almost forgotten how much I hated them, I think the last time I'd heard of them before I met Kat was when I was in the sixth grade. I scanned her just once because I wanted to know what she thinks about when she hears their music. It turns out, not surprisingly really, that she thinks about nothing. This is actually an unusual reaction to music, unless it's something classy like jazz or that new age stuff. Part of music's appeal to the human mind is the great amount of activity it invokes, a large percentage of music listeners conjure images in their minds while they listen. Music videos aid in the experience by providing the images to the viewer. This is part of the reason why videos that just show the band playing in a dark room or on stage usually suck.
However, my curiosity was still not satisfied, I switched to the alter-view and looked at her aura, it was light pink, a good sign. I touched her hand and shifted myself closer to her, I said something stupid and romantic that I knew she would like. I saw her aura change gradually into a dark shade of red, we're talking red wine red here. I leaned in and began to kiss her face, she turned my head and bit my neck, vampire freak, I could have scanned her and felt the word blood intensely reverberate through my skull, that would have made me nervous. But I didn't, instead I looked  at her door, about to switch back into material view and saw a purple aura marching up the stairs. Dark purple, extremely stressed, needs alcohol badly. It was her father. I jumped out of her grasp, took a random book out of her bookshelf, and pretended to read it.
“What are you doing?” She was still laying on the bed when she asked me. Then she looked past me and saw her father in the doorway. He asked us the same question, I looked down and saw the book I had taken, Your Changing Body: A Guide for Girls and Young Women. It was the first time in months that I couldn't answer a simple question.  

The next day, aka. Final Silent Friday Before Thanksgiving Clusterfuck, my friend Martin (non-Shifter) called me a psychic on the way to school, he's been doing this a lot lately and I really hate it. The word psychic makes me think of those over-the-phone assholes who steal your money by making up vague facts about you that could apply to almost anyone. I admit I probably overreacted when I told him that if he called me that again he would wake up the next morning believing that he was a fifty year old woman on menopause. But if only more people knew how difficult it actually is to do a mind scan over a phone line. Imagine that you have to read this page from a hundred meters away through a dense fog with nothing but a twenty dollar pair of binoculars, it's hard, isn't it? Aside from that, no psychic, real or not, can predict the future. There are Shifters who came close only to report that the future changes constantly and cannot be predicted. So guess what everyone, Nostradamus, the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Book of Revelation, all full of shit. You just have to take things as they come. I know that most of us are paranoid about the future, but we can't keep obsessing over it like this. And believe me, we obsess over it a lot.
Consider, for a moment, the case of the freshman with the pink rose. Something Martin and I witnessed as we both stood outside of our first period class, waiting for our elderly and slightly mentally disturbed (I checked) teacher to arrive and open the door for us. Leaning up against the wall on the other side of the hallway was a very nervous-looking freshman holding a single pink rose.
I connected with Martin's mind: Look at the guy standing directly across from us.
“The one with the flower?” He mumbled.
Yeah, he's waiting for his girlfriend to arrive so he can give it to her.
“That's cute.”
Well, she's actually just his friend, but he thinks about her... a lot. He wants to give her the rose because he believes that it will show her how he really feels.
“What's your point.”
Well, I just admire his integrity.
“Integrity? He looks like a fucking idiot.”
Exactly, he has the balls to stand there, looking like an idiot, because he believes that he can make things better for himself and his friend by giving her that rose. And that's all that matters to him, he puts everything else in the back of his mind, even the terrifying possibility that she might just laugh in his face and tell him to fuck off. He knows about all the bad things that could come out of this, but he's willing to risk all of that just for the one good thing that could happen. He can make her happy by doing this and that's all he cares about.
“Interesting,” just then our teacher arrived and opened the door for us. “Well, I'm going in, tell me what happens.”
Sure. For a few minutes the freshman just stood there, alternatively looking at his shoes and back and forth down the hallway. I suddenly thought of how depressing it might be to watch his plan backfire. Maybe the girl will be embarrassed by his overly romantic display, maybe she'll be disgusted, maybe she'll think it's a some kind of joke. All these negative outcomes ran through both of our minds simultaneously as we waited to see what would happen. Suddenly he walked into the path of a seemingly random girl walking down the hallway and with no more introduction than a simple 'hi', he presented the flower to her. What's going to happen next? And why the hell didn't I see her coming? I went into alter-view and looked at her, a radiant, almost solar eraser-pink contrasted with the freshman's pale yellow. I returned to normal just in time to watch the girl throw her arms around him.
Good work, freshman.
I returned home that day to find my brother, Ryan and his friend Sarah playing Halo 2 and listening to System of a Down, typical, really a microcosm of the entire previous summer. I found it vulgar, not that they were playing video games all day, I had come to terms with that, it was the fact that having exhausted the entire Soad library several times over, they had made almost no attempt to switch to a different artist. They raised my hopes significantly back in mid-June by experimenting with various thrash metal bands. I'm no fan of Metallica or Slayer, but it was still a breath of fresh air. Then they had to screw it all up a week later by not only regressing, but deciding to play the same song at the start of every day as their special 'Wake-up Song'. So now, seven A.M, every morning, I have Sugar with my coffee whether I want it or not.
Ryan paused the game, then they both turned their heads towards me and said, almost simultaneously, “hey Alex”, then unpaused the game and continued playing
“Hey guys,” I said as I dropped my backpack onto the floor. I looked at the screen, they were playing against each other, Blood Gulch, sniper rifles only, this clearly wasn't going anywhere soon. I turned, about to leave the room when Sarah suddenly paused the game and stood up.
“Alex,” she said, “tell me something about me.”
You have a huge crush on me, and a large part of the reason why you hang out with Ryan is because I'm his brother.
Oh, if only I had the guts. But Ryan didn't have many friends and he and Sarah seemed to get along well, so I said nothing at first. She really did have a crush on me though. Something that gave me the ability to change her aura into a not-so-subtle shade of pink whenever I passed by her. Sarah liked to believe that she could hide her feelings by not thinking about me, the truth is, she's really bad at it. It seems that she can't listen to me for five seconds before letting go and thinking about how articulate I am (she enjoys concentrating on my mental attributes, rather than my appearance, which is nothing special compared to all the teen idols she's constantly exposed to).
You saw The Butterfly Effect last night even though your parents said you weren't allowed to watch it, you enjoyed it.
Sarah giggled, her aura turned slightly pinker. This has been her condition for the past year or so,  and I'm hoping it will stop within the next few months, as fun as it sounds, I'd rather not do any rewiring upstairs just to get her off of my back.
I could tell from the paused screen that their scores in the game were tied at eight kills each. Sarah's eleven, a year older than Ryan. And Ryan is... well, a boy. Where to find a more natural reason to be good at video games? And yet they possess no advantage over each other. Both of them could easily kick my ass one on one. Funny story actually, over the summer the three of us had participated in an eight-hour marathon run in which the two of them took turns pummeling my sorry ass in Sidewinder, at the end of which the score was Them-261, Me-26. I'm not ashamed, I think it's still a pretty good score, and my actual kill count was higher, if you don't account for me falling on my own grenade once or twice. Although Sarah claims that their kill count should be higher to account for Cuban neckties by plasma sword, which, according to her, are much more difficult than 'conventional' kills. I simply didn't buy that, not for her anyway, she appeared to be determined to give my blue Master Chief a virtual plasma enema with that thing every chance she had. I retaliated by claiming that Ryan's cheap sniper rifle kills should only gain them half a point each. That shut them up. The one thing I found unbelievable (really, simply unbelievable) was that neither of them had accused me of scanning their minds for intel. It turns out that I didn't... much. I may have made a quick peek once or twice in the heat of the moment, I don't believe that it helped very much in either case.
“Alex.” Ryan had turned around, trying to get my attention.
“What?” Nothing.
“Alex.”
“What?” I looked at him, he had that evil grin on his face. A beautiful thing, that grin, it was  both devious and twisted without actually being creepy. “Oh, yeah, I know, it's F.S.F.B.T.C.”
“You don't know, you just scanned me.”
“No, I didn't.” Actually I did, that smart little bastard.
You see, my extended family, to put it in the simplest possible terms, is fucking huge. My Father is the son of Italian immigrants, my Mother is the daughter of Irish immigrants, between them they have about a dozen siblings. Drawing on previous childhood experiences, they agreed early on that they would play it safe with just Ryan and me. I'm fairly certain actually, although they won't admit it to one another, that they would be more than willing to abort a potential third with few questions. Kids these days wouldn't believe what their parents think about, especially regarding the homeless. The Thanksgiving Clusterfuck is over a dozen aunts, uncles, and cousins arriving at our house to celebrate with us during our Autumn Break (Autumn Break now, turns out Thanksgiving is not PC anymore). In this sort of situation, Ryan and I find it best to be as scarce as possible. At the time, there were three pastimes that we knew of: movies, laser tag, and Starbucks binges.
“That's not going to last you all five days,” Sarah remarked at the end of our short brainstorm session.
“We know that,” Ryan said. Normally, having used up our initial escape tactics, we would either find friends to stay with or just stick out the rest of the weekend with them. But this year we would need something better. Not quite a forty-eight hour family dodge, that was simply impossible, given the circumstances. I mean something so awesome that it will completely outweigh every negative aspect of the Clusterfuck. I already knew (nowadays I just know these things, I don't even have to scan anymore unless I want details) that my parents would let Ryan and I go wherever we wanted Wednesday through Friday as long as we brought our cousins, their average age being about eight and a quarter years old. But come Saturday, we would be at their mercy. Fair enough. I wonder what's playing.   
Ah yes, the Internet, t3h Internetz, the Netz, the Webz, the Z at the endz of everyz wordz. Somewhere between the 9/11 Conspiracy sites and steamy Dustin Quail fanfics (disorder, disorder, disorder, those brats really do need new music). It's all very nice, but even better when you don't need a computer. Yes, we Shifters can surf the Internet, and in fact, use just about any electronic device using only our thoughts. It's tricky at first, but really very easy once you get the hang of it. And the best part? There are no limits. A good firewall can stop most hackers and viruses, but against a Shifter offers no more protection than a cotton shirt against a bullet. And I'm going to get a lot of shit for this next statement, but the Internet is in fact a series of tubes, for us Shifters at least. I doubt Senator Stevens really had us in mind when he said so, although it's possible that it was just another one of our tricks, but in a way he was right. I lay my hand on top of the modem next to the computer, close my eyes and, concentrate for a few seconds (note that this is a highly simplified description, the actual process of mentally surfing the Internet is much more abstract and cannot be accurately detailed with conventional language), and I am jettisoned into a stream of lights zooming back and forth across a black abyss at thousands of miles an hour. Anyone who managed to sit through The Matrix: Revolution in it's entirety will know what I'm talking about. So then what? I convince the system that I'm a packet of information (I am, in a sense), and instruct it to send me to Austin360. Now here comes the fun part, the only way I can describe it accurately with this cumbersome text is that it's like a super-fast roller coaster of light. It's intense, and if you're not ready it can melt your head like an ice cube under a hot water faucet.
Now I'm suddenly floating, a man-shaped bundle of lights disguised as a thirty-two bit data packet, before a gigantic God's huge-ass Dell Desktop-shaped bundle of lights representing the Austin360 server. I take a deep breath and shove my glowing golden hand into the server's ass so hard... and I see everything. Looks like Saw IV is playing at...
“I want to see Saw IV!”
Back in the material world, I actually have one hand on the modem, the other on Ryan's head so that he can see everything I can see.
“You're not seeing Saw IV, remember the nightmares you had after Saw III?”
“No.” Yes he did.
“Well, I do.  Anyway, you and Sarah can see Bee Movie or something.”
“No! That looks retarded!”
“Exactly, it's perfect for you.”
    Ryan closed his eyes and looked over the list again.
“How about American Gangster?”
I opened my eyes and scanned him. This was probably the closest thing to a compromise I could get. I connected with Sarah, who was watching some crappy Disney Channel show in the next room.
How does American Gangster sound for Wednesday?
“Is that the one where Denzel Washington shoots a bunch of people?” She asked. To herself, in a way, but I still picked it up.
Yeah, the two of you can buy into some other movie and then go in with me.
“Okay.” Ryan stood up, walked into the next room, and sat down next to Sarah.
Try to build a prison...
I think I'll have to take away their CDs.

It was around one in the morning that night when something strange happened to me. It was like a dream, even though I specifically remember waking up. I woke up, felt the need to piss, got out of bed, walked to my door, and banged my foot against the corner of my desk (that's how I know it wasn't a dream, it hurt like a bitch). As I leaned my back against the wall, nursing my crippled foot, I felt a sudden weakness surge though my entire body, and I collapsed to the floor. Sitting there against the wall, I looked around the room, scared out of my mind. It wasn't as if my body was paralyzed, I was simply too weak to move any part of it. First came the voices, nothing really comprehensible, just several dozen conversations overlapping each other. Then came the images, in no particular order, color, random color, more color, red and black appears to be the main thematic element here. Finally, the figure of a man materialized before me, through the dark I could only see  that he was wearing some sort of hooded cloak. I tried to switch to alter-view, but there was something blocking it.
He said, “I'm going to help you, Alex.”
Okay, I said in my mind. Whether or not he actually received it or not is anyone's guess.
The man disappeared, and all I saw was the dark of my room, then strength returned to my limbs.

“Do you know what it was?” Ryan asked me at breakfast the next morning. I awoke at around nine-thirty to find him, Sarah, and Martin sitting at the table, drinking coffee and eating Martin's Super Bud Muffins.
“I'm convinced it was some kind of attack,” I replied as I dipped a piece of Bud Muffin into my coffee. “Older, more experienced Shifter gets his jollies fucking with the minds of younger, less powerful Shifters. It happens all the time.”
“Are you sure it wasn't an echo,” Sarah asked me.
Martin stopped staring at his empty mug and said, “The hell's an echo?”
“An echo...” I stopped for a moment just to comprehend the fact that Martin really didn't know what an echo was, I actually had to scan him to make sure it wasn't just the muffin talking. “In a nutshell, it's when a Shifter receives the projected memories and emotions of people who have recently experienced a traumatic event, like a rape or the death of a family member. It usually happens to younger Shifters who don't know how to resist that sort of thing. I had them for about two weeks when I was nine.”
Martin responded with a blank stare, for a moment I was afraid that he was too high to understand, then he clapped his hands and said, “that's right, I remember that! You were absent from school for like, ten days in a row, nobody knew why, then when you came back you were all moody and shit. Are they really that bad?”
I frowned. “Imagine... every horror movie ever made on acid, with a distorted Alvin and Chipmunks soundtrack. Now imagine you're a little kid and you have to experience that shit every time you shut your eyes, and there's nothing you can do about it. But this wasn't an echo, this was completely different. I'm still not exactly sure, maybe it wasn't an attack at all, there could just as well be some third thing causing it that I don't know about yet.”
There was a knock at the front door.
“I'll get it,” I got up from the table and switched to alter-view, Kat's familiar aura was clearly visible on the porch (something I never mentioned by the way, material objects only show up as faint shadows in alter-view, allowing us to see an aura through just about anything up to a certain distance, for me it's between two hundred and five hundred yards, depending on where I am in the material realm) her aural pattern told me that she was clearly uneasy, if not upset about something, but when I opened the door in normal view, she seemed alright.
“Can I help you?” I asked, and immediately realized how much it made me sound like a dick.
“I just want to hang out with you guys, is there something wrong with that?”
I decided there wasn't. Come on in.
Mother is taking a double-shift at the hospital and won't be back until ten in the evening, Father is at some Writer's Guild Strike bullshit in L.A. The five of us, Martin, Sarah, Kat, Ryan, and myself spend the day in a caffeine and THC induced daze (slow motion twitching is a factor here, it's really fun to watch everyone in alter-view, it's like a rainbow) staring at the late-autumn rain, watching Futurama DVDs Martin smuggled out of the Blockbuster where he works. Life is good until around six in the evening, by which time we have run out of weed and coffee and are reduced to laying around on the carpet next to the television, talking about life while waiting for the chemicals to completely wear off. The current topic is happiness. Kat asserts that life is mostly suffering, Martin agrees with her, Ryan disagrees, Sarah is uncertain, I offer no comment.
Kat says, “it is normal for human beings to be in a regular state of unhappiness. So that way, when we are happy, we appreciate it more. If you're content most of the time, it's not as special when you're really happy.”
This upsets Ryan, who says, “Yeah, but I just think it's a really negative way of looking at things, I mean, I think about my life and... I don't think it was really that bad, I-I think that most of the time I am happy or content, not suffering.”
Kat doesn't respond for several seconds, I broadcast my thoughts to everyone: Ryan, you may think you're happy all of the time, but think about everyone in the world, all the refugees, all the addicts and junkies and debtors and hookers, the people who have shitty lives. When they're happy it's really great because most of the time life sucks for them. We need sadness to make happiness significant.
Everyone offers a “hmm” of approval. Martin looks at the clock. “Oh shit,” He says, “I gotta get out of here, I'm working tonight.” He collects the DVDs, taking several minutes to find the last disc, which somehow ended up under a couch cushion.
As soon as he walks out the door, Kat stands up, grabs my hand, and pulls me to my feet. She leads me to my room where I collapse on the floor almost immediately. Kat lays down next to me.
“Alex,” she whispers.
“What?”
I looked at her, expecting an answer, but she was already asleep, her head resting on my chest. I rolled my eyes lazily, then closed them just once.

I woke up after what seemed like a couple minutes and looked across the room at my clock, eight forty-three. I gently pushed Kat off of me and tried to stand up, realizing instantly that I had one of the most insane caffeine hangovers in history. This alone would have been bad enough without the addition of brutal, suffocating cottonmouth, but I suppose I had it coming. Whether or not this was punishment for my amoral activities yesterday (I mean I was using marijuana for Chrissake! I was supporting narco-terrorists, Goddamn! I'm kidding, actually, all of Martin's stuff is locally grown) one fact was perfectly clear to me I needed something to drink, really badly.
In the refrigerator my family keeps three kinds of drinks, soda, beer, and milk (by the way, no matter how much money your friends offer you, don't try all three at once, it's unpleasant). I wrapped my hand around a soda and walked into the living room as I opened it. Sarah sat on the couch watching some old forensics show on the Discovery channel, Mister Serial Killer thinks he can get away by moving to Spain, but ends up screwed over by a tiny, insignificant fiber found at the scene that matched the seats in his girlfriend's mother's car, something like that. How funny, they want you to think that this forensic crap can solve anything. It can, really, but the truth is that as wonderful as all this modern technology is, homicide teams have always had a huge hard-on for Shifters, why spend thousands of dollars on expensive equipment when you can hire one of us at a fraction of the cost? To boost ratings, that's why.
For a few minutes I silently watched the dramatic re-enactment of the brutal murder, which was most likely ripped straight from the killer's memory. Then, for some reason, I automatically turned around and looked at Sarah, I saw Ryan asleep next to her, his head resting in her lap. She looked down at Ryan, then up at me.
“You know,” she said, “that it's only because he looks like you.”
Yes, I know.
“I think Kat was right... about happiness, because hanging out with you two, it makes me happy. I can sit in my room, I can sleep and eat and go to school and do all that crap, but I feel like it's all just a way to fill in the gaps between times like this.”
That's the way things are. It's one of the first things I learned when I started going to the Temple. That emotions are relative, the concept of relief from pain versus constant positive feeling. It's a cosmic, universal balancing act with consequences that reach far beyond the realm of emotions. It's why we can't have sex without the risk of diseases, it's why we can't have XTC without Suicide Tuesday, it's why we can't have System of a Down without kids like Ryan and Sarah.
“Wake him up,” I told her. “We're going outside.”
That night, all of us stood on the roof and looked north at the downtown skyline. Kat, Sarah, Ryan, myself, and the man in the hooded cloak was there too, somewhere. He was the one who had brought Sarah to my house. A few blocks away, Martin was restocking returned VHS tapes or arguing with one of his co-workers about the historical accuracy of 300. Across town, our Mom was looking at some crack addicts chart or sewing up a deadbeat's knife wound. And we never knew until then that annoying things like the Thanksgiving Clusterfuck were insignificant compared to all the singular moments of joy we would experience throughout our lives. Ryan and I would have to endure our annoying relatives and our whiny, hyperactive cousins. But after they left, we would all come back together and have one more moment just like this. Where I could shift into the alter-view and see our auras joined in their piercing radiance.