"Why are you here?" Schiller looked at the figure across from him.
The other man smiled at him and said, "The trouble in the universe I went to has more or less been dealt with. Of course I came to help you."
"Thank you, but first tell me how exactly you're helping." Schiller narrowed his eyes.
"That surprises me a little," he said. "Didn't you see the résumé I sent?"
"Brainiac!" Schiller shouted. "He sent you a résumé? Why didn't you forward it to me?"
"I'm afraid it wouldn't have been easy to forward," Brainiac said. "If I piled that many corpses in front of you, wouldn't you have turned the Nature Reserve upside down?"
"Corpses?"
Then Schiller received the materials Brainiac had sent over. From Jerryta holding his own genitals, to the subsequent cases numbered one through eight, they looked exactly like job applications.
Schiller could see more in this résumé. The reason it could be called a job application was that the condition of the corpses emphasized the aspects Brainiac lacked—more precisely, the pathological part of the human psyche he found most difficult to understand.
For example, Brainiac could understand human sexual desire. Although he was an Electronic Life, he understood how the reproductive urges of carbon-based lifeforms had evolved and how they had played an important role in the development of human civilization. Though he had never experienced it himself, he could fully comprehend it.
What he could not understand were the pathological desires derived from it, especially certain inborn mental disorders. The most typical example was sexual perversion. Such problems were more like programming errors produced during the combination of human genes, entirely random. A thousand madmen had a thousand different forms of depravity. How they arose, what purpose they served, and how they should be