Emile Dulaq’s catatonic state

Emile Dulaq’s catatonic state is the decisive consequence of the psychonic duel between Emile Dulaq and Major Par Odal. Conceived as a temporary, nonlethal condition produced inside the dueling machine, Dulaq’s post-duel shock becomes a living crisis: he is withdrawn from ordinary perception, unable to speak, hear, or see, and ultimately dies when attempts to revive him fail. His collapse changes the meaning of the machine from a controlled outlet for aggression into a technology capable of transmitting, amplifying, and perhaps weaponizing personality itself.

Origin in the Dueling Machine

The immediate setting of Dulaq’s breakdown is the duel arranged between the Prime Minister of the Acquataine Cluster and Odal, a representative of the Kerak Worlds. Dulaq enters the contest with a weapon of his own invention, a short cylindrical stat-wand kept in his tunic pocket. He deliberately chooses his own crowded, noisy city as the environment for the encounter, the metropolis he has known and loved since childhood. The choice makes the duel intensely personal: Dulaq is not merely fighting in an abstract simulation but defending a mental version of the world that defines him.

The machine is presented as safe because no one is supposed to be physically injured. Its purpose is to let opponents settle scores and discharge aggressive feelings without mental or bodily harm. That promise gives Dulaq’s later condition its particular horror. The machine does not simply fail to prevent an ordinary injury; it violates the principle that made psychonic dueling acceptable in the first place. Dulaq’s experience demonstrates that a contest can remain physically enclosed while inflicting damage at the level of consciousness.

The duel’s first phase leaves Dulaq visibly altered. Newsmen watching the contestants emerge from their booths describe his face as gray and say that they have never seen the Prime Minister so shaken. Odal, by contrast, stands quietly before his booth and chats with his seconds, creating a stark visual contrast between the defeated-looking political leader and the composed Kerak major. The public report identifies Dulaq as the acknowledged leader of the coalition opposing Chancellor Kanus and states that he has failed in the first part of his psychonic duel against Odal. The report also notes that the antagonists must undergo routine medical and psychological examinations before the duel can continue, placing Dulaq’s catastrophe within procedures that initially appear ordinary and manageable.

Symptoms and Medical Meaning

When Dr. Leoh is informed of Dulaq’s condition, he asks whether Dulaq was already in a state of catatonic shock when he was removed from the machine. The answer is that he remains so: completely withdrawn from the real world and incapable of speaking, hearing, or seeing. The description of him as a living vegetable emphasizes not only the severity of the condition but also the disappearance of the active political identity he possessed before entering the booth. Dulaq had entered as a leader making a deliberate choice; he emerges unable to participate in the shared world at all.

Leoh immediately recognizes that the case is unprecedented. Nothing like it has ever happened in a dueling machine before, and the novelty of the injury turns Dulaq from an isolated patient into evidence of an unknown failure or mechanism. Leoh’s investigation initially resists the conclusion that the machine itself caused the damage. He considers that something in Odal’s mind may have overwhelmed Dulaq’s, though he recognizes that the word “overpowered” is scientifically imprecise. This hesitation matters: the doctors can observe the result, but they do not yet possess an adequate vocabulary for a mental assault occurring through a machine designed to reproduce thought.

Leoh tests the machine by feeding it electroencephalographic records from clinical cases of catatonia. The machine rejects those records immediately, refusing to process them through its amplification units and association circuits. In practical terms, it recognizes the EEG traces as harmful to human beings. The test appears to clear the apparatus of a simple mechanical defect, but it sharpens the central mystery rather than resolving it. If the machine can detect catatonic patterns as dangerous, the question becomes how Dulaq was forced into that condition during a duel the system was supposed to regulate.

Reconstructing Dulaq’s Terror

The investigation reaches Dulaq through the machine’s capacity to reproduce the mental experience of the duel. In the reconstruction, Leoh passes through the confusion, frustration, apprehension, and growing terror that Dulaq experienced as Odal repeatedly appeared within the crowd, only to merge into another person and escape. The shifting pursuit makes the opponent difficult to locate and denies Dulaq the stable target required for ordinary combat. Odal becomes less a single visible adversary than a hostile presence distributed through the environment Dulaq chose for himself.

After the first part of the reconstructed duel ends, the jumble of thoughts and impressions slowly clears. Leoh then sees an immense barren plain beneath a harsh yellow sky, with no trees or grass and only rocky ground extending to the horizon. At his feet lies the weapon Odal selected: a primitive club. The environment is a radical departure from Dulaq’s beloved metropolis, replacing the familiar city with an empty landscape that offers neither social protection nor recognizable orientation. Leoh understands that he has broken through the shock-created armor surrounding Dulaq’s mind and that Dulaq is reliving the portion of the duel that produced the shock.

The approach toward Odal reveals the structure of the trauma. As the two figures draw nearer, one Odal splits into two, then four, then six. Each image is a tall, lean, blond assassin carrying a massive club and advancing with the same cold smile. Dulaq’s terror is therefore not merely fear of being struck; it is the multiplication of the adversary into an apparently limitless force. He panics, tries to escape, and is overtaken because the younger figures easily outdistance him. One blow sends him sprawling, and another figure kicks away his weapon. The sequence presents helplessness as the final condition of the duel: Dulaq loses not only the contest but also the means by which he might still act within it.

Death and Aftermath

The catatonic state is not temporary. Geri Dulaq reports that the experience was too much for him, that Dulaq is dead, and that the doctors have tried to revive him without success. The announcement converts the psychological aftermath into a political and personal death. The machine’s advertised distinction between aggression and harm is rendered meaningless by the fact that a contestant can leave it mentally inaccessible and then die despite medical intervention.

Dulaq’s death also explains the urgency of Leoh’s subsequent work with Hector H. Hector. To determine what the machine actually transmits, Leoh and Hector begin with controlled exercises, first hiding and seeking across jungles, cities, glaciers, and interplanetary voids without leaving their booths. Once Leoh is satisfied that the machine reproduces and amplifies thought patterns faithfully, they conduct light duels with blunted foils, pistols, sonic beams, and grenades while imagining protective equipment. These trials show that the apparatus does not improve knowledge or physical ability; it projects existing skills into a shared dream. Yet Leoh repeatedly defeats the better-trained Hector when they face one another directly, leading Leoh to conclude that the machine projects personality as well as thought.

That discovery gives Dulaq’s condition a deeper explanation. The machine may reject already recognizable catatonic patterns, but it can still amplify the personality and mental force of a participant during a live confrontation. Dulaq’s collapse is thus associated not with a simple technical imitation of illness but with an encounter in which Odal’s psychonic presence overwhelms Dulaq’s capacity to maintain a coherent self. The reconstructed images of multiplying assassins make that process visible as subjective experience.

Safeguards and Significance

After Odal’s ability to kill through the system has been established, Leoh modifies the dueling machine with new safeguards. One circuit psychonically isolates the duelists from the outside world, making it impossible for Odal or anyone else to contact the external world while the machine is operating. A second circuit monitors the entire duel so that, if either side requests an investigation, the chief meditech can review the recording and determine whether rules have been broken. These additions respond directly to the danger exposed by Dulaq’s fate: containment must protect not only bodies but also the boundary between the duel and everyone beyond it, while surveillance must make concealed violations answerable after the fact.

Dulaq’s catatonia remains the machine’s defining warning. The duel begins with a political leader choosing a beloved city and a weapon of his own invention, under rules that promise harmless release; it ends with a gray-faced contestant, a mind sealed away from speech and perception, and finally a failed attempt at resuscitation. The state therefore marks the point at which psychonic technology ceases to be a neutral arena. It reveals that thought can be reproduced, amplified, shared, and turned against its owner, and that the most dangerous weapon in the machine may be neither the stat-wand nor the club but the personality carried through the connection.