If it were up to Tammy Mori, she wouldn't have been caught dead in a place like that. Such polite company was not her scene. She was more comfortable trolling the streets around the airport for victims. Only, it wasn't up to her. The convoluted charade was some kind of test -- about that she was reasonably sure -- although what she was supposed to do, or how she was supposed to react to these phantoms that stood before her, she didn't have the first clue.
The woman who threw the party was called Goodblood. Tammy Mori had never met her before. How could she possibly have? Goodblood was not the kind of person who wheeled her luggage around alone in empty streets and parking lots, lost, because she had taken the wrong shuttle bus to the wrong car rental company, and had no other choice but to hoof the desolate mile or two to where she was supposed to go. People like Goodblood had no idea about the anonymous denizens of the outer-lying airport subculture. Far from it. People like her lived in shiny glass palaces, high above the streets, and sipped their morning coffee and evening wine aware only of the silver jetliners that seemed to them to hang silent and motionless in the twilight and dusk skies, like some kind of late industrial ornament hung from the clouds for no other purpose than to provide them aesthetic pleasure.
The apartment was huge and spacious with floor to ceiling windows on two sides. "People like Goodblood," Tammy Mori quietly whispered to herself as she looked out over the expanse of hotels and apartment towers that ran up and down the boulevard, followed the flight path of the airplanes that took off and landed behind them, and marveled at the constant stream of traffic that swarmed in every direction, "are blissfully unaware of the danger that lurks directly below them, a world populated with menacing creatures, bloodthirsty creatures, creatures like me."
"Isn't everything nature?" a young man in a freshly pressed blazer approached her from across the room.
"Numbers and letters, too?" Tammy Mori turned to face him.
"We are nature, so isn't whatever we create also nature?" he elaborated.
"How about my mobile electronic device?" she reluctantly got in the spirit of the conversation.
"That, too," he pressed closer to her.
"Doesn't leave much out, does it?" she held her ground.
"Only, me," he pressed closer.
"Hmm," she considered for a moment and looked him directly in his electric green eyes. Her answer was cool. "No, that's where I have to draw the line."
Tammy Mori said it as good-naturedly as it was possible for her to muster, and casually raised her drink glass to meet his. Under different circumstances she might have taken him back to her garage, allowed him to have his way with her before she tortured and killed him, but there wasn't anything normal about him or anyone else at the party. The girl in the black wig with the severe bangs, and the leather, powder blue pantsuit with the wide retro lapels scanned the room. There was something strange about the guests. Their eyes, like the young man's, she noticed, also seemed to glow with an unnatural intensity, as if they had been surreptitiously swapped out for some kind of beveled crystal lighted from within.
"The world never looked this real," she muttered to herself, and adjusted her stylish high-tech glasses. Brightly colored artificial looking figures surrounded her. The people she saw projected in front of her were at a fancy dinner party in a beautiful high-rise apartment near the airport. She moved among the apparitions with a newfound sense of suspicion, mildly annoyed at the growing tightness in her stomach, and a doom-filled sense that the intensity of the pictures she saw masked a hidden universe, the contours of which she could not imagine, as if she was a somnambulist whose sense of dread among these strangers that closed in around her with their glowing cut-glass eyes was nothing but a bad dream, and if she could only awaken she would, to her horror, find herself in reality perched on a thin ledge suspended precariously fifty stories off the ground.
Whether she was really at that moment tightrope-walking between the spire needles of two skyscrapers, prostrate in a pit with spiders and snakes crawling and slithering over her body, buried alive, or suffering some other far more hellish fate, it mattered less to her than the solace she took from not really being among all these well mannered, happy party goers who seemed to play at their roles so gracelessly, as if all their pearls and fancy dress were only costumes worn by swine far more deadly and sinister than herself. She smiled at the young man who had engaged her in conversation confident that he did not really see her. His leer was directed at another ghostly form within whose diaphanous body Tammy Mori was only a temporary visitor, and it didn't matter if the best she could do was to manage an awkward sway and lilt as she carefully perambulated around the room like the pendulum of a broken old clock, no better than some poor paraplegic young woman who had in her childhood lost the use of her legs to disease. As far as Tammy Mori was concerned, the other guests, with all their bizarre twitches and quirks, were no more convincing than her.
An older, scrubbed-clean, pink-faced man at the other end of the open apartment was the first to snap out of grid. Out of the blue, for seemingly no reason at all, he began strangling the equally distinguished looking gentleman who stood across from him. Everyone else stood perfectly still. Not one among them intervened. They just stood by quietly and watched as the older man squeezed the life out of the other fellow. Two by two, to Tammy Mori's astonishment, a similar scene was repeated throughout the room. After one person had killed another, they turned on a third and fourth and fifth. Various implements were used. Some party goers stabbed each other with dinner knives, a woman beat a man to death with a fire iron, and all the while the disembodied girl with the black wig and severe bangs watched as the fiery crystal eyes of these maniacs glowed unblinking in their sockets.
Goodblood was the last to go. All the others had already turned on each other. There wasn't anyone left to kill her. Tammy Mori was the sole witness to Goodblood's dramatic change in color. The face of the hostess turned beet red, and swelled to the point of obscuring her features. Tammy Mori continued to watch in stunned disbelief as Goodblood stabbed herself in the eye with a dinner fork, spit up a mouthful of food and drink, and slid from her chair at the head of the table down to the granite floor, like a side of frozen beef dropped from a meat hook.
The girl with the black wig and severe bangs had seen enough. "Goodnight, Goodblood," she exhaled, lay back exhausted and delirious in her specially designed seat, removed her stylish high-tech glasses, and let them drop to the ground.
"We're losing her," Dr. Fenster's assistant yelled from the control room of the newly retrofitted wing at the insane asylum. "Quick. Turn the training module off! She's having some kind of fantasy delusion response to the stereoscopic lenses. She's talking nonsense -- claims she's a skank serial killer who fucked her husband to death -- keeps repeating the phrase 'Goodnight, Goodblood' -- thinks she's about to fall off the ledge of a high rise and plunge face first to her death onto the cold, hard concrete sidewalk fifty stories below."
The test grader stood in the frame of the door and scratched his head, perplexed. "You won't believe this, Doc," he said and held out a computer printout to the misshapen, corpulent man to show as proof.
"I'll be darned," Dr. Fenster sang out. "A perfect score!" he celebrated, and added: "I do believe we have another ideal candidate for scholarship at Fortean College."
-- Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
Excitement for Sam Spikone was driving over the speed limit late at night and shooting holes in roadside signs with his dad's old Colt. Up 'till that point, the most exhilarating thing in his life was the new cyber-sword he had purchased the week before. He and the gang, he bragged, had once slummed it in the urban ghetto with a paintball gun. They had nailed some homeless street people, but they had never burned anyone alive. There were limits. There was this one screw up juvenile delinquent he remembered from his youth who liked to set bullfrogs on fire, but that kid, he insisted, was sick in the head.
"People like to be chemically altered," he said after he took a feeble hit of crystal off the tinfoil pipe and handed it back to the young woman in the black wig with the severe bangs.
"No shit," Tammy Mori coughed.
The kid loved taking her from behind. Her small, skinny ass and shaved pussy made his cock look huge. She was like some beautiful creature that had crawled out from a sewer. The girl was kinky. He knew she was weird, but it wasn't until she invited him over to see how she had fixed up her garage that he seriously understood how weird she really was. The place kind of resembled what he imagined a sterile station at a meat rendering plant might look like. If he wasn't sure he was way out in the burbs, he might have thought he had taken a wrong turn on some school trip to the metropolitan city morgue. The place was that creepy, like someone had tiled over an insane asylum rubber room.
"What's this?" he picked something up off the floor and handed it to her.
"A knuckle bone," she answered nonchalantly, and carelessly threw it into the garbage.
Tammy Mori couldn't remember when or where she had met Sam Spikone. It was as if he simply appeared one day out of the blue, like whoever or whatever, for reasons she couldn't begin to fathom, decided her role as a serial killer skank was not nearly cruel enough, and what she really needed was a bumbling pimple-faced sidekick with an adolescent sex-drive to add an extra measure of torture to her already intolerable existence. No matter how forcefully she pointed out to the kid how suspicious the heat was of the unexplained disappearances of so many families at the upscale gated community in such a short period of time, how it was just a matter of days before they dispensed with their mild mannered questions, and came down hard on her, all Sam Spikone could think of was how all the winches and other equipment in her garage presented him with unprecedented potential for bizarre, sadomasochistic sex.
Girls always wanted to let their hair hang down low in front of their face when they gave you head, as if the mystique added to the sensorial experience, he groused. They always wanted to turn out the lights when you made love to them. After he saw her garage, Sam Spikone thought maybe Tammy Mori would take a different perspective, like maybe, unlike the other girls he had bedded, the fact she liked to watch her victims under the cold light of bright bulbs was an indication she understood how important the visual component was to male sexuality.
Despite the fact she knew it was pure folly, or maybe it was precisely because she knew what a bad idea it was -- she couldn't decide -- Tammy Mori let the idiot kid have his brutal, misogynist way with her. At least that was what she led him to believe. Truth to tell, the kid didn't possess a spark of deviate imagination. Like everyone else, after he stumbled around aimlessly with the ropes, it became abundantly clear it was left to her to tell him exactly what he was expected to do. The young woman needed to tell him to bind her breasts as hard as he could, and to shake him from his awkward resistance, she was forced to shame him into whipping her by verbally attacking his fragile manhood. It wasn't like she was asking him to burn her alive. The object was only to get him to douse some gasoline over a dumb dog she grabbed off the street earlier in the day, and torch the damn mutt. Shit, she thought, suspended belly down by her arms and legs with his pencil thin, little dick in her mouth, and a large mechanical dildo pounding her ass, when she was his age she would have jumped at an opportunity like that, you wouldn't have had to ask her twice.
She was all along only playing a part, she confided to the schoolteacher neighbor who cut her down afterwards, and loosened the ropes from her wrists and ankles. Others might judge her badly, she conceded, but she insisted it was only the role she was assigned. How, she wondered, was it possible for anyone to moralize her character, if they enjoyed, from the start, parts that were ethically superior to hers. Was it her fault that she was assigned the role of a deranged hussy? She was sure she could have played a pastor's wife, a nurse, or Girl Scout equally well, was she called on to do so. Her only prerogative was to make her character resonate. The bottom line was that, no matter what the part, she was an actor, and her job was to take whatever came her way and convince an audience she wasn't faking it. Whether she was cast as a serial killer or as a lovable grandmother, she was not only supposed to make herself come off as believable, her job description demanded she make herself sympathetic.
"It's pretty clear this Sam Spikone fellow worked her over pretty well," the high school geometry teacher confided to his wife. "The guy has her thinking she's in some kind of movie or something, and she was only following his direction, like he had brainwashed her into believing she was in some Hollywood film and he was the producer. She keeps saying how it was all his idea and how she was only given a copy of her lines, the studio never gave her a full script, and she has no idea what the story is all about, or how her scenes fit in with the larger narrative arc. This was her big break, she insists. Her only aim, she says, was to nail her lines. In her fragile state of mind, I can't believe she was capable of masterminding such a terrible trail of bloody murders. The Sam Spikone character," he pointed out, "strikes me as a much more likely candidate for the maniac killer you are looking for. I mean look at her," he implored his wife, the district assistant prosecutor, "the experience has practically unraveled her."
Outside the garage it was like every black and white from every municipality within radio distance was called in. Their whirly-bird lights made it look like a traveling carnival had set up shop at the end of the block.
"I only have one question for her," she told her husband. The assistant district prosecutor kneeled down in front of the naked, trembling young woman and snapped her briefcase open. "Just so you understand, I represent the law, and you are currently a suspect in a string of recent local murders," she told the young lady. "We've identified the bodies of most of the victims," she showed Tammy Mori a sheath of photographs, maybe forty thick all told, "but there is still one body we can't account for." The assistant prosecutor pulled out a glossy print from the top of the stack. "There is one victim we can't match with anyone from the neighborhood. Do you recognize him?" she asked the young woman in the black wig with the severe bangs, and showed her the picture.
"Oh, him," Tammy Mori's face hardened. "Sure, I know him. I'm his mail order bride. He's my no good husband."
-- Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
Behind the counter in her leather, powder blue pantsuit with her signature extra-wide lapels, and her black wig with severe bangs, she looked a bit like Vampirella. Only, she wasn't any kind of Gothic super chick from the planet Drakulon, she was Tammy Mori -- the bar hostess.
On some level, the whole experience was similar to pure Hollywood make believe, but she was not all showbiz glitz, far from it. She wasn't some media industry phony who put on a big act in front of the camera, or on stage, or wherever else in public those folks vamp it up. When the lights came on she wasn't an Amazon seductress, or some exotic vixen, or whatever kind of personality the insiders had for a professional shtick. Her whole facade was not constructed in the same way theirs was. Out of the limelight she was not in reality the most well grounded business professional who, with the help of a team of highly paid writers and stylists, diligently fine-tuned her false persona to wow the audience at her next appearance. Neither was she one of those sad victims of the spectacle machine she had heard of who were exactly who they appeared to be. Not even close, she thought as she poured a round of shots for a bunch of rowdy, oversexed, fraternity boys. In her case, the sad truth of the matter was that when she wasn't at work filling drink orders behind the bar, she had no idea who she was, or how, for that matter, she got there.
Her new husband had a different name for her. At home she was Tammy Mori -- the no good slut. At home, she was nothing but a douche bag whore, nothing but a used dishrag. After she took care of the night's receipts, restocked the liquor, put all the chairs and stools up on the tables, mopped the floor, and turned out the lights, she knew there was a good chance her creepy old man was waiting for her back at their place with a choice thing or two to tell her about what a no good prostitute he thought she was. Most nights, luckily, the hairy sleaze-ball of an ape was passed out drunk by the time she shut the bar down, and she wouldn't have to endure his non-stop litany of complaints about how badly he believed he was screwed, how she looked nothing like the picture of the girl he picked from the website, and, in general, what an incredible disappointment she was to him.
On those quiet occasions, Tammy Mori had a little time to herself to try and address the problem of her lost, or forgotten identity. There were the memories of herself as an orphan, of the whorehouse she worked in as a sex slave back in the old country, wherever that was. To Tammy Mori, there was something all too convenient about these images of her sordid youth. No one could account for every detail the way she could. It was almost as if her past was too complete, as if it was scripted rather than lived. The more she thought about it, the more she doubted the veracity of what she recalled, as if it was nothing more than some bizarre mythological story she had adopted to bamboozle her friends into thinking she was cooler than she really was, or to try and make them feel sorry for her. Only, in the process of telling her tall tale, her tragedy was that she had somehow forgotten what exactly it was about herself she was so intent on hiding from everyone else in the first place, like her memories were nothing but a cover story, a fiction that may or may not have happened, and that somewhere behind all the little white lies there was actually still a personality she could recognize and claim as her own. Somewhere deep inside her, she felt certain she was neither Tammy Mori "the bartender", nor Tammy Mori "the slut". She wasn't even so sure her name was actually Tammy Mori. For reasons she had trouble rationalizing, she strongly believed it was possible the past that she remembered masked some important, maybe even crucial, aspect of her history that would allow her to escape the nightmare of misidentification she currently found herself in.
Of more immediate concern, however, was the possibility that tonight was one of those rare occasions when her drunk and abusive new husband was still wide-awake when she got home. In those instances, he would almost always greet her in the living room full of confused jealous rage, his leather belt wrapped tightly around his fist, beat her semi-senseless, and brutally rape her. Once, he even stabbed her. The thought of the cold steel blade plunged deep in her soft neck made her pull her powder blue leather jacket tightly over her right side. Her memory of the attack was still so vivid in her mind she shuddered at the thought of it. Almost too vivid, she thought as she brought her electric purple Corvette to a stop at a red light.
It never occurred to her before to check for the scar. Had the assault actually happened, or was it simply another aspect of her past she accepted as granted? The way she recalled the incident, the tip of his serrated hunter's blade, had glanced off her collarbone. It had barely missed her carotid artery. In search of the wound, she pulled out her compact mirror from her handbag and brushed back her hair to expose her neck and shoulder, but no matter how she tilted the mirror under the street lamps that loomed over the intersection to try and angle the light onto her throat, she couldn't find any trace of it. If there was no scar -- the very idea of it frightened her more than her memory of the assault -- did that also mean there was no Tammy Mori? If one memory was proved false, did that mean all her other memories were equally false? Nothing, not all her previous suspicions, prepared her for this possibility. She replaced her compact in her purse, and tried to button her shirt back up before the light changed back to green, but her hands and the rest of her body shook almost convulsively, like someone had just dumped a bucket of ice water through her open sunroof.
"The water feels great," her new husband shouted as soon as he heard her come into the house. The bastard was out back in the hot tub. He wanted her to get into the water with him.
Tammy Mori tried to remind herself she was only roll playing, and the whole thing was a diabolical game in which she was only a pawn. Maybe, she thought as she took off her clothes and got in the roiling pool with the man, there was an outside chance that her new husband was also aware of the farce, and he was as troubled by his assigned personality in the present fiasco as she was by hers. Maybe, she hoped, as she lowered herself into the water, he disliked his character in the story as much as she disliked hers. Maybe, she figured, as she allowed him to penetrate her, he wished he wasn't cast as a speed freak and alcohol addled, low-life, wife beater, as much as she wished she wasn't cast as his mail order bride.
"There is a recurring image I have of myself as a little girl seated on a swing that hangs from a large tree, an image which doesn't quite square with the other memories I have of myself," she said, as her sexual fervor increased. "Maybe," she said slightly out of breath, "It's a clue to my identity. If all the other memories are false," she arched her back a little, "Maybe, it's the only true recollection of my past I still have?"
She wasn't quite sure what came over her. The man under her clearly gasped for breath a couple of times. If she had looked, she would have seen her new husband was having trouble keeping his head above water, but she wasn't paying any attention to him. Her eyes were shut tight. She laughed. How she laughed. She laughed hysterically, like a little girl on a swing, one moment kicking the blue sky with the toes of her shiny black Mary Jane's, the next almost kissing the earth with her lips. Nothing could break her reverie. Not even the sick gurgle her new husband made when he clasped his exploding heart with his hands, and, just before his head sank bellow the jet bubbles of the Jacuzzi for the final time, moaned with his last breath: "You fucking bitch. You killed me!"
When Tammy Mori finally opened her eyes, she was genuinely upset by what she saw. It honestly never occurred to her to fuck the old fart to death. "Now," she thought, dryly, "I suppose I can add murderer to my illustrious career." She toweled off and took one last look at her husband's bobbing lifeless body. "Tammy Mori -- the whore, and now Tammy Mori -- the killer," she snickered to herself.
-- Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
"If I had tripped," Buddy Alexander laughed off his near perfect game, "I would have fallen on a hundred dollar bill."
He came into the room, his girlfriend thought, as if miraculously delivered by a hidden conveyor belt, built to her exact specifications, fresh off the factory floor, and shipped directly to her door. She imagined an assembly line between her and some industrial plant far away on which Buddy Alexander's body was constructed one piece at a time by giant robotic limbs with welders and all manner of other tools for extensions. The process, she imagined, started with his torso. His legs were attached next. She pictured how his two arms were fastened to the frame after that, and how finally, just before he knocked on the front door of her parents' house, his head was firmly secured on his shoulders.
When she opened the door and saw him stand there with that little boy smile on his face, she almost expected chubby cherubs to float in behind him and a heavenly orchestra to appear through the parted clouds in the sky above. At over six feet tall, the student athlete made quite an impression on the girl. To her, it was almost as if his figure was visibly outlined by a bright aura, like someone was standing behind him with a very bright neon light. The kid seemed to glide into the house effortlessly, as if he was detached from the earth, his feet never touching the ground. The effect was rather remarkable to her -- as though he was afloat, atop a dolly with wheels that could swivel in any direction, his buoyant frame pulled around by invisible strings held by equally invisible angels.
As she helped him off with his letter jacket she examined him closely with the curiosity and attention of someone who has just taken a brand new toy out of the box. She squeezed his upper arm, as if to gauge its firmness, combed through his hair with her fingers, as if to assess its quality as compared to all-natural fiber, slowly ran her hands over his neck and shoulders, as if to feel for seams at the joints, pressed her ear to his chest, as if she wasn't sure the model unit would have a heartbeat, and playfully grabbed the denim crotch of his pants, as if to make sure there were no defects in the model, nothing important was left on the production line floor, and her bright, shiny boyfriend was in every way anatomically correct.
"My barcode is tattooed on my ass," he playfully said. The big win over Mountain High put the young man in a jocular mood, like a gambler who was running the table on an extended lucky streak. He twirled her around to take her all in. Everything was going his way. Much to his delight, she still had on her cheerleader's outfit.
Some people sleepwalked through life. Not her Buddy Alexander, she thought. It was as if the great big factory she imagined somewhere out there had outfitted his model with an extra battery. The kid just seemed so full of energy, so full of life. His very presence in the room seemed to her to light it up with an unnatural glow. She longed for the time they could finally spend a whole night together. It wasn't like she didn't like their stolen interludes. Oh, how she loved them, but she wanted more, she wanted to posses him totally. She wanted to wake up with him lying next to her in bed in the morning, if only so that she could check his sleeping naked body more thoroughly for hidden panels, and disguised switches. If she had designed him herself from a manufacturer's catalog, he couldn't have been more perfect. The young woman simply couldn't believe he was real.
Not that it mattered. If she was to run her hand down the length of his bare stomach and a hidden drawer were to unexpectedly pop out that revealed a complicated tangle of wire and hydraulics, it wouldn't dim her passion for him one single bit. If it were to turn out that he was actually some kind of Christ-like robot, custom made for her and delivered to her doorstep, she was sure she would gladly, no questions asked, devote herself for the rest of her life to his general upkeep, oil his parts and patch his synthetic shell until she took her last dying breath. She loved him that much.
Seated in the plush Naugahyde recliner, the young man leaned over the glass coffee table to uncap the bottle of Maker's Mark he brought along to celebrate the special occasion. His girlfriend pushed him into the chair so he could more comfortably appreciate the private show of high school cheers she was about to perform for him. At first she pumped her pom-poms enthusiastically and kicked her legs up through her regular old routine, but alone together in her parent's den, with them gone, and her a little drunk on cheap bourbon, it didn't take long before her dance moves got more erotic.
The sheer giddiness of the performance was what got her going, like she was a little girl again -- the mid-American version of a little ballerina -- who entertained for the grownups at some family gathering or other. Then again, she knew full well she was not the same skinny adolescent anymore, and, should she choose to use it, she had real power over men. She redoubled her efforts to turn him on. Her aim wasn't to make her parents or extended relatives take notice of her, her aim was to seduce her boyfriend with a devastating display of her feminine charms. Even if it did turn out he was a mail-order fantasy shipped to the wrong address and she would some day have to return him after the mistake was discovered by the company's main office, she wanted to make sure he would have something special to remember her by.
Maybe if she cupped her breasts and flashed him some panty shots, she thought, she could divert his attention long enough to rifle through his pockets for some kind of documentation. A bill of sale, or warranty would be nice, she thought. A user's manual would even be better. The problem was that all that kinky posing and jumping around aroused her as well. The longer she danced for him, the more randy she got. In a somewhat desperate maneuver to dampen her excitement, she initiated a number of stretches in which she turned her back to him and bent over. In her cheerleader's micro-skirt, she extended her right heel so it rested on the ledge of the mantelpiece, and leaned over the long length of her outstretched leg, all the while entirely aware of the effect she was having on her young man.
"Do you want me to take my underwear off, they feel like they are on fire?" she whispered provocatively as she straddled his thighs and sat down on his lap.
"No, sweetheart," he answered, as he gathered her warm body into his arms. "Please keep them on. I'm more than glad to put out your fire."
If in her eyes he was unreal, the young woman surmised as she crushed her soft breasts against his muscular upper body, maybe she wasn't real for him either. Maybe they were both illusions, and the desire that coursed through her veins when she touched his taught hot skin was only a false computer simulation of human passion. Maybe her boyfriend had the same feeling about her she had about him. Maybe in his little boy's mind when he fantasized about making love to her in the shadow of a mountain, under the canopy of the lush trees of a valley, or beside the cool flow of a country stream, he also wondered if her body wasn't actually hollow, too beautiful to be true, filled with nothing but electronic hardware and gears, like maybe he thought of her as a product of his imagination, as much as she thought of him as a product of hers.
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
A red light glowed inside a hole. The opening, it became clearer to Buddy Alexander as he inched forward, was in the side of a head whose profile he could not make out. What was all aglow, it turned out, was an almost blindingly radiant human brain, almost like someone had set off a roadside emergency flare inside a hollowed out pumpkin, except there was no smoke and the light was steady and never varied from its intensity the whole time he watched it.
He realized he was not alone in the dark room. Someone else had come in behind him -- a strange figure that walked past him, right up to the head planted on the operating table, and peered inside the radiant opening. The other person's broad back was turned to him, but it struck the young man how oddly shaped the figure's silhouette was, distorted in a way he could not exactly articulate, like the proportions were all wrong for a body of that size. To the onlooker, whose shoulder was pressed to the wall, the way the other person in the room held his hands over the opening, it almost seemed as if the dark figure momentarily warmed them over the red-hot light ablaze in the hole.
For the first week at Fortean College, Buddy Alexander was confined to the infirmary. No matter where he went he had to wheel around his intravenous drip, which made it a little difficult for him to maneuver without giving himself away. In the dark room alone with the mysterious figure, he was afraid to move, afraid to breath even, but he also felt an incredible desire to learn the identity of the man whose back was turned to him, and to discover whose head it was with the burning brain inside it.
At one point it seemed to the young man like the dark figure's arms were elbow-deep in the circular opening in the head, like there was a halogen bulb inside the patient's skull, and the other man was some kind of diabolical mechanic or plumber who strained every muscle to get to a difficult spot at the far back. Every once in a while he would swear and pull his arms out to exchange one cumbersome looking tool for another. They were piled willy-nilly on a stainless steel gurney within easy reach. The dark figure would put one down, which invariably hit the table with a heavy metallic clunk, pick another one up, and plunge his arms in with renewed vigor, his latest implement firmly gripped in yellow rubber gloves that went up past his forearms.
Every night during his first week at Fortean College the young man woke up with a start. In his dream he was usually doubled, but sometimes there were three and even four of him all mixed up in a mosaic pattern, as if he saw himself through the many-sided crystal of a kaleidoscope. All these four images, seemingly identical, repeatedly exchanged places with one another until it made him dizzy to try and follow them around. One, a picture of himself he recognized easily enough, was of a young man who melted away hours of convalescence at the college infirmary on a video game box. It was his present self. Another, slightly less clear, but still very strongly felt image was of a recently discovered part of himself that was completely insane, a psychopathic killer with nothing but rage and murder in his mind. It was his past self. Of the third and fourth images, one that he could still barely make out was of a very popular athlete in high school who had a beautiful girlfriend and everything else going for him. That self was almost completely gone. Try as he may to make out the last, however, it was an impenetrable mystery. If he strained to picture it he drew a complete blank. All he felt was a cold sensation, like he walked into a room he thought was twice as large, and discovered that the feeling of deep space was only a cheap illusion created by a mirrored wall. That self no longer existed at all.
Every night during his first week at Fortean College he awoke with a strange feeling, as if he was dragged against his wishes into a circus big tent to see a clown show even as he begged not to go in. Despite his repeated protest of how much they scared him, he was forced to enter the tent. One clown in particular frightened him the most -- a round, misshapen figure whose head was way too big and heavy for his little body. Every night the young man would get dragged to the circus tent to sit alone in the dark and watch the freakish clown in surgeon's scrubs take the center ring and dramatically unveil this giant head. In the act the clown took some parts out, and put other parts in. The kid watched as the clown unscrewed the top of the head, remove the radiant red brain and cut at it with the dull, toothy blade of a large handsaw until it lay scattered about on the table in pieces.
Once awake it was hard for him to fall back asleep. He swung his heavy legs over the side of the metal frame bed, slipped his feet into his disposable slippers, put his robe on over his hospital pajamas, loudly yawned, and stretched his arms over his head. With one hand he opened the door and with the other he shoved the squeaky metal chassis of the intravenous drip out into the hall. No one was on duty but the night watchman and he wasn't scheduled to do his rounds for another hour. The young man pushed the intravenous drip in front of him. The room he went to every night was down the hall and to the right. If he got there early enough, he thought, he might have time to finally creep up close enough to the head with the hole in it to better study its features. Up 'til then the dark misshapen figure had always interrupted him just before he could get near enough, but tonight, he felt confident, was the night he would finally get up close, if only because he had awakened so much earlier than usual.
Every night the dream was unchanged. The kid would watch in horror as the crazy clown under the spotlight in the center ring of the big tent stuck his arms inside a large hole in the side of a giant head and pulled out a glowing brain as though it wasn't a brain at all he was holding in his hands, but a gob of slippery, gelatinous, day-glow, red colored goop he could not quite get a good handle on.
Every night the dream was unchanged, the young man thought, except for the night before. Last night he walked in on the surgeon already hard at work in the dark laboratory. Last night, to his great consternation, the dark misshapen figure heard a squeak from the rickety chassis of his intravenous drip and angrily wheeled around to confront the kid before he could duck into a corner. Last night was the inglorious night that he finally saw that the face of the clown in the blood spattered rubber apron was none other than Dr. Fenster's.
The young man scrambled to get out of the government scientist's way, and, in so doing, inadvertently tripped into the stainless steel gurney piled high with surgical equipment. Last night was the night he flipped the operating table over as he tried to break his fall. Nothing happened the way it had on any of the other nights. He lay helpless and death scared on the cold tile floor while the clown reeled with anger. It was the night he finally saw the face of the head with the hole in it. Last night was the night he saw that the face of the head with the hole in it was his own, and at the end of the circus clown show under the big top, when he exited the tent to return to his room as he had done every night before, he was sure something very significant had changed. For several days after, no one could change Buddy Alexander's mind. He believed Dr. Fenster had turned him into a clown.
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
No one at the asylum for the criminally insane was warned ahead of time of the eminent doctor's arrival at the front gate. The unannounced visit of the federal government scientist and his large entourage was, to the institution's staff, like a surprise inspection of the mental health facility. They scrambled to line up in the hallway and greet their unexpected high-ranking guests.
Most mental hospital employees were completely unnerved when the buoyant scientist flashed them his boyish smile. To say the least, the visit was extremely unusual. As a point of fact, according to one of the most senior personnel, a guard who had worked at the insane asylum since its inception, it was the first time the man had ever showed his face. No one remembered Merlin Fenster, M.D. (a.k.a. Dr. Fester) having ever set foot on the facility grounds prior to the present visit because it simply had not happened. There was, in fact, considerable doubt the scientist had actually ever ventured out in public before. The researcher, who had the air of an overgrown child, was rumored to do all his work inside a covert, windowless bunker on a military base in the middle of a dessert, or inside a hollow mountain, or in a shadowy top-secret facility altogether outside the country somewhere where human rights laws didn't apply. Whichever answer you got largely depended on whom you asked. No one was exactly sure which was true.
One day Merlin Fenster's happy face would undoubtedly grace the glossy front cover of Time Magazine like he was some kind of beloved, benevolent United States hero, but in reality he was the guy most folks hereabouts immediately suspected every time there was an outbreak somewhere around the world of some horrible virus or other malady or disease formerly unknown to science. If someone was going to figure out how to turn human beings into bloodthirsty, brain eating ghouls, you could be sure Dr. Fenster's name came to everyone's mind first. If a fine line existed between a "miracle" and an "abomination" of modern medical science, the joke was that he was always the first across it.
"The doctor is also alleged to share an interest in Fortean College," one mental institute staffer quietly whispered to another. "He allegedly shares it with the U.S. government and the Interan Corp., but the sad truth of the matter is that it's all pure conspiracy theory and speculation. What, if anything, they do at the university science Tetragon, over there, or whether the doctor is actually involved in any significant way is entirely unverifiable -- strictly hush-hush," he reluctantly admitted. The two attendants were far enough in the rear so that they were safely out of earshot. Nobody ahead of them could hear a word they said.
Besides the fact no one among the staff knew where it was or what the hell the good doctor did in his secret laboratory, they couldn't even understand a single word the scientist spoke. As he randomly poked his head into closets, knocked around the rec room and cafeteria, peeked into cells, and generally rummaged around the treatment facility with no goal in mind that anyone could fathom, all the while prattling on about all the things he noticed, large and small, he might as well have addressed the dayshift in Swahili. At one point, as he examined some antique electro-shock therapy equipment on display in the library, the doctor blurted out: "You mean to tell me the inmates here are not entirely bereft of their nervous faculties?" Most senior psychiatrists on duty were dumbstruck by the question. "You mean to tell me," he went on, "they retain some semblance of their core consciousness and personality?" It was almost as if Dr. Fenster spoke of some controversial method or other he strongly disagreed with when there was, in fact, no other known technique to compare it with.
"They are heavily sedated," the chief physician bravely put forward. "But," the proud doctor acquiesced with a little difficulty, "this isn't the lawless 19th-century. There are serious limits to what we can do with the clinical tools at our disposal here at the asylum." He addressed the back of Dr. Fenster's bobbing, bald head the entire time he spoke to the man, and the only way to describe the look on his face after the government scientist's curt dismissal of his reasonable (not to mention tempered) response, was to liken the expression on his face to that of a person who has just discovered the hard way that he is not bullet proof.
Out in the exercise yard the government scientist cursed like a sailor. "Disgusting, vile shit," was the way he described the row of inmates as he walked past them. Slurs flew from his mouth as he addressed the assembled crowd of the criminally insane who stood in the mottled shadow of an old Maple. Some of the smears, Buddy Alexander thought, were very creative indeed. He had heard a lot of mean, spiteful, outrageous things uttered against people -- humiliating words, words that could obliterate a fragile ego -- but he was fairly certain he had never before heard some of these foul curses that the doctor hurled at them.
The kid felt the cold gray eyes of the corpulent scientist pause suspiciously on him as if the man instinctively new his thoughts were not fully invested in the present interview, and that the young man was otherwise preoccupied with fantastic visions of mass graves, pits filled with human remains that dotted the forest lawn, tireless federal government death squads that kept everything working smoothly 24/7, and lips, lots of half parted lips, all painted in the reddest lipstick.
"No mama's boy crybabies wanted!" the childlike scientist paused in front of the young lunatic and flicked his thumb in the direction of the gate that led back to the cellblock.
Buddy Alexander locked his jaw to show his resolve, but for what purpose he had no idea. Consequently, his effort was rather transparent. For some reason he couldn't help but think of the scientist as some kind of child's toy version of a person, like the man was an inflatable balloon baby that was so full of hot air it was about to pop and explode it's internal plastic contents all over the place. Eventually he knew he would inadvertently betray himself with a laugh or some other inappropriate guttural outburst, so he squinted an eye and bit the inside of his cheek to further try and stave off the inevitable display of emotion before it erupted and caused him all kinds of disciplinary problems with asylum authorities that, if he could help it, he would much rather avoid.
To a man, the scientist was told, the patients suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and none among them was sentenced for a lesser crime than murder. Most of the men, it was explained for the doctor, had brutally killed more than one person. In each case, they had raped and/or mutilated their victims beforehand. Some had killed family members. Others had murdered loved ones. There were even a couple of especially unsavory characters that had gone on extended indiscriminate killing sprees after they had slaughtered kith and kin.
"How about this clown?" Dr. Fenster cut in.
"Buddy Alexander. Let me check, sir. Buddy Alexander was committed to the asylum for the rape and murder of his high-school girlfriend," the mental institution staffer matter-of-factly replied. "Afterwards he cut her up and dumped her body under a bridge," the mental health professional added casually.
"Well, son," Dr. Fenster turned his full piercing attention on the frazzled young inmate with the dark crescents under his eyes who, throughout the entire time he was addressed, continued to squint his one eye shut and bite the inside of his cheek to try and keep a straight face. "It's your lucky day, son," the scientist eventually muttered, and added in a louder voice: "How would you like a full-scholarship, courtesy of the United States government, to attend Fortean College?"
-- Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
Down the end of the block a deranged looking young man with a buzz cut harassed oncoming traffic. The lunatic, who yelled profanities at the top of his lungs every time a car passed by, had on mirrored aviator glasses, a ratty black T-shirt, and military style shorts.
When the driver in the truck passed him by, the maniac in the aviator sunglasses unexpectedly stopped swearing at the other vehicles, stiffened, brought his right hand up to the side of his head, pressed the tips of his ridged fingers to the point where his right eyebrow and temple met, and pulled it down again quickly with a practiced, sharp angular motion. The driver of the truck thought the gesture a bit odd, but he didn't let it stop him from casually saluting back. All these post-traumatic stress disorder types left to wander aimlessly on the streets, Buddy Alexander lamented. What a shabby world.
The day began inauspiciously enough. The simple wooden barn he and the beautiful girl who escaped the Federal Territory with him fell asleep in, it turned out, upon his rising in the morning was somehow transformed into a cinderblock building with exposed electrical conduits, and the whole foundation was apparently on extremely unstable ground. Cracks and fissures ran up and down the walls and ceiling. The concrete floor showed similar signs of buckling and tilting. It was as if an evil spell was cast by a powerful woodland demon that brought the large dormant root system of an old tree to life. The subterranean limbs that curled and expanded under the building's infrastructure were reanimated by the demon's incantation, and it was simply a matter of time before the walls would give way and the ceiling would come crashing down on his head.
But, when he put his boots on and went outside to see what was going on, what was causing all the damage, his idea that the roots of an old tree were to blame was completely obliterated by what he saw. There was not a single tree on the horizon. He slowly turned around and gasped in astonishment. The unspoiled verdant landscape that had stretched for miles around in every direction the day before was completely gone, replaced entirely by an array of five-story tall relay towers. Where once there was a beautiful view of unspoiled primeval woodlands, there was now a man-made forest of rusty metal scaffolding and all sorts of antennas of various shapes and sizes.
Not to mention that the beautiful young woman he had escaped the Federal Territory with was missing. Much to his chagrin, though he called her name and looked for her behind the utility shed which now stood where a chicken coop had been located only a few hours earlier, she was nowhere around. Neither was the dog that had protected the hens from the foxes. Instead the woman he found when he walked back into the cinderblock structure was an ugly girl he, to the best of his recollection, had only dated once, way back when, during his brief stay at the Interan Campus.
The woman sat with her back against a column, nursed a cup of water, and glared menacingly at him, like it was his fault she was there. Back in the day, he remembered, he had laughed his date with her off like it was a romantic love affair, but with the nastiest hooker on the corporate campus. The young woman, it started to slowly come back to him, was totally insane. Not only was he surprised to find her there in the cinderblock structure, after so much time had passed since he last saw her, he was actually surprised he remembered what she looked like. To his mind, it all happened so very long ago, back in another distant era, in another lifetime.
She was, hard as it was to believe, even less happy about the situation than he was, and she did not hesitate to make it perfectly clear how much she had always despised him for taking advantage of her at such a naive and emotionally vulnerable period in her life. Her face partly obscured by a shadow, she accused him of having stolen her youth. She accused him of all manner of crimes against women. He was called a lot of different names, and she made it abundantly clear to him her greatest wish was that she was just about anywhere else in the entire universe than stuck under the tin roof of this glorified shed with him. The young woman was pretty sure Buddy Alexander must have doped her drink back at the restaurant bar, and then went on to further accuse him of even far worse underhanded and cowardly misdeeds.
How they had hooked back up wasn't exactly clear to him either. Nothing that was going on, for that matter, made much sense to him. It wasn't like he had all the answers. He wasn't even sure where he was. For his part, the young man figured he must have gotten into an argument with the beautiful young woman with whom he had escaped from the Federal Territories, driven into the small town near the barn where they had holed up, and got plastered at a local restaurant bar. As near as he could figure, he must have got so drunk, in fact, he started to fool around with this crazy woman from his past, and somehow or other the two of them ended up in the sack together back at her place.
The problem was, no matter what explanation he came up with, he didn't feel the least bit assured, like every scenario he tested against the facts, no matter how plausible, was at best only a desperate stab in the dark. Too many questions gnawed at him. Too many dislocated remembrances plagued his mind. It was as if all the pieces of a puzzle were laid before him, but without some kind of key to how they should all get arranged, how they were supposed to fit together, the truth of the matter was fated to forever remain as partly hidden from the light of day as the shadowed face of the angry female quasi-stranger in the cinderblock structure who contemptuously glared at him.
Among the litany of unanswered questions they both had, there was only one fact on which the two of them readily agreed. Whatever had transpired between them, and for however long, or however briefly it had gone on, there was one very notable change that was obvious to them.
"These cell phone and satellite towers outside the kitchen window that look like they run into infinity in every direction..." he began.
"They definitely were not there when we came here yesterday," she finished his thought.
At the next corner another deranged lunatic, this time out front of a boarded up building, stood attention as the driver of the truck slowed for a stop sign. As nearly as the man in the truck could make out, much like the lunatic before had, the disheveled street person motioned as if to salute him.
So let me get this straight, he thought to himself as he nodded to the poor man on the sidewalk. I am a nameless, purposeless man who lives in a cinderblock box in a forest of antennas with a crazy bitch I feel relatively sure I have not seen for years. Yesterday I was on the lamb, chased through small towns and woods by a posse of Federal Intelligence agents and their local guides whose orders were to haul my ass in dead or alive. Whereas today I'm driving a truck, and even though I am not sure exactly who the heck I am, or even where, for that matter, it is that I am, deranged street people act as if they know me.
The more he thought about it the more it occurred to him there was only one plausible explanation. However outlandish it sounded, this, apparently, was what the world he lived in really looked like. The glorified shed with the corrugated roof was his real house. The unattractive woman was not a one-night-stand arbitrarily plucked out of his memory. Alas, the growing evidence was compelling. It was probably not with a beautiful young woman he had escaped the Federal Territories, but with this other woman that he had been on the run with the whole time. The hangover, he realized, was probably not from drinking too much at the small town restaurant bar the night before. His headache, it dawned on him, was probably some kind of withdrawal from the video game, probably due to some kind of alteration or malfunction of the game, because that was the only thing he could think of that accounted for all the unexpected changes all around him. Either the game's interface was changed to this new squalid end-times aesthetic theme, or the game had crashed, and his growing suspicion was that it was probably the latter: Drone Wars was probably down.
-- GAME OVER --
-- Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
Think back, buddy boy, he asked himself. Think back, way back to the other night. Buddy Alexander was scared and desperate. The court appointed psychiatrist wrote something down on a legal pad and looked knowingly at the young man in the high school letter jacket. The kid tried to recall. What, he implored himself, is the last thing you remember from the other night? What happened? He blindly searched his murky mind for some trace, some record or clue, lost or misplaced among his synapses, that once found, would pull the whole episode back out of the clammy, black nothingness of oblivion into which it had disappeared.
Buddy Alexander remembered how he uncapped the bottle of Maker's Mark he brought. They were going to celebrate he told his girlfriend. It was, he recalled, the same day he heard back about his athletic scholarship.
Between nips of bourbon he recalled how he and his girlfriend undressed each other in the den of her parents' house. Her folks were out for the evening, he remembered, and the two of them had the place all to themselves. He remembered how smooth and beautiful her skin was in the flicker of yellow candlelight. "An idea overwhelmed me," the young man told the court appointed psychiatrist. There was something he always wanted to, but never had done before.
With a swift motion he remembered how he grabbed the waistband of his girlfriend's underwear and tore them off her.
Her first reaction, he remembered, was confused, a little angry even. They were her nicest lace underwear. He dimly recalled her telling him she had saved them especially for such an occasion. But, her anger it seemed to him hadn't lasted more than a split second. None of her other boyfriends, she slurred her words slightly drunk on the bourbon, had ever ripped her underwear off before. In fact, she was sure it was a romantic first for her. He remembered her hot breath when she whispered it to him. It was like one of those choice scenes highlighted in a pubescent girl's first romance novel, she told him. When she was slightly younger, she said, it was the kind of passage she had dreamed would some day come true.
When he tore her bra off he remembered a darker look flash across her face. At the time he thought he had witnessed a mysterious shadowy and shapeless entity briefly emerge from the deep uncharted currents that coursed under her skin. Gone just as quickly as it had appeared, the apparition had retreated right back into the impenetrable and gloomy waters of her unconscious. He told the court appointed psychiatrist it was too late, though, he had already seen the dark amorphous shape race to the surface and snap at him.
Of course, now that he thought back on it he realized what he had seen in those eyes was probably more like primal fear and confusion than some kind of monster that lived inside her body. The way she looked at him it was probably more like maybe she thought he had gone too far, like maybe she wasn't so sure if it was really funny anymore, and she wanted him to stop. When he roughly turned her over on her stomach and pinned her head against the couch seat cushion with his knee he remembered how she tried to shake herself loose and yelled for him to let go. "You're hurting me," she screamed. He remembered how red faced she was when she shrieked at him. He remembered how she spit the words out at him like a trapped animal.
After that, he told the court appointed shrink, he didn't remember anything more, like someone or something had totally erased it from his memory. "Except," he added, "for the strangest feeling that maybe I wasn't myself anymore, like maybe I was someone else, like maybe someone else was at the helm."
What choice did the court appointed shrink have? "A classic case of paranoid schizophrenic dementia," he typed on the prescribed form and stapled it to the back of the report. To match the malice of the crime his recommendation was severe. The final line of the document simply read: Buddy Alexander is a threat to himself and to others; it is my expert opinion he should get locked up in the Federal asylum for the criminally insane for the rest of his natural life. "The kid must have just cracked," was how he put it at the hearing. "No rhyme or reason to it. It can happen to any one of us at any given time, I suppose, like lightning striking. What a talented kid. A heck of a shame is all I can say. But there's nothing we can do about it. 'Might as well throw away the key."
A decade or so prior, the land the federal asylum was erected on was the property of the local forestry school. The government chose the heavily wooded area at the edge of town to build it on. The idea was to keep it out of the prying public eye and avoid any undo attention. To one side of the mental institution there was a reservoir, to the other an abandoned quarry where some degenerate teenagers sometimes hung out and partied. Buddy Alexander's barred cell window looked out over the wooded preserve that was book-ended by the lake and grotto, and it didn't take long at all before the raving lunatic began to make some pretty wild and outlandish claims about what unnatural acts took place in the thickets of those old firs when no one but he could see.
In the witching hour, he told the on-duty dayshift attendant, gruesome and horrific things were going on right under the noses of the hospital staff. After only a few days at the asylum dark rings already circled his eyes. It was clear to the male nurse the young man's sleep was erratic, so the healthcare professional wasn't all too surprised when Buddy Alexander informed him about the mass graves that were out there just beyond the tree line. "Go see for yourself," the new inmate was unimpressed by his attendant's small-minded, unenlightened skepticism.
According to the kid, death squads in black uniforms used the forest to murder and bury enemies of the state. They drove them in under the cover of dark in tarp covered camouflaged trucks, lined them up in front of ditches they had dug earlier in the day with bulldozers and other heavy equipment, and mowed them down with machine gun fire. Thirty, maybe sixty people were killed on a daily basis, and crudely buried under damp dirt and pine needles in those gaping pits. "Can't you smell the stink of death around here?" he asked the male attendant in disbelief after the mental health professional re-checked the chart and upped his morning dosages to nearly double.
Once he had made up his mind about something, it didn't matter how heavily medicated he was, he told the attendant. "Buddy Alexander is not the kind of guy who is easily dissuaded," he notably referred to himself in the third person. He further claimed to have seen old and young men alike murdered by the death squads. Women and children, too, he told the attendant. His voice was hushed, he explained for the man, so the spies planted inside the walls of the institution by the death-squads could not hear him. "Once, a little girl even tried to make a run for it," he said. "She almost made it to the wall of the asylum right under my window, too," he said, "when a sniper picked her off with a 50 mm round to the back of her head from his scoped rifle. If you squint, you can still make out the blood spatter on the walkway down below, see," he pointed.
"Fascist shit," Buddy Alexander adopted a cooler more cynical tone, like the lunatic maniac was the most worldly among all men, a man who had already seen it all so many times before nothing, not a single thing, could get under his skin. As if his hide had been beaten and tanned under the hot noonday sun by the cruelty of human indifference until it was as hard as shoe leather, and nothing could touch him.
"Believe me no one has thought of a better way to step on the neck of an innocent person than the fascists have." He sat cross-legged on his cot. "There are some tasks they simply excel at. No need to look elsewhere for a more effective method. When it comes to making a man eat a mouthful of tire tread, some techniques just seem timeless, don't they?" he asked rhetorically. "They just work better than other ways do." An unsettling calm came over him.
Buddy Alexander directed the male attendant's attention to the sign he had hand-painted earlier in the morning on a raggedy piece of discarded cardboard picked up who knows where. "United Snakes of America," was what he had spelled out in colorful calligraphic capitol letters. "Like it?" he challenged the nurse.
-- Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
"The trouble with automatic withdrawal is a machine does it," his co-worker was quick to point out. "Someone has to actually turn the machine off. It's amazing how easy it is for them to turn it on, but when it comes to turning it off all of a sudden no one knows how to do it. Your local rep can't help you. He has to tell the district rep. And the district rep can't help either. He doesn't have the correct password, and has to call some guy in the I.T. department over at corporate headquarters. That fellow has no idea either. He has to contact the subcontractor who is maintaining the computer bank that takes all that money out of your account every month like clockwork. See what I mean," the co-worker threw up his hands in disgust. "It's a hell of a mess with all these machines doing everything automatically all the time. If I were you, I would go ahead and block the account. Much easier to block the account than to go on some inter-office trans-corporate wild goose chase to try and claw your money back, right?"
They worked the bingo lounge at Winterhaven -- an upscale retirement community in Pleasant Valley. As near as he could tell "fake" was the closest the place came to a consistent theme. The entire complex was some kind of weird hybrid -- halfway between a high-end theme-park mall and a pricy casino. They had done the place up as a late 19th-century North American outpost town, faux red brick on every building, but instead of a bank in the middle of the town they had built a pharmacy where the tenants could step up to the barred windows and get their prescriptions filled. No detail was spared, no matter how tacky. Or more accurately speaking, he reformulated his description: no tacky detail was spared. The retirement community even came complete with bronze placards that declared certain neighborhoods were protected by the local historical society.
For whatever reason, Buddy-Balls was one of the most popular events at the retirement community. The novelty of it was, of course, utterly lost on him. After all, Buddy-Balls was simply bingo with a partner, but what the hell? Everyone at Winterhaven loved it. And it was not like he lost any sleep thinking about it. If it made sense to the tenants, it made sense to him.
He was out in the hallway doing his best to explain the situation for the folks who were not going to make the cut-off for the Eight O'clock game. The only seats left, he was telling everyone, were for the game after. "Come back at ten!" he yelled so everyone out in the lobby could hear him.
For reasons he knew not, even though she was exceptionally hard of hearing, Mrs. Stromboli (Mrs. Insane Retiree, he called her) always managed to forget to put her hearing aid in. For her sake he raised his voice even louder: "Ten O'clock, Mrs. Stromboli!"
She looked, he kind of thought, like someone had painted a portrait of a semi-good looking middle-aged woman on a canvas that lay flat on a tabletop with really, really thick-thick impasto paint, and had, due to some inexplicable fit of impatience, hung it on their wall when it was still completely wet. Every feature she had looked like it was melting off her body. Her head had already slid halfway down her chest so it was practically lower than her back and shoulders and looked like it came straight out of her upper torso. Her breasts were just about where her stomach used to be, and so on, until you got down to her ankles and feet where a lot of the rest of her lower parts had over the years settled.
"How are you this morning?" he blinked a couple of times, and then smiled that empty, somewhat annoyed smile you see more often than not in the service industry these days. In an effort to stay even-tempered, he tried to fill his head with good thoughts and summoned up the most beatific image of his wife Iris and two lovely daughters he could imagine. After all it was for them he would gladly sacrifice anything. At least in theory, he corrected himself. He could plainly see that this theory of his was about to get severely tested.
"Nothing works right anymore," Mrs. Stromboli had him pinned behind her walker. She was talking about how she had just had to return the blood pressure monitor she had bought because if she went by the machine, she was legally dead. "Back in my day," she told him, "if you bought something it worked damn it, and not just until you walked out of the store. Nowadays look at the crap they try and sell us. You can't expect anything to work the way it's supposed to anymore." She rattled on without a single thought for the person she was talking to. In fact, he wondered if she could even see him through her big round sunglasses.
"And the salesmen," she really sounded indignant, "the salesmen... where the hell did all these brown people come from? Brown and yellow and tan," she said. "It's an abomination. Just walking into the store I felt like I had fallen into some kind of unnatural snake pit, slime everywhere, like in a casbah," Mrs. Stromboli was on one of her famous rolls. "Nothing but colored people, all these colored people I've never seen before, and they are all just trying to rob an old woman blind with their dirty foreign hands in your pockets and your purse. Nothing but a bunch of common criminals and petty thieves: the lot of them. It's a disgrace, I tell you. It's terrible, you hear me, just terrible!" She raised her voice so the others in the lobby could hear her.
What could he say? He was genuinely intimidated by the old girl. Just by looking at her, you would never have guessed in a million years how much anger was still left in that old body of hers. Despite her questionable assessment of the contemporary shopping experience, there was no other way of describing her energy level than "impressive". That kind of hatred came from deep down inside, it radiated out from inside the marrow of your bones.
"For such a frail looking little old lady," he later kidded, "she sure could raise your hackles" -- but it was going to be a heck of a long while before he regained his sense of humor and thought back fondly on this period in his life. At the moment he was much more intent on finding a place to duck and take cover.
A series of loud explosions rocked Winterhaven. With the first impact a fine white dust sifted down from the ceiling. With the second impact, flame leaped out at him from every direction. All the quaint shops with their fake themes up and down Main Street were in various states of ruin and disrepair with broken storefront windows and collapsed shelves and racks. Old Town, only a couple of blocks from where he stood, took the worst of it. An explosion decimated it -- and with it the pavilion and the emporium.
Geriatrics scrambled around. None of them could understand what was going on. Some of them got disoriented in the smoke and debris. They were, with few exceptions, scared witless.
Heavy weapons fire rained on the roof of the retirement complex. As hard to comprehend as it was, Winterhaven was under attack, but who or what would knowingly bomb an old folks home was not in any way clear. All the young man knew was that the munitions falling on their heads were military weapons-grade. As he took in the mayhem around him, a chilling thought occurred to him. Could it be, he wondered, that the suburban retirement community was taking rounds of friendly fire? He shook it off. There was time for speculation later. At present, the top priority was clearly to save himself and anyone else he could help.
Mr. and Mrs. Stromboli looked up at him like what the hell was going on. In turn, he glanced over at his co-worker who was peering through a crack in the ceiling to try and see what was happening outside. ''I think there's a Predator drone out there," the man yelled back. "As far as I can tell, we're taking incoming fire from a drone," he projected his voice across the room and ducked under a table just as the ceiling in the main thoroughfare of the shopping district gave way and, with a nasty groan of steel and concrete, collapsed into the wishing well.
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
CO-CREATOR #1: There are still some severe limitations to Drone Wars. Private moments between people are still somewhat elusive to the logic of the technology. The game requires that everyone is an equal participant (whether they like it or not).
CO-CREATOR #2: We are currently working on tools that will give rise to scripts in future upgrades that we believe players will find much more believable. It's one thing to create clouds that look like they belong in the sky. What we want to do is to create characters that feel genuine. Like most popular culture narratives, the video game is ultimately action driven, but we strongly believe that, as much as anything else, it is the characters that drive the action. After all, the game's denizens are you and I, so they have to be able to act like us. They need to possess the same positive characteristics as we have, and just as importantly, they must also possess some of our flaws.
CO-CREATOR #1: In past video games we have not stressed the flaws as much. Most people are dissatisfied with themselves, they want to better themselves, or simply become better than themselves. There was a survey done recently where people were shown pictures of supermodels and plus-sized models, and it turned out the only thing people liked less than images of perfection, are images of their own imperfections. It goes against every marketing tenet to try and sell someone a fantasy less glamorous or otherwise exciting than the life they already lead. The software tends to slightly enhance your personality traits, sense of style, your physical features and prowess. But without the personal defects, the grit and blemishes that give things the patina of something real and natural, I'm afraid to say the environment created by the game wouldn't hold anyone's attention very long.
CO-CREATOR #2: When we first started out, if a game could hold your attention for more than a week, it was considered a big deal success. These days a game can go on for years at a time, maybe longer. Players can spend a significant portion of their lives in a single game environment, so that environment becomes their entire world. Experiences, people, relationships, everything needs to hold the players attention the whole time they are in the thrall of the game.
INTERVIEWER: Funny you should say so. When Drone Wars went down three weeks ago I never felt so utterly alone. I felt like I was shipwrecked on some squalid uninhabited island in the middle of nowhere. It had been so long since I was there last I felt like a complete stranger. I barely recognized myself or where I was.
CO-CREATOR #1: We don't often realize how after a while our organic lives grow up around these games, but we live by their rules, we adopt their value systems, gladly and voraciously consume their moral frameworks no questions asked. Your job in the game is your real job. Your dorm in the game -- filled with all the little things you have gathered to decorate it, all your personal keepsakes and belongings -- is your real dorm...
CO-CREATOR #2: As you will soon learn, a lot of what we are working on in future upgrades has to do with the psychological side of the program, not only the mood and temperament of the space we construct, but the veracity of the people the player encounters over the course of the adventure. What we are going for, what we want to happen more than anything, is to get the software to a stage where you can't tell the difference anymore between what is real about a person and what is generated by our code. Friends and loved ones in the game are your friends and loved ones. As you so eloquently put it, turn the game off, even for a split second, and you quickly realize how cut off from everything familiar, everything you have grown accustomed to, you are. Like the panicked sleep of jetlag when you lose sight of where you have put your head down. You wrench yourself back into consciousness only to find yourself in a strange bed it turns out was the bed you had really been sleeping in all the while, and the significant other you dreamed shared it with you the past eighteen months, the significant other you dreamed you'd just made love to -- she is gone.
CO-CREATOR #1: We don't really want you to wonder if we are actually conducting an interview here in the Drone War Idol studio with you. We want you to be so absolutely positive we're really here that you would double-down your billfold -- even if it turns out it is the furthest thing from the truth. We don't want you to wonder if you are real or a computer generated fantasy, we want you to feel certain, absolutely sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are the real deal, flesh and blood, with thoughts, memories, and experiences all your own -- even if that is not entirely true either, even if a great deal of you, perhaps the better part of you, is an acquired identity you have chosen from a pull-down menu.
CO-CREATOR #2: As is painfully evident, however, we have yet to get it exactly right. There's still a long way to go. For one, you are still aware that we dictate a significant portion of what you see and take as truth. So, naturally you struggle with the question of where it is in this whole fantastic scheme of things that you begin and where it is you end. You doubt your own ability to discern with any great authority concrete fact from contrived fiction. Self-doubt creeps in from all angles. The landscape becomes hyper-charged and electric with uncertainty. You wonder what part of it is really real, and what part of it is pure suggestion generated by our trademarked software; what part of the world, in other words, you can truly, with complete certainty, claim as yours -- if any, as opposed to what part of the world we have created for you, what part of the landscape is our electric brainchild.
CO-CREATOR #2: Our biggest fear is we might never entirely resolve the problem, and no matter what we do in our attempt to correct it, Drone Wars, regardless of how earnest our aims are, is ultimately condemned to obscure the monstrous features of a veiled reality we would much rather illuminate.
-- Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
In his dream he took Wiota to Neola.
As the trees flew by, the kid tried not to dwell on the bad stuff. The bridge was coming up and he was keeping a sharp lookout because he was told the turn-off was hard to spot. It was the twilight hour when everything turns a slightly different shade of gray. There wasn't much difference between the gray of the road, the gray silhouette of a toothy ridge, or the gray color of the sky. You could get turned upside down easily enough in a landscape like that, so he flipped on his turning signal, slowed down, and strained to find the dirt road that was supposedly right up ahead.
If he'd had a brain scan just then, he was sure his brain would glow brightly, glow bright red, in fact. He figured his brain might glow like he was high on drugs, or the nicotine from cigarettes, or anything really that might make a brain glow so brightly. In his dream his brain was made out of pure light, like the thing was burning like pure flame inside his head. In his dream his brightly colored brain was so fantastic and beautiful he unscrewed the top of his head and took it out, but it wasn't really his brain. What he saw was more like a projection of a brain. Like his brain was really somewhere else and this fluorescent red one he held in his hand was only a figment of his own imagination.
There were strange visions, but one of the most memorable was a vision he had of his girlfriend the night before. In it her mouth looked to him like it was the most beautiful flower, like a magenta Tiger-Lilly with dappled yellow spots. In his dream he wanted to pollinate the flower. In his dream he wanted to fertilize her mouth.
At a certain point in his dream he became violent. He tried to make sense out of it, he tried to pin down a reason for his mood-swing, his unscheduled outburst, but he couldn't really think what might possibly have triggered it. There was no plausible explanation for such behavior. She hadn't done anything, or said anything to set him off. She was all smiles, full of sunshine and happiness. There wasn't a single unpleasant aspect of her personality. Nor was there anything out of the ordinary in her demeanor. She was his high-school sweetheart. They were going to get married. They were going to buy a little house. They were going to have two wonderful children. If the children wanted a dog, he would get them a dog. Why fight it?
In his dream he turned off the main road and drove down a snaking dirt path that lead under the bridge.
There was a young man in his dream, the envy of all the other kids. He was a star athlete, graduated near the top of his class, and dated the most beautiful girl in the school. This guy was the picture of health and had a politician's good looks. In his dream the guy knew everyone in town. It was a marvel to watch him operate. The women, they all thought he was charming, and the men, they all thought he was going places. Some people exude power like that, some people have an inner strength that is impossible to resist. You can't challenge intensity like that. Such was the potency of this guy that he could wrap you around his finger like some kind of magical wizard and keep you enthralled with his big plans, until there wasn't anything you wouldn't do to help him. In his dream this guy had it all: the money, the car, the girlfriend, the bright future -- you name it, and he had it.
In his dream he was mopping up blood with a rag. There was so much blood. He was genuinely surprised by how much blood there was.
One day this perfect guy in his dream goes completely off the deep end. One day he's his normal self, tossing a ball around with some of the other fellows in his neighborhood. The next he's in his girlfriend's bathroom and he's dismembering her body with a pair of heavy-duty garden shears. In his dream he caught a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror as he went about his grizzly business. He was sopping up blood with a terrycloth robe. What a sight to behold. And that was putting it mildly. He was covered in her blood. From head to toe, this perfect guy who had everything going for him was covered in his girlfriend's blood, and there was no emotion, no proper expression to match the horrific circumstances. He didn't feel a thing. The guy in the mirror shrugged his shoulders and threw up his arms. When he looked at the kid his only thought was that something was seriously wrong with the young man. The guy had just killed another human being, and not just any other human being, he had killed the love of his life, but there he was mopping the floor on his hands and knees like nothing more serious had happened than that he had knocked over a can of beer. He wanted to yell at him. He wanted to yell: "Wipe that shit eating grin off your face, you god damned motherfucker!" They flipped each other the bird. The guy clearly did not grasp the severity of the situation.
It seemed like every day someone else in his dream snapped. His best buddy's dad up and killed two women in his tenth story office and jumped out the window two weeks prior. There was the English Teacher at school who came to class the previous week with an automatic assault rifle and killed twelve students before she killed herself. In his dream there was the guy who lived three houses over who killed all his kids with, of all things, a cleaver. Can you believe it? A cleaver. Like, don't mind me, just another day of hard work at the slaughterhouse. I'm just butchering a side of veal, but, oh wait, it isn't really a side of veal, it is my baby daughter.
The story was always the same. No one else saw it coming. He or she was always described as the "nicest" person, "the spit polished image of kindness". All these perfectly normal people who wouldn't have hurt a fly started to turn into psychopathic maniacs for no discernible reason and the worst aspect of the whole thing was that everyone just went about their business. No one asked the really tough questions. It was like someone in his dream said count them off by fours and pick the fifth one to go on a homicidal rampage, like it was an organized effort done at a massive industrial sized scale to look almost random to the average person.
In the dream he sat in his car. He couldn't remember his name, or who he was. It was like he was so many different people, and they were all trying to crowd each other out. He wanted to make a phone call but he didn't know what to say if anyone on the other end asked to find out who he was. So he sat there and thought about his girlfriend.
In his dream his girlfriend came back to life. He had to kill her over and over again, but every time after he had killed her she would come back to life. Her eyelids would twitch and her long black lashes would spring open like the jaws of a Praying Mantis. She would look at him with those Praying Mantis eyes of hers, like he was a juicy bug, and smile that pretty smile of hers, like he looked so juicy she had to have him, that smile of hers that was a little bit naughty, that smile she smiled when she wanted to do that trick for him where her mouth turned into a flower. He looked at himself in the rear-view mirror. He was still covered in her blood. In his dream he pollinated the flower. In his dream he fertilized her mouth. In his dream he killed her again and again and when he was tired of killing her he left her body under the bridge.
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
Anyone on the thoroughfare at that hour would have thought that the short man was talking to a closed door. In fact, that was pretty much exactly what he was doing. It was very early in the morning. The person to whom he thought he was talking was a young man who was still fast asleep when he first knocked.
After a good yawn the sinewy kid wrapped himself up in his warm blanket and put a pair of tube socks on. He wondered what kind of maniac would knock so loudly first thing in the morning like that. Through the small stained glass window in the door he made out the top of a person's head. The short man outside his door had no hat on. He wore a wig, a second rate one by the look of it, and the kid found his King's English incomprehensible.
"Who the hell is it?" he squinted through the colored glass suspiciously.
His caller was caught off guard. Normally, the little man would simply have said he was the mailman, but it occurred to him mail carriers might have called themselves something else during the American colonial period. What were they called before the Pony Express? he wondered to himself. Oh, never mind, he decided. Time was short. "Mailman!" he announced. "I've got a very important letter for you." To prove he was on the up and up, the man waved an envelope in front of the little window.
After a deep breath the guy inside opened the door. Right away he regretted he had not jumped out the bathroom window and made a run for it down the back alley. Two other Redcoats besides the one who had knocked stood outside. Even though they wore the military uniform coats, white knickers, buckled shoes, and the whole bit, to match the style of the day, it was clear on closer inspection that they had simply put these garments on over their federal government issued gray suites, and rather hastily at that.
"By royal decree, I have been charged," the shortest of the three tried to remember the rest. "Oh, to hell with it," the little soldier cut himself off, handed the young man the envelope with the red wax seal, and simply said: "You are under arrest."
They escorted him down Cinnamon Tree Lane, past the canal and the freshly painted little white courthouse, to the military barracks. Along the way they passed the blacksmith, the schoolmistress, and the shopkeeper who all looked at the kid as if they had known there was something wrong with him the whole time. To hell with them, he thought. All awash in the pale yellow early morning light the small colonial town looked picturesque to him, like a picture postcard.
"Allan Arkin," the little soldier paced back and forth in the interrogation room as he spoke, "once said 'There's two people in this world who can talk without making sense. That's John Wayne and Fred Willard.' I'm thinking of adding your name to the list." The two other men were told to go back to the apartment and turn it upside down. "Has it ever struck you that in this version of the video game the United States Constitution has not yet been written? In fact, it won't get written for quite some time. Unless they change the game, not in your lifetime, I warrant. This is a fantasy era for law enforcement. We can practically do anything we like. We don't have to call it 'extraordinary rendition' anymore. We don't have to farm it out to contractors. We don't have to send you to black sites halfway across the planet. We don't have to lie to the American people about what we are doing behind closed doors. Call it torture if you like. Call it any thing you damn well please.
"If we have to harm you to get the information we want we can do it, easy as that. We can hurt you so you can never walk again, or hold a spoon. We can drug you so you piss blood and shit your pants," he shook his prisoner by the shoulders. "Don't you get it, kid? You are on your own in a cruel and primitive world. Can't you see that there's no one to stop me from doing whatever it is I have to in order to please the King? Get it through your head, boy. You are floating downstream without a paddle. You are in water over your head without a life jacket -- and the sharks are circling," he slowly walked around the young man. "I can be your worst nightmare, or I can be your best friend. It's entirely up to you. Don't test my patience. Tell me what I want to know and you can go merrily along your way, back, I should imagine, to your warm cozy bed. If you understand what's good for you, start talking and start talking fast, my young friend. I saw you make the exchange in the park. I got it on tape... I mean I wrote it down in my ledger. We got your Ms. Shasta in the holding room across the hall."
"How many times do I have to tell you? I'm a government intelligence man just like you -- a Redcoat, a British soldier, whatever it is we are these days, comprende?," the young guy twisted in his seat. "I don't know any Ms. Shasta. This is a case of mistaken identity." He realized he was slipping out of character and added "kind sir" to his lines. "Kind sir," he said, "You have mistaken me for another man. I can assure you, as soon as your superiors realize what you have done, you, kind sir, are going to catch a world of pain for the mistake."
"Let's stop fooling around, shall we," his little interrogator sat down at his desk and pulled out a large black feather quill. "Let's get right to the point. Who or what is the Suicide Party?"
"Look," the young man was on the verge of losing his cool. "How many times do I have to tell you," he tried not to sound too out of sorts, "I work for the Federal Government. I was sent back to colonial times to find the same guy you are looking for. We are on the same team."
"Don't act so innocent. We know you are a member. What we want to know is who the other members are and what your sinister little underworld organization is up to."
"You're kidding, right?" the young man finally managed. "This is all a joke, right? Some kind of prank one of my no good buddies back at headquarters is playing on me? That's it isn't it? Any minute now someone's going to yell 'surprise!' and jump out from behind the curtains. Like I'm on Candid Camera, or something. I get it. Good one! Now untie my hands before I get you fired!"
"I assure you this is no joke, kiddo." The little interrogator changed his approach. "We actually already know much, much more about your nefarious organization than we are letting on. That's right! We're on to you, mister," he righted his wig. "Ms. Shasta, what a lovely young girl, what a vision of beauty, and so helpful. You see Ms. Shasta has already been kind enough to write out her confession -- and what a confession it was. A bard could not have scripted it with more poetry and skill, more panache, every word carefully chosen, every line perfectly metered, a masterpiece of imagination and wit. A Penguin Classic, I tell you. No, by George, I won't soon forget it. But, all you need to know is she named names, and I can tell you that you, my friend, are someone she thinks very, very highly of indeed. Now it's your turn to put some names down," he pushed a sheet of paper over to the young man and placed the Raven quill he pulled from his drawer next to it, along with a pot of coal black ink.
"Ms. Shasta was kind enough to elucidate your, what shall I call it, your ideology -- simpleminded though it may be. To express your, how shall I put it, your dislike, no that's too mild a word. What you feel is so much stronger than that, isn't it? You hate us don't you? Oh, don't look so surprised. I wouldn't make up a thing like that. 'Hate' was the word the fresh-faced Ms. Shasta used. You got it in that idiot skull of yours we're greedy madmen hell-bent on the destruction of all that's sacred to you. Something along those lines, aren't I right? We are despicable to you -- that's it, isn't it? And now you've gone and started a political party. How clever. I suppose you're intent on the overthrow of our tyrannical occupation. I suppose you are all willing to die for your cause. I mean that's the whole point isn't it -- that you kill yourselves, I mean. To express your point of view you have to kill yourself, don't you? You have to suicide! Honestly. How daft is that plan? And you think we're the nut jobs?"
"I know all about the supposed Suicide Party," the boy massaged his temple and eyelids as best he could with his arms bound together at the wrists. "But quite frankly I don't buy it. The whole thing sounds loony tunes to me. I never heard of anything so cockamamie. Who would go for a political party like that? I mean think about it. First off, the party wouldn't last very long would it? I mean if I understand you correctly, what you are describing makes absolutely not one single lick of sense. The first time anyone in the party had a disagreement with an opposing party, organization, what have you, they would have to commit suicide. Why would anyone join an organization like that? I mean you gotta be putting me on. Only a crazy person would believe something like that. The first little thing that bothered a member, the first thing that went wrong or didn't work out perfectly straight off the bat the first time around, the first thing that didn't come off exactly how they planned, and they would have to kill themselves? Half of the members would be dead ten seconds after they signed the party card, and the rest wouldn't make it through the rest of the day! I'll tell you what I think. I think the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. I believe our own government is behind the Suicide Party. I don't know if our team is recruiting these maniacs, or brainwashing them or what, but I'm pretty sure we are investigating ourselves... kind sir."
"Look clever-boy, you can drop your feigned air of exasperation. It's really simple," the little dictator said. "We know you're the head-honcho kingpin of the organization. Do you want me to toss your skinny ass into the dungeon, because that is precisely what I mean to do if you don't cooperate, that and a whole lot more? The sooner you start singing the better. Because I can assure you, you little twerp, you are not going to see the light of day again until your confession is signed and delivered."
-- Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
"Come on!" one of the co-creators of Drone Wars entreated the gathering. "Think! What would you have wanted to see when you were six years old, what would have thrilled you?" He was addressing a company of theatrical designers newly recruited from among the pilgrims to take the video game to the next level.
"How about a chase sequence? Did you want to see the gravel spray from the wooden spokes of a horse-drawn carriage as it took a hard right, fishtailed and swerved in the loose stones?" he asked the crowd.
"These aren't thin-skinned men we are talking about. These men are pirates. They are tough guys -- mean -- hard as nails. Their leader looks like someone put a pile of boulders into a large black overcoat. His square head under his black three-cornered hat looks like a large brown rock someone painted a five o'clock shadow on," he paced the length of the stage and looked up. "These men are scary. They look ghostly, like phantasms. The second man looks like someone took a distorted photo of a corpse -- its features twisted and out of focus, unnaturally flattened and compressed -- and then, if that wasn't bad enough, they went ahead and animated it so it could walk and talk."
The crowd of pilgrim craftspeople stood silently.
"But why are they running?" he wondered out loud, looked up, and rubbed his chin for dramatic effect. "Some sort of dark, devilish creature, I would have to suppose," he announced a bit louder, "must be hot on their tail. Yes, that's the ticket. They are being chased, chased through our little colonial Virginia town by a terrible monster."
In the original version it was an LAPD drone that bore down on the three men. This being the Seventeenth-century and all, he supposed he would have to change things around a bit.
"I guess," he took a more serious tone, "we should straight away replace the winged robot airplane with some diabolical, hellish, flying creature that better resembles a reptile, gargoyle, or a scaly dragon than a fighter-plane. Any preference from among the creatures I've mentioned?" he looked up at his audience hopefully.
Nothing from the gathered pilgrims but blank stares.
"So, let's go with a good old-fashioned dragon," he suggested. "Now, where was I? Oh yes. The cast-iron rims of the carriage wheels clatter over the wet cobblestones of the quay as it rounds another corner in full gallop. The men aboard are inches from the outstretched talons of the dragon," the speaker looked up from his three-ring binder to gauge the enthusiasm of his audience. "The environment is fraught with peril and danger. The kind a kid can understand. But," he asked, "Who are these three mysterious pirates who are running from the dragon and why is the dragon angry at them?"
None of the gathered pilgrims had any answers for him. It was as if they were expecting another kind of event entirely, like they came to the town square to watch someone get drawn-and-quartered but got this 21st-century inspirational speaker instead.
Finally, a tall Native American stepped forward. "What if the three men have stolen something precious from the dragon, like a jewel?" he solemnly proposed.
If the co-creator recalled correctly, in the original version they were LA gang-bangers working as double agents for the Feds. When the FBI cut them loose, and threw them to the wolves, so to speak, they stole the software that let them compromise the aerial police drones. The dialogue in that version was pretty straightforward. He thought back. Gangsters spoke like gangsters. There wasn't much subtlety to the main character. He was pissed all the time -- pissed at the rival gangs -- pissed at the world -- but mostly pissed at the FBI. The gang-banger couldn't be sure the Bureau put the drone on his ass, but under the circumstances it was nearly impossible to know who was really friend or foe. More than likely the milk-toast guy he had just teleconferenced with was the guy who called in his assassination.
"A ruby like, or maybe topaz, crystal could work, or how about a sparkling emerald?" the Native American looked up at the man on stage.
"Okay, that's good," the co-creator responded, regaining his focus. "I like ruby. For version XXXI, let's go with a ruby. Now, let's recap. What do we have? We've got pirates. Pirates love rubies. Kids love pirates. Perfect. The pirates have stolen a precious ruby from the dragon's lair, and are on the run. Kids love adventure. Picture this," another idea occurred to him. "The horse drawn carriage skids, swerves to avoid a man on horseback, barely misses another oncoming buggy, and speeds up again just before the fire breathing dragon exhales a searing jet of flame. The dragon trails white-hot vapor as it sweeps through the air, it's giant wings catch the air like big black sails. One of the pirates looks around just in time to see a horse and buggy behind them go airborne in a plume of smoke."
The specter of a fire-breathing dragon actually seemed to agitate the gathering a little.
"Behind them," the co-creator further elaborated how he imagined the scene could play out, "the dragon almost instantly stutters in mid-flight, loses air, and performs a couple of indescribably odd maneuvers to keep from wiping out. The pirate captain, the one with the stone jaw, pulls hard on the reigns just as the belly of the low-flying serpent passes them overhead. Hard wheels scrape across the road, frightened horses neigh and rear up at the sky, and everyone in the carriage lurches forward. Only a few yards in front of them the dragon slams into the street snout first. The pirates duck down just before the flying lizard explodes. Even with their heads hidden below the sideboard of the carriage they can see the horrific fireball ignite in front of them."
"Maybe we should change the name of the game?" the Native American raised his hand to try and regain the co-creator's attention. "In all seriousness, I was talking to these SS officers who stumbled into my quaint Indian village the other day (talk about lost, they had never even seen a tepee before). I learned, subsequently, they were left over from the ill-fated, never released 'Second World War Nazi German Soldiers vs. Zombies' version of the game -- anyway..." the tall shirtless man with the feather in his cap sensed the co-creator's lack of enthusiasm and looked down at his toes when he relayed their suggestion, "what they came up with was: Dragonkrieg. What do you think? It does have a ring to it."
"First thing's first," the man up on stage absent-mindedly brushed the Native American's anecdote aside. "Let's first flesh out the storyline a bit more before we go and do anything too radical, like change the name of the game, shall we?" he leafed through the pages of his binder, like he was trying to find a note he had left for himself, but couldn't remember where he had written it down.
"Why does the dragon fall out of the sky? Ah," he said. "Here you are," he adjusted his spectacles and read from the page. "The dragon falls out of the sky because the jewel has some power over it. Not unlike the software in the original version that could intercept and swap out the live video feed from a drone, the jewel can cause the dragons to see only what it's owner wishes the winged monsters to see," he snapped his binder shut and looked out over the room triumphantly.
"Come on, now... let's get cracking, then!"
The huddled pilgrims stared around at each other with fear and uncertainty.
"So -- what I need you all to do," he began to wave his arms over his head in all different directions, and jumped off the stage to physically move people where he wanted them to go, "is to divide yourselves up into groups. We need pirate costumes. Costume designers, did you hear me? We need old-world ambiance... and plenty of it! Set decorators over here. And we need one group to construct the dragons. As lightweight as possible! Not to mention aerodynamic. These kites have to effortlessly glide through the sky, and they need to look menacing."
-- Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
"Eljin!" he shouted when he saw her across the street. They hugged and kissed like old friends.
She was surprisingly affectionate, and seemed genuinely happy to see him -- at least as happy as he was to see her.
There was only one little problem.
She didn't exist.
He had made her up out of whole cloth. The fact was she had never existed, not before, not ever. The woman was a lie he had told himself, a figment of his imagination he had contrived early one A.M. to get his lowbrow friend off his back, to get the guy to stop riding him so hard about being a bachelor, about never getting laid and living all alone in his little dingy Eleventh Street dorm.
But there was more to it. The aim was to shut his friend up. He wanted to turn the table on the cocky bastard, so he laid it on thick. No excess was spared. Eljin was stacked. Not just drop-dead beautiful like a Parisian whore. She was smart too, math-wiz smart. What he was after wasn't just a victory over his friend. He wanted an unconditional surrender. It wasn't enough just to say he had a girlfriend. Oh no, that would have been far too easy. He wanted the poor guy to shudder with envy when he pictured the two of them together on her unmade bed.
Normally he would have avoided the popular, loud and boisterous bar she picked for their date like it was the plague. House music thumped through the sound-system. Bottles and glasses clinked. If it were a work environment, he was about to tell her, the schizophrenic federal government intelligence men would surely have shut it down and fined the place out of business years ago. But even though the decibel level was through the roof, anything approximating a civil conversational tone was out of the question, and there was one way and one way only to communicate -- and that was to yell, he put his complaint aside.
Up to that point in his life, the idea that anyone would go out of their way to willfully choose to spend any of their hard won leisure time in such an awful establishment had totally eluded him, but leaning in closely to try and hear what it was Eljin was talking about, he realized how happy he was for the noise. It meant his face was only a fraction of an inch from hers. If he turned just slightly in one direction, he could feel her warm, wet breath on his ear and cheek, and if he turned the other way just a little, which he promptly did, he could practically inhale her perfumed words.
Pressed up so closely to her in the crowded restaurant, no words could relate how self-satisfied he was with the story he had made up to impress his friend. Eljin was truly incredible. No words could convey how happy he was he had made her out to be so absolutely stunning, almost perfect in every respect.
Anyone would have appreciated his level of enthusiasm. After all she was his unique creation. He wanted to know everything about her. Beaming with pride, he asked her all sorts of questions.
"And, what is it you do for a living?" he finally asked.
"Don't know if there is a technical term for it," she said. "But I suppose the best way to describe what I do is to say I extract smiles."
"A smile extractor," he repeated.
The potential for a new and previously undiscovered job title amused him. But the euphoria didn't last for long. As much as he didn't want to, he had to admit to himself there was also something pretty creepy about the idea of a "smile extractor", like it was some weird surgical implement that clamped over ones mouth.
He sat back a little to study her features better. While she was talking about herself an unsettling idea had occurred to him: what if his friend was playing a trick on him? What if the man kept meticulous records of the florid descriptions he had provided of her, and somehow based on them, the dastardly son-of-a-bitch had commissioned an exact, if not life-like, replica of his wet dream girlfriend from some Italian master of the dark arts, an alchemist technician who could turn almost any inanimate material you could think of into supple flesh? Maybe the whole thing was nothing more than a torment his friend had devised to once more gain the upper hand, and drive his ego further into the ground? He looked at Eljin carefully. At the very least, he reluctantly conceded as he studied the lines around her mouth, it was a sobering scenario that required his serious consideration.
He looked around. What if the pedestrians outside the window weren't really pedestrians? What if the jogger that ran past the window wasn't really a jogger? He wondered. What if the cabby wasn't really a cabby? What if the bus driver wasn't really a bus driver? What about the waiter? What if the waiter wasn't really a waiter? What if the couple that sat next to them wasn't really a couple? What if they were only masquerading as a couple, but in reality they were something quite different, like undercover narco-cops, and he was in the midst of an elaborate sting operation, or some other conspiracy? He desperately wanted to somehow voice his concerns to Eljin, somehow share them with her, but he realized it didn't really matter much if she was his own invention come to life, or whether her presence was a joke his friend was playing on him. Either way she was not really there. She couldn't be. He had made her up.
In version XXX the creators decided to share some of the basic aesthetic code with their fan base. "We don't think it's so self-indulgent if we get other people to act out our fantasy," they told Michael Michaels on the Sunday night broadcast. "Our videogame designers are more often than not brilliant. We have watched them as the coals have burned brightly. We have watched them when the embers grew dark. We have nothing except the highest regard for our engineers, but you have to remember Drone Wars is a publicly traded company. Our shareholders have the last say, and let's not forget that the Federal Government is one of the biggest stakeholders in this whole goddam venture. They have a lot of weight to throw around, and you have to keep in mind no one on Capitol Hill wants the game to get dull. Heaven forbid. And what the government wants, the government gets. Imagine how many folks would be out on their asses if the Feds didn't get their way! Not only does the game account for the lion's share of the nation's GDP, it is basically single-handedly bankrolling big government. When they said it was high time to get some fresh blood into the mix, it was high time to get some fresh blood into the mix, and what better way than to allow gamers to redesign and tailor the aesthetic parameters to their own specifications? DOOMWAD went 'open source', and remember how successful it was for them. When a number of the gamers noticed the similarity between the fortress interiors and the tight, claustrophobic space of an interstellar cargo freighter, they were allowed to convert the scenery to look the way they wanted it to, and the rest, as they say, was history."
"You ever met my friend?" he bit the bullet and asked Eljin. It was bothering him too much to ignore, as much as his uncomfortable starched canvas breeches. It seemed to him like one moment they were having dinner in a post-apocalyptic science fiction future where winged robots flown by infant gamers terrorized innocent civilians, and the next they were sitting alongside the muddy main drag of some ugly and squalid version of the U.S. colonial past.
When he asked, his fantasy girlfriend sounded genuinely unfamiliar with the other man's name. She pulled back the veil from her hat and removed her fine satin gloves one finger at a time. "Who?" she sighed innocently enough when he mentioned the other man's name.
"Never mind," he assured her and tried to loosen the collar of his own ruffled shirt. "Don't worry your pretty head about it," his mind wandered as he pulled the timepiece out from his vest pocket.
"Just some jerk I called a friend," he patted her on the hand and stared past the curled platinum locks of her oversized, powdered wig at the horse and buggy that was newly hitched to the post in front of the eatery.
"Forget it," he told the strange woman who sat across from him with the beauty mark at the corner of her full red lips. He leaned his newly acquired ball-shot musket rifle and saber against the wall beside the fireplace, stretched his arms behind his head, and asked a passing server for some tobacco for his pipe. There was nothing to do but play the game out to the next level, so that's exactly what he decided he would do.
-- Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
Two androids were locked in combat on the street below. "Look at 'em go," the host, a junior narcotics salesman by day, called out to his friend. "They've gone at each other like that for over an hour now."
After the warring sides pulled their respective troops outside of city limits in Version XXIX, lots of hardware was left behind, including government landmines, weapons of mass destruction, rebel trip-wired and command-detonated bombs, assorted booby traps, as well as a wide variety of drones and robots deployed by both forces -- some of which like these two, much to his delight, had no idea the fight had moved on down the road months ago.
Overhead, the moon hung low in the black sky. Sparks flew with the hollow clank of every new blow the two machines landed on one another. Both of the young men cheered on the metal warriors.
"My money's on the skeletal chrome android with the red satanic eyes," his friend baited him through the blare of music from the stereo. Behind them, the party secretary passed out noisemakers and other celebratory treats. "I'll take that bet," he yelled back, clearly dead-set on enjoying himself no matter what, like it was the last chance he would ever have.
Buddy Guy was the first member to suicide. He put a gun to his head, yelled at the top of his lungs, and pulled the trigger. The party was officially underway! The junior narcotics salesmen and his friend carried the limp body of the young man to the bathroom, dumped it into the tub, and pulled down the space-age plastic shower curtain to cover the deceased's upper body and face.
Some of the other kids took pills to overdose, or injected drugs into their veins. Summer Cooper notably stuck her head in the oven. She asphyxiated on natural gas the old-fashioned way. Geronimo Pratt was next. It wasn't pretty. The boy slashed his wrists. By the end of the night there wasn't a square foot of the apartment without at least one dead body hunched against a wall, or prone on the shag rug. Gore covered the place. They had long since run out of enough sheets, towels, and tablecloths necessary to cover everyone. The host sidestepped a young girl's half-naked body and turned up the music even louder, not that anyone was dancing.
Several members including himself and his friend did not kill themselves. They had set themselves different tasks. By the time the schizophrenic government intelligence men showed up at the front door of their secret hideout (in the wee hours of the morning, no doubt, like they usually did) the remaining associates would be long gone. It would take the psychotic lawmen a while to realize some Suicide Party members were unaccounted for and missing. They would have plenty enough trouble simply sorting through and identifying all the dead bodies they found at party headquarters.
At their last conference a massive show of force was deemed necessary. "None of you will die in vain," they promised the rank-and-file. A number of the party faithful would suicide-bomb key subway stations in the nation's capitol, while the junior narcotics salesman and his friend were dispatched to find and kidnap a government intelligence person who could get them past the front desk of the "doughnut building", so called due in large part to it's glazed pink roundness and what looked like sprinkles on the roof. It was the location where the game show Drone War Idol was filmed. The ultimate goal of the mission was to gain access to the "doughnut hole" at the heart of the building and destroy the electronic brain housed there. Suicide Party faithful believed it was the location of the supercomputer that contained the master-code to Drone Wars, the theory being that once disabled the videogame's tyranny of cruelty and insanity would finally and for all time come to an end.
Both the junior narcotics salesman and his friend were caught a bit off guard by how quickly they spotted the police van parked around the corner in the Exxon gas station. They couldn't have circled the block more than three times before they were sure there was only one officer in the paddy wagon parked inconspicuously in a dark corner of the lot. "Of all the dumb luck," his friend applauded their good fortune. As the two of them crept up alongside the vehicle they were pretty sure there was no one else inside but the driver, and by the look of his partly eaten junk food meal, the officer was obviously on his dinner break.
Mindful of the electric eye of the law, the junior narcotics salesman scanned the street lamps and nearby buildings for cameras. Several were visible, but he was a little surprised at how randomly they were deployed, and wondered what the odds were they would ever record a crime. Chances were pretty low by the look of it. You had to be hard on your luck to get spotted. If the van were located six yards to either side, say, there was a camera trained on that particular plot of dirt or half-acre of blacktop, but as things stood, the vehicle was actually parked in the gaping maw of a blind spot. There was, it struck him, something strangely arbitrary about the modern-day, high-tech Police State.
"If you're going to try and get people to stop eating so much junk food," a pop-up advertisement on the police officer's dashboard blotter announced during the brief scuffle in which the two of them overpowered the driver, bound him, and locked him in the trunk of their car, "there are many ways to choose from. The way our company executives have chosen to promote good eating habits is through 'reverse psychology'. We say eat as much fast food as you want. The way to get people to cut down on all those empty calories, our company policy says, is to exhort them to gorge themselves on as much of our junk food as humanly possible. Eat up, America!"
By first light, the crime scenes were swarming with schizophrenic intelligence men and women. Two of the lunatics stood in the parking lot of the Exxon gas station where the police officer had been taken a few hours earlier. They carefully read through his electronic blotter to no avail. After a thorough search of the vehicle, they interviewed the local law enforcement officer who was the initial responder at the scene.
"There is no bounty, is there?" the man grumbled resignedly after a while and spit on the ground. "This is all some kind of weird science-fiction trip, isn't it?" He looked around at the empty police van with disgust. "So how can I help?"
"We can only infer the proximity of these insurgent dissidents," one of the psychotic government intelligence madmen came back with an answer. "To us the enemy is like super-symmetric dark matter. You know what I mean? You have to understand it from our point of view. To us they are invisible," he continued offhandedly as he scribbled some numeric figures on a pad and made some quick cursory calculations. "We know they are everywhere, but we can't actually see them like you can, so we require the use of supercomputers and sometimes even the help of average citizens, such as yourself, so we can start to recognize their patterns, break their encrypted codes, and better track their nefarious activities."
Across the street at the entrance to the metro station a third psychotic intelligence man interviewed two young girls who were in the subway when the suicide bomber detonated her explosives, killing thirty nine people and injuring countless dozen others.
"We live in DC," one of the eyewitnesses told the schizophrenic agent as she shouldered her rifle. "It's like living on a powder-keg. Even in the best of times this is a violent city. Some of the bloodshed has to do with greed and corruption. Some of it is about religion. Some of it is about socioeconomic conditions. The Federal Government has a long list of enemies. These two bombings were no fluke. They were carefully planned and strategic. The Pentagon Station explosion was obviously targeting military employees, and its pretty darn clear the McPherson Square bombing over here was aimed at government officials."
-- Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
