Ben's Narrative

Introductory Text

A Dead Cat Wearing an Old Jock Strap
Ben's Narrative Part 01 33rd Post Posted 3 May 2016 at 02:32:44 EDT Link to original

Imagine a dead cat wearing an old jock strap.

This is the smell of the bed sores. This is the smell that comes out of the hygiene beds when we open them up. It's not just a smell but a feeling -- a sickly warmth that the masks cannot block out. Even through the filtered, scented air, you know it's there, coming through the filters in <.1 micrometer sized particles, touching your face, touching your clothes, adhering to you, fouling you, fouling everything it touches.

I think what makes the smell so putrid is that it's a combination of living tissue and dead tissue. Somehow this unnatural intermingling of life and death creates a potent stench that is repellant to basic human sensibility. This is why I am saving up to go to school and become a Readjustment Specialist. Pulling people out of malfunctioning hygiene beds is no way to make living. Certainly it is not the calling of a sensitive, erudite soul such as myself.

When a hygiene bed breaks (say, the Healthy Limb System fails, or a catheter gets blocked up), it's supposed to cut off the internet feed, forcing the sleeper to get the bed fixed. But it's easy enough to override this cut-off function. Immersed in their feeds, people often forget that the bed is broken. But eventually pain or discomfort will force the sleeper to get their bed fixed. The pain of bedsores or the stench of a backed-up evacuator is a strong motivator. But if the sleeper has direct sense feeds, they can switch off these smells and discomforts. They can even switch off the worry associated with the broken bed.

At this point there is only one thing which can impel them to save themselves: basic human dignity. The age-old desire to not spend one's days playing Princess Romance Cafe, lying in one's own shit while one's dick rots off. (I would also say that an occasional fleeting desire to see the outside world could also prove advantageous, but for the sort of people I'm talking about here, this is simply not a factor.)

Sadly, for some people, this desire is not strong enough, and we come to the very last line of defense: the smell.

The smell eventually leaks out of the hygiene bed's encasement, and nearby tenants start to notice. The building manager calls us, and we go and pull them out. For the most hardcore sleepers, those who have entirely rejected reality in favor of their feeds, it is the smell and the smell alone that saves their lives before the bacteria devour them alive. It is the stinky hand of salvation that plucks them from the abyss.

I don't know what God looks like. But he smells like a dead cat wearing an old jock strap.

Fingerblasting
Ben's Narrative Part 02 42nd Post Posted 8 May 2016 at 23:07:27 EDT Link to original

In the training curriculum for becoming an Readjustment Specialist, they omit fingerblasting entirely. Which is odd, considering what a routine part of the job it is. I can't tell you how many times I have been in the middle of a conversation with a client only to have her slip her finger into her shorts and start diddling away.

My clients, long-term session-heads i.e. people who have been connected to a direct sense feed for multi-year spans, are practically feral. Even though the feeds are supposed to be all about empathy and social connection, everything is so mediated that they lose the capacity for normal social interaction. If their session begins at an early enough age or goes on long enough, shit gets truly weird.

The readjustment client is a stimulation addict. They crave easy, immediate stimulation. Some turn to drug use, but they usually require near-lethal or outright lethal amounts to properly stimulate themselves. Others turn to masturbation. The readjustment client has no patience. If they are uncomfortable, they want immediate relief. If that entails a indiscreet bout of onanism, then so be it.

Almost all my clients are women. The female clients tend to choose male specialists, and the male clients tend to choose female specialists. In the feeds, they often surround themselves with a coteries of admirers of the opposite sex. So they insist on opposite-sex specialists. This is an unhealthy impulse, but we must meet our clients halfway. Our job is to slowly transition them away from being fake adoration-sponges into being functioning adults.

I am not a doctor. I am not a therapist. I am trained to think of myself as a paid big brother. Perhaps there is an inherent contradiction. I must be stern without being overly judgmental. I must be empathetic but effective. I can't coddle them. The feed coddles them. That must end.

The work could be described as Sisyphean. Trying to re-culture a person after years of all that whiz-bang feed stimulation is like pushing a heavy boulder up a hill. And occasionally the boulder is masturbating.

You must cut it out
Ben's Narrative Part 03 50th Post Posted 12 May 2016 at 20:24:04 EDT Link to original

I could tell it was going to be a hair cocoon before we even opened it up. They have a smell, like a mix between a barber shop and an ass crack, which is distinct. They occur when the hair growth regulators in the hygiene beds go awry.

At this point, I had not been a readjustment specialist very long and still enjoyed the feeling of standing back in my white lab coat while the technicians did all the mucky work, as I once had to do. This was how I saw the trajectory of my life: moving farther and farther away from the dirty work. When I was discharged from the Marines, I was very proud of what I had accomplished and fully determined to never get myself involved in bullshit like that again. So I went to school to become a bed tech. Went to school again became a readjustment specialist. Eventually, I hoped to become one of those high-dollar panty sniffers at the Halcyon Psychomotor Clinic. A thousand coins an hour, not bad.

So I was standing there in my spiffy jacket while the working joes opened up the bed. I was pretty sure there would be little need for me today. We were pulling out a 33 year old woman who had gone into the bed at age 9. This was approaching a record. The younger a person is when they go in, the lower the likelihood of viability. Even if she had gone in at age 20, spending a full 24 years in the bed made viability unlikely. But at age 9, it was almost certain that she would be a gibbering smear.

The technicians lifted the lid on the bed to reveal a nest of black hair. Guided by the glowing ER outline, they started working through it with scissors, cutting around the shape of the sleeping figure until her yellowish limbs were revealed. She was emaciated it, but fortunately the soft, moisture-wicking hair had prevented any sores. She had a medium mixed-American complexion, which would turn into a deep bronze color if she ever went into the sun, but now was the color of yellowed cardboard.

They finally removed the mass of hair that covered her face and wiped away the various crusts that caked her head holes. The typical eerie agelessness of a long-term patient was especially pronounced. For a startling moment, it seemed as if she was still 9 years old. She was especially short and bony, but as I came closer to her, I was able to see those indefinable signs of age that let me know she was an adult.

"Hi, Karen. Can you hear me?" I asked. I was required to at least attempt to communicate with her, though the odds of her being able to comprehend a basic face-to-face conversation were essentially zero.

Her eyes opened, revealing large, wet eyes with black pupils. This was a good sign. Some occupants were unable to even understand the concept of eyelids or blinking. The pupils roamed within the eyes. After not seeing anything more than a micrometer away for 24 years, there was no chance of her being able to see anything in the room. She licked her lips with admirable muscle control.

"Hello, friends," she said in a faint, creaking whisper. Her eyes still roamed, unable to fix on anything.

"She talks," one of the technicians muttered. Another technician, who was taking a blood sample, turned and strode out of the room.

"Is that you Ben?" Karen asked.

I was surprised by this. She knew my name. This was supposed to be a "black awakening" i.e. a spontaneous, involuntary disconnection, due to some physical layer disruption in her hygiene bed. She shouldn't have known my name. I had been assigned to her less than half an hour ago, after she had been disconnected, when she was just lying in a dark hair cocoon.

"Ben?" she called again. Her eyes stared blindly at the ceiling.

"Yes, Karen, I'm here," I said, trying and failing to sound reassuring.

"Can you come closer to me? I can't see you. I'm scared."

I stepped closer to the bed, the smell of the foul hair becoming more intense. Up close, her face looked positively inhuman. "I'm here, Karen," I said. Not knowing what else to do, I began the standard speech for a responsive occupant. "You've just been disconnected from your feed. You're in a hygiene bed. My name is Bed, I mean, Ben. I'm a readjustment specialist assigned--"

"I know all this. Come closer."

Something in me resisted. I didn't want to get any closer. Though I had seen and handled occupants much worse than this, there was something eerie about this one talking to me, with the face of a child and voice of an old woman on her deathbed. Still, my entire job was to be psychologically reassuring. I couldn't afford to seem the least bit but off. I stepped closer and put my hand on the hygiene bed. We were instructed to touch the occupants as little as possible, as they were unaccustomed to actual physical contact.

"Are you there?" she asked. Her skin had an unreal, plastic quality.

"I'm here. How are--"

"Come closer. I want to feel your breath on my face."

I wondered if I should comply with this request. It was very odd. Frankly, I was a little unnerved by it. But I figured what harm could this wasted little creature do to me? I learned toward her, letting out a small, shaky breath. The woman's mask-like face became a blissful smile. The pupils wobbled within the rims of her huge, glistening eyes.

"Listen..." she said, in the faintest of whispers. "You must help me."

"I'm here, Karen."

"A moment ago, one of your technicians placed a small pellet under the skin of my forearm. Within 10 minutes, the pellet's wax coating will melt and release a cardioplegic into my bloodstream, stopping my heart. You must cut it out."

Pulling a long-term occupant, everything goes smear
Ben's Narrative Part 04 54th Post Posted 15 May 2016 at 03:18:59 EDT Link to original

"A moment ago, one of your technicians placed a small pellet under the skin of my forearm. Within 10 minutes, the pellet's wax coating will melt and release a cardioplegic into my bloodstream, stopping my heart. You must cut it out."

Hearing this, I breathed a sigh of relief. There was something unsettling about her face that made me believe she would tell me something urgent and terrible. But this was typical occupant talk. Like many of them, she believed that she was still inside a feed narrative.

"You've been disconnected. This isn't a feed. There's no pellet in your arm. Your name is Karen Castillo. Do you remember--"

"Scan my right arm with the ER," she said in a bare, cracking whisper. "You'll find it."

"Karen, do you know why you're in this bed?"

"I've been disconnected."

This was a strangely lucid answer. It didn't make sense. If she had been force-disconnected, how did she know that--

"Hey, we got two more calls to get to," one of the techs reminded me.

"Yeah, OK, pull her," I said, stepping back.

A pair of techs hoisted her tiny, doll-like body from the hygiene bed onto our gurney and covered her with a sheet. "Please," she croaked. "Just scan my arm."

"What did she say?" asked Ricardo, the lead tech, as we rolled her out into the bed-rack apartment's narrow, almost lightless hallway.

"It's a feed dream," I explained. These guys were looking at me to be the expert, so I had to act like I knew exactly what was going on. It was best to go ahead and get to a medical center and address her physical needs before we started countering her delusions. Until then, all I needed to do was be reassuring. Under no circumstance could I encourage her delusions.

We rolled the gurney down the hallway to the elevators. Karen was making little croaking noises. Her voice was almost useless after 24 years of disuse. Her face seemed extremely disturbed.

Somebody was standing at the elevators, already waiting for one. It was just Elian, one of our techs. I hadn't noticed him leave before us. "I got an elevator coming," he said with a little smile.

Even though the apartment building was a 300-cube, it had old-style cable elevators, and they came with the frequency of subway trains. Thanks to Elian's thoughtfulness, one was arriving just now.

I gave Karen a friendly smile. "Don't worry. Nobody's going to hurt you. You're completely safe."

She managed to gasp a couple words, which I barely heard. "Elian... He..."

There. She had known another of our names. How was this possible? It was hard to sort through the implications. Did she have access to our records? Maybe dispatch was wrong about how she got disconnected.

The elevator let out a ding and the doors opened. There was barely enough room inside for the gurney, me and the three techs. Elian stood on the other side of the gurney from me. I looked him over as the doors closed and elevator began to descend. Was she saying that this guy put a poison pellet in her? It was strange that he would be a part of her narrative. Very strange.

I didn't know much about the guy beyond his name, but I had worked with him a few times. He was just one of the rotating techs, young guy, military hair and goatee, skinny but pretty fit. I wondered how he would be in a fight. These younger guys had so much supplementing, it was hard to tell.

Elian caught me looking at him and gave me a bit of a surly look. For some reason, this irritated me. "So, friend, you trying to get out of here before the rest of us? You got a date or something?" I asked, needling him.

"I was just getting the elevator," he said quietly. He didn't seem to like the banter. Well, whatever.

I looked down at Karen and noticed something: a small red spot on the white sheet that covered her arm. Blood. It must have been from where they took her blood. Who took it? Elian? The spot was really was too low on the arm for that. Odd. I thought of taking a look at it, but one of the most important protocols when dealing with occupants was to not act like your believe their delusions, even for a moment. You must insist on the reality of reality.

I realized that Elian was watching me. I casually looked over to the elevator panel to see what floor we were on. 238. Man, this fucking thing was slow. What was the deal with that spot? It wouldn't be out of place for me to wonder about some patient bleeding. I lifted the sheet and took a look. There was a small puncture wound a few inches above her wrist.

"How'd she get that?" I asked. One of the techs just muttered about not knowing. Elian didn't even look at the spot. His face was blank, unreadable. I touched the her arm and felt a small nodule under the skin about an inch from the wound. Huh. Interesting.

I stood there trying to process this, caught between two realities. Was I in an elevator on a routine call with stable client and a few techs who were just ordinary acquaintances? Or was I in an elevator with murderer and a woman on the brink of death? There was really no way to split the difference on this one, no course of action that would work for both cases.

Fuck. What was I even asking myself? There was no way. Simply no way. Stuff like that never happens in real life, but it happens in the feeds all the time. It's a 100% typical spy narrative bullshit. How could I let myself get caught up in some feed fantasy so easily. But still-- a nodule under the skin? There was no good explanation for that.

Elian turned to me. We looked at each other for a long, silent moment. I couldn't read the expression on his face. It wasn't chummy goodwill, whatever it was. I felt a twinge in my stomach and my body began flooding with adrenaline. I could feel it radiating out into my limbs. Fuck.

My time in the Marines had taught me many things, many of them useless in the normal world, many of them useless outside of a bar or cathouse, but one of the more useful ones was that I should trust my adrenal gland. It meant that my paranoid lizard-brain understood something that my snotty intellect was too busy to notice. It happened when things were too quiet, when a certain car kept following the convoy, when somebody was acting funny.

There in the elevator, I almost reached for the grip of my rifle. I wasn't wearing a rifle, of course, so I just scratched my chest, trying to keep my fingers loose. Elian put his hand to his hip. Just like that I was leaping across the gurney. I grabbed his wrist with both hands, but it was an awkward angle, with me splayed over the gurney, and I had no control. A silver pistol came out of his pants, still halfway in its holster.

"Help! Get him!" I shouted as I slid off the other side of the gurney towards Elian's feet, holding on to that wrist for dear life. I heard shouting everywhere, but nobody helped me and nobody got him. Now I was on the floor, wrestling with Elian. There was lot of awful, terrified fumbling. Four hands were grabbing and clawing for the pistol. Somehow my head was jammed between Elian's shoulder and the wall, and I couldn't even see the gun. I could just feel the metal.

There was a shot, painfully loud. Elian shouted. Was I hit? Now the gun was wet. I managed to wiggle my fingers around the grip. With one huge twisting jerk, I put the muzzle again Elian's face. "No!" I pulled the trigger, a shot, and his head kicked back against the wall, the mouth popping open. Everything went still. His hands were still holding mine.

You're in the real world now
Ben's Narrative Part 05 58th Post Posted 17 May 2016 at 20:56:48 EDT Link to original

Now I was standing in an elevator, my hands covered with blood, a dead tech lying on the floor and a helpless occupant lying on the gurney. The other two techs had hit the emergency button and hastily gotten off at the next floor. Understandable. I had tried to explain to them about the poison pellet in Karen's arm, but they didn't stick around to consider the merits of my argument.

I set the gun down on the floor. This wasn't good. A couple of Elian's fingers had gotten blown off, and there was blood all over me, not to mention the bullet in his head. Shit, what now? I had shot people before. I had killed them before. But this was different. They had given me mandatory therapy after the war. They might give me mandatory something else after this.

Karen was wheezing, her blind eyes wiggling in her head. The pellet. I should take care of that before anything else. I wiped my hands off on my nice white coat and rifled through one of the tech bags to find the C-knife and some local. This shouldn't be too hard. It was a lot like removing a rotted jack.

"I'm going to cut out the pellet. You ready?" I asked.

Karen's head jiggled in a way that could be construed as nodding. Good enough. I hastily gave her the local and cut a pretty sizable chunk out of her arm, and the whole elevator filled with a burning smell that was a welcome change from Karen's existing smell. After sealing the wound, I examined the shriveled chunk of meat. There was indeed a white pellet lodged in it like a little pearl. I put it in a specimen jar. I might need it to avoid death row.

"OK, you're safe now," I said, not really knowing if this was true. Her monitor still looked OK.

What now? I wanted to just get the fuck out of there. But there was certainly a camera in the elevator plus two witnesses who knew me. What would the camera show? Me suddenly leaping across the elevator and shooting a guy in the head. That wasn't good. But how would I even begin to go on the run? I didn't know the first thing about identity shifting. And hadn't I done the right thing? I had saved her life. I had the pellet to prove it. I was a hero. Right?

I felt like reporting this to my CO. This didn't make any sense. But I should report it to somebody. I called the emergency service on my set and told it what had happened. It told me that officers would be sent over immediately. I tried to explain about the pellet, but this seemed to confuse it. It asked me if the pellet was armed. After a few minutes of confusing crosstalk, I just hung up.

As I waited and the minutes passed, the elevator felt very small and smelly and stifling. The blood around Elian covered the floor, surrounding my shoes. I imagined the cops coming up on another elevator as slow as this one. Karen's head was still wobbling in its weird way, the gurney making little creaking sounds, little gasps coming out of her throat.

"Everything's fine. You're in the real world now," I found myself saying, half-heartedly going through my standard patter. Absurd. Nothing was fine. Then the thought finally occurred to me. Why had Elian tried to kill this girl? Who wanted her dead? This was an important question. Whoever it was wouldn't be happy with me. Looking at her lying there, gasping, I knew it wouldn't be much use to ask her verbally. But she still had good jacks.

It was against protocol to plug into a feed-head's jacks. We were supposed to be getting them used to face-to-face conversation. But protocol did say you could plug in during an emergency. This definitely qualified. I told my set to find her jacks' wireless presence. A flood of messages hit the set, a backlog from the last couple minutes:

"dont / dont / dont call police / bad idea / we have to go / go / go / police r coming / get out / go / go'"

"What?" I murmured as I saw the messages.

"'Q controls techs / controls police / police will kill u / we must go'"

"Who is Q?

"'the adversary'"

Shit, this was so similar to a feed narrative. It felt like I had played this one before. What was that one with Zack Okonkwo? Fatal Escape or some shit like that? Terrible story.

"Why do they want to kill you?" I asked.

"'i am 1 of the bred'"

The Bred? I had heard the name before. I wasn't sure if it was from the news or a narrative. I had a vague idea that it was one of those old art protest collectives, like Anonymous or The Weather Underground. Or was it a feed cult? I asked my set, and it gave me a summary.

"The Bred is an alleged group of exploit experts who are thought to have been kidnapped at a young age and trained by a shadowy group, variously identified as the Human Front, the Restoration Alliance or the New Organ. They are the subject of a number of conspiracy theories, most of which assert that the internet's Combined Governance Corporation has been taken over by a sinister force, which the Bred are struggling against within the feedrealms and infraspaces. These theories generally involve discussions of mind control, feed conditioning, information war and the possibility of a Fascistic Singularity. Occult Singularians regard the Bred as the leaders of the new twelve tribes of Israel."

"Is this real or is this part of a narrative?"

My set replied, "The Bred are featured in many narratives, but are purported to hard-exist. There is no widely accepted proof of their existence."

Karen interrupted. "'can i thru-gate ur set?'"

"What for?"

"'we must go now / now / now'"

I heard footsteps in the hallway. The elevator doors were still open, so I peeked my head out. The police were coming down the hall. A lot of police. In tactical gear. I intended to call to them, but that little lizard part of my brain told me to duck back into the elevator. There was a huge metal bang and found myself on the floor with the gun in my hand. A bullet had hit the elevator door frame.

Karen's messages unspooled onto my set. "'i know Q / ruthless / she'll spoof calls to emergency / multiple calls / say ur an active shooter / let me thru-gate / NOW / u want to die?'"

I gave her through-gate access on my set. The elevator slammed shut, and my stomach leapt into my throat as we plunged downward.

How to Establish a Physical Link
Ben's Narrative Part 06 59th Post Posted 18 May 2016 at 03:48:53 EDT Link to original

As the elevator plunged down through the building, I tried to understand the implications of it all. It was horrifying. Enraging. All this time, my entire life, without me knowing it, elevators have had a secret faster speed that they don't tell us about. Those bastards.

A message from Karen appeared on my set:

"must lure them / they will fire in here / get ready"

They will what? This was out of hand. God, I felt cranked up. Fantastic. The elevator began to slow, everything becoming heavy.

"pls move the body away from the door"

Move the dead body? No, she meant her own body. I pushed the gurney against the side of the elevator.

"door will open / take cover"

I pressed myself up against the wall. The elevator came to a rattling stop, and the door popped open. The back wall banged and dented as bullets hit it. I cowered against the wall, hoping nothing flew into my arteries. The door clapped shut again, and the floor seemed to fall out from under me as we went down. Man, this little bird had some access. I'd never seen anything like it.

Another message from Karen popped into my set, and I read every word in an glance.

"silver haohua van / parking # 17A / 20 meters / pls take me / pls"

The elevator came to another shuddering stop, and the doors opened one of the underground decks, a dim concrete cavern filled with rows of cars. I yanked the gurney out and pushed it like a madman, rattling over the asphalt. The van was where she said it would be. I stood there for moment, waiting for it to pull out for us, but it just sat there.

"u must get me wired / i dont want to get fingerprints on its presence"

Wired? Did she mean physically? An article appeared on my set called "How to Establish a Physical Link to Your 2039 Haohua Luxury Chariot." I guess so. I followed the ER guide, looking around every so often to see if anybody was coming. Weird sounds were emerging from the elevators. They seemed to be malfunctioning. I got a wire from my bag and linked Karen's fleshjack to a physical jack by the van's gas cap. A second later the van's rear door unfolded.

"get in"

I did as she said. Following her orders felt totally natural. It was like I was right back at the tip of the spear. I remembered my time in Turkey and Greece, playing feed games with the platoon all day then getting dropped right into the kinetic, right into the warm bloody center of the war. Run here. Shoot this. Get down. 19 years old. Traveling the world and blowing shit up while other kids were sitting economics class. God, it was beautiful while it lasted.

I shoved the gurney into the van and jumped in beside it. The rear door folded down.

"pls secure the body. 90 secs left"

90 seconds left until what? I flattened a seat and clumsily transferred her body to it and strapped it in. The van leapt backward and began twisting through space, throwing me against a side window.

"sry / must go"

I got in the other seat and strapped in as the van peeled out. We found the exit ramp and went up. I felt like I was about to break a rib on the arm rest as we went on a never-ending left turn, up and up the spiraling ramp. Finally, the daylight of the ground level burst in view. The whole parking lot was swarmed with flashing cop cars, black armored vehicles and cops in hard gear. The van came to a stop in the middle of it all.

"Fuck," I muttered. The cops were moving in a hurry. It seemed like they hadn't quite formed a proper perimeter around the building, but they were close. "We've got go now. They're going to form a--"

"wait"

"For what?"

"air"

All around us, the cops were assembling, pulling their vehicles into place, leveling their pistols and rifles. I watched our few possible avenues of exit close up. The van just sat there. Karen's eyes were closed. She looked calm, at peace, just a sick little girl taking a nap.

I heard a sound, and my blood ran cold. I hadn't heard that sound in years, but there was no mistaking it. It was a sound that was etched in my brain.

In the Marines we used an app called Harpy to call in air-to-ground strikes. It was a wonky over-engineered DOD piece of shit, full of weird quirks that they were afraid to fix in the name of ultra-stability. It made a little sound like a sleepy bird chirping when a friendly missile was incoming and it was time to put your stupid head down so that you wouldn't get all that expensive training blown out of your skull. About 2 seconds after that sound, something would light up, and a moment later the sound of the blast would hit and the ground would shake.

I heard that sound now coming from my set. My god, what kind of access did she have?

"get down"

A moment later, police perimeter around us became a wall of fire, and the van was hit with a boom that felt like the earth splitting open. I put my head between my knees and let that old feeling flow through me, the shuddering rush of American air power being liberally applied. When I opened my eyes again, the van's safety windows had bowed inward on Karen's side, almost becoming liquid. Everything around the van was engulfed in fire and smoke. Slowly, the windows began to regain their shape. The van took off with a start, rushing blindly through the chaos.

Two minutes later, we were on the interstate, flying down the taxpayer lane, and I was sitting there, trying to remember how to swallow. It was unreal. Just unreal. She had called in a drone strike in the middle of Atlanta. The level of access required to do that was unimaginable. It meant completely basing the DOD systems. It was beyond any exploit collective. It was beyond governmental. It was planetary. It was god-level. I was sitting in van with an infraspace god.

They take kills pretty seriously in the real world
Ben's Narrative Part 07 61st Post Posted 19 May 2016 at 03:34:06 EDT Link to original

We rode in silence for a while, the Haohua Luxury Chariot flying along the curves of the interstate as all the other cars obediently changed lanes to let us through. I had seen people pull access stunts before, like changing the music in a club or turning off the lights in a restaurant, but what she had done was outright sorcery. She had taken control of the elevator, the car, the drone, the other cars on the highway, all within seconds. She must have had control of all the security cameras to plan our escape. Every one of these was a hardened system. The drone was a DOD system, the hardest of systems. But she had based it like child's play.

Sitting there in the car, I felt like I was coming down off a high. It wasn't a good feeling. I was sitting in a van with a mass murderer of unspeakable power. And I had helped her, given her the access she needed to pull her stunts. She had saved my life, I think, and I had saved hers. But she had also just killed dozens of cops, maybe over a hundred. Men with families. Fuck, my life was over. I had helped her. That was a death sentence right there. We would become the most wanted people in the country. How did I get caught up in this?

I looked over at her tiny, skeletal body. So frail and weak. I could pick her up and chuck her out the back of the van and end this whole escapade. But then what? Face the death penalty? She had to be my best chance at getting away. But who the fuck was she? She was a killer, that was for sure. Utterly ruthless.

A message from her appeared on my set.

"srry bout all that. had to hurry"

Sorry? That was rich. I asked her where we were going.

"upstate NY"

"What's there?"

"our objective"

"What's our objective?"

"a way to defeat Q. hard to explain"

I wondered if she was insane. She was responsive and lucid, but she was also capable of murder. She would probably get rid of me as soon as she could.

"So you want me to come with you?"

"id like it. i need physical help."

"You killed like a hundred cops back there. The whole world is going to be looking for us."

"no they wont"

"You don't think so? This isn't the feedrealm. They take kills pretty seriously in the real world."

"i do too. but theyll b too busy to look for us"

"Busy with what?"

"Q"

"What's Q going to do?"

"u will find out. ~4 mins"

"Just tell me."

"u wouldnt believe me"

We fell back into silence. My thoughts were racing. I wondered why they didn't just flag our car or shut down the highway. I guess she was busy working her black magic on the police and transportation systems. Who knew what she was capable of? Was she really one of the Bred? A grown-up child soldier?

It was illegal to hook children into long-term feeds, but I had heard stories about China and the FRN connecting infants, trying to create people who were utterly at one with the internet. According to the tales, the children all died. So they tried older children, but they all turned into drooling skullbaskets. For some reason, the brain needs a certain level of maturity before it can withstand a long-term feed without resulting in total madness. Even then, it results in near-total madness.

I figured Karen was another child abuse case. But she wasn't just some feed casualty. Her mind worked. Worked well. Whoever had made her had done the forbidden, and they had done it successfully.

But why did I have to get involved in all this? I had just gotten my specialist license. After getting out of the Marines and just drifting around for years, I was finally hitting my stride. Now it was all fucked up.

"dont look back"

I looked over to the girl lying next to me. Was it possible that she had hacked so far into infraspace that she could read minds?

There was a passing flash of light, like sunlight glancing off some car, then everything around us started to get brighter and brighter, like the sun had just come out from behind a cloud. But there weren't any clouds in the sky. The light was coming from behind us, bouncing off the other cars, creating a painful glare. I almost turned around, but then I realized what Karen had said. I closed my eyes against the brightness, and the insides of my eyelids glowed red like I was lying on the beach. After a few seconds, the light dimmed and seemed to return to normal. I opened my eyes, blinked a few times and turned around.

A few miles behind us, the entire city of Atlanta had disappeared behind a megalithic wall of dark roiling smoke. I felt my mouth falling open. I leaned down to look up at the sky behind us. The giant wall of smoke was just the base of a monstrous black tree of ash that rose miles into the sky, growing larger and larger, looming over the world.

Then we were hit by a blast that rattled me right down to the roots of my teeth. I shut my eyes again. The blast turned into long horrifying roar. The van wobbled and shuddered as awful groaning sounds passed through the metal. Eventually, the van's steering systems righted us, and slowly the roar passed.

That must have been the blast wave. Of a nuclear detonation. That had just destroyed Atlanta.

I unbuckled my seat and crawled to the back window and pressed my face against the glass. The tree of smoke was still growing over us, becoming ever more massive. I just stared in silence. Slowly it changed from one awful form to another until it became a vague gray pillar in the far distance.

I'm not sure how long I spent watching it. I know that by the time I looked away, I was crying.

What the hell had Bengaluru done to anybody?
Ben's Narrative Part 08 77th Post Posted 4 June at 01:30:14 UTC Link to original

When we got to the Clearview hospital, it was like Karen said it would be. The emergency room was flooded with patients coming in from Atlanta, but the readjustment center was empty except for a lone staffer who was watching the lobby's wall set and praying. The set was showing footage of the black cloud over Atlanta. Or maybe it was Denver. Or Riyadh. 12 cities had gone up in the last hour. They weren't the largest or most powerful cities in the world. Hefei. Zhengzhou. Bengaluru. What was the pattern? What the hell had Bengaluru done to anybody?

Karen said there was no real pattern.

"this is Q's opening move. her entrance into the world. she wont destroy everything. but she will kill and kill until she thinks we are ready for her demands."

I found a wheelchair by the readjustment center's entrance and wheeled Karen down to the EMRT room. Somewhere, a hygiene bed's life alarm was ringing. I ignored it. My goal was to get Karen some muscle treatment. A single treatment probably wouldn't give her enough strength to stand on her own, but she could at least hold her head up and move her arms, and she might regain her voice and sight.

In the treatment room, I filled a treatment tub with the minty-smelling conducting gel and washed Karen off and fit her with breathing tube. These were normally tech duties, stuff I thought I would never be doing again. Looking down at this little twig of a woman on the table, it occurred to me that all I had to do was tie off her breathing tube, and that would be the end of her. I asked her the question that kept coming to my mind. "How do I know for sure that you didn't blow up Atlanta yourself? How do I know you aren't full of shit?"

My set was blank for a while before she answered.

"well... how could I prove it?"

I tried to think of a way. Some kind of test. "I don't know," I said finally.

"u know much about statistical proxy distillation tracing?"

"No."

"then it would be hard to prove it to u"

"So how do I know it wasn't you?"

"u cant know."

"I need to know if I'm going to help you."

"then learn about SPDT"

"I don't have time to learn about fucking SP fucking DT."

"then u cant know. ur just dealing with stuff thats too advanced"

I walked away from the table and sat down in a nearby chair. I felt like I was cracking up. The urge to cry had come and passed every few minutes, and it came again. "I don't know what to do."

"i told u. we must get to upstate New York. there's a way to defeat Q."

"Maybe you are Q."

"listen before u put me in the gel, I want u to pull my jack battery. cut it off"

"And that would prove you're not Q?"

"not really. i couldve scripted everything"

"Oh."

"but it would mean i cant directly order nuclear strikes"

"Oh, well, that's a relief," I said, rubbing my face and trying to blink away the fresh wave of tears. "What's in upstate New York that's so important?"

"there is a resource Q cant access. something she cannot defend against."

"What?"

"honestly, if u dont understand something simple like SPDT, u wont understand this."

"Fucking great," I said. We sat there in silence for a long moment. Finally, another message showed up.

"im not Q. i spent my life fighting Q. i fought Q instead of living a life. we still have a chance to win. we must win."

I sighed and stood up and walked over to her. "Well, then let's get started."

"good"

I found the jack patch on the back of Karen's neck and squeezed at the tattooed points. Her battery capsule slowly slid out of her skin like a giant blackhead. I disconnected the wire. Now she was completely disconnected from infraspace. I picked up her body and gently lowered it into the conducting gel. It took a minute for her to sink to the bottom, for the gel slowly slide over her face like a closing curtain. I dialed up 90 minutes of muscle treatment and 30 minutes of eye treatment and started the tub up. I sat for a while, listening to the soft wobbling sounds of the gel shifting as Karen's muscles clenched and unclenched at a rapid-fire rate. This was the sort of spare moment where a person would stare at their set and look at game replays or something, but my set was a just a long list of red interrupts, telling me about how everybody was dead.

I realized that the hygiene bed's life alarm was still going off in some other room. Usually when I heard that sound, I went racing to find out what was going on. But I had just ignored it. Well, the person was probably dead before we got here. What were the odds that they had just gone into arrest when we walked in the door? And who gave a shit anyways when a 100 million people had also died today. Still... there was an instinctive part of me that wanted to run toward the sound, that wanted to help. I got up and walked down the hall. The ringing got louder. At the end of the hallway, there was a small room with 4 hygiene beds that had been brought in for in-hospital disconnection, a procedure usually reserved for really complex cases. The last bed was blinking red. I took a look at the readout, but it didn't show cardiac arrest. In fact, it was showing 260 bpm. It must have been malfunctioning. I looked at the patient chart. Zhenzhen Sobakin. 24 years old. Total connection duration: 47 minutes. It must have been runtime crash. Unlucky.

I pressed the seal button, and the bed lid opened up. When she came into view, I staggered back and shouted for help.

A Man Arrived To A Duel With Only A Pen And A Piece Of Paper
Ben's Narrative Part 09 78th Post Posted 5 June 2016 at 02:08:00 EDT Link to original

I sat Karen up in the electroconvulsive tub and wiped the warm gel from her face and detached the breathing tube. Her head rolled back, her face glistening in the glare of the LED. I could see the shape of the skull clearly through the wet skin. Slowly, she pulled her head upright, blinking the goo from her eye lashes. "Heh. Hi. Hello. Hello. Can you hear this?"

"Yeah, I can hear you," I said.

"Wow. OK. It worked. Good," she said. Her voice was completely flat and surprisingly deep for somebody so scrawny. "I am here," she said, baring her teeth in what might have been a smile.

"Can you see anything?" I asked.

She opened her eyes wider and moved them around. "Yes. Persistent shapes," she said, pronouncing the word 'persistent' like a child.

"Can you see how many fingers I'm holding up?"

"No."

"Try squinting."

"Oh, right. That changes things. Hmmm... Two?"

She was right, except she was looking at a completely different direction than my hand.

"Great," I said.

Slowly, her knobby knees emerged from the gel, and she grasped them with her hands. It was a good sign for somebody in her state. It also showed that she knew some of the standard tests for emergents. We went through a few more of the tests and found that the treatment had worked well. She might even be walking soon. I got her out of the tub and washed her off and put her into some scrubs. She managed to sit upright on the table without leaning on anything, her bony arms set stiffly at her sides.

"Can I ask you a question?" I asked.

"Sure," she said in her deep, childish monotone.

"What is Q?"

"You want the whole story?"

"Yeah."

She took a deep breath. "OK. So, approximately fifty thousand years ago..."

She told me the whole story of Q as she knew it, from the beginning in prehistory, when the "hyperspace code" was inserted into the human genome, and she went all the way to right now and the so-called plague of the flesh. Her description of the plague explained what happened to poor Zhenzhen in her hygiene bed. It also explained the red butterfly thing I found the other hygiene bed.

If you are "reading" this, I guess you have access to her story as well. Hopefully she wrote down the whole history of Q because I honestly didn't understand it all and couldn't do it justice. If I had heard it on any other day than the day Atlanta was destroyed, I wouldn't have believed any of it. As it was, I just took it all in in a calm detached way, as if I was just listening to another delusional. I guess you'll be reading her story before any of this even happens, so you'll be inclined to believe it even less.

So, at that point, I asked her how she knew so much about Q, like what its plans were and everything. She said Q had recently stopped hiding anything from her and the other Bred soldiers. It was fully confident in its ability to win against them in any scenario. It no longer felt the need for any secrecy. I asked her why it had tried to kill her, and she said that it hadn't. It was planning to destroy Atlanta anyways. She had arranged for the assassin herself, an improvisation to get her out of the city more quickly. I asked her if her ability to see all those extra dimensions allowed her to see into the future. She told me that she could only see extra dimensions in the feedrealm. It allowed her fight against Q more effectively because she can process information on a different level.

She explained, "When you look at a digital picture, you can process a huge matrix of color values all at once. If you tried to process the same picture by looking at a list of color codes for each point, like R:101, G:254, B:017, it would take forever and be incomprehensible. For certain problems, I have the same advantage over you that you have over a guy reading a list of color codes on a ticker. I can see many things all at once. But I can only see extra dimensions in the feedrealm. Here outside the realm, there seems to be only three dimensions plus one timeline. I can't see beyond that. But I can imagine beyond it."

"So you can't see the future?"

"No. I can only imagine the future. I can imagine a lot of futures."

"Then why did you hire an assassin for yourself? I mean, that just seems like a really risky move. Like, something that was unlikely to pan out."

"Oh? I couldn't imagine many scenarios where it wouldn't have worked."

"Really? What if I had just been like, 'Fuck this, I'm out of here.'"

"Oh, come now. Nobody would do that."

"Nobody would do that? Almost everybody would do that! He had a gun."

"Wrestling over firearms is quite common."

"Maybe in feed narratives, but not in real life."

"You see stories about that kind of thing all the time in the news."

We argued about this point for quite a while. It was like arguing with an intelligent child who has no clue about the real world. Her view of real life had been warped by seeing only the sensational parts of it that managed to leak into the feedrealm. She seemed completely unaware of that most basic and fundamental fact of human life: that most of it is boring, that most of it is just waiting around, that people go through large portions of their lives tired and sleepy and wanting to lie down. I tried to convince her of this, but in her short time in the real world, she had experienced a murder, a drone strike and nuclear holocaust, so I wasn't having much success until -- lo and behold -- she got tired and wanted to lie down.

I helped her onto a gurney, and we made plans to head toward Plattsburgh in upstate New York. She said that the key to defeating Q was somewhere near there. Of course, she was lying to me, but I didn't realize it at the time.

The Beginning Of A Story
Ben's Narrative Part 10 81st Post Posted 9 June 2016 at 08:57:41 UTC Link to original

Right now, the car is headed silent down the highway. It's dark, and there is nobody driving. I snuggle up in my seat and listen to the hum of its parts. I have turned my set off. It shows nothing but reports of destruction and plagues. The world on fire. The world gone mad.

Most of the interstates have shut down. They want people to stay in one place. The car is moving along the back roads, switching from one lonely little highway to another. We are headed towards the answer, towards the key to defeating Q. I hope we get there fast.

Slowly, the sky pales, and the blue curves of the mountains emerge from the darkness beyond the guardrails. I heard once that the Appalachians used to be as high as the Himalayas. Looking at the sloping hills under the sky, I can sense the ancient shape of the world. A world that was here before us.

Man, I'm getting pretty philosophical.

In my mind, another shape appears. Massive. Continental. The slope of human decline. The awful descent of the human race into...

Christ. Let's just enjoy the pretty mountains.

Karen is lying in the back. She's doing another eye treatment with equipment we took from the hospital. Before we reach Plattsburgh, the car switches highways and heads west. The sun climbs higher. We are getting closer.

Eventually, the car turns onto an unpaved road. After few minutes, it slows to a stop. And here we are. I look around. It's a nice bit of country scenery -- grass and trees and gentle hills and blue sky and pretty much fuck all. There is nothing here. Or whatever is here, is hidden.

Karen is still doing the eye treatment in the darkness of the van's rear. The light from the goggles seeps out in little flashes, sketching the shape of her face. Finally, the goggles turn green, and she pulls them off, blinking and squinting.

I go and help her sit up. "Can you see a little better?" I ask.

She looks down at her hands, moving the fingers slowly in the dark. "Yeah."

"Persistent shapes?"

She raises her hand into a shaft of sunlight shining in from the front of the van. Her fingers catch the glow. "My hands," she says softly, her voice quavering with disbelief. It's the first strong emotion I've ever heard from her.

"Good. That's great," I say. "Well... we're here. What do we do now?"

She looks at me and smiles maniacally. "We go into the forest," she says. Her smile is unnatural and stiff, more of a grimace than a smile, but for a brief moment, as it first spreads across her face, she looks like a giddy little kid. "The key is there," she says.

"What is it? Some kind of secret underground base? Hidden laboratory?"

She makes a groaning sound that I barely recognize as laughter. "You play too many narratives. It's much simpler than that."

I unfold a wheelchair that we "borrowed" from the hospital and help her into it. When I open the back doors of the van, she winces against the bright sunlight, and again her face looks like a little kid's for a moment. I give her a pair of huge black wraparound sunglasses that we took eye treatment center.

The van lowers to the ground, and I roll the wheelchair out onto the dusty road. She makes sure I take a bag of supplies with us -- snacks and drinks and other stuff. The sun is warm on my skin, but the breeze is fresh and cool. It's a perfect day. You would think that everything is right in the world.

"So where to?" I ask.

She looks around, her head wobbling on her thin stalk of a neck, her eyes hidden by the massive glasses. "There was once a house here. Do you see it?"

I look around and spy a low, crumbled gray wall mostly hidden behind the high grass. "I think see an old foundation."

"That's it, she says. Her eyes are hidden, but there is something in her voice that wasn't there yesterday, a shivery excitement. It makes me excited too. I push the wheelchair down a weedy gravel driveway toward the foundation. There's nothing else left of the house. It must have been torn down and hauled off. Karen has me push her around it and go down a trail leading towards forest.

"What was that house?" I ask. "Anything important?"

"I used to live there."

I turn and give it another look, as if I would see some new detail in the crumbling concrete that I had missed.

"That was the old children's home?"

"Yep."

"Then where are we going?"

"We're almost there," she says. "It's close."

We follow the trail into the forest. The trees become thick and shadowy. The wheelchair has a little power assist, but it's still tough to push it over all the roots and rocks and that lie along the narrowing, twisting path.

"Oh, yes!" Karen whispers excitedly.

Up ahead, sunlight gleams through the branches of the crowding trees. A wave of excitement moves through me, and I push Karen faster. We come out into a clearing, a broad patch of wild grass that glows green and golden in the sunlight.

"Here," Karen says.

I stop the wheelchair and look around. At first glance, there doesn't seem to be anything here.

"So what's here?" I ask.

"I used to come here as a child... and play make-believe... before I was connected."

I take a walk around the clearing, looking for something. A hatch? A hole? An actual key lying in the grass? There is nothing.

Across the clearing, Karen is slowly pulling off her sunglasses. When her eyes appear, they startle me. They are wide and gleaming within utter fascination. I walk up to her. She is staring at something. Tears fill the rims of her eyes and spill over. What is she looking at? It seems to be something right in front of her, something I can't see.

I stand beside her and crouch so I can see what she is seeing. There is nothing there but a small cloud of gnats. "What are you looking at?" I ask.

She looks all around and takes a deep breath and shudders. "There's... more..." she whispers.

"More what?"

"They said the feeds were complete... but they were wrong."

I wait for her to say more, but she doesn't. "What do you mean?" I ask.

She looks at me and smiles, the most goofy, crazed smile I've ever seen, tears still flowing down her cheeks. "The designers of the feeds said that it provides a complete experience. Enough colors, enough frames, enough smell gradients, enough complexity to make it indistinguishable from reality... but they were wrong. Here! Look at them!" she says, raising her hand into the air.

"You mean... the gnats?"

"Yes."

The gnats are glowing specks dancing senselessly in the sunlight. I wonder if some pattern will emerge. Can Karen control them with their mind? Is that the secret? Are they forming shapes? But they just dance and dance, forming nothing, making no pattern that I can see. I feel silly for even thinking that they would. They're gnats.

I turn away. A flood of angry thoughts rushes through my mind. Gnats? Fucking gnats? She's a nut. She's lost it. Yeah, she's powerful and impressive in the feedrealm, but now she is in the real world, and she has completely lost her shit, and this whole trip has been a waste. "Is there anything here?" I ask. "What's the key? Seriously. Don't give me any of that bullshit like 'I can't explain' or 'You'll see.' Just tell me. What are we doing here. What is the plan?" I ask, almost shouting by the end.

The crazed look of joy fades from her face and is replaced by the look of a scolded child. She lets her head hang and wipes the tears from her face with her weak little hands.

I feel a bad. I kneel by her chair and say, "I'm sorry. Please, just tell me what your plan is. I need to know now."

Karen begins speaking softly without looking up. "Q has base control of every major system in the world. Every drone, every rover, every defense robot, all orbital assets, all nuclear weaponry. She has control over most human political systems. She has destroyed or contained every existing countermeasure, including me. There is no scenario in which we could ever reacquire control. Not with a thousand times our current resources. Not with a thousand years of computation time."

"So then what's the plan?"

"What we need is a way for Q to be destroyed by just one or a few motivated individuals. I believe there were points in the past when this could have happened. Maybe one of the Germans overseeing the early research program could have stopped it. Maybe it could have been stopped around 2020, when the portals were shut down, and interface research was temporarily abandoned. But it didn't happen. Currently, at this point, there is no way for it to happen. Q has control of far, far too many assets. The war is already lost. Irrevocably."

"Then what do we do?"

"We must hope that there are alternate timelines and that somebody in one of these timelines foresees what is happening to us right now -- that somebody foresees this very moment in time and takes steps to prevent it."

I stare at her. She looks into my eyes. I grope for words. "Is that... Wait... Alternate timelines? Is that the plan? We have to send a message back into the past?"

"In a sense."

"Then the person who receives this message will destroy Q in the past, and that will save us?"

Karen shakes her head slowly. "No. That clearly won't happen or everything would already be different. We are utterly doomed. We'll either be either incinerated in a nuclear strike or rounded up and incorporated into Q. There's no stopping that. The only hope to defeat Q is on some other timeline, if such a thing exists."

"There's no hope for us? At all? Then what are we doing here? Why are we in this fucking clearing?"

"Haven't you felt it?"

"Felt what?"

"The feeling that you're inside a narrative."

An eerie shiver comes over me. I look around at the clearing. "Like, I'm inside a feed?"

"No. Inside a narrative. A story in somebody's mind. Doesn't this all seem just like a story? Two people rushing off to save the world, to find some hidden key in the forest?"

"Yeah, it all seems pretty unbelievable."

"That's how I wanted it to feel. That's why we came out here. So that we can be inside a story. Now, hopefully, there is somebody out there in the past who will write the story."

"Write the story? What? So there's nothing here?"

"There's no magic key or secret underground base."

"Well this story sucks."

"Why?"

"It's a huge fucking let-down."

Karen makes a mild choking sound that might be a chuckle.

I slump down into the grass beside her wheel chair and hang my head. I'm out in the woods with a crazy person. She doesn't even make sense. She's spent too long in 5D. She's talking about alternate timelines. Finally, I ask her, "So we're just fucked, right?"

"If you look toward our future, if you look at the series of events which will happen to us, they are dark. They are very awful. We will suffer. We will die. But that would be true in any timeline. On the other hand, if you look at the entire story, not as a series of events, not from beginning to end, but as a single continuous, connected shape, where every event is occurring simultaneously... I think... my life... even my stupid little life, which I spent mostly inside that hygiene bed... could form a beautiful shape."

I snort. I'm tired of this cryptic bullshit.

Karen goes on. "Maybe that shape reaches back, back to some place where somebody can see it and change things."

I don't say anything. Karen reaches into our bag of supplies and pulls out one of the little paper notebooks she bought at the gas station.

"What are you doing?" I ask.

"I'm going to write a poem. Do you want a notebook?"

"What for?"

"Maybe there's somebody out there who needs you to write a story."

"Who would read it? Isn't everybody going to die?"

"Who knows," she says and drops the other notebook into my lap. "Maybe somebody would be interested."

I toss the notebook off into the grass. Fucking pointless. I can barely write on paper anyways.

We sit in silence for a long time. When I look up, Karen is staring at that same little cloud of gnats, occasionally jotting stuff down. I find myself staring at them too. They look like nothing more than living specks of dust worked into a crazy, whirling frenzy. Is there any pattern in how they move? Would it matter if there was? I think about what Karen said about the shape of her life, what it would look like if everything happened simultaneously, if it could all be seen at once. I think about the shape of my own life. I stare at the gnats and imagine seeing every position of every gnat all at one time. What kind of shape would it make? Even if I could see it, would this shape have any meaning?

I pick up the notebook and begin to write.