Author Archives: natechen

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Thirteen

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Eric caught a glimpse of sensible women’s shoes coming towards him before the brainworm collapsed into scrap metal and buried him underneath. The pressure on him was immense for another second or two then there was a strange popping sensation and Eric found himself in empty headspace with the metal ring still clenched in his hands. He took a few steadying breaths as the beginning of a migraine built behind his sinuses. Sensory deprivation was starting to sound more and more like a perk of working in headspace rather than a drawback.

His abused cranium was really starting to protest when a door appeared, swung open and Vent stepped through, his ten year old form shifting back into the familiar Victorian persona. Eric spared a brief glance for the door, which was’t attached to any thing and vanished as soon as it swung shut behind behind the other meme. Vent hurried over to him, his meme visibly relaxing as he looked Eric over, patting him down as if to ensure everything was still there.

“Relax, Vent, I’m fine.” Eric gently pushed Vent’s hands away.

“Do you feel dizzy? Is there any sensation returning to your limbs?” Vent continued to look him over but kept his hands to himself. “Are you experiencing any synesthesia?”

“Any wha- no, never mind. I just have a headache.” Eric pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled, it was a lot less therapeutic when he wasn’t inside his own head. “Is that normal?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never heard of someone’s meme being forgotten while they were in someone else’s headspace. I guess it just bounces back to running in your own head? It’s not like your memes were ever dependent on someone else’s mind.” Vent’s voice trailed off in the same way Eric’s father’s did when he was deep in thought.

Not that Eric was sure what he was thinking about it. Now that he wasn’t under the threat of brainworm attack the idea that someone else’s bad memory could pose a danger to him seemed silly, even with telepathy in the mix. Eric decided to investigate the ring he’d gotten from the worm instead. It seemed like a featureless circle of metal until he ran his fingertips along the inside of the ring. Then it suddenly sprouted teeth and wrapped tightly around his hand.

“Gah!” Eric yelled, trying to work his fingers out from under the ring.

“Ah!” Vent snapped out of his reverie and crowded in to help.

Neither one managed to get a grip on it before it vanished under the skin. Both of them stared at Eric’s hand for a moment. With exaggerated calm Eric looked at Vent and asked, “What happened?”

“Well…”

“This is another thing you’ve never heard of happening before, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.” Vent produced the tools he’d used earlier to examine the brainworm. “But if you don’t mind, we can take a look and try and figure it out now.”

Eric rolled his eyes. “Fine. Take a look.”

Ten minutes of uncomfortable poking and prodding later, Vent tucked his tools away and humphed.

“Humph what?” Eric asked.

“You know how a telepath wakes up, right?”

“The nontelepath,” Eric put out one hand flat, “synchronizes with the telepath.” He put his other hand under the first hand. “Then the telepath slowly cranks the nontelepath up to speed,” he pushed his top hand up with the bottom, “and you have two telepaths.”

“Pretty much. As near as I can tell, what happened that the part of the brainworm that took care of the synchronization just synchronized with you.” He ran one hand along his jaw sheepishly. “But I’m not sure what happens now. I think the rest of the process was handled by other parts of the brainworm so there’s nothing left there for it to do.”

Eric rubbed his hand uncomfortably. “Right. Well, I guess that’s one problem dealt with. But it kind of leaves a bigger issue, don’t you think?”

Vent shot him a look as he adjusted a new top hat on his meme’s head. “What’s that?”

“You said the First Teep knew everything he needs to make more brainworms.” Eric gestured broadly to encompass everything that happened in the last half hour. “And I can’t image that we won’t end up right back here if he does.”

“That’s true…” Vent struck a thoughtful pose. “At the same time what do you suppose we do about it?”

Eric threw his hands in the air. “Well you’re the expert, right? Couldn’t you convince him that the thing is dangerous?”

“He wouldn’t believe us.” Vent shrugged. “It wasn’t dangerous when he first built it.”

“But it became dangerous over time. It took you five minutes to figure that out, couldn’t you explain it to him?”

Vent looked away and didn’t answer. Eric grunted in disgust. “Is there some reason he wouldn’t believe you?”

“We might not have parted on the best of terms.” Vent heaved a sigh and looked back. “Fine. We’ll go talk to FT. Maybe he’ll be in a mood to listen to sense this time.”

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Twelve

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Eric and Vent broke through the featureless headspace and found themselves in a living room straight out of a Normal Rockwell painting. A quick look around revealed that they were standing in front of the front door, looking at a small but well furnished room with a tan colored sofa along the opposite wall. An round table with a lamp and vase on it sat immediately to their left, beyond it was a door to what looked like a dining room.  A closed door to the right of the sofa led to the back of the house, a curio cabinet full of knickknack was the only feature on the wall to the right.

There wasn’t anything that struck Eric as particularly useful against a rampaging brainworm. He gave Vent a curious look. “Where are we?”

Vent’s meme removed his top hat in a respectful fashion. “The mind of an Alzheimer’s patient.”

“Alzheimer’s.” Eric cast about for the word. “That’s the condition where you forget everything, right?”

“No.” Vent strode across the quiet room, absently running one hand along the top of the cabinet. “Alzheimer’s is a state of permanent short term memory loss. People will remember events from ten or twenty years ago just fine but won’t be able to retain memories of things that happened a few days, a few hours or, in extreme cases, a few minutes ago.”

Eric picked the vase up off the table at his side, turning the thing over in his hands and marveling at how tacky it looked. That was pretty much the only sensation he got off of it, there was no feeling of porcelain or any sense of weight to the object. He put it back on the table and, without his touching it in any way, it scooted a few inches to one side, stopping exactly where he’d picked it up. Eric suppressed a shudder. “Weird.”

“The human mind is incredible. It can completely recover from any kind of intrusion as long as it can forget.” Vent strode across the room, his meme losing coherency for a moment, wavering between the snappily dressed, pseudo-Victorian Eric was used to and a much smaller figure, half Vent’s normal height at a guess, with sloppy hair and poorly fitting clothes. “If you could duplicate Alzheimer’s in a controlled fashion you could cure any mental disorder.”

The vase may not have had much in the way of weight but it sure shattered nicely against the side of the table when Eric swung it. The pieces actually froze in mid air before most of them even hit the ground, flying back upward and reassembling on the table as if nothing had happened. “So they call stasis a cure now?”

Vent gave him a nasty look over his shoulder, the shifting, protean aspect he wore at the moment making it even more sinister than the blank disapproval of the typical meme. “Don’t draw attention, Echoes. You don’t belong here.”

“What?”

“As long as we’re in the subconscious we can’t get forgotten, not really. But if you catch the attention of the conscious mind and you can’t fit into the memories that are here you’re on the road to oblivion.” Vent’s meme tossed it’s hat on the floor. For a moment it sat there and then it crumpled flat, into a ball, then finally a tiny point of darkness before disappearing entirely. “I don’t know what that will do to your mind or body and frankly I don’t want to find out.”

“Point taken.” Eric moved to the rough center of the room, staying as far as possible from the furniture and anything else he might disturb and get unwanted attention.

Vent’s meme had settled on an actual size and shape, no longer the imposing Victorian scientist but instead a tennish year old boy in an oversized shirt and shorts. Large blue eyes stared out from under a fringe of blonde hair and he had a nose that would probably be strong and handsome someday but for the moment was just comical. Eric stared but Vent didn’t seem to notice. “Now listen, because that brainworm could be here any second.”

“Wait,” Eric hissed, trying to keep his meme’s ‘voice’ quiet since he wasn’t sure whether that would attract attention or now. “You’re going to dump the brainworm in the middle of a mentally unstable person’s brain?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s nothing more stable than an Alzheimer’s patient’s mind. They’re basically in stasis, you said it yourself. If a brainworm comes in here it will have to be processed by the conscious mind, but this mind can’t hold thoughts together long enough to make anything of something as complicated as a brainworm. Long before it can do lasting damage it will be entirely forgotten.” Vent made a poofing motion with one hand. “The problem is, the worm’s coming here for you. If it finds you odds are you’ll be noticed along with it, so you run the same risk of being forgotten as it does.”

Before Eric could ask the obvious question the door to the house shook with the sound of something heavy crashing into it. Eric and Vent both jumped and slowly backed away from the door. “Okay, Vent, how do I do this without getting myself forgotten?”

Vent pointed frantically towards the kitchen. “Hide. Without interacting with the headspace too much.” Vent turned and scampered towards the other door, his now-boyish voice shrill as he started yelling, “Mom! Mom, there’s someone at the door!”

The door thumped again and this time the sound of splintering wood came along with it. Eric backed into the kitchen and crouched down behind a cabinet, his attention still focused on the door, which sported a spiderweb of cracks. The damage was already vanishing when the door took a third hit and it fell apart completely.

It didn’t look much like when they’d first found it. Any vestiges of its pseudo-Vent appearance had fallen away to be replaced with a clattering, whirling mass of wires and pistons that bore more resemblance to a headless buffalo than a worm. In spite of his efforts at hiding the brainworm made a beeline for Eric, who backpedaled through the kitchen and banged into a table he hadn’t noticed. With the brainworm smashing through the kitchen doorfram and concern for staying hidden now in the wind Eric turned and grabbed the first thing that came to hand, a chair set at the table, and threw it threw it at the brainworm. Naturally the worm didn’t pay it any attention.

There was a door out of the kitchen in to the back of the house and Eric did his best to drag the table across the doorway as he continued his frantic retreat. The brainworm crashed through the remaining chairs in the dining room and stomped the table into twigs with a single bounding leap.

The table did make the brainworm stumble, a dozen leglike pistons churning as it tried to force its way through the door frame. As it twisted one way Eric tried to push through the gap on the other side but the flailing hooks and wires caught his arm and yanked him up short. A second later Eric was trapped under the brainworm, trying to deflect the churning limbs that threatened to crush him.

Over the noise he caught fragments of a feminine voice yelling, “What is going on, Harold?”

If there was an answer Eric missed it as a piston slammed him down into the floor hard enough to splinter it. Which made him kind of glad he couldn’t feel anything that was happening to him. The sudden change in altitude put Eric in a perfect position to see the table remnants vanish. Not good.

Eric made a frantic scramble for freedom but he suddenly felt much heavier than a moment ago. The brainworm creaked and groaned, trying to pull itself along on legs that were starting to bend and buckle under its own weight. As it got closer to Eric its center of mass split open and it extended the metal crown of teeth it had put on his head the last time they’d met.

Eric managed to get his hands on it and pushed back as hard as he could. But that left him sinking deeper into the floor as the pressure to restore the house to normal crushed ever harder.

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Eleven

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It didn’t take Eric long to decide that being detached from his body was on the list of top five things he hated about being a telepath. After a mere thirty seconds of his first out of body experience he’d compiled a list of at least a dozen things he hated about it, starting with no feeling in his limbs and ramping up to the pressing urge to hyperventilate as no air got into his nonexistent lungs. Vent stood off to one side, watching the whole thing without comment or advice.

Fighting down rising panic wasn’t easy but after a few minutes he found himself getting used to the new sensations, or lack thereof. Once he had his wits about him again Eric stood up and gave Vent an evil look, probably completely lost on him with the way meme’s had no expression. “I thought you were here to help out.”

“Help you find the brainworm,” Vent clarified. “And hammer out the basics, but I’d like to see you figure out as much as possible on your own. It’s already revealed a lot to me.”

“Right. Whatever.” Eric looked around his cramped, borrowed room. “Why can’t I see myself in here?”

“Because we’re piggybacking on your senses. We can only see what you can, and you weren’t looking at yourself when you jumped into the network.” Vent put a hand on Eric’s shoulder, the first thing Eric had felt since he ‘jumped into the network’ as Vent put it. Although it wasn’t the usual sensation of touch, it was more a tingle in the back of his head. “Now, there’s a lot of what we call ‘headspace’ out there, basically it’s in the back of people’s heads where they dream. At least, that’s my theory.”

“Any other theories?”

Vent shrugged. “Not that I know of. There’s still not many people looking into telepathy in a scientific fashion.”

That made sense. “Okay. Headspace, the back of the mind where dreams live. Simple enough.”

The pressure in the back of Eric’s mind got a little stronger and he found himself drifting along with Vent’s meme, the wall of the apartment fading into the blank, featureless expanse where he’d first met Tails. “It’s important to keep in mind that stuff you do in headspace might work its way into other people’s minds. So try not to cause too much havoc here. Likewise, you can run into some pretty freaky stuff in people’s subconsciousness. Later on we can cover general mental self defense, for now it’s probably best to move through headspace fast and not linger.”

“Go fast, keep a low profile. Got it.” Now that Vent had mentioned it there did seem to be ripples and distortions on the seemingly featureless darkness around them. It was almost exactly like something out of a cartoon dream sequence.

While Eric tried to sort out the murky subconscious Vent fished around in his cloak and produced a weird bundle of gears, wires and membranous cloth that looked like a cross between a bumblebee and a clock. “This is a little something I put together to track brainworms back when they were the focus of my research. I did some tinkering with it and I think it will pick up the thread of the worm that woke you and lead us to it. Think you can keep up?”

Eric tore his attention away from the weirdness around them and turned it back to Vent. “I think so.” An experimental push moved him a bit in one direction, then another. “Do you get tired quickly doing this? Do you have to build endurance or anything?”

“To an extent. People build up mental endurance every day, of a kind, it’s just not suited to this kind of work. It’s like a long distance bike rider trying to become an endurance swimmer – it doesn’t all transfer but it’s not going to be like you’re learning to walk.” The gizmo clanked and whirred for a moment then lifted into the air. “I’ll pull you along for now.”

The tracker spun away into the darkness, looking more like a maple seed whirlybird than an insect once in motion. Vent took off after it and Eric trailed along behind. He pushed himself forward as much as he could but still found he couldn’t keep up with Vent, even though they didn’t seem to be moving very fast. Then again, with the featureless nature of the headspace around them there wasn’t much to judge by.

On top of the lack of terrain to measure speed or distance by, Eric found it was very difficult to judge time. He wasn’t sure how long it took but it felt like they hadn’t been in motion for more than a a few minutes when Vent started to slow. The tracker had come to a stop and was spiraling around one of the ripples in space. Vent let go of Eric and drifted over to the tracker, picked it up and tucked it away.

Eric looked over Vent’s shoulder as he examined the area, pulling on a pair of gloves he had pulled from his cloak. “Where’s the brainworm?”

“It’s dormant for now, buried at the back of someone’s subconscious.” Vent plunged his hands into the distortion, peeling away a strip of reality to reveal a nearly identical copy of Vent’s meme. The only real difference Eric could see was in the intricacy of the piping on the hat.

“Why? Isn’t it supposed to be turning people into telepaths?” The brainworm was fully revealed now, standing motionless like a store mannequin and Vent was prodding it with the end of a wrench he’d taken from his cloak.

“In theory.” Vent sank his wrench into the elbow joint of the worm and cranked it around a couple of times. The arm dropped off to reveal a strange assortment of hooks and wires. “What’s all this?”

Eric snorted. “You’re asking me?”

“Rhetorical question.” Vent started picking through the wires with a concerned look on his face. “The worm didn’t look anything like this the last time I looked at it.”

“What would make it change?”

“No idea.” A new tool made an appearance and Vent used it to crack open the arm up to the shoulder. “I’ve never seen a brainworm change this much over such a short period of time. I looked at this thing three months ago and it’s changed by an order of magnitude more than brainworms I studied for six months!”

Eric trailed his finger through the wires as Vent moved up to the body of the brainworm. “Maybe it’s got something to do with the way it interacts with the mind? Hugo said waking a telepath involves synchronizing minds. Maybe it picks up some of. The personality of whoever it infects?”

Vent paused for a moment to think. “Possible. But-” His meme froze in the process of turning around to look at Eric, then snatched Eric’s hand out of the wires. “Don’t touch those!”

There was a sharp, biting pain in the palm of Eric’s hand and he found one of the wire hooks had gotten stuck there and broken off. “Calm down! Look, you got something stuck there.”

Vent frantically reached into his cloak, fumbling a pair of wire cutters out as he said, “That was probably already there. Don’t let it sink in further.”

Eric gave Vent a skeptical look, not sure how to take that until a sudden increase in the pain levels he was experiencing made him look back down and find the wire trying to worm its way under his skin. He made a grab for it but it slipped entirely under his skin before he could get a grip on it. “What was that?!”

“That’s a – I don’t have a name for it. But it’s how the brainworm works its way from the subconscious mind into the conscious one.” Vent threw the cutters down with a curse and went fishing for a new tool. “You’re infected now.”

“But I’m already a telepath!”

“I’m not sure that matters to it.” Vent made a grabbing motion and started pulling the distortion that had concealed the brainworm a moment ago back into place. “And I’m not sure what its trying to transform you a second time is going to do to you. Should have thought about that before now.”

Eric did his best to follow along as Vent hustled him away from the brainworm. They hadn’t gone far, however distances were measured in headspace, when there was a tearing sound behind them and the brainworm came charging along behind them. To Eric’s surprise it no longer looked like a carbon copy of Vent’s meme, the loose wires and nasty fish hooks that made up a large part of its innards were dangling from its disassembled arm and whipping from under its cloak. The worm could apparently use them like pseudopods, dragging itself forward at an alarming rate.

“Great,” Eric muttered, pushing himself after Vent as hard as he could. “What are we supposed to do about that?”

“Don’t worry,” Vent said. “I have a place where I dispose of dangerous brainworms. We just have to get there ahead of it, so hurry.”

They hurried.

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Ten

Posted by natechen on

“So then you built a meme and sent it after me.” Vent’s meme leaned back on the bench and sprawled with its legs stuck far into the path in front of them, its posture not even remotely matching the way it was dressed. “You sound like you’ve had a rough week.”

“It’s not even half over,” Eric said, watching the pedestrian traffic unconsciously give them a wide berth. Vent insisted that no one would take notice of them as long as they didn’t do anything that would directly draw attention but Eric still worried about being dragged away to a room with padded walls for talking to himself in public.

“Let’s try to end it on a high note. You wanted to talk to me and here I am. If you don’t have anything in particular you wanted to ask I’d love to see you pull up that meme again.” Vent switched from casual lounging to almost predatory excitement in the blink of an eye. “I’ve never heard of anyone creating a meme directly from the Jungian unconsciousness before. It’s always been an expression of their own personality that they project outward into the collective Network. So how did you do it?”

“I don’t know!” Eric leaned away, a bit taken aback by Vent’s sudden forcefulness. “No one ever bothered to tell me how to handle memes so I just had to guess at it. They seem to be the only way to get anything done telepathically, which seems really clunky to me by the way, so I just acted like a stereotype and there it was!”

Vent plunked its chin in its hand and scrunched down in its seat, the wheels in its mind audibly churning. It was the first time Eric had heard audible sound besides talking from a meme and the sound of gears clanking was a little disturbing. He did his best to edge away from it without looking weird. “It sounds almost like you did the exact opposite of what teeps normally do – instead of projecting yourself outward you pulled the Network in… or maybe you just bent it somehow? That would explain why the meme seemed so empty when it finally got to me.”

“Empty?” Eric gave Vent’s meme a once over and, like normal, it was still possible to see through it faintly if he concentrated. “That kinda goes for all the memes I’ve seen.”

The meme laughed and pushed a hand through it’s chest, causing Eric to lean back queasily. “They aren’t exactly the solidest things around, are they? But that’s not what I meant about your meme. It didn’t have much of a personality when I first met it. Normally, even when you’re not piggybacking on a meme like I’m doing now, it keeps some component of the personality of whoever created it. Yours started out fairly monotonous but started acting more and more like me as time went on. It fell apart just a couple of minutes after it reached me. I’d have loved to examine it closer.”

“Maybe I just went about building it wrong.”

“That’s just it.” The meme went back to examining him closely. “You did something that no one thought to do because you didn’t how things are ‘supposed’ to be done.” Vent’s meme didn’t have much expression but the voice it was projecting managed to imply he didn’t think much of how things were supposed to be done. “You’ve done something no teep has ever done before – twice! – because you didn’t know how we would have gone about it.”

“Twice?”

“The whole making yourself invisible trick.” Vent waved at the people walking through the zoo in the distance. “I’m pushing people away by actively diverting attention whenever it comes towards us. Tricky at first but it becomes a thing you do almost by muscle memory. But telepaths notice it happening pretty easily. You did something else – you lulled them into complacency rather than pointing them into a different direction. Very different approaches. I think it might be because you’re an actor. Most of us are in the field of psychology or communication, at least so far.”

Eric jumped on the opportunity to push the conversation away from weird things he’d done and wasn’t sure he could do again. “Was that what the First Teep was?”

Vent adjusted his posture to lean slightly away from Eric, the first sign of discomfort he had shown during their conversation. “Well, I honestly don’t know. I can’t even be sure he’s really the first telepath to exist, although there are some bothersome signs…”

“Bothersome how?”

“He…” Vent trailed off and for a moment his meme was entirely silent, to the point where Eric started to wonder if he’d decided not to answer the question at all. Eric was on the verge of waving his hand in front of the meme’s face, just to see what would happen, when it spasmed slightly and shook its head. “Sorry, Echoes, I got distracted.”

Eric laughed. “Echoes? Is that me now?”

“Unless you have something else you’d like to be called.” Vent shrugged. “I don’t recommend using your real name, at least until the government decides chasing us around isn’t a good use of time, and Echo would be as good as anything. And it fits what I’ve seen your meme do.”

That seemed fair enough. “So. The First Teep.”

“Yeah. Him.” The meme leaned back and heaved a soundless sigh. “He has bothersome signs of being obsessive-compulsive, or maybe something a little more complex. Like I said, most of the first round of teeps are psychology people and I’m no exception. When I woke up to the teep world I think there were less than a dozen of us, all in the Chicago area. FT was one of us and from some of the stuff he said I got the impression he was in treatment for something. My theory was that he was part of a research project for something that needed FDA approval and he reacted differently than others. Or maybe not differently, maybe the entire first crop of teeps were disturbed people in a drug test. But it made him an interesting case study regardless, and he’s never been forthcoming about the circumstances that transformed him. Didn’t seem to think they were important.”

Like most real-life stories Eric found that Vent’s didn’t quite line up with other things he’d been told. Fortunately, with a little work he could write a script of his own. “Hugo mentioned that you were looking at brainworms. Did you think the First Teep was a source of them?”

“Brainworms?”

“Insanity that spreads mind to mind, or something.”

Vent laughed. “That’s a good name for them. But I wasn’t really that interested in them, except as an example of memetic propagation. The First was. I think he related better to people telepathically than in person and he was convinced that brainworms could be used to spread telepathy. I think he just wanted to get along with others better.”

That sounded a little closer to what Hugo had said. “So you helped him come up with a brainworm that could wake telepaths?”

“No, I knew he was working on the idea when we parted ways but it just didn’t interest me.” Vent shrugged. “I’m more interested in understanding the structure of the mind and the structures the mind creates in turn. There’s all kinds of potential treatments for mental disorders inherent to telepathy but I quickly learned brainworms wouldn’t help me understand them at all. Most of the Network just wants to keep a low profile and figure out what they’re doing with their lives now that they’re different from everyone else. I already knew, so I left them to find their own way and went my own.”

Eric felt his eyes narrow as a nasty thought occurred to him. “You’re awfully cavalier about all the people the First Teep wanted to drop his brainworm on.”

“Well it’s not like there was anything I could do to stop it, per se,” Vent said, dismissively. “He hadn’t made one yet and he knew as much about the art of memetics as I did and it’s not like there were blueprints or anything I could steal. Besides, I did notice when he released his first one and I took the time to look it over. It does it’s job and, aside from being telepathic, I didn’t notice the person it affected being any worse for wear. Even if I had done something about it, FT could always have made another one.”

“It didn’t seem like a very benign thing when I ran into it.” And Eric couldn’t help but think of Rachada’s mentioning other, nastier side effects. Unrelated? Perhaps. “Tell you what. If you show me one of these brainworms and explain how they work I’ll show you how I pulled up that meme I sent to find you. Deal?”

Vent’s meme nodded its head quickly. “A perfectly fair exchange. But you could be away from yourself for quite a while in the doing of it. Better get indoors, and give me a little time to marshal my own facilities. I’ll come looking for you in a three hours. Is that enough time?”

Eric nodded. “I’ll see you then.”

Holiday Update!

Posted by natechen on

And by update I mean no update. The Antisocial Network will not updated tomorrow and will continue on the 1st of 2016. See you then!

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Nine

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Eric hadn’t mastered the strange art of forming a meme. In fact he hadn’t been thinking about it much at all even though his time with the Network and his own observations suggested it was pretty central to what telepaths did. The day after Rachada got in touch with him Eric wasn’t working so he spent part of the day taking care of basic things, like writing his parents to let them know he was okay and picking up some cheap Goodwill clothes to wear. As he poked through the racks of discarded clothing he absently wondered whether he’d see anything he’d left behind in his apartment again.

With that done he turned his attention to the all important task of figuring out what the heck a meme was and how he made one.

Hugo and Tails had both talked a lot about the collective unconsciousness, not something he really understood that well. All he really had to go on was the idea that everyone was somehow connected at the back of their minds, which he supposed the existence of telepaths kind of supported. He knew from theater classes that people really had two levels to their personality, who they thought they were and the thoughts and motives below the surface. Showing both was one of the challenges of the stage and, he was guessing, one of the challenges of being a telepath, because a meme sounded a lot like the below the surface part of a character.

And it was really a kind of character, since the way Tails had described hers made it sound more like a stereotype or an archetype mixed with elements of herself. That kind of went along with Rachada’s theory that meditating, a thing that Eric guessed put you in touch with your subconscious to some extent, had given her a very realistic meme. It was mostly her, with very little cliché. On the other hand, Eric figured he was an actor and it would probably be easier to go the other way entirely.

He was going to go with as much cliche as he could. He’d had a whole class on the hero’s journey, it’s importance and unimportance to film and theater, that kind of thing. But most of that was unimportant because most people agreed on the important part: The hero’s journey was one of the biggest cliches there was.

Actors leveraged cliches all the time, it’s why there was such a thing as “character actors”, another thing Eric had a class on in school. Slipping into the persona of a vaguely naïve, well meaning and optimistic would-be hero was very easy. To his immense frustration making the jump from that to meme wasn’t. After pacing around his friend’s apartment for a few hours Eric finally broke down and went for a walk.

Indianapolis wasn’t big on parks but it did have a pretty good sized zoo and after some debate Eric decided to head there to clear his mind. Tickets weren’t expensive but he didn’t want to shell out the money and, after a moment of guilt, he fired up the “I belong here and you know it” aura he’d used when walking away from Hugo and the Network. The zoo employees at the gate didn’t stop him for anything, barely looked up from the textbooks and college ruled notebooks most were reading, and once again Eric worried about what people without morals could accomplish with these kinds of powers. He wondered why Rachada hadn’t been more worried about it.

Thoughts about national security kept him from noticing the meme until it cleared it’s throat. Eric started and shook his head. “How can your own thoughts sneak up on you?”

“Surefire sign you aren’t using your head enough,” the meme replied. Cheekiness aside it was a pretty bland thing, dressed in unremarkable khakis and an unbuttoned collared shirt with sleeves rolled up to its elbows. It was built like a runner and had hair that was both longer and several shades lighter than Eric’s and like all of its ilk, save for Rachada’s meme the night before, it had no face whatsoever.

Eric frowned. “You’re the archetypical hero?”

“Well not yet,” the meme replied with a shrug. “We’re still early in the journey. We’ve just crossed into an unknown world-”

“The zoo?!”

“You always wanted to go on a safari when you were younger,” the meme said, talking around Eric’s interruption like it hadn’t happened. “So we’re in the unknown and it’s time to tackle the real challenge.”

This was going to be more complicated than he had planned on. “Okay, what do I need to do?”

“Not get run over by a car?” The meme shook its head. “I don’t know, but if I’m the hero it’s going to be me doing the work, right?”

Eric hadn’t counted on that. “So I can just tell you to look for someone and you’ll find him for me?”

“I guess. Although that’s not a very heroic thing to do.” The meme didn’t sound very enthused at the prospect of playing messenger boy.

“Think of it as looking for a mentor,” Eric said, fairly sure that was a default part of the meme he was trying to generate. “That leads to the bigger goal.”

The meme nodded, some excitement starting to creep into its movements. “That makes sense. I’ll look for Vent and be back ASAP.”

The meme faded out of sight leaving Eric standing in the middle of a path into the zoo with a few people nearby looking at him strangely. He ignored them and started walking again, a little discomforted. Somehow he’d thought that finding Vent would be more of an involved process, not just a matter of asking a meme to go find him please. In fact, he hadn’t even asked the meme for anything it had just sort of read his mind and gone. That was an uncomfortable thing to think about.

Hugo and Tails had told him letting the collective unconsciousness touch someone’s mind was potentially really dangerous but the meme he’d just talked to had done it twice, first when it learned he’d wanted to go on a safari and again when it had pulled the name Vent, and presumably what the guy looked like, strait out of his head.

And now, from the sound of things, the only way for the meme to stop looking for Vent would be for Eric to get hit by a car, or presumably have something else equally traumatic happen to him. No wonder the teeps were so worried about those brainworm things. No matter what you did it sounded like stopping them would take something nasty. Telepathy was sounding like it had more and more dark sides to it every minute.

Hopefully Vent would show up in the next few days and give him some idea of the upsides.

——–

As it turned out Vent showed up within the next hour. Eric had just finished an ice cream cone and was thinking about heading for the exit when he spotted the tall, black cloaked meme crossing an open plaza and coming in his direction. It was immediately obvious as a meme, Eric could see the faint outlines of people through it as it approached and the top hat with steam leaking from the top confirmed that it was the exact same one he had seen when his own telepathic abilities woke up.

At least, Hugo and Tails had seemed sure there was only one of these guys and Eric figured that was as close to an expert opinion as he was likely to get.

Eric approached the meme, dodging other zoo patrons as he approached it. As he got closer to it, it held out a hand and waved him towards a secluded corner of the plaza where it situated itself on a bench. After all that had happened to him after the first time he’d seen this meme Eric approached it warily, coming to a stop a good ten feet away.

The meme spoke first. “Hello, mirror maker. You meme was a very nice bit of work, a perfect echoer if I’ve ever seen one. Which I actually haven’t, that was an entirely new breed of meme to me and that alone is more than enough to get my undivided attention.”

“A perfect echoer?” Eric asked dubiously.

Vent tilted its head to one side, the blank face somehow more disturbing than a scrutinizing stare. “Perhaps it wasn’t a deliberate creation but just a true reflection of its maker? Either way, pretty impressive stuff. You wanted to talk to Vent, Mr. Echo, so I came to talk. What do you want?”

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Eight

Posted by natechen on

A quick check revealed that there were no men in suits getting ready to burst in and drug him into submission again. Eric felt a very minuscule amount of tension ease out of his body. “Am I okay?” He demanded. “It kind of depends on whether I’m going to be dragged out of here unconscious, doesn’t it?”

“Pretty much impossible,” Rachada said with a wan smile. “I don’t know where you are. When people communicate like this they only have a vague idea where the other person is. I only know what the room looks like because I’m piggybacking on what you see.”

Eric’s eyes narrowed as he looked Rachada over hard. “Weird. You look like you.”

“I look like- oh.” She waved at her face. “You mean I show the full range of human expression and all?”

“Well, close. It’s not perfect.” Eric leaned side to side to get a look from multiple angles. “You’re see-through in places. But yeah, it’s pretty accurate to life.”

Rachada shrugged. “I did a lot of meditation when I was young. It helped me develop a really good imagination. We think it may be part of the reason I have such strong memetic presence.”

“Who’s we?”

“Dr. Thorwald and some of the others working on our project.” She planted her chin in one hand and watched as Eric went back to inventorying the bar. “There’s a lot we still don’t know about how telepathy works, though. We’d like to be in touch with the telepath group that talked to you, glean some of what they know and maybe build a better idea of what’s going on.”

“Afraid I can’t help you there.” Eric headed into the back room to get some fresh bottles. A curious glance over one shoulder showed him Rachada drifting along behind him, still seated on a barstool behind a section of bar that suddenly existed on its own, apart from the rest of the building, and followed him at a distance of about six feet. Weird. “The fact is I bailed on the telepaths ASAP after we left you. Not really eager to get back in contact either.”

Rachada made a mildly disgusted noise. “That’s disappointing.”

“I’m sure you’ll get a subject to dissect sooner or later.” Eric headed back to the bar, Rachada repeating her moving barstool trick except in reverse.

“We need to understand the physiology of stable telepaths better, we don’t need to dissect anyone to do that. And there’s still a lot of things they can do we don’t understand. Case in point.” She tapped the side of her head. “Whatever that woman did to me in the van has left me disassociated from my body.”

It took Eric a minute to parse that and figure out what Rachada meant. “You mean your stuck in an out of body experience?”

“Basically. Dr. Thorwald says I’m in a REM catatonic state, which hasn’t ever been recorded before.” Rachada pushed herself up off the barstool and took a stroll around the room. “We’ve been running a lot of experiments and it looks like I still have the full suite of telepathic abilities we’ve recorded before. I just can’t wake up. I was hoping you could ask them for me.”

“Where are you right now?” Eric asked, watching her and wondering if she was trying to figure out where he was from the room’s decor.

“A facility somewhere just outside of Chicago. It’s where we were taking you when we got hijacked.” She looked back at him over one shoulder. “How are you doing, by the way? Any sign of complications?”

“Not yet.” Eric considered what he should say. He knew it wasn’t really his fault Rachada was in a bad position, he wasn’t sure he could really be considered responsible for most of what had happened to him in the past few days. But his gut told him he should help out in some way or another. “Apparently I’m lucky in that respect. I got my telepathic abilities from a guy who’s a bit of a rogue on both sides of things. The telepaths call themselves a Network and they’re looking for him and Vent doesn’t sound like one of yours.”

“Vent?”

“That’s what they call him. Nicknames sound like a thing with them, maybe because they’re worried about people like you. Vent sounds like he likes to tinker.” Eric mimed working with a wrench. “He might be kind of like you and your doctor friend, working to figure out what telepathy can really do, except he’s not working for anyone.”

Rachada nodded. “He does sound like a person worth knowing. You’ve met him?”

“Not yet,” Eric said, giving the bar top a final wipe down. “Although I’ve been thinking he might be a good person to try and get in contact with. Maybe I can finally get some straight answers from someone.”

Rachada looked down at the ground and her meme got more transparent. “I’m sorry, Eric. I know there’s a lot you want to know but there’s limits on how much I can tell you if you’re not under oath. Especially now that I’m officially out of the field, Dr. Thorwald was very emphatic that I wasn’t to try and contact the telepathic Network until my brain is fully recovered.”

“You’re talking to me.”

She gave him an amused smile. “You’re a convenient loophole. A telepath outside the government and the Network isn’t off limits.”

“How did you know I hadn’t joined them?” Eric stepped out from behind the bar and headed towards the back door. Once again his distance relative to Rachada didn’t seem to change.

“They actively avoid us. There are ways to avoid contact if you don’t want it, most of it is unpleasant.” Rachada flicked a hand in his direction and Eric experienced a moment of vertigo. “It’s like how they knocked out Franks and Beane in the van, kind of like the telepathic equivalent of screaming in someone’s ear. We have reached out to the Network before, they just don’t want to talk.”

Eric hesitated at the door. Rachada had mentioned she saw what he did, or something like that, he wasn’t sure he wanted her to get a look outside and possibly realize where he was. “How would I go about talking to the Network if I don’t know where they are? Or you for that matter?”

“Basically you build a meme and send it looking for whoever you want. Eventually it gets back to you and you’re in touch.”

He heaved a sigh. “I only understood half of that, Rachada.”

“What more do you want, Eric?” She shrugged, the closest he’d ever seen her to exasperation. “You won’t let us help you figure out your gifts and you won’t work with the Network. You’re bound to be missing out on a lot. I don’t know where you are but I can tell you’re not anywhere nearby. Talking to you is already becoming tiring and I won’t be able to keep it up nearly long enough to explain everything you need to know.”

“Okay, fine, I get it. Some of this is my fault. Pardon me for being paranoid about the men in black suits.” Eric massaged his temples, feeling something he figure was an approximation of the exhaustion Rachada must have been suffering. “Tell me, if I need to get ahold of you again how do I jump the distance between us?”

“That depends on how many telepaths there are around,” Rachada said. “As near as we can tell there’s a collective boosting effect. One telepath has a range of a couple of miles but they can piggyback across the subconsciousness of other telepathic minds to expand their reach, like an actual phone network, or a bunch of them can work together and boost a signal. A group of a dozen or so can make contact with another telepath anywhere on the continent given practice. The piggyback route is trickier. You need a line of telepaths stretched out like breadcrumbs. We think the Network uses bundles of telepaths scattered through the country to stay in touch with each other.”

“Got it.” Except, of course, he really didn’t. But what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt him. “Rest up, Rachada. If I hear anything that could help you recover I’ll be in touch.”

“I can’t ask for more than that.” Her meme faded away and left Eric alone in the back of the bar.

Eric slipped out of the building and onto the street. He hadn’t been lying when he said he’d be in touch but at that moment he was determined not to talk with Rachada or Hugo and Tails again until he knew more about telepathy and what it might mean for his brain. And if he was going to get answers to those kinds of questions without tangling with either the Feds or the Network he figured there was only one place to go.

The only real question was how he was going to find Vent.

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Seven

Posted by natechen on

Under the watchful supervision of Captain Hilts Eric managed to wiggle one of the old springs on the mattress frame until it broke off and straightened the wire into a lockpick. Actually picking the lock in question proved to be more of a challenge but took less time overall. All in all it took him nearly two hours to get out of the room and according to Hilts that was the easy part.

As far as Eric could tell, this was the first time the meme was wrong. Although it took a little caution and timing to make sure he never encountered two people in the building at once all he had to do to effect a disguise was pretend he was a telepath. An evil telepath, aparently. After some consideration he decided to play at Spock, since the Vulcan was at least cold and sometimes unsympathetic and he couldn’t think of a truly evil telepath vibe. So he just acted like he belonged among the Vulcans.

To his shock and not inconsiderable horror it worked.

Not that he wasn’t happy to be out on the street and under his own power again. But it barely took him three minutes to get out of the apartment, down the stairs and out the door. He passed four people in the halls and none of them thought to stop him.

It was possible that one or two of them were too new to realize he didn’t belong but four of them? Hugo had certainly made it sound like the place was a central hub for teep activity. Surely most of the people there knew one another already. At least one of them should have stopped and said something, even if it was just a quick “hello” before moving on.

If it was that easy to go through a building full of telepaths undetected it was no wonder the X-Files were so worried. Imagining what a bunch of teeps with no morals who knew the technique and wanted into military bases or research centers could do gave him the shivers. The next question was where he should go now that he was away from everyone who wanted him locked up, at least for the moment.

It didn’t take him very long to decide that he wanted to leave town. If the government was only watching major cities the telepaths couldn’t be spread much further. After all, no matter what the movies made it look like running a resistance movement across an entire country was pretty expensive and took a lot of people and cash, things he was pretty sure the teeps wouldn’t have. At least, not people. The whole process of “awakening” a telepath sounded tricky, especially with what Rachada had added about complications. He wasn’t sure if that just came with the brainworms Hugo had mentioned or if it was a universal danger but he was willing to bet it was the latter. The experience had been – still was – pretty freaky.

After a little thought he decided the right move was to go someplace big enough to blend but small enough that neither of the groups interested in him would have outposts there. Indianapolis sounded like the right bet. Indiana wasn’t a particularly notable state but capital cities were always happening with lots of coming and going and he was pretty sure there was regular rail service there.

Still, he wanted to check without drawing too much attention to where he was going. And there was something else worth checking out too. He wasn’t sure if the Hilts meme that had helped him escape was some kind of fluke related to being around a bunch of telepaths or if it was something he could do anywhere and trying to check his travel plans seemed like a good way to get a confirmation of some kind. Once he got to the L station he climbed into a car and started to think real hard about where he wanted to travel.

At first all that Eric saw were the same kinds of memes he’d spotted floating around the cars earlier, all clearly attached to people and kind of aimlessly directed into the space in the center of the train. Not what he wanted. After a few minutes, with no miracle answer meme showing up to impart wisdom Eric switched tactics. Rather than thinking hard about going to a city he’d never actually been to in his life he started focusing on the idea of travel by train. Then he switched to thinking about Amtrak and finally just movies with trains in general.

After about ten minutes, by which point he was almost to his next stop, a new meme made it’s appearance. This one had taken the appearance of a conductor with luxurious mutton chop whiskers (but no other facial features) in a uniform from the late 1800s. If pressed Eric would have guessed he came from some version of Around the World in 80 Days.

Eric stared at it for a second, wondering if he could talk to it just by thinking hard. Eventually he decided that it was probably best to just stick to what he knew worked. So he looked around, saw no one paying him a lot of attention, and said, “Can I get from here to Indianapolis?”

The meme thought for a minute or two and then rattled of a list of possible ways he could do just that. Eric tried to figure out what the best move was and wound up asking the meme to repeat itself a few times. He noticed that he got different answers the more he asked but, as with so much he’d seen that day, he had no idea what was going on. He started trying to work it out but quickly decided he didn’t care anymore and wouldn’t care until he’d had a good night’s sleep.

As it turned out, whether by luck or due to the strength of meme-Hilts’ advice, he managed to get to the Amtrak station and out of Chicago without further incident.

——–

As it turned out he got almost two nights’ sleep before thinking about it, although not back to back. With only the money in his wallet to live on he’d been forced to go out and find a job as soon as he got to Indianapolis. The city didn’t have a large theater scene, at least in comparison to Chicago, but Eric still knew a couple of people in town he’d gone to school with. It only cost a handful of change and a few minutes at a payphone for him to track one of them down and get a couch to crash on.

Money was still an issue so the day after Eric arrived his host brought him to the bar where he worked and Eric had something of a job by the end of the day. Eric briefly considered trying to use telepathy on the bar owner in some way to get the job in the bag but he wasn’t confident enough he could influence the woman without hurting her.

So he worked that night as a bartender, collected his tips and got invited back to work the next evening. So Eric slept another night, went back to work and was given the dubious privilege of closing bar that night. Eric never liked closing, not because getting the last few drunks out the door was a chore or because he had to walk the deserted streets at night but because once the bar was closed he had to clean out and restock the bar.

Every bar had it’s own idiosyncracies and learning them was always a pain. He was in the middle of running through the hard liquor trying to remember what went where and make sure it was all in the right place when he felt the hair on the back of his neck standing on end. He’d never been a real believer in sixth senses but after acquiring telepathy he’d started paying more attention to the voices in the back of his head. So he looked over one shoulder and took a look around the bar room. At first glance it still looked empty but, just as he was about to write it off, he caught a meme fading into the room at the far end of the bar. To his surprise it wasn’t Hugo or Tails or even Vent.

“Hi Eric,” Rachada’s meme said. “Are you doing okay?”

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Six

Posted by natechen on

They left him with a promise that the First Teep would show up to talk to him in person. Eric still wasn’t sure he wanted to stick around for that but it turned out he didn’t have much choice in the matter. They’d locked him in his room.

It seemed like a good time for him to find a corner of the room and panic for a bit.

Unfortunately for that plan, the Han family had never been big on panicking when he was growing up and he’d not bothered to pick up the skills on his own so he wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. He wound up sitting on the bed, his back against the wall, and wondering what Indiana Jones might do in this situation. It would probably be improvised, whatever it was, and Eric had never been any good at improv. He was still trying to think of what to do next when a pair of loud thumps startled him and he looked around in an attempt to find the source.

He found Captain Virgil Hilts bouncing a baseball against the wall.

Technically it was a meme, he could tell that right away as from the angle he was looking at it clearly had no face, but otherwise it was a pretty accurate recreation of the character from The Great Escape.

“Sorry to bother you, Captain,” Eric said, “but this isn’t solitary confinement.”

“Really?” The meme bounced its baseball again. “Because it seems like you’re the only one here.”

He had to give it that one. “Okay, let me put it another way. Why are you in here with me?”

“I’m anywhere someone wants to get out of. Most people just don’t bother to talk to me.” Hilts pulled off its glove, tucked it under an arm and stuck out its hand. Eric reached out to shake it reflexively but naturally found there was nothing there to actually grab. If the meme was bothered it didn’t show. “So should we get started?”

“Started on what?” Eric asked, dubious.

“Breaking you out. That’s what I do.” The meme showed no sign of irritation or exasperation at what, from its choice of words, it must have considered a stupid question.

“Breaking me out of here.” The meme nodded its agreement to the sentiment. “What, aren’t you on the side of the telepaths?”

“I am on the side of getting out of places,” the meme said, its voice taking on enough of a tone to suggest it thought this was a very profound statement.

Come to think of it, when Eric compared the way it was acting to Tails’ meme or Vent’s brainworm, meme, whatever, it was acting really flat and monotone. “Who’s meme are you, anyway? Do you guys just run around and do whatever when teeps don’t need you?”

“I’m the meme of getting out of places. I go wherever someone needs to get out of and tell them how to get out. No one sends me, people just think about me.”

Eric studied Hilts for a minute. Hugo had mentioned that memes were part of the collective unconscious. He vaguely remembered something about that from college but obviously nothing in what he’d studied had covered how the idea might interact with telepathy. It seemed almost like he’d just tapped into everything the human race knew about escaping from places.

But that would be crazy. Who just waves their hand and just has everything the human race knows on a subject available?

Eric decided he’d need to do a little more digging before trusting the oddly helpful meme. “Okay, Captain Hilts, why don’t we start planning an escape then. Where do we start?”

The meme considered Eric for a moment, going so still that, along with it’s totally blank face, it looked more like a display from a history museum than an embodiment of human knowledge. Finally it said, “You’ll need to blend in once you’re out. It’s important to cover that kind of prep work before you think about actually leaving. What you have and what you need to take can make a difference in what way you go. Do you speak the language?”

That was a weird question. “Yes?”

“Good.” Hilts started pacing the length of the small room. “Do you have all the papers you need? Will your clothes blend with the local population?”

“Yes.” Eric wondered how much of this was influenced by the film the meme’s appearance was drawn from. If he was remembering right, The Great Escape had put a strong emphasis on these kinds of details. It would be interesting to see if he could get the meme to show up again in a different guise and find out if there were any differences. Or maybe memes were always the same for the same people.

Hilts was looking over Eric’s clothes with a skeptical eye, as if he couldn’t believe that what he was wearing was the kind of clothing that would blend seamlessly anywhere, but it didn’t comment. “Okay. What kind of person are you going to pose as? It’s important to have a coherent cover story if someone stops and questions you. Making that kind of thing up on the spot is a recipe for disaster. They’ll catch any inconsistency in a heartbeat.”

Eric hadn’t given that any thought. “I don’t know. You’re the expert. Any suggestions?”

“Who is the opposition?” The meme asked quickly enough it had probably anticipated Eric’s question.

“Well that’s kind of tricky. I don’t really know what’s the deal with these guys.” Eric waved vaguely at the rest of the building. “But I do know there’s some FBI wannabes out there looking for me and I’d prefer to avoid them too.”

Hilts thought about that for a second. “A group of irregulars and a Federal agency. You’ll need some kind of a role that will create respect and a desire not to ask questions from both parties. You could try for a doctor.”

Eric thought about it. He had watched some ER but he’d been paying more attention to the actor’s performances than the words they were saying. He didn’t really know enough jargon to pass. But even more importantly, “I don’t look like a doctor.”

“I thought you said you had everything you needed to blend with the local people.”

“I do,” Eric said, pressing down a surge of irritation. “But that’s a lot different from looking like a doctor.”

“I see.” The meme paced some more then seemed to come to a decision. “You need to rely on something else, then. I don’t know if it will work, since most people who do this in the field have a lot of training. But it’s worth a shot.”

“Lay it on me, Captain.”

“You act like you belong.”

Nothing more was forthcoming. “I’m sorry, what?”

The meme took a seat and started tossing his baseball against the wall again. “It’s pretty simple. You are a telepath. If you act like you belong wherever you are people will be sucked in and believe you.”

“Yeah, but believe I am what?”

The meme caught the ball deftly using a glove Eric was pretty sure it hadn’t had a few seconds before. “That’s the real question, isn’t it? You’ve got no way of knowing, it all depends on what they’re expecting to see. And if your actions don’t meet their expectations the illusion won’t hold.”

“I guess that makes sense.” While he wasn’t the greatest improviser to ever walk the boards Eric did know all the stock nonsense phrases you could use to cover over an awkward moment on stage when someone missed a cue or something unexpected happened. Hopefully that and an occasional flash of brilliance would be enough to get him through. “One question. What if I run into a group of people? Will they all see me the same?”

“It depends, but probably not. Of course, they may not realize they think they’re talking to different people until they stop to compare notes. All part of the gamble.” Another toss of the baseball. “That’s one reason why I didn’t suggest it right off the bat. Still, given all you’ve got to get around I think it’s your safest method of approaching the matter.”

“Well it’s nice that you think so but there’s still one thing we haven’t addressed which is definitely keeping me from escaping here.”

The meme caught its baseball and gave him what Eric assumed was a curious look. “What’s that?”

He gestured around at the room. “I’m still stuck in a locked room with no way out.”

“Oh!” The meme sounded genuinely chagrined. “Well that’s easy enough to fix. To start with you’re going to need to crawl under the bed…”

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Five

Posted by natechen on

By the time they got to the safe house, which turned out to be a semi-decrepit apartment block just inside the Chicago city limits, Eric had settled on his strategy for the moment. He started asking more questions. With his eyes roving about for trouble – although realistically the whole neighborhood promised it – he climbed out of the car. The state of the building didn’t say good things about anyone who lived there long term.

“Nothing to be nervous about here,” Hugo said, catching Eric’s looking about as he climbed out of the car. “This place is safer than it looks.”

On the other side of the vehicle Tails slammed the passenger door shut and paused for a moment. Her distinctive, pigtailed meme broke away from her and drifted off around the corner of the building. Its legs didn’t move, instead it just drifted along the ground much like the ghosts Eric first thought of them as.

“What are you doing?” He asked, watching as another meme drifted around the corner where Tails’ had just disappeared.

Her eyes opened and she gave him an appraising look. “Checking the perimeter. Nice catch, most teeps less than a day old wouldn’t notice something like that.”

“Thanks?” Eric followed the two of them through the doors into the building, winding up in a small antechamber that looked just as decrepit as the rest of the building. As Hugo fished for keys Eric asked, “Speaking of noticing, how did you guys find me, anyways? Is there a teepdar or something?”

“Please never say that word again,” Tails said with a venomous look.

“Tails is very protective of our little group of telepaths. Doesn’t like things that would give us a bad image.” Hugo unlocked the door and pushed it open, leading Eric out of the rundown entrance and into a hallway that looked like it would be more at home in a hospital or modern office building. The floors were tile, the walls a bland beige and the doors heavy metal industrial monstrosities. Hugo ignored the hallway and instead led them into a stairwell and started up. “Anyway, we don’t exactly find new teeps. You guys kind of tell us where you are.”

“What?”

Tails laughed. “The first thing a newborn does is cry, right? New telepaths are the same – you haven’t got a concept of inside-your-head voice and outside-your-head voice. Most of us shout a lot when we become teeps and that clues the Network in to where they are when we aren’t the ones who wake them up. Of course we can only hear you over short distances, kind of like the Feds.”

Eric stopped halfway up the flight of stairs. “Not the ones that wake them up? What’s that supposed to mean?”

Hugo stopped at the top of the stairs, giving him an odd look. “Telepathy is an innate human ability but it takes another telepath to wake someone’s telepathic abilities up. The active teep synchronizes thought patterns with the sleeper and pushes their dormant telepathic abilities into an active state.”

“Do they have to be close by?”

“In the same room, generally,” Tails replied. “Like the government telepath with you.”

“I didn’t run into Rachada until after I started noticing memes, though. That means I was telepathic before I met her, right?”

Hugo’s face went blank and instead of answering he waved them out of the stairwell and into another hallway, one with the same basic layout as the hall before but carpeted, and into the farthest of the three rooms along the building’s south side. It looked like your average studio apartment, nicer than the one Eric was living in at the moment, with a bed and couch on one side. No sign of a TV but Eric guessed you had to give something up for a place that nice.

Hugo sat down on the couch and waved for the other two to sit down. Eric made himself comfortable on the bed and Tails hesitated for a moment before perching on one arm of the couch. “What was the first meme you saw, Eric?”

“Uh… I’d guess it was something I saw this morning? I thought it was a dream.” Eric quickly sketched out the strange, faceless figure in a tux and hat leaking steam.

When he was finished Hugo grunted disgust and Tails muttered, “Vent. He hasn’t let it go.”

Eric waited a moment then, when no explanation was forthcoming, asked, “Who’s Vent? What hasn’t he let go? And most importantly, should I be worried?”

Hugo heaved a sigh. “Vent is something of a troublemaker. Not intentionally, you understand, he just has a tendency to meddle with things that are less than safe.”

“Before you panic, you’re probably not in any danger right now,” Tails put in. Somehow Eric felt less than reassured.

“There’s a dark side to memes that you probably haven’t seen yet,” Hugo said, ignoring Tails. “Are you familiar with the origin of the term?”

“Not really.”

Hugo waved it off. “It’s not really important. They were postulated as the mental equivalent to genes in the evolutionary journey of the collective unconsciousness. Or something like that. Regardless of their origins that’s kind of how they function.”

“My meme looks like this, right?” Tails pointed to an empty patch of floor next to the sofa that was suddenly occupied by her pigtailed meme, this time sans hammer. “It’s a pretty refined meme and you’ve seen some of the things it can do. Nerve hammering can be used to knock people out. Then there’s more refined things, like nervejacking, which will let you exert a certain amount of control over people. That’s how we got the driver of your van to pull over before we pulled you out.”

“Okay, I’m with you so far.” Eric frowned, looking at Tails’ innocuous looking meme with new respect. It was a little uncomfortable to think that anyone could exert that kind of control over other people. On the other hand, Rachada had resisted Tail’s nerve hammer so maybe telepaths were more resistant to other teeps. “Why can’t you use your meme to wake a telepath?”

“Because memes are somewhere between a personal projection and a chunk of the collective unconsciousness,” Tails said. “I’ve basically taken an idea that exists in the back of everyone’s mind and used it as a vehicle to broadcast my personal thoughts. But letting that chunk of the collective unconsciousness synchronize with your brain, like you’d have to do to awaken a teep, can cause issues. The biggest is that the person who’s exposed can wind up becoming unstable.”

“Unstable how?”

“It depends. Anything from paranoia to psychosis to lapsing into a semi-catatonic state.” Eric thought of Rachada and how she had mentioned his “condition” and wondered if she’d been referring to something like this. Tails waited a moment, perhaps expecting another question from Eric, but then kept going. “What’s almost worse is the meme becomes pretty much impossible to control and runs rampant, inflicting itself on any telepath it stumbles across. We’re not sure why they suddenly become independent because normally a meme takes a lot of effort to project. It’s kind of like insanity turned into a virus. We call them brainworms.”

Hugo took up the train of thought. “The saving grace is, right now, there aren’t many telepaths to be infected by brainworms and people who aren’t teeps seem to be safe from them. Like most diseases, without a host brainworms quickly go extinct.”

“That is a good thing,” Eric admitted, “but it doesn’t explain who Vent is or what that has to do with me.”

“Vent was an old associate who wanted to make a study of brainworms,” Tails said. “We worked together for a bit trying to understand memetic telepathy. But he was convinced brainworms could be used constructively. His first area of study was going to be whether you could make a brainworm to wake telepaths, get rid of the need to have someone there in person.”

“He left us a couple of months ago and we’d hoped he’d given up on the idea for the time being. It’d be safer for everyone involved.” Hugo leaned forward on the sofa. “But now there’s you and I think we can safely say that not only has he not given up, he’s actually succeeded.”