Category Archives: Fiction

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Eleven

Posted by natechen on

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.”

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Nine

Posted by natechen on

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 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.”

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Four

Posted by natechen on

“What’s a teep?” Eric asked, stalling for time.

“Telepath, T.P., teep,” the woman answered, turning to give him a mostly unobstructed path to the back of the van. “You, now, I’d guess. You still look a lot like your meme so I’m guessing you’re not government issue.”

“No, I guess not.” Eric looked at the three unconscious government issues she and her friend had created. “So what happens now?”

“Depends,” the man at the back of the van said, his voice surprisingly high and reedy for a person of his size. “Do you want to go on the lam with two strangers who happen to be telepaths or disappear into a government facility you’ll probably never come out of again.”

“To be fair,” the blonde added with a nod towards Rachada, “if you do survive whatever happens there they might give you a nice job like hers.”

Eric thought about that for a second. “As fun as it sounds to grab random, freshly minted telepaths off the street on behalf of the government I think I’ll take my chances with strangers for the moment.”

“Then let’s get going.” The man turned and disappeared onto the sidewalk, Eric and the blonde woman struggling to keep up. She had an easier time of it than he did, Eric guess that she was at least four inches taller than his admittedly short five feet, six inches and she used her enormous stride to cover ground with long, leisurely steps. The man trailblazing for them wasn’t much taller than Eric but had the advantage of knowing where he was going. It was unlikely either one had a stomach revolt in progress, although after the first minute or so Eric’s nausea faded into the background and he did his best to keep the man’s green knit stocking cap in sight as the group’s leader wove through back alleys, jumped a fence and ducked around corners.

After going what felt like two miles at a fast jog, but was in fact closer to two blocks, Eric was about ready to ask for a break when they came to a battered Nissan station wagon and piled in.

Once he was semi-comfortably settled in the back seat Eric asked, “Do I get to know anyone’s names?”

“Maybe,” the woman said.

“Okay, Miss Piggy.” She turned around in her seat to give Eric a skeptical look. He mimed holding his hair up in pig tails to explain the choice. She snorted and turned back to face front.

“And you can call me Hugo,” the man said, starting the car. “Now I hate to be rude but Miss Piggy and I have a few things to discuss.”

The woman gave Hugo a disgusted look and Eric wondered if Miss Piggy was a nickname that was going to stick. She wasn’t plump and didn’t have curly hair so he felt that it might be a little off base. Maybe as irony.

The train of thought got away from him when the two in the front seat began communicating. Eric couldn’t figure out how or what they were saying to each other, he just knew that ideas were being exchanged somehow and he was being kept out of it, deliberately if what Hugo had said was any indication. Eric was just thinking that he might as well have stayed with the Feds for all the straight answers he was getting when the woman finally threw her hands up and said, “She’ll recover, okay? The last thing we want is a government telepath chasing us halfway across the city.”

Hugo sighed. “The issue was how you did it, Tails. You need to learn control. Case in point: This was supposed to be a quiet conversation. Introduce us to our new friend, please.”

Apparently Miss Piggy wasn’t going to stick. Tails turned around in her chair – she hadn’t buckled in when they got in the car – and said, “Hi. I’m Tails.”

With a heroic effort Eric managed not to laugh at the absurdity of it all, that kind of thing was very hard to stop once it got going. “I’m Eric. Or do I need a name that’s clearly not my name?”

“What makes you think I’m not Hugo?” Hugo asked, thankfully keeping his eyes on the road as he did so.

“The Hugo Award patch on your jacket, for starters. Goes nicely with the present circumstances all things considered.” Eric shrugged. “I’ve done enough theater to spot the difference between coincidence and deliberate showmanship. Your parents could have named you Hugo but the odds that you’d become a telepath and have the skills to get the job of going around meeting new telepaths? Pretty small.”

Hugo shrugged. “I’ll take your word for it. Call yourself whatever you want, it’s bad form for teeps to question a name.”

“Right. Can I question where we’re going? Because it’s been one of those days so far and I’m hoping it’s not going to get any worse.”

“We’re going to take you to a safe house,” Tails said, turning to look at him over the back of her seat. “We’re not sure how the Feds are finding us, although based on the girl back there they’ve gotten teeps of their own somehow, but they only seem to be watching the big cities. Once we’re far enough into the ‘burbs we should be okay. We’ll lay low for a few days, then arrange you a meeting with the First Teep.”

Eric didn’t need telepathy to hear the capital letters that made it sound like a name. “How do you know he’s the first?”

“He says he is,” Hugo said. “And when you meet him you’ll have a hard time doubting it. But for the most part, it’s just something we call him.”

Eric rolled that over in his mind. “Is he in charge? The old mentor who shows people the ropes? What?”

“More like he’s Gandalf,” Tails said.

“Who?”

Hugo glanced at him in the rear view mirror. “You recognize the Hugo Award but don’t know who Gandalf is?”

“If it’s not on stage or screen I don’t know what it is,” Eric said.

“There were a couple of animated films a while back,” Tails mused, “but they were dreck.”

“What she’s trying to say,” Hugo put in, eyes back on the road, “is that the First Teep is the guy we count on to help us figure out major roadblocks and warn us of trouble brewing. He’s a better telepath than anyone I’ve met and trust me, I think I’ve met just about all the ones we’ve got in the States.”

Eric snorted. “But not Rachada.”

There was a disturbing brushing sensation, like he’d just walked through a cobweb, then Hugo said, “I met her just now, didn’t I?”

“Did you just read my mind?” Eric demanded.

“Not exactly,” Hugo said. “It’s called checking associations. I just pushed the idea of the woman in the van at you and got the same reaction as when you said her name.”

“Huh.” With his profound thoughts about that articulated Eric sat back in his seat and thought about things. He found that he had a lot to think about. Between telepathy, government agents and a carjacking – and he still wasn’t sure how Hugo and Tails had done that – it had been a big day. But even with all that the things that bothered him about the day, the thing that concerned him the most wasn’t something that had already happened.

For all that he didn’t want to wind up in an X-Files holding facility, the biggest thing on his mind was that he wasn’t sure he wanted to meet a guy who could get the X-Files black ops team hijacked on short notice. The question was what was he going to do about it when everyone around him could read his mind.

The Antisocial Network – Chapter Three

Posted by natechen on

“Hey. You okay? You look a little raw.”

Something was poking Eric and he didn’t like it. Why would someone poke him? Couldn’t they tell his head felt like it was stuffed full of cotton?

With a mighty effort Eric opened one eye and looked around. He was face down in a dimly lit, featureless room, looking at an equally featureless face, half hidden by blonde bangs, out of the corner of one eye. “Oh, great,” he muttered. “The faceless people have returned.”

It’s not a faceless person,” an obnoxiously chipper female voice told him. “It’s a meme. It’s not supposed to have a face.”

“Then it is faceless,” Eric said, closing his eye again. “By definition, instead of absence, but still faceless. Lemme go back to sleep.”

A hand grabbed him by the shoulder and tried to haul him into a sitting position. Eric refused to cooperate and wound up twisted around and facing up instead of down. He opened both eyes and found the blonde meme hovering over him.

Literally hovering. It actually looked like it was standing on a wall to his left, except there was no wall there. It was leaning on a hammer of some sort, the head looked like it had been cut out of a log and then had a hole drilled through for the handle. Based on the feel of things from a moment ago he figured the meme had been poking him with the hammer handle rather than its finger. “What do you want?”

“Dude,” the meme said, grabbing one arm and trying to pull him upright again. “You just got drugged. You’re unconscious.”

“The doctors must have had a good reason for it.”

“By the Feds, you moron.” It let go of his arm but for some reason he stayed in a half-sitting position instead of flopping back down to the ground. Eric was slowly coming to grasp that he wasn’t actually in a room and there wasn’t any ground to speak of. Up and down were more suggestions than directions. He’d just turned to take a closer look at the not-floor when the meme said, “Look, I’m sorry about this but you sound like your brain’s too mixed to sort what’s going on so I’m just going to snap you out of it, okay? We’re on our way to pick you up so be ready to move.”

“Oka-What?!” Eric looked up to find the meme hefting its hammer over one shoulder. Before he could make more than a pretense of scrambling out of the way it whistled around and into the side of his face-

-and his head snapped around sideways, trapped in total darkness. There was someone or someones holding firmly onto each of his arms. Eric had just enough time to register the sound of a car’s engine and the steady rumble of tires on pavement when a wave of horrible nausea went through him and he vomited.

It was dark because there was a bag over his head. That wasn’t a pleasant discovery.

The hand on his left arm vanished and a second later the bag was coming off from his head. By deft manipulation of the bag and Eric’s posture most of the mess stayed in the bag with only a little bit clinging uncomfortably to his face. Eric blinked at the uncomfortable amount of light that hit his eyes.

He was staring out the side of a van that had a bench running down each side. He was seated on one bench and a whip thin man in a cheap black suit was carefully tying off the bag that had been over his head. On his right was another suit, and by the cosmic law of stereotypes this suit was occupied by a slightly rotund man of incredible breadth. Eric didn’t actually take note of them at just that moment, since Rachada was leaning over the seat with a rag or handkerchief in one hand.

Another wave of nausea crashed over him and Rachada pulled back as he doubled over and deposited the very last bits of his breakfast on the floor of the van.

“What did you dose him with, Franks?” Burly suit asked. “Water? Sewer water? He shouldn’t be awake, much less spewing like that.”

“The usual,” skinny suit, presumable Franks, said. “He should have been out for at least an hour. Longer, with how skinny he is. Never had anyone react like this.”

Eric slowly dragged himself back to a half-sitting posture. “Sorry, why do I need to be unconscious?”

“I think it’s part of the playbook secret government programs have to use to get funding.” Rachada watched him carefully as she spoke and, when it was clear Eric’s stomach had absolutely nothing more to add to the situation, she leaned back in and carefully cleaned his face off. “I’m sorry about this, but Eric you’re not well.”

Eric worked his mouth, grimacing at the taste. “I noticed. Can I get some water? Or at least know why you work for a secret government program?”

Rachada tossed the cloth into a plastic bag she pulled from under her seat. “To be honest it’s because they don’t mention what kind of work you’re going to do when they’re out recruiting interns.”

“Seriously? The X-Files has interns?” Eric started to shake his head, stopped as it triggered a new wave of nausea.
The two stereotypes on either side of him leaned away slightly and for a split second Eric caught a glimpse of more faceless echoes in their wake. Rachada moved to be out of the potential line of fire and rested a hand on his knee.

“Eric, what’s happening to you isn’t normal, even by the standards of your condition.”

“My condition?!” Eric said. “What, you mean being surrounded by faceless not-people who talk to me?”

“The technical term is preliminary-”

“Ma’am,” not-Franks said. “I’m not sure now is the time to discuss that.”

Rachada huffed a bit. “He is going to be read in anyway, Agent Beane.”

“Really?” Eric asked. “Franks and Beane? Who’s genius idea was that?”

“What’s wrong with their names?” Rachada asked with a blank look.

“Nothing, ma’am,” Franks said quickly. “Regulations call for you to explain matters to the subject once we are in a secure location.”

“Well the subject would like an explanation now.” Eric turned his full attention on Rachada, as if he could stare the information straight out of her. “Please. Can I get some kind of a clue as to what is going on here?”

She gave him a sympathetic look and for a moment it felt almost like she was draping a cool cloth over his head, calming him. “We’re trying to help you, Eric. We just… haven’t found a good way to do that yet.”

The comforting sensations vanished. “What is that supposed to-”

His question never got finished as the pigtailed meme that woke him up a few minutes previous suddenly came through the side of the van and swung the wooden head of its hammer through Agent Franks’ head. Literally through, the hammer ghosted through the man’s skull without any apparent resistance and Franks collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. At the same time the van suddenly jerked and slowed down. Rachada sat bolt upright then leaned to one side and yelped as the meme’s hammer came for her.

Beane gaped at Franks for a moment before asking, “What happened?”

The meme got him with the hammer before Rachada could answer but she managed to get one hand on the hammer and shoved it towards the meme hard. In response the meme seemed to melt and flow back out through the wall. The van had come to a stop by then and the back door flew open.

Rachada got up from the bench and put herself between Eric and the back of the van. A disinterested part of Eric’s brain noticed that they hadn’t been buckled in the whole time and that probably violated some government safety regulation but maybe The X-Files didn’t have to work by those rules. It was the same part of his brain that wondered, a moment later, if Rachada was trying to protect him from whatever was at the back of the van or if she was just worried about him trying to make a run for it. His stomach was vocally against the idea of running anywhere or he might have tried.

There were two people silhouetted in the van’s door. Eric was still woozy and unfocused but he could tell that there was a man and a woman there. Rachada started to say something but it never got beyond an indistinct sound before he felt a powerful push and a gut wrenching twist. His stomach heaved again but, to his relief, he managed not to puke again. That was a double good thing, since he probably would have wound up hitting Rachada as she collapsed onto the floor with Agents Franks and Beane.

The new woman made a quick lunge and managed to grab Rachada before she could collapse all the way to the floor. Once Rachada was carefully situated in a position that didn’t look horribly uncomfortable the strange woman looked up at Eric. For a brief second before they made eye contact Eric thought he saw a resemblance to the pigtailed meme but as soon as she looked him in the eye he was less certain. There was too much expression in her face in person to make a comparison to the meme certain.

She quickly stood up, grabbing his arm and pulling him along for the ride. Eric’s stomach protested again but not to degree it had been. The new woman, who was blonde and, Eric now realized, quite tall, gave him a once over and asked, “So, are you the new teep?”

Thunder Clap: Era’s End

Posted by natechen on

Helix

The door behind me swung closed. As soon as it latched I leaned back and blew out a long breath.

“You okay?” Sanders asked from where he stood by the observation window.

“Being okay implies I have something like normal to judge by.” I walked over to the window and stared out at Circuit, who was back to staring at the table top like the mysteries of the universe were written in the wood grain of it’s surface. “I’m not sure we’ve ever had anything like that. He was right about that much, even if what it drove him to was completely crazy.”

“He wouldn’t have been nearly as dangerous if he wasn’t right about a lot of things,” Sanders said, staring at Circuit with me.

I glanced past Sanders. Darryl was sitting at the far end of the window, leaning heavily on his cane and, like the two of us, contemplating the man in the other room.  I nudged Sanders lightly and tipped my head in Darryl’s direction. Had he said anything? Moved at all? Did we need to get him an ambulance? Or would Circuit need a security escort out of the interrogation room?

Sanders shook his head twice, a negative response on all counts.

“I can hear you two, you know,” Darryl said, not looking away from the window.

“We didn’t say anything!” Sanders protested.

“I hear you thinking.” Darryl snorted and finally tore his attention away from Circuit. “Since when were you two so good at reading each other, anyway?”

“Since we became middle management?” I offered.

That got a chuckle from him. “You certainly don’t act like middle management, Helix.”

“They never sent me to any classes for it. Maybe that’s why.” I searched his face for some sign of what he was thinking but Darryl had been in the field before I got out of middle school. People say I’m good at reading people and maybe so but Darryl was even better at hiding his feelings. “How are you doing?”

“Breathing.” Darryl laughed a weak, shaky laugh and turned back to the window again. “I’m not sure I’ve done anything more than that in the last three years or so. Not sure that’s going to change any time soon. If it’s saving I need then I didn’t find it here.”

Sanders put a hand on Darryl’s shoulder with a light, comforting touch. “Sometimes all you can do is keep breathing, if that’s what it takes to survive.”

“Survive?” Darryl shook his head and pushed up out of his chair. “Some days surviving feels like it just takes me further away from Mona.”

Sanders and I watched Darryl slowly make his way out of the observation room, his steps shuffling along to the rhythm of his cane. When he was gone Sanders asked, “Do you think we should keep an eye on him 24/7? Or just during the evenings.”

“Round the clock,” I said without hesitation.

“You want first shift?”

“Sure. Grab HiRes and the sisters cold to help out, too. It will look better if his own team handles him during the day.” I looked back through the observation window to the interrogation room. Circuit had left the table and pulled all the way back into one corner of the room. His head was bowed and he may have been resting it in his hands. Maybe he just fell asleep in his chair, but I doubted it.

He’d tried to save us all, in a way. His wife, Elizabeth, from parents who didn’t see a person’s gifts as something to be celebrated. Teresa from a world that had been content to never tell her that her father’s killer was gone simply because keeping the killer’s unusual abilities secret was more expedient. Me, from a system that wouldn’t let me use my greatest gifts to rise in the world. Even people like Sanders, who had spent a huge chunk of their lives laboring in a world no one knew about and that they could never share. It all seemed so noble.

“Do you think he realizes he wasn’t passing it on?”

Sanders shot me a questioning look, clearly not following my non sequitur.

I gestured towards the back corner of the far room. “Circuit wasn’t looking to save us. Maybe that was a side effect, but I don’t think it’s what he wanted.”

A moment passed while Sanders decided whether he wanted to bite or not. “So what did he want?”

“I think he was looking to save a much younger man from a plane crash that took a lot more than working legs from him.” I shook my head sadly. “Too bad he’s still stuck here with the rest of us.”

I turned and headed towards the door. Two steps later Sanders asked, “You going to keep an eye on Darryl?”

“Yeah. I’ll get…” I ran through a quick list of people in the office who could take the second shift from me and stopped as I had a sudden idea. “Actually, can you take first shift?”

Sanders gave me a confused look. “I guess. What are you going to be doing?”

I smiled. “Looking for a way to save someone.”

Izzy

I hadn’t helped set up for church in years but after the week I’d had, with all the power outages, kidnappings, smashing of buildings and incredible debriefings the simple action of setting up rows of chairs was soothing and distracted me from my impending First Media Interview. My ankles were still swollen and uncomfortable after my unpleasant experience with explosives but all in all the activity felt good. Good feelings when my boss snuck up on me and asked, “How are you feeling, Rodriguez?”

After nearly jumping out of my skin – and through the roof, super strength does have some drawbacks – I spun around to find Helix, looking like he was doing his best not to laugh. “Sorry, you startled me.”

“Sorry, not what I was trying to do.” He managed to say it with a straight face although I could tell he was still struggling. “But seriously, how are you? A lot of people, talented or not, who go into field work are ready to move on to something else after a week like the one you had.”

“I don’t know.” I sat down in one of the folding chairs I’d been setting up and sighed. “From what papa told me I knew not to expect anything like normal cop work. Taxmen get assigned to cases that need someone who can play hardball. I guess I didn’t count on getting abducted being part of that.”

Helix straddled a chair in the row in front of me, leaning with his arms folded over the back. “Honestly, I don’t think any cop or government agent who’s just finished training and been issued his sidearm and badge does. But it does happen, every once in a very long time. Being powerful doesn’t mean you’re not in danger and for someone who wasn’t even technically through training I think you handled yourself very well. But that also means if you want to stay in the field I’m going to assign you to cases like this again.”

I nodded. “I get that. It’s just kind of a daunting idea. And now Cheryl wants me to go and talk to the TV reporters. It’s kind of freaky.”

That got a laugh. “You can get used to the job, Izzy, but the media is something else entirely. And so long as you keep handling high profile cases I think they’re going to keep wanting to talk to you. Who knows? Maybe Cheryl will recruit you for the PR department and you can do it all the time.”

“How about I just get through the first time for right now.” I suppressed a shudder at the thought of dealing with cameras every day. Time for a subject change. “What did you want to talk to papa about?”

Helix grimaced. “Politics. That, and I need him on board as the man in charge of Project Sumter’s correctional and rehabilitation programs.”

There was only really one reason I could think of that he’d want to talk to papa about that. He’d talked about it often enough. “You want Mr. Sykes put in a special facility?”

“Actually,” Helix said, sheepish expression showing he thought what he was about to say wouldn’t make sense, “I was thinking of arranging for something more like work release. Partly because I don’t think he’d stay in any jail we could build for long unless he wanted to and I’d rather have him somewhere I can keep an eye on him. And party because it seems like a waste not to give someone so well intentioned a second chance. Either way I’m going to need Samson and Voorman in my camp if the idea is ever going to get off the ground.”

People who’d known him for a while said Helix used to be an idealist, back when he’d started, but I’d never reconciled that with the hard edged man I saw around the office. Looking at him now I could kind of understand what they meant. “Glad to see you’ve forgiven him.”

Helix sat up straight. “I’m sorry, what? Forgiving Circuit for what he’s done is way outside my authority.”

“For everything he’s done, sure. But he’s hurt you in the past and you wouldn’t be helping him now unless you’d forgiven him. God always forgave His people before He saved them.” I shrugged. “How could you help Circuit unless you’d forgiven him?”

Helix looked at me sideways, like I suddenly had two heads with three eyes each. “Your mind goes some strange places.”

I spread my hands. “We’re in a church, Helix. What were you expecting?”

He looked around at the polished wooden floors of the gymnasium. “We’re in the middle of a school, Rodriguez.”

“Come on.” I got up and straightened my chair out. “Papa’s in the office with some of the elders.”

Helix got up and followed me out of the gym. “You never said, but I guess I didn’t ask directly. Are you going to stay in the field?”

“Why’s it so important?”

He thought for a moment, then said, “You’re the first of the new generation, that’s all. Our first talent who came in after Circuit made us public. I’d feel better if I knew we’d done right enough by you that you’d stick around for a while longer.”

I smiled. “You know, Helix, I think you have.”

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Thunder Clap: The Interview

Posted by natechen on

The room was sparse, poorly lit and had three distinct features. First, the table in the middle. Second, the chairs, both on one side of the table. Third, the reflective sheet of glass in one wall of the room next to a barely visible door. Opposite the room’s two chairs Matthew Sykes sat in a chair of his own. Not the rather absurd, overbuilt, motorized electric chair that had served as his court of last resort during the struggle for Waltham Towers but rather the simple leather and metal wheelchair that had served as the prop for a masquerade lasting nearly ten years until the sham had somehow turned into the truth.

Whatever thoughts might have been going through the mind of Sykes in that melancholy room had their progress halted when Double Helix pushed into the room, the door behind him swinging closed on well oiled hinges. Practically the only sound in the room as Helix walked over to the table was the sound of him turning the pages of the enormous file he carried. Finally Helix plopped it down on the table with a soft but forceful thud and sat in one of the open chairs. He prodded the file with one finger. “You know, we usually pad these to make them more intimidating? But yours didn’t need any work. Everything in there is an actual document produced during the course of investigating you over the past ten years.”

Sykes glanced at the file then back at Helix. “I’m guessing you wrote at least half of that.”

“More or less.” Helix folded his hands on top of the file and stared hard at Sykes.

The silence stretched out, neither man seeming particularly uncomfortable with it. Helix looked the other man over repeatedly, as if looking for something and repeatedly failing to find it. Sykes was more interested in the file, studying the bulging manila folder as if he could see through it and read the information within.

Finally after a good two or three minutes Sykes looked Helix in the eye and asked, “Should you really be doing this alone?”

“No.” Helix leaned back in his chair, the back resting against the wall. “But then, should you really have spent a decade running roughshod over the US?”

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Helix laughed, real amusement in his voice. Sykes frowned. “It wasn’t that funny.”

“Sorry. Irony is a personal thing, probably no one else on the planet that would laugh at that.” Helix tilted forward again, still smirking. “Tell you what. This isn’t on record, although there are some people out there,” he jerked a thumb towards the glass, “who would like some answers. And I’d like them, too.”

Sykes’ head jerked momentarily towards the one way mirror, then back to Helix. “Elizabeth is here?”

“Just the psychologist we’re thinking of assigning you in prison,” Helix replied. “So level with us, Circuit. What possesses a man to try and overthrow the government single handedly? You never struck me as the ideological type. Was it glory?”

“It was my parents.”

“The Sykes? Or your biological parents. The…” Helix flipped the folder open and started looking through it.

“My adoptive parents,” Sykes clarified.

Helix twitched the file closed again. “Go on.”

“It’s hard to explain what it’s like.” Sykes looked down at the table for a moment, absently dragging his thumb back and forth along the armrest of his chair. “The system isn’t a place for kids. Foster homes… you never feel like anyone really wants you there and hiding the fact that you can touch the TV to feel that it’s practically alive doesn’t help things. When Daniel and Martha came and took me out of that place I was more grateful than I’d ever been in my life.”

Helix tossed the file aside, braced his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “And that drove you to try and rule the world?”

The shadow of a smile brushed across Sykes’ face. “When I asked him why he wanted to adopt a kid Daniel told me that he’d been pretty successful and he wanted to pay it forward. Since he and Martha couldn’t have kids they decided to find one to share with. Then he told me that sooner or later I’d probably want to do the same, and when the time came I’d know how I wanted to do it.”

“This still doesn’t sound like the foundation for megalomania.”

“I took them flying because Martha really wanted to try it. There was a cloud… probably a small rainstorm brewing. I’d been through clouds before but there was more charge that time than there’d ever been before. It…” Sykes waved his hands ambiguously. “That was the first time I realized I could be a living lightning rod.”

Helix sat back in his chair, a little thunderstruck himself. “That’s why your plane crashed and there was no records of what happened. The lightning fried the black box.”

“When I was in recovery after the crash and the surgeries I started poking around the Internet, finding places where the underground talent community compared notes. I learned some of the things I could do.” Sykes pulled his gaze up from the table, long buried fury smoldering in his eyes. “And I learned that there were people – there was a whole branch of the government – that knew about people like me. That could have warned me of the risks I was running. But they didn’t because they were too scared.”

Sykes pulled himself up and looked Helix right in the eye. “That was when I knew how I was going to pay it forward.”

Helix nodded slowly. “You were going to take over and change things.”

“No.” Sykes’ composure crumpled and he slipped down to stare at the table top again. His voice faded to a whisper. “I wanted to save them.”

Confusion flitted over Helix’s face but his expression quickly shifted to neutral again. “I don’t follow.”

“Daniel and Martha saved me from the foster system, from feeling like I was just a face in the crowd. They showed me that people had survived the kind of indifference that’s endemic to systems before.” Sykes threw his hands out as if to encompass the whole building and the organization that had built it. “Sumter was a system, Helix. It didn’t explain, it didn’t protect. It just demanded people do as it wanted and damned the consequences. There were three other fuse boxes in the state that could have explained the dangers of flying a plane to me, to say nothing of all the experienced field agents who had probably seen dozens of those kinds of accidents before. What was the statistic before Project Sumter went public? One in five talents died in accidents caused by their own talents?”

“One in eight.” Helix looked away for the first time since he’d come into the room. “One in five was a guess Analysis made to account for accidents that were never tied back to the talents of those involved.”

Sykes slammed his hands down on the table. “Too many! It was going to end!”

“And damn the consequences?” Helix asked.

“There were things I should not have done. But Helix, there’s something you have to understand.” Arms straining, Sykes pulled himself forward and pushed himself into something like a standing position. “Everyone wants someone to save them.”

Helix looked up at Sykes then nodded at the other man’s chair. “Sit down, Circuit. You’ll hurt yourself.”

Sykes glared down at the shorter man but Helix ignored it with the ease of long practice. “Tell me you didn’t feel isolated, Helix. How many times did you accidentally start a fire with your talents? How often did you worry about hurting someone when you touched them before your grandmother taught you how to control a heat sink.”

“Careful who you bring into this,” Helix said, his voice soft but full of menace.

Finally Sykes did slump back into his chair with a disgusted snort. “I have an IQ just shy of 130, I ran track in high school, people thought I was decent looking. But I couldn’t see a way out of foster care on my own. Don’t you understand, Helix? Sometimes you need other people to help.”

“The Project -”

“Not only wasn’t the help people needed, it was actively getting in the way.” Sykes sighed and looked down at his hands. “So I decided to get rid of it.”

“And set yourself up in its place?” Helix folded his arms across his chest. “Not exactly inspiring confidence.”

“Someone was going to do it sooner or later.” Sykes shrugged. “Frankly I’m surprised no one ever tried to play the supervillain before. Ruling a country seems like a simple business from the outside, though I’m sure it’s much harder once you actually have to do it.”

“And you wanted to try anyway.”

“Oh, I had a plan.”

“How surprising.” Helix didn’t sound like he thought it was, really. “What kind of genius plan was it?”

“You.” Sykes chuckled at Helix’s blank look. “Or someone like you. Come on, you don’t think I really could have taken over the country just because I had some breakthrough transportation and electronic warfare technology, did you? I knew that sooner or later someone would put together a way to stop me but by the time they did Project Sumter would no longer stand in the way of talented people. It would be the first step towards letting them be all they could.”

“You were going to save people by getting thrown in jail?” Helix shook his head. “That is a really stupid way to live.”

“It’s a great way to die.”

Silence ruled the room for another minute, much less comfortable this time.

“I paid off the doctor who declared me disabled after the accident,” Sykes said when he grew too uncomfortable. “But once the grand plan started to take shape I had to get rid of him. I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve blackmailed, I’m sure a lot of security directors at banks have lost their jobs because of me. Parts of my organization haven’t always… proceeded as I’d have liked.”

Helix snorted. “You mean like this last week? Or how about in Morocco?”

“Two very big examples.” Sykes rubbed a hand over his face and sighed. “Then there was Templeton. Not even a deliberate decision there. I just made a stupid mistake. But it was Elizabeth that made me see it.”

“Please don’t tell me this is the power of love at work.”

A cynical smile crossed Sykes’ face. “In a way. It wasn’t until I saw her toss away everything I thought I was going to be giving people – family, support, a place to belong – that I started to realize.” He gripped the armrests on his chair and took a deep breath. “I wasn’t saving anyone. Michigan Avenue was well intended and it even succeeded – far beyond what I was expecting. But everything before and after that… it was me trying to justify what had happened in the past. And I decided that it was time for all of that to go away. So I did. Until this week, when I realized my bad decisions weren’t quite as gone as I thought. But we’re finished with that now, too, so I suppose I really am done now.”

Sykes lapsed into silence again. After waiting to see if anything more was forthcoming Helix picked up the file on the table and stood in a single well practiced motion. “I suppose we’ll have to see about that.”

A few minutes later the door swung shut behind him and Sykes was alone with his thoughts once again.

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