by James Curcio
“What is this nonsense with you busting in on a boardroom about unholy vengeance? You are in the presence of a God, son. If you are going to continue working for this company you need to realize that your first concern must be the growth of Kaltec. He must be your God. He is a hungry God, Don. A hungry, vengeful God.” An edge of genuine fear made his voice tremble.
Don froze in horror. All of this was news to him. He had never heard of Kaltec before. Corporate brochures, countless awkward and tedious meetings. No Kaltec. Maybe Dave was trying to bring him in on the ‘inside.’
“Lord Kaltec watches your every move. Do you follow me? Kaltec is not a he, Kaltec is an it. I want you to go to sleep at night thinking…how can I keep it fed tomorrow? If you don’t feed it, it will eat you. You are a cell in Kaltec's body. You are little…tiny…You are tiny Don, do you understand that? Tiny.” Dave was chewing on the end of his cigar as he spoke. A brown froth lined his mouth.
The Plan. The ketchup. He rummaged around in the bag for packets, nodding absently. “Yes sir.”
He had an arsenal of arguments and complaints he could unleash in a forum like this…finally the opportunity had presented itself and he had no appetite for it. There was no point. He may as well argue the ills of eating beef to a cattle farmer. His counter-argument would need to be much more visceral, if he wanted to reach this audience. And anyway, he was pretty sure Dave was completely insane.
“Your bleeding hearts are small. How will that please Kaltec? You must have passion. Real strength, to kill millions to serve and please your Lord. If one person out of a thousand dies as a result of our medication, there’s an outrage,” Dave growled. “They don’t understand true power.”
Don nodded, giving an almost mischievous smile. If Dave had been paying more attention, that smile might have made him wonder. He might have wondered why Don was opening packet after packet of ketchup, without anything to put it on. But Dave wasn’t wondering much of anything at all. He was so hammered his face was numb.
Dave continued, “When I was your age kids were crying up a storm about a couple slants getting blasted in Mai Lai. Fuck them, we were trying to crush Communism. I killed a bunch of them over there, just spraying bullets. All the same. We had to get out of the jungle but we won the war, goddammit. And one day, Kaltec, he–“ Dave dropped his drink. “Don?! What in the hell do you think you are doing?”
While Dave was speaking, Don had dropped his pants, and proceeded to squirt ketchup all over his genitals, nodding his head agreeably, conversationally.
Don and Dave regarded each other awkwardly over the slop-slop-slop sound of his hands doing their work below. The cigar fell from Dave’s flaccid lips, making a wet splat as it landed on the desk and stuck there hissing amidst a cloud of ash and smoke.
But there was no other reaction. Dave was apparently far more insane than Don had assumed. There was no brain to shatter. Dave was a simulacra, a shell of a man that existed merely to serve his imaginary Lord, an Aztec Leviathan, a feather-plumed tyrant of the dark beyond: Kaltec. Lord of Europharm AG.
Don kept a wide smile as he proceeded to masturbate, ketchup splattering all over the expensive rug. The smile grew, but this was getting awkward. Dave wasn’t moving, only staring with an increasing look of curiosity on his face. What was supposed to happen next? In hindsight, maybe calling it a “Plan” was getting ahead of himself. Nothing to do at this point but run.
Finally, Dave reached for the phone to call security, but Don was already gone.
As he flew down the steps, an uncomfortable slimy feeling between his legs, Don realized he had been planning this for months, maybe even years. Not the ketchup stunt, that was just a sudden flash of genius, but instead the realization that there was something very, very wrong with this world. The question was, what was it and what could he do about it? It had been bouncing around in his head all this time, it had even been the subject of his dreams – when he wasn’t occupied by three-foot-tall naked green women. Dave’s drunken rambling about cells in bodies had given him an idea…a terribly wicked idea. Simple and profound. What was that band’s name? Babylon? He’d have to give them some help. Kaltec was a weakling compared to the Gods he could invent.
Cancer starts with just a couple cells, after all. It is the revolt of the few against the many, when the many are fat and insane.
Maybe the analogy didn’t hold, exactly. He had more pressing things to worry about anyhow, like evading the guards.
The autumn months moved towards winter. Clumps of auburn leaves were replaced by an unsightly gray sludge. The bustle on Park slope was a perpetual blur, viewed through the window of Don’s makeshift office in the front room of his apartment.
Not that he looked out on the outside world much – his primary contact with the outside was through Xi Ping Bo, who brought his orders from the corner Chinese store regularly by bicycle. There were other options in the area, but Xi Ping was his favorite. Maybe he just found his name amusing.
Don had been gaming corporations since middle school. Hacking, playing the market, but he never knew why before. Yet again, he’d banked against Europharm, fucked them over all across the news, outed them to the government anonymously, and raked in some back end off his investment in their competitors. He lived in a modest apartment and endured the commute, and kept saving. This was no different than before, except now he had The Plan.
Subversion had been his modus operandi. A means unto itself. Not anymore. He would use the money and techniques learned through that interaction to fund social viruses which would spell the end. For the Pharmaceutical industry. For all industries founded on imperial ownership notes.
Crushing major corporations and causing civil upheaval took planning and skill. This was why he needed to recruit the help of some of the most brilliant and eccentric minds in computer programming, economics, media and social engineering. Ontological terrorism on this scale was a long con. He had to settle in.
Implementation of such a plan would require wide dispersion and a thorough understanding of social patterns and chaos theory. It could begin with cells and meta-cells of operatives that didn’t even know each others names. It would take on a life of it’s own. In the end no one would know where it originated. When that time came, he would be long gone. He would be in Thailand, or Switzerland. The image of that flaccid cigar falling from Dave’s slug-like lips would taint his nightmares until his dying day. He didn’t want to be Dave 2.0 in twenty years. That image was reason enough to drag the Western World to its knees. Blue screen of death. Hit Ctr-Alt-Delete. Pray for the best.
Over the course of months he dabbled with countless approaches. With the nest egg he’d saved, he had time to research. He had time to skulk and plot and eat copious amounts of greasy Chinese food. Pages of notes collected first in vast piles of napkins, wrinkled and stained with coffee rings. A couple napkin ideas graduated to a notepad.
Many of these notes later got the red pen, writ large: not feasible, unnecessary, stop eating Lo Mein after midnight, magnificent tits!, and so on. He considered just destroying centralized banking, but after long and tedious research on the history of the federal reserve, he came to realize that the system itself was devised to bring about the same kind of stratification and destabilization which he thought he had to create. To bring about his desired goals, the most crucial elements were social rather than financial, so his focus turned towards the media.
He gathered information on the groups and individuals he would need to contact, he charted out all their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd tier contacts, and determined at what point their cell would need to be activated. He barely slept, no one saw him, and the few friends he used to have were long since convinced he had gone entirely insane.
When he was done researching, he started making phone calls.
First on his list was the Colonel. His guess was that his moniker originated with Colonel Kurtz, from Apocalypse Now, Coppola’s modern adaptation of Heart of Darkness. Kurtz had gone beyond the re
alm of the Military’s command, had gone beyond the realm of sanity, and found a strangely pragmatic reality out there, in the tangled roots of the mango trees. Of course, this Colonel looked more like Klink, from the 60s television show Hogan’s Heroes, if he was fronting an Industrial band in the 90s.
Last he heard, the Colonel was making a killing running the IT department of some medical web start-up, and blew that killing quite literally in white-hot blasts through the septum. He did it alone, he did it at great parties that he threw at his pad, he did it while he worked. Chances are soon he’d do it subconsciously, while he slept. Don could imagine his hand slinking around the top of his bedside table like a tarantula, quivering atop the glass when it sensed its prey was near.
He made a quick call to give the Colonel a heads up. The real way to sell him on the concept was in person, over a line or two. Don honestly wasn’t fond of the stuff but he’d make an exception to close a sale. When the Colonel answered, Don heard hysterical giggling in the background, loud enough to overpower crashing electronic drum machines and distorted vocals.
“Speak,” he said. He obviously knew who was calling from his caller I.D. Two years, and that was all he had to say. Typical.
“Colonel, it’s Don– ” he started automatically.
“I can read. OK, go to town girls. Now. Like a vacuum cleaner…Though you might want to have your number protected. I could find out where you live…” he hissed.
“You’ve known where I lived for years. Anyway, I have a business proposal for you. It’s not just money…it’s…something bigger than that. Do you remember that ongoing conversation we had back in school…about taking down the big names in the media industry? About shifting the geography? Well I have something that could be bigger.” Don spoke rapidly and loudly, hoping he was being heard over the music.
The Colonel hummed to himself when Don finished speaking, and then replied with what sounded like bemusement, “Great, I was wondering how long it would take you. Making these porno videos is totally sucking out my soul.”
“Porno videos?” Well that explained the background noise.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’m making one right now. Thank God for DV cams, and coke whores. Girls these days, they’ll do anything for a gram. It’s sad. Isn’t it, honey? Anyway, it passes the time but I’d rather do something more subversive.”
He hadn’t said otherwise, but Don knew he wasn’t actually participating in the films, either. The Colonel was rather particular about making flesh on flesh contact with anyone, even in passing. Most of the time he wore tight leather gloves, layer upon layer of clothes. It was such a straightforward mechanism that psychoanalysis seemed unnecessary.
He was still talking like a jackhammer, probably swimming in a deep, invigoratingly cool pool of dopamine. “So you’re at it again huh. Let me guess, all of the business world is like…different organs in the same organism. Like, oh my god!” Hearing the Colonel try to talk like a Valley Girl turned Hippie was almost more than Don could bear. “And you want to become an organ and then, like, pull the plug. Or fill the body with confetti or something. I’d rather an army of monkeys, or a pet elephant. Or an M-1 tank. But your plan sounds grand, too. Jesus girl, finesse, c’mon…Though I have to tell you I don’t think humans are fit to govern themselves. How about tomorrow night, your place? Throw in the army of monkeys and I’ll love you forever. Me love you long time. Spit or swallow girls, make up your mind. Oh wait. Tell me why I give a fuck, again?”
Don cracked open a book on his desk. Bibliomancy. He opened to a random page. “One must be free to learn how to make use of one’s powers freely and usefully. The first attempts will surely be brutal and will lead to a state of affairs more painful and dangerous than the former condition under the dominance but also the protection of an external authority. However, one can achieve reason only through one’s own experiences, and one must be free to be able to undertake the– ”
The Colonel spluttered, shooting spit as he cut Don off.
“–Don! Please for the love of everything holy tell me you aren’t reading Emmanuel Kant to me right now.”
Now he was the one being cut off, by a baritone voice in the background bellowing “oh God oh God OH GOD!”
The Colonel relaxed. “Eh. You harpooned your whale, Ishmael. Now get off my ass. I owe these DNA coated foundlings a line of shitty mob coke.”
The best and the brightest might be good enough for Silicone Valley, but he needed to add derangement to the bill. When you’re looking up at such an overwhelming opponent, you gotta go squirrely.
Recruitment went smoothly, as Don methodically moved from partners to employees. Supply them with a living wage and the freedom to actually be themselves, most people would do just about anything. Propaganda was the easiest of all. Anything to avoid that cookie-cutter 9-5. As he continued making phone calls and everything fell into place, he started to feel the dominoes had been set for years…maybe even decades. Was he just a single link in a long chain?
In the end, it didn't matter. Was God's hand moving him, or was he a part of God's hand? It was time to put agents in the field.
The feeling of cool shell casings in my hand brings me back. Brings me back from what? I’m not quite sure. But the adrenaline pumps through me all the same. The heart races, blood throbbing through sluggish capillaries. The only evidence of these internal gymnastics is a sudden flush followed by a sheen of sweat, the sensation of ants crawling rapidly across the base of my neck. Rationality be damned, my body is an athlete primed for action. These shells hold a vital secret.
I received them in the mail along with a simple handwritten note: “Cell 036: Activate.” There were no instructions. But the Universe would show me what to do. These bullets are the first part of its encrypted message.
I pull one of them out of the pocket of my overcoat. Inspect it, rolling it back and forth in the glittering candlelight of the restaurant. My business partners are speaking to me, glasses of Chianti dangling from their drunken fingers, but I can’t hear them. The words escaping between bites of half-chewed filet Mignon and lobster bisque are bland mush in my ears.
Derivatives trading? The fuck kind of nonsense is that? There was nothing in the room but me and that bullet. Deadly yes, but what it really stands for is the harsh light of truth. The only truth.
Didactics crumple under the clear “is or isn’t” of a shard of metal, traveling many times the speed of sound. Your skull shatters like fine china on the kitchen floor, or it doesn’t. Here is the modern equivalent of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, updated, streamlined, stripped of faith and hope. These assholes want to talk to me about derivatives trading. In ten years, your pathetic imaginary pyramid is going to be nothing but ash.
The bullet I now cradled in my sweaty palm was live. Even though I am a rocket scientist, I wouldn’t need to be one to know what this means: it’s time for shit to get heavy. This clarity brings a sickening vertigo that I am at a loss to explain rationally. I have the conclusions, but not the postulates. This I knew for certain: the security of the free world is at stake, and I alone hold the ability to save it in my hand.
I lean towards one of my compatriots, placing a bullet in his hand and closing his resistant, clammy fingers around it for him. “If you are in danger of being caught, bite down on this. Bite down hard. Do it for the Mother Hive Brain Agency. Do it for mankind. For the love of our one eyed, ether-crazed God, just do it. If you are successful…report back to me in a week. You know where to find me.”
I watch his reaction with clinical intensity. If he knows, he is one of us. If not, he will be marked for erasure. There can’t be a moment’s hesitation at times like this, not room for a blade of grass to slide between the chinks.
The man’s eyebrows raise when he recognizes the small but deadly parcel in his hand, leaving a trail of wrinkles right through his receding hairline.
Not one of us, I note.
I don’t have time for this. I need to get back in touch wi
th the other agents.
It is time.With that I stand up abruptly, and grab my fedora. I am ready to report for duty.
Chapter Seven
Dennis walked down a dusty highway. Thunder rumbled in the distance.
“Fuck,” he said, to no one. His head, wrapped in an American-flag bandana, hung a little lower.
The skies opened up. Soon, he was trudging through quickly forming puddles. Spitting out a mouthful of rain water, he stopped and looked down at himself. His shoulders drooped.
Streams were already forming in the gullies along the side of the highway. At that pace, it would be a flood in no time. The weather kept getting more freakish.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
Headlights pierced the murkiness ahead. He didn’t notice at first, but when he did, he stopped and began waving his arms.
A luxury sedan pulled over. The driver, a kid with black-dyed hair and pathetic facial hair, looked at him through his Matrix sunglasses. A redhead leered at him from the back seat, and an emaciated ice princess rode shotgun. He doubted she was capable of facial expression, aside from a perpetual look of surprise painted about two inches above where her eyebrows should have been.
“Where are you going?” the boy asked.
“Rapid city, South Dakota.”
“That’s... really far to walk.”
“Yeah. Can you give me a ride?”
“Only if you can handle riding with us.”
Dennis frowned. “Your name is Morpheus, isn’t it?”
“No, it isn’t.” Morpheus said, blankly. He lowered his sunglasses and tried to give a piercing stare. “We operate on a different level.”
“Okay. It’s cold, it’s wet and it’s possible my fiancee ran off with a friend of mine. So...”