by Oliver Smith
“The final touch,” he said.
“Ow.”
“Very handsome,” said Jeanne d’Arc.
“Look into these eyes,” said the Cubist, jumping up onto a stool and staring at me even more strangely than usual. “These are the eyes of my unconscious mind, the eyes of the animal deep inside. These are the eyes of Loplop, King of the Birds. Left right, up down, count backwards from ten, here try your hat,” he picked up an outsize black hat and rapped on it with his knuckles.
“Are you in there, Maestro? Come out Arkenholz, come to Señor Loplop.”
He passed the hat to Max who bellowed into it. “Arkenholz, you bastard, I know you’re in there! Come out!”
Something clunked and clucked deep inside my head.
Max held up a mirror to reflect my face. A stranger’s eye trapped behind a glass lens stared back at me; it was alien, cold, and grey as stone.
“Ah, there you are, Arkenholz,” said Max as he shook me firmly by the hand. “We’ve been waiting.”
The audience had been unsettled by the delay, and only broken applause greeted me as the lime lights brightened; and even that poor greeting faded into faint howls as I took my place before the stage.
I silenced them with a single glance. I glared at them, turned the full force of Arkenholz’s hatred and disdain on the expectant patrons, and then having admonished them, I rotated like a turbine and faced the orchestra. Now I would show them all, show them who was the genius and who were the undeserving scum of no more consequence than lice. I shot one final eye full of venom over my shoulder, lit a Gauloises Bleu and raised the baton.
I stopped. I paused, I choked on the cigarette. I saw the musicians; dead-faced, dummies every one. They had been made in mockery of me, each manufactured with Arkenholz’s hair, each fitted with Arkenholz’s monocle, and each embossed with Arkenholz’s smile. While I hesitated the audience giggled.
I thought about what I was going to do to the Bureau de Lupines when I got out of there. The thought of their impending agonising deaths cheered me up a little.
There was a single slow hand-clap.
The rain was beating on the roof, through the roof, pissing like a cow onto the orchestra.
Dripping. Dripping. Dripping.
Then Max’s voice came rolling out of the darkness. “Turn them on, idiot.”
I was enlightened. I looked down. There was a big electrical switch at my feet.
With a single flick, sparks of static electricity flew from the dummies. They shone with an odd blue light over the stage and ghastly shadows washed over the immobile faces of the Arkenholz dummies. Max may have carved them from wood and forged them from metal, but they raised their heads as if on invisible strings. In each black suit a spider shape unfolded itself, took its position, and held its instrument in readiness. I gathered those figures in my gaze. The newly animate limbs jerked and danced; the fingers spasmed. Slowly a note of sorts emerged. A low, tuneless-moan with the cello-deep timbre of catacomb darkness.
Twenty cold grey eyes glittered behind twenty glass monocles and regarded the audience with amusement and malice.
How Arkenholz mesmerised them, unleashing that strange music through the force of his desire; he overcame all resistance. Among the crackle and spark of the arcing current, those mechanical creatures performed.
The current flowed like water; a terrible magnetic grip spread through the atmosphere.
I became the great conductor. I caught the lightening in my fingers and whirled the music into a froth, whipped and waved the noise into a wild sea foam that swept over the theatre like a storm.
Blue sparks ran from my fingers and over the stalls, reaching up to the balconies and even into the private boxes.
The audience was convulsively tapping out the rhythm of the rain, the rhythms of their hearts, the rhythms of my name. The baton in my hand rose and fell, fell and rose again. I shared my power, conducting the sparks of blue flame from head to head, from heart to brain. They howled the name.
Arkenholz,
Arkenholz.
Arkenholz filled the air.
Faster and faster, the orchestra played the deranged, terrible music of Arkenholz. Faster ran the dance of the dynamo, faster screamed the cogwheels dashing headlong to the inevitable. The cry of metal gears joined with the shrieks of the tortured strings.
Faster, faster, faster, faster and at last it was complete.
The coda. The resolution.
Leaving just the thump, thump, thump on the roof of the interminable cow pissing rain.
Some lay still, some twitched—stunned, some were black, burnt husks. Andre was an automaton with a meaningless vomit of poetry dribbling from his mouth. Harlequin was suffering involuntary contortions, convulsions and convolutions. The Cubist was a picture of plastic formalism, having gained several extra dimensions but lost much of his depth. And Max, Max was moving as if caught in an evil dream; he danced with Jeanne d’Arc, who, as usual, was smouldering slightly.
On they danced, oblivious to the danger, for creeping after them, as they whirled and bowed in a halo of residual electrical discharges, were dark spider-shapes. There was a hint of diabolically floating hair as white and weightless as midwinter snow; there was the noise of sharp nails scraping on the wooden boards; and there was the wink of an eye ripe with black amusement and grey malice. A monstrous and famished shadow rose up, spreading wide its vengeful spider arms, eclipsing the light, and darkness descended over everything; darkness filled with the ghastly screams of the damned.
A gratifying result. It had all gone rather well.
I adjusted my monocle, on my head was a fine black Homberg. I sniffed the static in the air as I turned the rusty key, held the stage doors wide to let the orchestra out of the Théâtre de Pompions. There was the smell of cleansed gutters. I lit another Gauloises Bleu and offered one to Arkenholz.
“Thank you, Arkenholz.”
“Don’t mention it, Arkenholz.”
“One for Arkenholz, and Arkenholz, and Arkenholz...”
“Oh Arkenholz, I am thrilled, excited, anticipating an age that runs to logical rhythms, an age of mechanical passions and electric music. Are you ready, Arkenholz?”
“Oh yes, Arkenholz. We shall make it the age of the electric musician, the electric composer, the age of the electric conductor.”
“…and then no one will play the banjo.”
“Never again, Arkenholz. Never again.”
We, the Arkenholzs, stepped out into the streets of Paris. We skipped beneath the electrified lines of the tramway, our monocles glittering like diamonds in the electric lights of the shops and street-lamps. In our pockets, one ticket each for the Midnight train from the Gare du Nord.
We were going home.
Implants
By Michael Bray
September 17th 2024
Day 2,306 of isolation
It’s funny how I always thought the world was too small, at least until I was the only one left in it. It’s the little things I miss. The things you never really think about. The steady drone of traffic, the subtle chatter of birds. Anything to break this silence, this godforsaken silence, which is so oppressive I swear I can feel it pushing me into the desolate earth. I’ll never forget the day it happened. One minute the world was a vibrant place, alive with noise, and then in the blink of an eye it was silenced.
Now I’m the only one left.
As I tell my story, you will appreciate the irony of that last sentence. I write this now from the White House. Yes, that one. Don’t get me confused with someone important though. I’m a nobody, a regular guy who said yes to something I should have said no to and am now paying the price for. It’s funny. The world used to be filled with people rushing around. Things to do, places to go. We were always in a hurry. Things are different now. Time works differently. Minutes feel like hours, hours like weeks, and weeks like years. Hell, maybe that’s how it actually is. Maybe I’ve roamed this ball of dirt for centuries withou
t realizing, festering in my very own living hell. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Daylight is fading and I want to do this before the shadows get to that deep shade where things can hide in them.
As I was saying, I write this from the Oval Office of the White House. I just walked right in. Across the south lawn, through the door, past the decaying bodies of Secret Service agents and pen pushing officials. The sight and smell of the dead don’t bother me anymore. If you‘re around enough of something, you quickly desensitize to it. I half wondered if the President might be in here when I arrived, dead eyes staring at the door, skin like old leather hanging from white bone, skeletal politician’s grin waiting to greet me. Alas, I was wrong. As with everywhere, there was just dust and silence and the smell of death. Maybe our Commander in Chief got away to one of his bunkers before the world went belly up. Hell, maybe he’s looking at me right now through some kind of hidden camera, wondering what the hell I’m doing in his office.
Prick.
On the off chance that I am being observed, I lean back and put my feet up on the desk, wondering what my father would think if he could see me now. His son, Alec Greenborough, living it up in the President’s house. Then I remember he’s one of the lucky ones. He’s already dead.
I imagine you’re asking yourself, as you read my left-handed scrawl, what is Alec Greenborough, the son of a baker from Seattle, doing with his feet up on the President’s desk in the White House? Well the answer, as I referenced earlier, is simple and ironic.
I’m only here because I screwed up killing myself.
Didn’t expect that, did you?
It all started when, back in the spring of 2018, Microsoft and Virgin decided to pool their vast resources and move from computers and telecommunications to advancing medical technology—primarily in the field of helping amputees to live full lives again. After the short world war of 2015, in which the British and Americans bombed the shit out of the Russians for bullying their neighbors, as well as the increased unrest in Syria and Iraq, the VIRSOFT merger was a PR dream. Within a year they had developed artificial limbs that could register sensation, giving disabled war heroes a chance to lead normal lives. The much vaunted Google glasses were redeveloped into actual artificial eyeballs, giving sight to the blind. They also developed artificial eardrums, allowing the deaf to hear. The public perceived these products as miracles. By 2021, it wasn’t uncommon to see people comprised of equal parts machine and organic tissue. VIRSOFT was the name on every tongue. This, my friends, is where I come in.
My story doesn’t begin is such a lofty locale as the White House, but in a motel on a rainy Sunday night just outside of Portland. The gun had been in the glove box of my old Chevy for at least six years—bought as protection for my wife if she was out late at night. You can never be too careful, after all.
Of course it was she who drove me to turn it on myself.
She tried to blame me of course, saying I pushed her into the arms of my best friend, a slippery piece of shit named Garfield. Unlike the lasagna loving cat of the same name, the Garfield in this story was a womanizing alcoholic with a mean streak. He was one of those guys who wouldn’t immediately seek his revenge if you wronged him, but wait as long as it took to really make sure he got you good.
Anyway, I must have wronged him pretty badly for him to turn his attention to my wife. The worst was that I’d confided in him, telling him how we were drifting apart. He must have seen it as the perfect chance to worm his way into her bed. When I found them she screamed at me and said it was my fault. Garfield just sat there, grinning like a Cheshire cat.
Anyone who has ever been cheated on will know the absolute, heart wrenching agony of it. There is no way to mend the broken trust, and no matter how hard you try, you can never put things right. She was my world, and with the certainty she would no long be a part of it, killing myself seemed like the most logical thing to do. I’ll admit, the reasons were driven by self-pity, and if I’m perfectly honest, revenge. I wanted her to feel guilt, I wanted her to suffer for the rest of her life for what she’d done to me. Let me tell you, a day doesn’t go by when I don’t wish I’d made a better job of my suicide attempt. I remember sitting there, vision blurred by tears, feeling like the most worthless son of a bitch in the world. I’m sure if I’d put the gun under my chin and pulled the trigger, I wouldn’t be sitting here now and writing this. But I’d seen one too many movies, and put the barrel in my mouth instead.
That made it real. The taste of oil, the cold steel against my teeth. I tried to conjure up a vision of my wife, but could only picture Garfield’s stupid grin. I wasn’t sure I would be able to go through with it and pull the trigger, but I guess I must have. There was a roar of sound and then blackness.
No white light.
No rose garden full of dead relatives to greet me.
The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a hospital bed, facing a chubby, bearded face I didn’t recognize. I did however recognize the red and black VIRSOFT logo on his white coat, and started to piece together what had happened.
II
The bearded man was a doctor. His name was Belsham. He tried to come across as over friendly, and I didn’t like that. He also smelled odd. There was a faint odor of stale sweat under the powerful cologne he wore. I’d hoped to see my wife waiting by my bedside full of apology, but I guess she either didn’t care or was too busy letting Garfield screw her brains out. Either way, I doubt she’d have got a look in anyway, because Belsham hardly stopped talking at me from the moment I woke up.
It seemed my botched suicide made me a perfect candidate for the latest VIRSOFT product. Rather than blowing my brains all over the cum stained bed sheets and yellowed wallpaper as I’d intended, the bullet had somehow clipped off my spinal column (destroying my teeth and jaw in the process) and then down into my chest cavity, damaging my heart and embedding in my lung. Belsham told me it was a one in a million shot. I might still have died if housekeeping hadn’t been in the room next door and heard the shot. I was whisked off to hospital barely clinging on to life. Belsham had grinned at this point in the story and told me my survival was a minor miracle.
I tried to ask him what they had done to fix me, but the words didn’t come. Either way, he seemed to know what I wanted to ask.
“It’s called the Neurointel respiratory system,” he said, proud as punch.
I wanted to remind him that, for all his posturing, he had actually screwed things up by saving me as far as I was concerned. Of course, I didn’t get a chance to speak, as he was going on, and was now showing me charts and documents detailing what they’d done to me. I’ll spare you the long version I had and give you a condensed rundown of what they did.
According to Belsham, the bullet had ravaged my insides pretty good. It had damaged by spinal column and a lower portion of my skull before changing trajectory. It had destroyed my windpipe, then nicked the aorta in my heart, then the right atrium before coming to rest in my right lung and collapsing it. Essentially, it mangled everything apart from its intended target.
Even so, it wasn’t anything VIRSOFT couldn’t fix. By then their research was so advanced they were just waiting for someone with the right injuries to come along. As you know, the Consent Free Right to Operate act of 2020 meant I didn’t get a say in what happened to me. I was essentially slab of meat for them to experiment on as they saw fit. I can’t complain too much, though. Despite everything that happened since, they did a pretty good job of fixing me. They repaired my jaw and teeth with a super tough synthetic plastic called Persaflex. They had also installed a new throat and vocal chords for me so I can speak (not that there’s anyone to talk to anymore). The trickiest parts were the replacement heart, lungs and nerve network. Belsham explained how the new synthetic heart would never clog or fail like the human hearts of old. To ensure this, it was regulated and controlled by a small chip connected to the base of my skull. A fusion of technology and biology,
the chip was fused to the nerve endings of the spine. Belsham said it was to ensure the heart was regulated correctly and kept in working order. Then again, he had to say that. He could hardly say I was now controlled by a computer, could he? Either way, that’s how it was. The chip would keep me ticking over.
As impressed as I was with the science that had given me a new lease of life (wanted or not), I couldn’t help but think about getting out of the hospital so I could finish the job I started, but do it properly this time. Only that’s not how it worked out.
Instead, at the same time I was recovering in hospital, something happened. The actual details are hazy because it all went down so damn fast. Some said it was the Koreans. Others blamed the Arabs or the Russians. Some even said the U.S was responsible; that it was a botched plan to consolidate power. Either way, it doesn’t matter now. What matters is that someone released a virus; a deadly, highly contagious virus; one resistant to major fluctuations in temperature, and transmittable by air as well as blood and saliva. Worse was that it had a lengthy incubation period, so by the time people started to die, three quarters of the world’s population had been infected. Even so, there was hope for a while; at least until the mighty VIRSOFT said it was beyond their ability to stop. That’s when the panic started. For those who remember when films used to be made with actual people instead of CGI casts, you might be thinking some kind of zombie apocalypse was in the cards. It didn’t go down like that though. Real life was much more cruel and savage.
People died and stayed dead. The virus dreadfully effective. Within hours of the incubation period breaking, severe flu would onset the victim, who would in turn cough more of the virus into the atmosphere.
For all the technology, for all scientific advances, the world didn’t stand a chance. People were walking around dead and they didn’t even know it.