Vanadium Dark

by Ben Sheffield

  What had Robertson been looking at?

  Vanadocam footage was stored forever in hundreds of hard drives in the Pentagon sub-basement. He could rewind as far back as he needed to. All the facts were his if he was willing to do the digging. And he found he was more than willing. He was desperate.

  He examined the digital logs of what the Vanadocams had been looking at on the night of Robertson's suicide and then looked at the cases.

  He was disappointed. They were all mundane, nothing more exciting than a vehicular hit and run in Austin.

  He went back to the video of Sean Robertson's final hours and watched it again.

  He fast-forwarded at 20x, watched Sean Robertson bound from his seat, race to his suite, take pills, die.

  He watched with what the analyst side of him called “new eyes.” There had to be some clues.

  He reached the part where people gathered around Robertson's body. Emergency. Security. The Secretary. Mourners, although none of them seemed to be doing any mourning.

  Something was a bit off here.

  He wondered where the noseless man was.

  Now, he was nowhere to be found. That strange, easily-recognizable face eluded him in the crowd. He panned, swiveled, and manipulated the timeline, this time not trying to escape the creepy guy, but find him.

  He simply was not there.

  “What the fuck?” breathed Viktor. Videos should not change from watching to watching.

  “Sir? Is something wrong?”

  Ignoring Joyce, he ran the timeline forward beyond the point he'd watched before his fateful meeting with the Secretary.

  It was astounding how little fuss Sean Robertson's death caused at the Pentagon.

  Fluid samples were taken from his body, and he was ferried to the DC Chief Medical Examiner's office in a bag.

  The crowd dissipated, like dissatisfied concertgoers. Elvis had left the building.

  The carpet was steam-cleaned within the hour.

  The final people to leave the scene were Secretary Wilson and his personal aide, an untrustworthy little rodent whom Viktor had met once and wouldn't mind never meeting again. They stood by the spot the body had been with the aide whispering in the Secretary's ear.

  You know, he might be recommending you for Robertson's place. The thought chilled Viktor, and he could not say why. What if this whole engagement had started with his name being spoken in the Pentagon suite of a dead man?

  He hit ESC, and his vision went dark.

  “Joyce?”

  He pulled off the goggles.

  “Yes?”

  “Today's Saturday, and there should be time for something fun after my shift ends. If I catch a train into DC, you'll be able to contact me in case of an emergency, right?”

  “Of course, sir.” He heard a little judgmental tilt on the end of that sentence. Haven't you had more than enough time off?

  He couldn't wait to get out of here. The Zoo and its mysteries were choking him.

  He signed himself out of the Pentagon and got on the next maglev to Washington.

  Washington

  It was late at night, and Viktor was in DC's 14th Street. A well-known meat market.

  Crowds of young people milled around the red light district, all of them scrupulously well behaved. Fashions were edgy, but not too edgy. And Viktor knew why.

  Elephant Handlers worked with very limited time, and they profiled like shit. If a crime got committed and they didn't know by whom, they'd zero in on the guy with long hair or ripped jeans or the girl with a septum piercing and thigh-highs.

  It did not pay to stand out.

  He found a brothel and walked in. The sound of cars and shouting was replaced by pulverizing waves of sub-bass.

  “Evening.”

  The girl at the front desk looked up and gave his suit an up-and-down. “Hey. Do you work for the government?”

  “I plead the Fifth.”

  “Are you from the Pentagon?”

  “If I am, you don't need to know. So what's happening tonight?”

  She passed him a menu. He always got a kick out of that. A fucking menu.

  He perused the list of fetishes and oddments. The name at the top read MADAME HYPATIA'S MASSAGE PARLOUR. This sort of establishment was perfectly legal, but the euphemisms of older days had stuck.

  “What's a Doric Baptism?”

  “A girl pisses into your mouth.”

  He did a double take. “Do you ever wonder about your customers walking around the street, unattended? Seems like they'd stick out a little.”

  Down the bottom of the list were optional extras. Viktor noted that Vanado-Bracelets could be rented for ten new dollars per session. The venue was probably making a killing on the useless things. No shortage of paranoid nutbags visiting cathouses.

  Viktor made his selection, feeling embarrassingly vanilla, paid, and was escorted into a back room, where the lights were dimmed, and ersatz candles provided ersatz ambience.

  “Do you want this encounter to be enhanced?” The leggy middle-aged woman who was to be his amorata tonight asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  She held up a set of goggles. “These things. The dynamic VR modelers. Twenty new dollars extra.”

  He shrugged. “Oh, right... those things. Yeah, why not? No offence to your au naturel charms, of course.”

  The woman pinned electrodes to her body with dabs of spirit gum. Elbows, breasts, navel, and other places. Viktor fitted on the goggles, feeling the plastic mould itself around his face.

  The electrodes were the biggest innovation in sex in the past twenty years. They mapped the rough contours of the human body, allowing your partner's body to appear modified in the goggles.

  Now, love no longer needed to be blind. You could make your partner look however you wanted.

  More ass, if you pleased. Different proportions. A younger face. Yes, touch occasionally spoiled the illusion. You'd caress where the goggles said flesh existed, and your hand would touch just empty air. But even that could become erotic—the reminder of your erasure of humanity's imperfections and flaws. Like the hard, therapeutic jolt of a car changing gears.

  The goggles came with various presets built in. You could turn the dial to MEGA-BUSTY and watch the woman sprout comically huge breasts. You could turn it to EXOTIC and give the woman dark mocha skin. There were dull options like BLOND HAIR and TATTOOS, as well as more enterprising options for more enterprising people.

  You could turn the dial toward XY and watch the woman grow a dick. Viktor knew of supposed heterosexuals who used this option to obtain the experience of sex with a man without actually having sex with a man. He didn't judge.

  The final choice on the goggles was locked away. Well, officially it was forbidden. No matter. Large amounts of money would surely make it less forbidden.

  SMALL-FRAMED, it said. Another euphemism. The option was for patrons who wanted to fuck a child.

  Again, Viktor didn't judge.

  He used the VR goggles to remake the woman to his liking, lightening her skin a little, bringing in her waist, taking the distracting bony points off her elbows and knees. For some reason, it wasn't very pleasant. Maybe because it reminded him so much of the Vanadocam goggles.

  He shifted her proportions around, sculpting her like clay, and he realized something: he didn't want to fuck.

  Why not? Hadn't he gotten out of the Pentagon for a night of adventure?

  “Well, let's get on with it,” he said.

  She undressed him, making it into an erotic event, rubbing his flabby and unimpressive body and pretending to like what she saw. When she reached his cock she stretched open his foreskin and spread a little oil inside. Viktor lay back on the couch, watching her lithe body. He felt himself becoming tumescent. But only slightly.

  “You seem stressed.” This woman didn't talk. She purred.

  “I am. You know how they talk about a soul-destroying job? That's how I feel. Like my soul's destroyed.”

&n
bsp; “Mmm... Let's fix your soul... together.” Stupid. Trite. Her voice was breathy but emotionless. She pushed him down on to the lounge and straddled his body. His dick was half-erect, looking comically like a question mark.

  Viktor found that he'd rather talk than copulate. “You know what I'm thinking about at the moment?”

  “What?” The escort caressed his cock with vinyl-lacquered nails.

  “About sensory perception. About seeing things that aren't there.”

  “Are your goggles faulty?”

  He sighed. “No, not these the goggles. I'm talking about human vision.”

  She kissed him, and he returned the kiss. The taste of a breath mint passed from his mouth to his, and he pushed her away. He wanted to have his say.

  “You've heard of phantom limb sensation, where amputees feel a limb that isn't there. What if there was something like that for eyesight... seeing things that aren't there.” He had no idea why he was telling her this. “Especially the raw sensory input of nerves. If you analyze it, it’s full of blind spots, out of focus areas, and noise. But we never perceive this. Our brain edits it out... like how they used to cut film out of movies.”

  The woman prodded his completely limp penis, looking confused.

  “It's like the Vanadocam Network, in a way. The Vanadocams stream data. But sometimes, they break and transmit wrong or garbled input. It's the job of the Project Elephant mainframe to sort all the gibberish and hope that there's enough good Vanadocam data to patch over the mistakes.”

  She wasn't touching him any more. As a general rule, women didn't like being reminded of Vanadocams. They didn't like the reminder that a government agent could be in the room with them, unseen, watching them shower or change.

  Furthermore, he realized she now thought he was crazy.

  “But we've all had times when that didn't happen, haven't we? We've all had times when... I don't know... we thought we saw someone standing next to us... and then we turned, and there was nothing there. We've all been fooled by an optical illusion in a book.”

  She was quiet, but she wasn't leaving. This was probably routine for her—just another white-collar asshole blabbing because he had nobody else in his 9-5 workaday world that he could blab to.

  His brain felt fatigued, but his lips carried on moving, seemingly with a mind of their own. “I just don't know. None of us have any privacy now, and we think that's a good thing because we have a crime-fighting system that's reliable. But how do we know it's reliable? Remember Anzor? How do we know the Vanadocam videos aren't wrong? We've given up our privacy, but Project Elephant might not have held up their end of the deal.”

  She bravely tried to bring eroticism back into the encounter. “Mmm... I love clever men.” Fake as a phone recording.

  Unable to tolerate the bathos, he drew her close and resolved to make at least an effort to have sex with her. Perhaps he'd made her too perfect, and it was turning him off. He adjusted the dials on the goggles, restoring her proportions somewhat to what nature had given her.

  They embraced again, pressing their bodies together, sharing warmth. Viktor felt himself respond in a passionless way, and soon he began to attempt penetration.

  He closed his eyes, not wanting to ruin the moment of entry by looking in her eyes and seeing boredom and impatience.

  When he opened his eyes, he saw something he did not expect to see at all.

  The face in front of him was not a woman's.

  It wasn't even a man's.

  It had a huge forehead, a tiny nose, a receding chin. It opened its mouth in a smile, revealing seemingly dozens of frighteningly perfect teeth—each one a perfect copy and paste of the other—with none of nature's variation.

  Tiny eyes with no pupil.

  He was embracing the horrible thing.

  He was about to be inside the horrible thing.

  The loathsome creature was not a reptile or an insect, but it resembled those things far more than a human.

  I AM THE NEXT, THE NEW, THE LAST

  Viktor's mind spasmed like a boxer pounded with a hard right hook. He opened his mouth to shout, and what left was a scream.

  A scream that hurt his ears.

  He took the hand that had been wrapped around the woman's shoulders and slammed the base of his palm into the creature's face. A shrill electronic squall left the gaping pseudomouth. Viktor was aware of limbs surging to life like coils of springs, pushing him away, pushing him off the lounge. He fell to the floor, the VR goggles torn from his head.

  He looked up at the noseless man and saw only the prostitute he had paid to spend an hour with. She was sobbing, and blood dripped from a broken nose.

  “Get out of here, you fucking freak!” She screeched. “Security! Help!”

  Oh my God. “I'm sorry, I... I... ”

  “Get out! I'll ruin your fucking vision, asshole!”

  Then, door swung inward, and two men entered the room.

  “What's going on here?”

  She jabbed a trembling finger at him. J'accuse. “He hit me! He went fucking batshit and hit me!” Saliva and blood flew from her mouth in a spray.

  Both men glanced at Viktor, lying naked on the ground. What they saw clearly didn't impress them.

  “You. Get your clothes on, and fuck off out of here. Playtime's over. If you're not dressed in thirty seconds, you're going out on your ass.”

  Viktor struggled back into his pants and shirt, his tongue suddenly not supplying a single thing to say. He wanted to apologize to the escort, but what apology could he offer? He wanted to explain himself to the bouncers, but what explanation could he give?

  So he nodded awkwardly and shuffled out of the club. As he left the door, one of the men grabbed his shoulder and shoved him out onto the street. He fell to the ground for the second time in a minute, taking some skin off his hands when they hit the pavement.

  There was nothing else for him to do.

  He boarded on a train and headed back to Pentagon Metro, lost in thought and just plain lost. He stared into his lap, as if seeking wisdom there.

  Is this what it feels like to go mad?

  As the maglev entered Pentagon Metro, he caught sight of the pale dawn breaking in the east like a cracked egg. The sun was a sickly poisoned yolk.

  He could shower and sleep for a few hours. Then it was back to work in the Zoo.

  Back to wearing goggles.

  Back to making sense of the nation's mysteries when he could not even make sense of his own.

  Part 2: This Machine Kills

  “If you want to shine like the sun, first you have to burn like it.”

  - Adolf Hitler

  Leavenworth

  Anzor rose up from sleep to hear an immense, rolling crackle, as the banks of lights went on in all the cells.

  He was well trained by the prison routine. He came wide awake at six every morning, as if he was chained into the prison power circuit like just another light.

  He blinked in the yellow glare. In the next cell, he saw Lucas sit up, yawn, and rub his eyes.

  Bulls stalked the halls, unlocking cells and yelling. “You have two minutes to make your bed! Two minutes! Then you will be escorted from your cells in groups of ten! Move! Move! Move!”

  Shower day.

  Other sounds gathered like mothballs in the corner of his hearing. Voices talking, muttering, or yelling. The rustle of dozens of paper prison uniforms. He was used to all of it now. He only noticed things when they weren't going to schedule.

  A guard went down his cellblock, unlocking cells at random via remote control. “You, you, and you. Join the others. Shower time. Stay out of arms’ reach of other prisoners. Keep your hands out where we can see them.”

  Anzor and nine others were first to be showered, it seemed. With guards before and after them, they went to the large communal shower room, where they undressed and were shoved through the running water like cattle. “Keep walking, and come out the other side. Squirt some soap into your hands if
you need it. Don't stop walking.”

  If you walked slowly, a shower at Leavenworth could be made to last for thirty seconds—enough time to wash under your arms, shampoo your hair, or clean your ass-crack and balls. Not enough time for all three.

  In his early days, Anzor had been scared of prison showers. Weren't they the place where mishaps occurred?

  He hadn't counted on the short shower times. Difficult to rape someone in thirty seconds.

  He came out the other side, toweled himself off, trying not the think of how many people had used that towel already, and picked up a pair of clean johnnies in his size.

  Nothing varied from routine.

  He went from the shower room to breakfast, which was likely to be oatmeal or sandwiches with nearly transparent slices of bologna. Prisoners were encouraged to supplement their diet with blocks of volucertein, protein rendered from the crushed and compacted bodies of insects. Anzor had tried some once. It was chalky in consistency and left a weird taste in his mouth. Once, he'd gotten a poorly-crushed block and had found pair of cockroach legs. He stayed away from volucertein after that.

  After eating, he clocked on for work at the prison laundry. The job was dull but safe—fewer sharp objects than in the kitchen.

  In every movie he'd ever seen, prisoners spent lots of time unattended in each other's company. In Leavenworth, there were guards everywhere. You were always exposed. There was nowhere you could stand where you were not in sight of a bull. If a general order went out to put you down, three darts full of md.99 would fell you from three different directions.

  He shoved armfuls of dirty laundry into the banks of industrial-sized washing machines, feeling the vibrations of the immense camshafts shaking the floor, shaking him like dice. He worked as slowly as he could without obviously loafing. The idea of being in prison was not to stand out in any way.

  Too lazy, and the guards would take notice of you. Too fast, and the prisoners would.

  But being unobserved was difficult for anybody called Anzor, especially when you were the Anzor.