They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy

by R. D. Harless

  She stuck her tongue out and gave me the finger.

  I gave her two back. "You also got money to burn because you use psychics like toilet paper."

  The Father shook his head and moved his hand across the tops of the liquor bottles. "Just the one. Best of the bunch, really. Psycho Silvy."

  He dropped that name like it was nothing and came up with a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue and set it on the table in front of me.

  "You want a drink before we get down to it?"

  Chapter 18

  A Conversation with Assholes

  I took five swallows of the Johnny Walker and set the bottle down. Then I went for the bottle of Everclear they had on the table.

  "Let's do some real drinking," I said, breaking the seal and up-ending it. Burned like a motherfucker, but I had walked into a surprise dick-measuring contest, and I had to put on a show. I wasn't gonna let this be Missouri all over again.

  I passed the bottle to the Father. "Your turn."

  He smiled. "What the hell. Won't be my hangover." He took a couple of swallows and tried to stifle coughing on it as best he could and passed the bottle to the little girl.

  "Try the Basil Hayden," the Mother told me. "That's the smoothest whiskey you'll drink."

  The Father pushed a pack of my brand of smokes to me. I slapped it against my palm with a "Thanks" and lit one from it.

  The little girl passed the bottle of Everclear straight to the Mother, who sipped it.

  The Father felt at the two chest pockets on his button-up and drew out a pack of cigarillos. He held one out to me. "You mind?" I flared it up for him.

  With the taste of smoke and alcohol filling my mouth I could almost imagine being at the bar down the road from the factory when I shut my eyes. Felt like coming home, that alcohol-fueled fire burning warm in my stomach. I took a deep breath and took another drink of Johnny Walker. Just needed some music to go along with it. The shit heads at the table had to ruin it by talking.

  "If you listen hard enough, you can hear your liver screaming," the little girl said.

  "Takes a man to drink like that," I replied.

  "That it does," the Father nodded. "And there are sadly too few of those at this table."

  "You're only saying that because we have vaginas right now," the Mother said.

  "Yeah, right now, you do."

  The little girl told him, "Suck shit, you senile old bastard."

  He grunted a laugh and puffed his cigarillo and blew smoke from his nose while he reached for a bottle of Gentleman Jack. Nobody at the table acted like they had anything better to do. "So how'd they treat you in Washington, Moses?"

  I did not give a shit to talk any fucking small talk, but it was part of the damn game, just like it had been with Kamikaze. These were the men in charge, and if you didn't let them be in charge, everything would go straight to hell. It was like dealing with a woman on her period.

  "They were cops, so you know how that is," I replied. "Got my ass kicked by that Tank chick."

  "No shit. That's the dyke one, right?" he asked the little girl.

  She nodded and stuck a joint from her pocket in her mouth. "Yeah, Federal rug muncher. Be a pal and light me, would you?"

  I just looked at her. "You're gonna make that girl smoke a joint?"

  "I'm smoking it. Light me the fuck up, would you?"

  I lit it. Felt shitty doing it, but I didn't need to start a bunch of shit over it.

  "We're in Mexico, by the way," the Father said. "One of the parts where nobody goes."

  The Mother put down her bottle of Basil Hayden and asked me, "Did you really break into a psychic's house on LSD?" He/she pushed the whiskey to me to get me to try some.

  I took a fucking drink of it so he/she would leave me alone.

  "Yeah, that's good whiskey. But, yeah, I got out of my mind on acid so if she accidentally read me she'd think it was just some part of a dream."

  "That's creative," the Father said. "Didn't work out, I take it?"

  "No, I broke in there and got her all tied up and everything. But, my fucking luck, it turned out she was telekinetic and she about blew my nuts off with the gun in my pants."

  "Always some shit, isn't there?" the Father smiled.

  The little girl blew a ring of smoke and asked me through it, "How you holding up about your friend? You making it?"

  Going back and forth between the three of them was giving me a damn headache. They were tag-teaming me so I didn't get a chance to talk; another way to just beat me into submission and get me to bow to their alpha status without me realizing it. Jurgen Chaotisher had taught me that trick.

  I nodded "Fine" back to the little girl, then immediately turned to questioning the Father before anybody else could talk, "So let me ask you; Uncle Bob, right? That your bunker we broke into, wasn't it? There were a bunch of books in there that said they were by 'Uncle Bob.' That Dr. Doland shit was just a front you made up."

  "Yeah, you are correct," he said. "Did you have time to look at any of them?"

  "The books? Kinda glanced through some, yeah."

  "What'd you think?"

  The guy was fishing for a fucking compliment on his homemade serial killer books. I took another hit of whiskey and kissed his ass with, "They were interesting, very interesting. You wrote all those yourself? I bet that took awhile."

  "Yeah, I went through a phase where I was really into that stuff. Younger days, far behind. So--"

  I acted like I didn't know he was about to ask me something and talked right over him. "How'd you get a Nazi bunker into North Dakota anyway? And that was your stuff Tracey stole, right? She stole your own stuff back for you? Did you not want to go back there?" I was just throwing shit at the guy.

  He lost a beat; he wasn't used to answering to other people and tried to play it off like he was doing me a favor. He flicked ash off his cigarillo. "Y'know, everybody asks me that. I like to tell them that it's a trade secret how I got that bunker there, but the truth is I didn't. Some German spies or fifth columnists or what have you built it during the war as a base of operations on US soil. It was never in Germany, I didn't transport it here, nothing like that. Getting back to the SCEIA, you tell them anything?"

  "So we stole your own stuff back for you?" I repeated. "Why couldn't you get it yourself? You know Tracey fucked up your test subject or whatever the fuck that thing was, right?"

  The Father looked at me through his hijacked eyes and narrowed the lids. "Did. You. Tell. The SCEIA. Anything? I think the question's fairly fucking clear, myself."

  I took a long gulp of Johnny Walker to make him wait before I answered. "Nothing, man."

  "Nothing at all, he says. That's not what I heard."

  I set the bottle down loudly. "Oh, I gave 'em Tracey. Sold her right up the fucking river. That was the only reason I went into custody, to fuck her life up. But if I had known Agent Red was dead, I wouldn't have done it."

  "And you gave them Barker Plumbing and Heating," he said, watching the tobacco smoke curl.

  I sucked on my cigarette. "Yeah, I guess. Is that important?"

  "It'll do. That's all you told them?"

  "That's all I fucking knew. I had some other shit going on with a couple of murder charges to worry about, so I was a little preoccupied."

  "Well, we're just lucky us you didn't know any more, I guess," the Father said.

  Before I could tell him to go fuck himself, the Mother jumped in. "Are you still mad at Tracey?"

  "The fuck kinda question is that?" I said to him/her. "Yeah, I'm still pissed at her. I told her not to bring Will in and now he's dead. I'm not gonna just let that shit go. She did it because Tracey does whatever the fuck Tracey wants."

  The Father nodded. "I hear you, I hear you. Here's the thing about that, though. Tracey is necessary to us. All right? So she's off limits; she's above this kind of petty revenge shit. Same way the W.C.S.C. has been forbidden from touching you for Run ALC or Kamikaze."

  'Petty.' Fuck. Him.
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  "I didn't kill Kami--"

  He talked right over me. "That's not to say, however, that we don't see your side of it." He gestured around the table, "I think we've had our own problems with Tracey promising things and not being able to deliver, and there are consequences for that sort of thing. There has to be or the whole system breaks down. So, as a peace offering, we've got a gift for you." He pulled a bundle of Mexican newspaper from under the table and set it in front of me. "Go ahead, you don't have to wait 'til Christmas."

  A red stain had come through the underside of the paper and soaked up one side.

  The little girl with the weed-glazed eyes pounded her fist on the table and chanted, "Do it, do it, do it."

  I set my cigarette in my lips and folded back the newspaper. Wrapped in it was a cut of meat with smooth white skin about eight inches long and maybe a half an inch thick.

  "The fuck is this?" I asked because that's what you're supposed to say even when you know what something like that is.

  The Father put a cell phone on the table. "You ever hear the phrase 'take it out of your ass?' That right there is what you get. It was a shame to deface a work of art like Tracey's ass, I'll admit, but her pride in it kind of added another level of punishment to the whole thing." He held the phone up. "I got the video of our boy Duck cutting it off for you. You're welcome to watch it, but turn the volume down because she screams like an old momma cat getting skinned alive."

  Now I lost a beat. They were testing my limits, seeing how far I could go and how far they could go with me, and they had sure as shit one-upped my Everclear stunt. "Yeah, I'll take a look," I said. I picked the fucking phone up and pressed 'play.'

  On the small screen, Tracey had duct tape over her eyes and ears. Some guy had her pinned to a grimy floor, kneeling on her back.

  "Why isn't she teleporting away?" I asked.

  "Silvy left her mind going so she could feel the pain but cut off all access to her body and abilities," the Father told me.

  Six minutes into the video, the guy Duck started with the cutting. I watched eight minutes of that shit, keeping my face like stone while the video focused on the knife sawing that hunk of her off. There was still six more of video left when I shut it off and said, "I think I get the point," tossing the phone back to the Father. "The guy does good work." I pushed the fillet of ass back to him. "I don't need this, though. Thanks."

  He pushed it back to me. "That's yours. You keep it."

  Through a cloud of stoned smoke, the little girl asked, "Aren't you even gonna say 'thank you'? That's a grade-A cut right there."

  I put my hand on the Johnny Walker bottle with a "Yeah, thanks," put the bottle to my lips and straight-up chugged as much as I could stomach. Jesus Christ. Wherever the fuck I was, Tracey was the least of my problems right now. I stood up, my head spinning, and nearly fell on my ass. I had no food in me to handle the kind of drinking I was doing. Had to brace myself on the table. "Well, this's been good," I slurred out, "But I'm'a go."

  "Sit down," the Father said like Grandpa Walton being stern with his kids. "Have a seat. Right now, you hover in a state between life and death. None of us know which you are until you exit this canopy; and only the terms by which you leave determine whether you're alive or dead when you do." He pointed up. "The Red Ghost up there just can't wait to find out."

  I looked up as if I could see through the canopy or something. "Is that the guy that's been shooting at me?"

  The Father nodded. "Correct. He's waaaay up there with an oxygen tank and a heated suit." He held his arms out like he was talking about a fish he caught. "He's got a high-powered rifle with a telescope about yea big on it. He's a precog, which made him the bane of the CIA and MI6 during the Cold War. You're old enough to remember him, right? They used him to make us all scared of the communists and frighten Post-Humans into signing up with Uncle Sam."

  Shit, I hadn't heard the Red Ghost's name since I was a kid.

  "Yeah, I remember him."

  "I thought so, Anyway, he knows where you'll be before you get there, being a precog, and he's just waiting to pull the trigger if you become a problem. How many problems has he notched up so far?" he asked the little girl.

  "A few," she puffed.

  The three of them stared at me, waiting to see what I would do.

  I sat back down at the table and grabbed the Everclear to do another swallow.

  The Father clapped his hands once. "Good boy. I think we've all got other things to do, so why don't we get to the real meat of this meeting? Moses, do you know anything about the nature of reality?"

  I didn't say anything, just stared at the table, ground out my almost-spent cigarette and thought about my apartment and the factory and Will.

  "Did you hear the question?" he asked me.

  I turned to him, to 'Uncle Bob' the fucking sick serial killer shit head, slowly. "I don't know anything about the fucking nature of reality," I said. Not only was he a sick fuck, but he was a condescending dickhole, too.

  "There, that wasn't hard. Thank you. Scientists have found that the things in our 'reality' tend to exist in what should be mutually exclusive states depending on if they're being observed or not. Electrons, for example, are particles when we look at them under a microscope, but when we look away, they behave like waves. What science is coming to terms with is that electrons have what they've dubbed a spherical wave structure. All matter has wave structures. But we don't notice because human perception is too finely tuned-in to seeing the puppet show instead of the strings. It's just a filter that interprets a car crash of wave frequencies into what we 'see.' Light, sound, the electromagnetic radiations of y-rays, x-rays, ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves, radio waves, particle waves, these are the things that make up 'reality.' Most of them we can't perceive, but those we can are experienced by separate senses, eyes for vision, ears for sound, etc., and this causes our brains to experience divisions where there aren't any. Then those false divisions are reinforced through the labels our language assigns to each experience. There's no difference between an El Camino, the Pope, a fly in the Balkans, or a collapsing star. It's all the same shit, different clash of frequencies. 'Reality' is an illusion carved out by our brains, which are also a part of the illusion. That make sense so far?"

  Jesus Christ. "Yeah. Pretty sure I need to be either more drunk or less drunk for this," I replied. I just had to let him get his shit out. Just play the game. Just keep my mouth shut while he rambled this crap.

  The little girl grinned and held up his/her joint. "It's a trip, mate. Completely bitchcakes."

  The Father went on like he was reciting all this from memory. "So, we have the question of the structure of reality. When you crack it open and look at it, you find one thing in this universe that parallels this wave behavior that all matter in the universe exhibits: holograms. Holograms are created by illuminating a wavefront, waves again, to create what they call the object wavefront from a two dimensional information source. Now, remember that last part. Waves, frequencies, vibrating, that's what all of this is. 'Reality' is an 'object' given false depth from an information source, of information tightly packed. That's why particles across vast distances can nearly instantly affect each other, which, given our current understanding of physics, should not be possible. Their separation of location is an illusion of this wave projection, but going by the holographic model, their two-dimensional information is adjacent regardless of what we perceive as the particles' distance from each other. So it becomes clear that our three-dimensional world is simply a projection of two-dimensional information."

  What. The. Fuck.

  "And, if we're all connected to everything as part of this information source, it suddenly makes sense why Post-Humans don't have to live according to the rules everyone else has to. It becomes clear how someone like Tracey can be in one place on Earth and then another. Because there are no separate places, only unified information given false substance. Silvy can experience our thoughts because the
re are no separate thoughts. You can create fire because you and a flame are both just pieces of information with no difference between you. Post-Humans prove and supersede the programming of reality as this holographic model, this giant Universe Machine. There's no difference between your body and mine," he said. "We only think there is because our brains confine us to thinking that way."

  The Mother kicked in with, "He's straight, by the way. Don't let the homo-erotic subtext fool you."

  The little girl choked on smoke and pounded the table, "I was thinking the same fucking thing!"

  The Father gave the Mother the finger with a laugh. He leaned forward toward me, elbows on the table. "What we're doing here is pretty straightforward, don't get hung up in the complexities too much because you'll go nuts. The part that concerns you is that we're testing Post-Humans with singular abilities, with only one gift, to isolate what's different in you that causes the perceived divisions to no longer exist. We analyze how your powers interact with everything around us, to the holographic super-structure, in a standardized and monitored way so we can find the truth beneath the illusion. People like you are the key to the lock no one can see."

  The Mother added, "This isn't just important, it's the only thing that's important. We're digging through to the sub-basement of everything, and we've already made discoveries that can be built on to make alterations to the code. Moving atoms first, mountains down the road to effect real, tangible change to everything around us."

  "That's right," the Father nodded.

  There was a pause that meant I was finally being allowed to say something.

  I licked the Everclear off my lips. "Okay. All this. All of this, has been about this hologram shit?" I slammed a fist on the table and rattled the liquor bottles. "All of this is for some crazy bullshit about the universe being a hologram? Goddammit, are you fucking kidding me? People are dead for this retarded shit. My best friend is dead. My life is shot to shit." I snatched up the newspaper'd hunk of flesh collecting flies and threw it at the Father. "Get this fucking thing away from me." He slapped it down before it hit his face.