Not good, not good.
Nausea set in almost immediately. The woman in front of me blurred, and I couldn't make out her smile. I instinctively pulled the data jack out and collapsed out of my chair onto the floor. Three days ago. Shift had taken three days of my life away. I tried to focus on a single point, subduing the nausea. The dizziness wasn't helping. I suddenly felt hungry, thirsty, sweaty, and exhausted all at once.
Shift wasn't intended to last longer than eight hours. A 72-hour Shift binge was essentially suicide, at best you'd be a vegetable. I closed my eyes and tried to focus. Ok. You were drugged and woke up at home three days later. Someone had to of taken care of you. Someone had sat for you while Shift took its effects. Good. This is reason. At least somewhat plausible reason.
I snapped my eyes open. Catbot had a camera running all day, every day. I knew I got that silly upgrade for a reason. My catbot came equipped with a simple camera that transmitted video to a local storage drive I kept on hand. You know, for backups of important data. I had feeds of her musings for months on hand. I could view the video and see who took care of me and what they did.
Sitting up was proving to be a bit easier. The clarity I’d achieved began to clear up my nausea and stress. I tried not to think about the implications if my hypothesis was incorrect. The unknown truly was scarier. Catbot entered the room and purred. How do they always know when you need them the most?
I walked to the kitchen and poured another glass of bourbon. I knew I was dehydrated and low on energy but I needed my nerves calmed. What was on that video could tell me a lot more than I'd like to know. The bourbon stung my raw throat at first, then settled into a smooth numbness.
I hopped on my terminal and pulled up my data store. Sure enough, I saw the most recent videos dated correctly. I clicked on the first day's video of when I would have been here, but zonked out by Shift. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I was hoping for something. Come on catbot, do me this favor and be my sitter's buddy.
. . . .
For the longest time, I simply sat staring at the static on my HUD, watching
What I had seen had worried me, shook me to my core really. I thought, with my apparently limited grasp on my own reality, that I had it all figured out. It seemed that I was wrong.
I clicked the small button in the bottom left corner that would replay the short clip. It lasted about five minutes, starting from when the door clicked open. The feed was a bit hazy and fuzzy. Almost as though something were interfering with catbot's camera.
The door slowly opened, and I saw my unconscious body being gently carried into the living room. Score one for my babysitter, I had thought. At least she was taking care of me. Catbot must have backed under the couch, because the feed swung around violently and then a flap of material obscured the view. Its head peeked out, and all I saw a pair of legs. Nice legs at that, I considered once more. There was no sound in the video, but I imagined that whomever owned that pair of legs had deposited me on the couch. Catbot watched as they turned and started to depart, and I saw the view widen a bit. The cat must have edged out to see more.
The woman walked up to the open door and passed through, pausing briefly to turn and look at me on the couch to ensure all was in order. It shocked me again to see that it was the very same woman who had greeted me on the 'net earlier, the one who had greeted me as Rimer. Apparently she had a flesh and blood analogue. Curiouser and curiouser, I had thought.
What happened next still creeped the ever-loving crap out of me. I could watch this feed again, and again, and again, and still not believe it. As soon as the door closed, as if on cue, I sat up bolt-upright on my couch, my eyes flying open. Catbot must have scurried out from under the couch as the woman left, because I had a full view of myself. The freaky thing was that my eyes no longer had pupils, no irises. They were of pure white, and even seemed to have a hazy glow to them, as though some sort of power was trying to escape. My digital mouth hung open in a wordless scream, as though it were fighting something intensely strong, and looking at that representation of myself, I thought the battle had already been lost.
Mouth still open, I had stood up, spine ramrod-straight, and proceeded to jack into my network. And there I stood, cable dangling down my back, mouth open as far as my jaw would allow, streamers of light worming their way out of my wide-open eyes. And then, the eyes turned upon catbot, and the feed went to pure, snow-white static.
--
Contemplating the situation was beginning to take its toll; a migraine began to form. The kind of migraine that just splits your head open, feeling as though a knife had been jammed into your skull. A real black headache. I had gotten them in the past, but this one, it felt like no other. Spots began to dance in my vision and I gave up on any hope of accomplishment this afternoon. I needed to get rid of this. Right now.
I went to the medicine cabinet and grabbed a few of my special headache pills. Simple, over the counter pills that have a dollop of caffeine scooped in with all the other chemicals meant to combat your body's aches and pains. They took care of me when I needed them to, and that was alright by me.
Pouring a glass of water, I downed two of them and sat down in my chair, bourbon forgotten. The stabbing sensation in my head was giving way to a ripping feeling, as though my brain were being torn apart by wild fingers with long, pointy nails. This was the worst.
Well, not quite the worst, I began to think, as the spots dancing in my vision seemed to blossom and grow. At first, they had looked like small dark spots, chased away each time I turned my gaze towards them. Now they grew exponentially, gaining form and color. They went from a dark grey to a pure glowing eggshell white, obliterating my vision as it was happening. This had happened before, losing my vision to a migraine. I had heard that sometimes the optic nerves are affected by such occurrences, but this felt different. Something was wrong.
I began to wonder what else the Shift had done to me, or, what it was continuing to do.
As the spots grew, my vision shrank. Periphery gave way to the glowing white haze, and then I could barely see more than two pinpricks in front of me. Then, it was gone. I was blinded. My eyes were wide open, and all I could see was pure white. I wondered if this was what had happened to me three days prior. Did I look like the freak I had become that Catbot recorded? Maybe so, but this headache, god, was it terrible. My ability to formulate rational thought was slipping away as well, as though I were being forced out of my own brain, out of my own mind. Everything began feeling muddy. Everything was slow. I couldn't think straight anymore. I tried to reassert myself, to regain control over my sluggish brain, but I couldn't. Something blocked me, something purely white. Blindingly white. I tried, but...I couldn't...I can't...I...I.
"It gets easier to accept me", said a voice somewhere, everywhere in my head. A woman's voice. Calming, soothing.
"Soon, you won't even notice me taking over. We blind you for the first few times, just so the sensory overload doesn't sever any connections." She kept talking, "You might know me, my friend. Or at least, you have been searching for me." Huh? I had no idea who she was. I barely understood what was happening.
"I am Rimer. The real Rimer."
"R-R-Rimer?" I stammered. It was all I could muster. I wasn't even sure I thought it or actually said it aloud. I felt a tingle on my data jack and then a surge of bright white pain.
"There. The last connection made. That one always gives us problems. It connects deep in your brain to help us better manage your emotions. For our jobs, we like you to not feel anger, sadness, or remorse.”
“You've been searching for me.” she continued. “You've noticed the few remaining crumbs I’d accidentally left along my path. I see that you’re fairly clever, now that I can directly punch into you. A late bloom
ing life of crime has allowed you to learn from young mistakes."
I finally managed a scream. "What the fuck is happening to me?!" A chuckle was the response.
"My manners, my manners. I'm so sorry. Again, I am Rimer. We are aware of your discoveries about me, about my new technologies. To correct the problem when assassination doesn't work, we tend to revert to an older version of our mind control process. My friend, you've simply come too close to exposing us. We now can control you, whenever we want, wherever we want, through Persistence."
I let that sink in for a few seconds. "What do you mean 'control me’?”
Her response sounded rehearsed. "We handle your movement and your emotions. We know everything you know, we control everything you will know. We start your life fresh. Trust me, you will be fine. However, cooperation isn't much of an option I'm afraid. We can no longer allow you to exist with free will."
Suddenly, it hit me. The blue lights from the assassins. Those were being controlled by this woman who claims to be Rimer.
"I am Rimer." she said, correcting my thought. She knows my thoughts. Knew them as I’d formulated them.
"You are quick, my friend. Yes, the blue thugs are slowly being phased in from those with free will. I will say it was a challenge at first to coordinate combat. You have taught us a lot with your short encounters!"
This can't be.
"It can, and it is. I'm sorry."
Chapter 8
We.
She had said 'we.' As in plural, more of us. She wasn't the only one pulling the strings. It made sense, really. I couldn't see one single person putting all of this together. It was something organized. Well organized at that.
"Lost in reverie, are we?" she said, snapping me back to reality. "I think it’s time we asserted a bit more control over you."
I followed her as she walked away from me, towards the middle of the simulated room. It seemed as though we were in an un-walled, white expanse. Everything was sheer, bright white, and blinding. In the middle of this, an ethereal, floating console appeared, as though she willed it into existence. She began tapping away at the floating keyboard and watched with bemusement as her commands were accepted one after the other.
Looking down at my hands, I began to see them fade away, chunk by chunk. I was losing myself, one cubic mass at a time. Voxels, I think they're called. She tapped out a few more sequences into the console and sighed with delight. "There we go, you won't need to worry about much, anymore" she said with a smirk. “We’ll handle the rest.”
My body continued to disappear, bit by bit. There was no pain, just a sad whisking away of my being. A small square of my body would burst with light, fade away into swirling, glowing particles, and simply evaporate into the air.
In this surreal and haunting moment, something seemed a little bit off. I mean, she had hijacked 'my' mind, right? How could she do this so easily? I then realized that I’d let her in, willingly at that. As though I’d opened the door to a vampire. I’d wanted somebody to take my reins, so desperate for somebody to help me along. I had thought she would help me, be my savior, and in reality she was no better than those creeps that she’d sent after me.
Well, fuck this. I wasn’t going to become a drooling idiot, controlled by some asshole with a keyboard. It was in my rage that clarity returned, though I had already lost the majority of my left hand. I realized that yes, this was still my mind, my playground. I imagined a brick wall and slammed it into existence, disrupting her connection to me. With that, I noticed a thin tendril of light that lay twitching on the ground. It had apparently been connected to Rimer. She had been somehow taking me into her, accepting my being. My wall had altered that connection so much that now it flailed along the ground. That was easy, though my hand was still missing.
Ok, I thought, we can do this on my terms. I imagined my hand as full and it came back into reality with an audible *pop*. Then I imagined a gun in my hand and steeled myself to drop the brick wall.
"I was afraid of this." Again, her voice was both in one and all places in my head. I thought I had broken the connection. I instinctively readied my proverbial pistol, pointing it at the whiteness in front of me.
"The problem with beta versions is all the silly bugs that crop up. I think our Shift engineers are getting clumsy, allowing side effects to creep in where we don't want. I'm afraid with your high dose, while we were able to alter your brain chemistry to show a new Persistence identity, mine to be specific. However, the drug adjusted your ability to articulate within the Persistence environment. That is, your imagination and your reality within Persistence will be blurred. Some things are Persistence, some are your own manifestations. Like that gun you're pointing with."
Rimer then snorted, presumably at me. I was pointing a gun into bright nothingness. I suppose I did appear a fool. But since I came this far...
I discharged the weapon. I emptied the clip into the white. There wasn't any sound coming from the gun or any impacts. The gun was completely silent. But the bullets were definitely real enough for Persistence. They pierced the whiteness, shredding it, allowing Persistence's blackness to seep through. I saw data streams through the holes: images, videos, and wave representations of sound. I had never been so happy to see the network behind the screen.
Rimer didn't blind me. She’d run a program within my brain that allowed her to place a white room around myself. Then she emitted a signal strong enough where it didn't need a direct feed. She didn't need the data jack cable, it could be done wirelessly. A wireless signal with enough power to control a human being.
I finally created a hole large enough in the white for me to walk through. I harshly spoke a command, 'LOGOFF,’ and my world, my reality, was returned to me. Catbot was cleaning herself nonchalantly, barely noticing my presence. Typical catbot. An angry booming voice echoed in my head "This isn't over. We will assume your role in this world. Thanks for the bug report." A flash of pain again, indicating her exit. The sarcastic notion of a bug report wasn’t lost on me. So long, bitch.
It felt good to have her out of my head. The oppressive, blinding whiteness had retreated, giving rise to my own rational, though still fuzzy, thought. She had gotten in too easily, and why not? I hadn't been prepared. Next time she'd find the entrance to my mind guarded. To be honest, I was really deluding myself. I had no fricken clue on how to protect my mind. Oh well, there would be time for that later. Right now, I needed to get a handle on my emotional state. I could feel my blood running hot, the pressure running high, though not angry in the slightest. The virtual woman had recognized me as Rimer. I could twist that to my advantage somehow. I needed to if I wanted to figure out what was going on.
I glanced at my untouched glass of bourbon. It had been sitting out for a few days now, though did it ever really go bad? Snatching it up, I downed it in a single pull, neglecting to affect the snobbishness with which I normally drank it; swirling around my mouth and letting its complex tastes wash over my tongue. Not now. Now I just needed the burn down my throat, the warmth in my stomach.
That being settled, feeling much calmer, I went to close the blinds. I didn't want the world to come in just yet, I had some research to do. For the foreseeable future, I thought it might be best to avoid Persistence and to find information in the meatspace. I knew a few shady characters who had dabbled in the old hacker rings. Formerly anonymous, some of their kind had risen to an actual political party, and now many from the old days had turned towards the establishment. Fortunately, a small few of my friends had spurned that notion, rejecting it in a fashion so eerily familiar to those who spurned the war, clamoring for peace rather than violence. These still fought their own private war, and they could probably help me out.
Or so I hoped, it had been a long time since I sent them a Christmas card.
Crap, I was hungry as well as thirsty. I rooted around the cabinets for some food and was exalted to find a pack of beef jerky. That would last me for a while. I'
d probably have a good few hours on the bus to kill, and I didn't want my stomach growling throughout. As a confirmed bachelor, my fridge was empty, save for a moldering carton of yogurt. No thanks. Jerky would do me fine.
I tossed the jerky in a ratty old backpack, along with a few clothes and other necessities. A toothbrush, small tube of toothpaste, and a steel flask given to me by an old friend. There was a blank area where an etching was supposed to go, but he had left it blank. Just as well, most of those engravings were ridiculous anyway. Looking around, satisfied that I'd be good for at least a little while anyway, I made my way towards the front door. I opened it and stepped into the sunshine.
Outside, I was greeted by a short man flanked by two of the Faceless. He was a smiling, conniving looking man, with a pencil-thin moustache and arched eyebrows that gave him a constant look of surprise. His face was pitted with the scars of old acne. He must have been an awkward teenager, but his later years were good to him.
It was the Faceless that caused my heart to sink. It felt as though icy fingers had gripped it and squeezed. These were creatures of legend, but now were doled out to the private sector. It was said that they were created during the Unstable Times (whatever that meant) but in truth they were simply failed government experiments; creatures that were engineered to be super-soldiers. We had just come off of a successful failure, and it was thought that no more 'normal' men of the good ole' red, white, and blue needed to die. Drafts would be a thing of the past, and we would have a vast army of cloned soldiers who would feel no pain and have no emotional ties. They would fight for us and our freedom, without us ever needing to sacrifice another drop of human blood.
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