Jacob's Trouble 666

by Terry James

  With the process completed, everyone present studied its grim appearance, then looked to the controller, to the little man who was his prisoner, and to the van operator who now helped drag the prisoner up two grated metal steps and onto the platform.

  The man made no protest when they pushed him to his knees and forced his neck downward into the concave notch.

  Another device descended. It, too, was notched--opposite in configuration to the lower notch--so that when fitting over the back of the prisoner's neck, it locked to form a perfect circle with the bottom notch, trapping the man's head.

  The two Decap Unit specialists stepped off the platform, one of them returning to the panel housing the various buttons that controlled the van's ominous machinery. The man remained motionless and silent in his pathetic kneeling position on the platform, supporting his weight on the palms of his hands. When the operator pushed a black button, the shimmering metal blade descended slowly with a mechanized droning sound until it reached the back of the condemned's neck. It slowed almost imperceptibly while pinching through the first layers of flesh, then into the muscles. It continued to slice through vertebra, spinal cord, arteries and trachea, completing its journey with a clank against the bottom of the lower notch.

  Blood spurted from the severed carotids, the head plopped heavily into a metal container, the body stiffened, then lay jerking in spasmodic death throes on the platform. The executioners hurriedly removed the corpse to the cheers of those gathered at the scene and heaved the body into the van through a side disposal chute. Another mechanized unit whirred from within the van and made several sweeps across the platform, shooting high-pressure streams of precisely directed water that forced the dead man's blood to run onto the street and into a nearby sewer drain.

  “On your interface Response Unit, you have witnessed which of the following? Press the response key for the answer you think is correct.

  A. Injustice to a citizen of Interface.

  B. A misunderstanding, leading to the unfortunate death of a citizen.

  C. Proper punishment for a questionable entity who broke a law to the detriment of Interface Unity.

  D. Punitive action for an offense against interface which should have called for a milder disciplinary response."

  The questions and the choices posed by the computer voice popped on the screen one line at a time in bright yellow characters against a royal blue background. Jacob Zen's attention darted swiftly from the legal pad on his lap to the screen, then to the key recessed in the right arm of his chair. He jabbed the key and the INRU screen displayed the "C" answer, which flashed on and off several times before the screen snapped to solid blue in preparation for the next question.

  "Do you feel Jews deserve equal treatment to that given other citizens of interface, in any or all of its aspects?

  A. Yes

  B. No”

  Jacob Zen pressed a button on the panel, generating the letter "B" and the word "No."

  "If you responded B, which of the following most accurately reflects your meaning?

  A. The governing of all Jewish entities should be conducted as it currently is under Interface Commission Policy 666 -- I.OOO.

  B. Jews should have increased rights.

  C. Jew entities should have decreased rights.”

  He responded to the hollow, synthesized voice after a quick glance at the graphic; the "C" answer pulsed brightly on, then off, then on again.

  "Ethnic Inculcation Session 6662E19 is ended. Responses will be programmed into INterface Response Unity and consensus views incorporated into INRLJ Law to the degree those views are deemed beneficial by TRINITY and the Commission of Ten."

  Before rising from the chair, Jacob Zen placed the old book on the floor, taking care to hide it from the Scanner Eye. He knelt before the big screen, bowed his head, and drew his right arm to his body, pressing his clenched fist against his chest while militaristic music assaulted his senses, setting in motion brain undulations that moved his thoughts feverishly in whip-like fashion along the full length of his cognitive spectrum. Each run through that dark cerebral inner space would, it seemed, take him over the end, or through the barrier, or into hell's vortex.

  But there was no hell, he managed to remember, forcing his oscillating mind to stabilize somewhere near the center of his brain—only heaven, only love. Master Manya and TRINITY said so.

  INterface Response Unity was salvation! INterface was the nucleus, the matrix of Universal Truth.

  "To Caesar that which is Caesar's and to God that which is God's! TRINITY speaks!" announced the computerized voice, which was at first three separate voices slightly out of synchronization with each other, but which then blended, finally becoming one cavernous voice that was TRINITY'S.

  "INterface Response Unity is the New Earth. You are either IN or you are lost. Mankind cannot serve two masters. INterface is salvation. TRINITY loves you."

  Jacob Zen lifted his face to see the INterface Response Unit screen fill with a triple image, three distinct faces revolving around and moving through each other, merging, then locking into a single image.

  "TRINITY forever!" said the computer voice of INterface.

  "Six Ways to Law! Six Ways to Order! Six Ways to Peace! Six! Six! Six!"

  The words echoed in his head, although the screen was now black, the speakers silent. Struggling to his feet, he felt two decades older than his 42 years. His throbbing knee joints and tension-knotted back muscles wreaked barely endurable pain on his stiff, convoluting mind. Looking into the mirror did nothing to roll back those unlived years, seeing the yellowish flesh and the creases branching in multiple valleys from the corners of his eyes and mouth. Hair once dark and thick was now graying and sparsely covering his scalp.

  From the only window in the tiny room that had become the one world left to him, Jacob watched the haze-shrouded, deteriorating concrete below, where a squad of controllers stormed into a tenement building. Then he heard the moaning children, the haunting cries of the children.

  He dropped heavily into the chair and tried to force the skull-crunching atrocities from his mind, his thoughts returning to the image on the INRU screen--to the black, soul-piercing eyes, the stark face-image which commanded instant obeisance whenever and wherever it appeared. He retrieved the legal pad and the book from their hiding place and, after reading a bold underlined passage in the volume, copied the words:

  "And he hath power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed..." Revelation 13:15.

  Soon would be the time of INterface. Time, under pretext of becoming one with TRINITY, to help them account for their victims.

  Time again to prove one's self loyal to the Father, Son and unholy Spirit.

  Existence at the merciless hands of INterface was possible only because, to fulfill his pledge--that the masters would know retribution as vengeful as that with which they crushed anyone who resisted their incalculable evil--he must remain alive.

  But how could he judge evil, considering his own record? How could he escape the fact of his own sin? The man's face when he plunged the 8-inch blade beneath the sternum, thrusting it upward through the heart. The issue of liquid warmth, the blood he could not wipe from his hands even now, while sitting before the INterface Response Unit awaiting TRINITY'S seeing, knowing intrusion into his misery.

  Jacob Zen closed his eyes and tried to drive the stifling demons from his mind. His thinking must be clear for INterface, it must! But could it ever be erased, those bugging, dying eyes? The man's gasping, clutching effort to keep his life?

  What of Jacob Zen's soul? Would the nightmarish image follow him forever during his eternal run through perdition?

  "TRINITY Loves You!"

  The electronic voice jerked his attention abruptly to itself and to the INRU screen.

  "Six Ways to Law! Six Ways to Order! Six Ways to Peace!"

&nbs
p; The screen was alive again, the triple image of the face swirling, crisscrossing, then locking into a single frame.

  "Six! Six! Six!"

  Subtle movement and noises told him the INterface Eye was active, making its central terminal-controlled adjustments in preparation for INterface.

  He must perform the hated ritual for a time longer. Until he was ready to deal with TRINITY and with INterface his own way.

  "Now is the time for joining spirits

  For becoming one --

  Time for committing the ultimate

  trust, one to another --

  To INterface in love."

  Jacob Zen sat back in the console chair, his posture erect, motionless. The Eye atop the INRU whirred and clicked when he pressed the button recessed in the chair's right arm panel. A thin stream of light beamed from the camera, forming a circle on the skin of his forehead. At the same time, a tubular device swung from beneath the right arm of the chair and moved electronically to a stop above his right hand. Data appeared on the INRU screen, glowing yellow characters against the blue background.

  JOHN I GARVER

  66E-IN-3- 1888271,br> SECTOR COORDINATOR 55O

  "Read the following pledge, one. eight, eight, eight, two, seven, one."

  He read aloud a copy, which appeared on the screen when the computer voice completed its directive.

  "I, six, six. six, I N. three, one, eight, eight, eight, two. seven, one. am one with INterface, as are all within Sector five, five, zero. We have and shall have no other allegiance."

  "Prepare for print ident. Seize print plate," ordered the voice of INterface Response Unit.

  He complied, placing his right thumb and index finger on the glass plate of the armrest's console panel. The screen display changed to:

  AFFIRM -- JOHN I GARVER

  SECTOR 55O

  COORDINATOR — BBB-IN-3- 1 88827 1

  "INterface accepts. IN are you."

  The screen went black, the Scanner deactivated, and the apparatus above his right hand droningly returned to its position beneath the chair.

  Relaxing, Jacob stared for a moment at the darkened, silent screen, thinking of the absurdity resorted to by history's most advanced technological state. The ludicrous play on words employed to inform the lucky citizen that he was a legal entity within the computer network society. "In are you through the INRU."

  He wanted to laugh at their silly official slogan, but there was nothing funny about INterface totalitarianism. The numerical dehumanization imposed by mankind's latest and greatest attempt at Utopia had exacted its toll. If not for his all-consuming purpose, this personality crushing end-product of the quantum evolutionary leap would long ago have driven him to self-destruction. No doubt he would die at the hands of this perfect society; the probability of being discovered increased hourly. But he would do his utmost to have his satisfaction before it happened. Perspiration beaded on his forehead and streamed down his thin face. A cold, unhealthy sweat bubbled up from his core being, the manifestation of the torturous remembrances always with him. Karen, sweet, lovely Karen, their one victim for whom they would pay as great a price as he could extract.

  Now he felt the monster closing in on him, its insidious, constricting, grasp squeezing life from him. Yet there remained the cerebral path to take him, if but for a sanity-preserving moment, away from the present.

  Chapter 2

  It had begun differently. So differently. He closed his eyes, tilting his face toward the ceiling. The sickness in his stomach eased, memories of those earlier times mercifully taking him from his unbearable present.

  "I've known you now for months and yet I don't know you, because all we talk about is me. You're not top-secret like that precious work you guard so jealously, are you?"

  "You've known me in the biblical sense; that's all that matters, really," Jacob teased.

  Karen Mossberg punched Jacob with her fist, mock horror on her face. "You are a clod for saying so! And that little arrangement can change at any time!"

  "You know life wouldn't be worth living without me around to--how shall I say it?--to stimulate your temperament once in a while."

  She struggled to a sitting position on the bed, trying to pound him with both hands. Her long, dark hair lashed wildly, whipping his face in their struggle before her resistance melted into submission, both of them feeling passion rise, bringing them together, finally, in a flesh-coupling armistice.

  Thirty minutes later, Karen tried and failed to take the cigarette from his mouth while he took his first drag. He held her at arm's length and she gave up. "Go on then! Kill yourself!" She sat in the middle of the bed, her arms folded, staring at him. “But not before I learn more about you." She again lunged for the cigarette, but again he was too quick, moving it out of reach.

  "It all began when I was born..."

  "Snakes in the grass aren't born; they're hatched," she interrupted his facetious narrative, snuggling her cheek against his chest.

  "Rattlesnakes are," he corrected.

  "Enough with the pedantic. Get on with the biographical."

  "My father died when I was three. Moriah Zen. He was 26."

  "You never really got to know him," Karen said in a more serious voice, propping on one elbow to see his face while they talked.

  "I remember the beach. When I think of him, I think of a beach... the orange kind, with the sand packed hard. Funny, isn't it? The things you remember from childhood--bits and pieces of things. I can recall the time when I was about five, running down a little hill near our house, and I fell and cut my leg on a broken shoe-polish bottle. Can you imagine? A shoe-polish bottle! I remember that tiny detail, but I can't remember what my dad looked like. Oh, I have a mental image from all the pictures Mother kept. But him? Really know what he was like, who he was... I can't remember. Seems like you'd remember something that important, doesn't it?"

  She watched him, seeing the distant look. She knew he didn't want her to answer, and let him have his moment of philosophical self-pity, but she felt deeply for the little boy she saw who would give his soul to know the man who sired him.

  "When I was six, Mother and I went to live with Uncle Conrad, Conrad Wilson. No kid could hope for a better father."

  Karen watched Jacob study his fingernails; talking about that early part of his life, perhaps dredging up memories of his father, obviously made him nervous.

  "Uncle Conrad wanted to marry Mother, but she wouldn't go along. A Hebrew sticking point. Oh, she loved him--slept with him to prove it, but she wouldn't marry him because he was Gentile. Isn't that an interestingly twisted bit of morality and theology? He wanted to adopt me, he really cared for us both, right up until Mother's accident."

  "And he was able to get custody?"

  "My mother's sister, who could barely afford to keep her own five kids fed and clothed, accepted Uncle Conrad's request to keep me with him. He had been my father for more than four years anyway. She wouldn't let him adopt me, wouldn't let him have any legal holds. She didn't want me to have the Gentile name; said Mother wouldn't have wanted that. But he took me on her terms. I didn't understand it all at the time, but I did know I didn't want to stay with Aunt Frenka and Uncle Jorba Swenke in Brooklyn. They were staunchly orthodox, and I mean you toed the mark or felt the wrath. If Uncle Jorba didn't take the skin off your backside with a yard-long stick for breaking one ordinance or another, then, Teddy—Theodore Hertzl Swenke, my 200-plus pound cousin with a gestapo mentality, would beat a tattoo on your face when you refused to give up whatever you might have that he felt he needed."

  Karen laughed, enjoying Jacob's lighter frame of mind. "Sounds like one of my cousins — Anna Daygan. She took great delight in pinching you until she got what she wanted... or just for the fun of it. I could never figure how somebody so fat could run that fast."

  "You're familiar with the problem then," he chuckled. Then his intonation became more somber. "Anyway, I was relieved when Aunt Frenka let me stay with him."


  Karen stood from the bed and stretched her arms toward him. The gesture made him feel once again like a man rather than the boy he had become during the brief remembrance — a time when Conrad Wilson began molding him into what Jacob hoped to one day become for his foster-father's sake. She bent to kiss him, holding his face tenderly with her slender fingers. The cool feminine touch he must never lose. To do so would be to lose himself. Desire he thought spent began its ascent, though it was an unconsciously beckoned desire he tried to discourage. Sensing his renewed awakening, Karen, he was almost glad, subtly moved away. "How about lunch?" she said.

  "Sure. What would you like?"

  "Pizza?" she suggested from the bathroom.

  "Fine. Want to go out?"

  "No. Let's have it here," she shouted to be heard, because she knew he had walked into the den. He came back into the bedroom, pausing to light a cigarette before retrieving his wallet from his pants on a nearby chair. Thumbing through the various papers and photographs, he found a half-metal, half-plastic card, returned to the den and sat in front of the small computer unit in the corner of the room. After inserting the card in a slot just above the keyboard, he depressed a key that activated the unit. When he manipulated other keys, the display screen lit up with information he had input. Five seconds later, the input data was electronically swept from the screen and new information appeared, confirming that his electronic funds were sufficient for transaction and informing him that the telecommunication had been completed between his computer unit and the business with which he wanted to transact. At the same time, the system alerted the business that he wished to interface and that the electronic funds currency units were sufficient for transactions up to 5,079 for Jacob Zen, 771-68-1794-6, Boston, MA TERMINAL 31 BB.