by Leon, Mike
“They call you Kill Team One! That sounds like a group of people too!”
“They’s got you there,” Helen says.
“It should be they’ve,” Mary Sue corrects.
“Oh, God. Sid’s right. That sounds weird. It’s like I’m talking about somebody else. It’s the hypothetical they then. They’re watching. They’ve got this new diet. They say eggs are healthy for you. I could be talking about anybody. It’s so unspecific.”
“I wanted to pull its pants down right away and get this sorted out,” Sid says. “Bruce stopped me, so you can blame him.”
Jamie points angrily at Fleabag. “He turns into a ten foot wolf-man and you deal with that just fine!”
“Yeah. Wolf-man,” Sid barks back. “Man is the operative word there. It leaves zero ambiguity. Fleabag, what do you call a girl werewolf?”
Fleabag raises a cheek as he considers the answer, then says “A hot mess.”
“Heard that,” Bruce chuckles.
“I hate all of you,” Jamie says.
“So this is a super nice battleship,” Mary Sue loudly proclaims to put an end to the argument.
“Yeah,” Bruce agrees. “Did you guys buy or lease?”
“It’s a rental,” Helen says.
“Damn. I heard of Enterprise, but I didn’t know you could get The Enterprise at Enterprise. It got one of those big glass world maps like they always have on the nuclear submarine in the movies?”
“It’s called a vertical plotting board,” Helen says. “And no. Nobody uses those anymore.”
“Aw,” Bruce grumbles. “I always wanted to be in one of those rooms.”
“What about in the CIA? You know what—never mind.” Helen physically shakes away the remains of that conversation. “Who wants to start?”
“Start what?” Sid says. “Aren’t you starting?”
“Okay, fine. Why the hell are you here?”
“Why the hell are you here?”
“One of us has to actually answer the question.”
“I don’t have to do anything.” Sid folds his arms in cold indifference.
“Then we’re all going to stay very confused until whatever happens happens.”
“I don’t want to find out what happens,” Jamie says.
“I need to know why forces unknown are attempting to kill Chan,” Helen says.
Sid laughs. “That’s the thing we don’t know either! Nobody knows. Fuck it. I guess this was a waste of time. Everybody back in the helicopter.”
“You stay right there, smartass,” Helen sneers. “How did you get sucked into this?”
“That would be my fault,” Bruce says. “See, I heard Chan call the Conspiratalk show, and me and Sid figured out it wasn’t just a phony call on account of Chan said postmodernism and you said postmodernism was an end of the world scenario.”
Helen’s eyes shift up into her head as she recollects that previous conversation. “Because I told him about that last time we talked.”
“You were here before the phone call,” Sid says. “So how did you know?”
“Those internet bloggers were all part of a watch list. Some flags were raised when they started turning up dead.”
“A watch list?” Jamie says. “I’m on a watch list? What for? What kind of watch list?”
“Classified.” Helen eyeballs Jamie suspiciously. “How did you all make the connection?”
“They all worked on BuzzWorthy’s doomsday machine,” Sid snorts. “Duh.”
“The what?!” Helen skeptically interjects. “They built a doomsday machine? BuzzWorthy?” She’s on the verge of laughing at the idea.
“Yeah. The transient called it a codification mainframe. It brainwashes everybody into wearing these stupid pants with big fat legs.”
“That’s not what it does,” Jamie whines. “This is so hard to explain. See, objective truth is a lie. The only thing that really matters is. . .”
“I know what a codification mainframe is,” Helen interrupts, surprising everyone. “You can stop.” She turns her attention back to Sid. “Who’s the transient?”
“He’s the ghost assassin killing all the bloggers. Everybody thought he was me, except he looks nothing like me. Also he walks through walls, and flies, and teleports, and does some other stuff, but we’re not sure he’s actually doing that stuff or if he’s a remote viewer.”
“A remote viewer? Like Project Stargate?”
“That’s the one,” Bruce says.
“Impossible. Remote viewers just view. That’s why they’re called viewers.”
“So then there really are remote viewers?”
“Hmmm.” Helen hesitates. “Not really.”
“That hardly sounded definitive.”
“It’s complicated, but he’s not a remote viewer.”
“Do you have a better explanation?”
“No.”
“He has some kind of serial number tattoo on his wrist,” Sid says. “It says Aqua Six One Six Green.”
“Really?” This piques Helen’s interest. She hollers for one of her people. “Hey Dave.” Dave is a pasty man with greasy hair and a tight-fitting pale green cardigan. He’s the only one of Helen’s entourage who doesn’t look like he experiences regular bouts of ’roid rage. “Can you run a search for wrist barcodes with six-digit serial numbers, and anything along those lines? Cross reference with human experiments.”
“Remote viewers,” Bruce adds as Helen scribbles the barcode down for the analyst.
“He’s not a remote viewer.”
“What system am I searching?” Dave asks.
“All of them,” Helen says.
“Ah. Okay. That’ll take a while.”
“I know.” She stares at the analyst as he lingers for a quiet moment of awkwardness. Helen has to wave him off to get him moving. “Thanks, Dave,” she says as he hurries off. Something occurs to Sid in the interim that does not add up.
“You knew about the bloggers,” he says. “But you didn’t know about the doomsday device.”
“It’s not a doomsday device,” Jamie proclaims loudly.
“It’s a doomsday device,” Bruce argues.
“It’s not a doomsday device,” Helen says, rolling her eyes.
“It’s not?” Jamie emits in high pitched surprise. Jamie did think it was a doomsday device then. Sid raises an eyebrow of annoyance at that implication.
“No,” Helen assures. “We’ve had mainframes like that since the ’80s. How do you think Rihanna ever got popular? It definitely wasn’t her voice.”
“Oh good,” Mary Sue breathes a sigh of relief. “I thought I was tone deaf.”
“Nah,” Bruce says. “Rihanna sounds like an auto-tuned Dalek.”
“You know how when you talk into a box fan it echoes back at you?” Fleabag offers. “I think she sounds like that.”
“That’s exactly what she sounds like!” Helen excitedly agrees.
“So nobody here likes Rihanna’s voice?” Sid asks. Everyone present responds with a gesture of negativity, from headshakes to thumbs down to Bruce making a fart noise. Even Jamie, who originally exhibited Rihanna as a good singer, agrees that Rihanna sounds terrible. “So everybody just thinks that everybody else likes Rihanna’s voice? How does that happen?”
“Codification mainframe,” Helen says. “Of course, they usually don’t work that well.”
“Why? Why Rihanna?” Jamie says.
“Classified. All of this is classified. Not that anyone would believe you.”
“She’s right,” Bruce says. “The evil shadow government conspiracy brainwashed everybody in the country to make some chick a popstar? That’s the kinda shit crazy people say.”
“Is it really?” Helen asks, slyly. “Or did we tell everyone to believe that?”
“Motherfucker. . .” Bruce stares off into empty space. “Don’t you mess with my head like that.”
“See?” Sid says. “I tried to warn you. Everything they touch turns to shit. We could
have stayed home with Netflix and whores, but you guys had to save the world.”
“Look, Jamie, I need know exactly who at BuzzWorthy actually built that machine,” Helen asks.
“BuzzWorthy didn’t build it,” Jamie says. “I don’t actually know who did. Maybe Izzy knew, but she’s dead now. All of them are dead.”
“You’re telling me somebody else constructed a supercomputer of that caliber and just dumped it on you?”
“Good shit, isn’t it?” Sid chuckles.
“Fuck!” Helen curses.
“The transient is probably one of his.” Fleabag suggests. “Cleaning up the trail.”
“Who?” Sid says. “What do you people know about this that you aren’t saying? What’s your interest here if there’s no doomsday device?”
Helen scans the room for a suspicious second, lingering just a little too long on Jamie Chan. “Classified,” she says.
“Okay, well clearly you guys have this all under control, so I’ll just leave Chan with you and fuck off back to where I came from.”
“You’re stuck in this whether you like it or not,” Helen says.
“Who says? You and the polo patrol? There aren’t enough of you here to make me do anything.”
“How are you going to get off the boat, Sid?” Helen questions skeptically.
“I’ll swim,” Sid grunts back. He might be able. Though he can’t see the city anymore, so they must be pretty far out onto Lake Michigan.
“There’s something you should see. Master Chief, can you show the others to the mess? We’ll catch up with you.”
EXT. USS JOHN MILIUS - FO‘C’SLE - NIGHT
“So what is it?” Sid grumbles as he looks up at the Mark 45 5-inch gun barrel over his head. The barrel points straight fore from a mount that appears something like an enormous grey cowbell behind Sid’s back, and is enclosed in a red circle painted on the ship’s deck to indicate all possible positions of the muzzle. Inside the circle is the safe zone. Outside the circle is the get-shot-by-an-actual-fucking-cannon-zone. Sid doesn’t like that zone. Helen tried to walk out closer to the prow, but Sid refused to cross the line. He doesn’t want to be in front of that gun. The damn things are automated. Most of the weapons on a ship like this are, and you just never know who’s on the other end of the controls. So here they are under the gun barrel.
“There are details of this operation that can’t be discussed in mixed company,” Helen says. She has a laptop computer folded under her arm which she picked up in the ops room before they came out here. The forecastle is wide open, deserted, and inundated with the ambient noise of the ship and Lake Michigan. Helen couldn’t have picked a better place to make sure no one is listening in—and that was certainly her intention. “We don’t know which side everyone is on.”
“It’s Mary Sue, isn’t it?” Sid looks over his shoulder suspiciously. “You can’t trust anyone that nice. It isn’t natural.”
“No, smartass.”
“I know. I’m being a dick on purpose.”
“Sid, we don’t know who Chan might be working with.”
“I don’t think Jamie is working with anybody, at least not in the sinister conspiracy sense. They might be working with a therapist, or working with an artist on a nice painting or something, but that’s it. I spent a lot of time with that weirdo today. This is somebody who can’t wrap their head around basic facts like whether they’re a boy or a girl. Nobody like that has a head for espionage. Bruce practically had to draw a diagram to explain how the mystery player set them all up.”
“What if that’s all an act? Those other people from the watch list are all dead now—except for Jamie. Jamie can make up any story he or she wants. Isn’t that a little too convenient?”
“We’re not getting anywhere here. Cut the bullshit. What do you know about this that I don’t?”
Helen unfolds the laptop from under her arm. “Here,” she says, looking around the deck for the nearest place to set it down, but nothing is inside the gun’s barrel radius, and even the couple of mooring posts and assorted railings along the edge of the deck would be ill-suited. “Don’t they have a table or something out here?”
“Just-” Sid takes the laptop. “I’ll just hold it.”
“Okay, here.” Helen reaches over his shoulder to manipulate the laptop. “It’s in—oh great it went to sleep.” She waits for the laptop to wake up and then it displays a large black screen which contains only a graphic of a vampire-fanged jolly roger and two empty fields for login and password. “Shit. It logged me out for inactivity. Just a second.”
“Awesome.” Already annoyed, Sid holds the laptop for Helen as she re-enters her password.
Helen grimaces at what appears on the screen. “Now it wants me to change my password.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously. Even your average community college uses password rotations. You think the shadow government isn’t as secure as the University of Phoenix Online?” Helen types some characters into the system and then rolls her eyes. “Oh for fuck—I need a non-letter or number character that I haven’t used in the last twelve passwords.”
“Try that straight up and down bar thing. Nobody ever uses that.”
“The vertical bar? Good one. Let’s see. Yeah. That works. Oh shit. Everything closed. Now I have to find the file again. Hang on.” Helen enters a query into a search bar on the Graveyard system’s home screen, which is not any friendlier than the login screen. “Okay got it.” She presses enter.
Sid waits as an indicator appears on the screen with a percentage symbol. “It’s buffering,” he points out dryly.
“This is . . . You know I feel like these things always work until the second you try to show somebody something.”
“Can you just tell me what it is?” Sid groans, tired of waiting for this stupid laptop to function correctly.
“You really need to hear it to believe it,” Helen assures. The file’s progress percentage meter finally begins gaining. “This transmission interrupted WGN for a minute and six seconds in nineteen-ninety-five during a broadcast of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Graveyard agents confiscated all known recordings. Our best analysts have listened to it and it has been run through every database the NSA has in search of patterns or connections to a current earthbound source and there isn’t any. I think you’ll understand right away why that’s significant.”
As the percentage indicator climbs, the audio begins to play. Sid is a block of solid skepticism, but as soon as he hears the first crackling words in a feminine pitch, an eerie chill creeps up his spine.
I don’t have much time. I don’t know how far back this message will go, but I can tell you some things to try and prove I’m not making this up. Somebody shoots John Lennon, in nineteen-eighty, I think. Oh, Snape kills Dumbledore! Google is a thing. Then nine-eleven. iPhone. It starts getting weird after that. There’s nothing left now. Everyone is dead, or one of those zombies, or they joined the death cult, and it’s too late to fix it. They’re cutting through the door. There’s no time. You need to believe me. I know Comfort Eagle is real! The postmodernists are going to deconstruct everything and everyone will die! Whoever you are, you have to find Kill Team One. No one else can stop Wyatt . . . Get away, you fucking cunt! Get away from me!
From there, the audio degenerates into a cacophony of heavy breathing and cursing and shrill screams. After a few seconds of howling shrieks, it cuts out with the sudden rustle of someone smashing or tearing at the microphone. The eerie message is bothersome to Sid. One might say it even comes close to shaking him. It is certainly frightening in tone and content, and the sounds of someone being horrendously torn at the end are quite graphic, but Sid has heard all those things before and typically yawns right through them. The detail that cuts to his core is not a gory one.
It is Lily Hoffman’s voice in the recording.
Sid flares his nostrils and tightens his facial structure with intense thought. None of this makes sense.
What could Lily possibly have to do with any of this top secret shit . . . in the future? Why would she have access to a time machine? Why would somebody fake this?
“It doesn’t make sense,” Sid grumbles to Helen with snarling incredulity.
“What part of it?” Helen wags her head at him with a sneering look that calls him an idiot without actually saying it.
“What’s Comfort Eagle?”
“It’s a song recorded by the band Cake in two-thousand-one.”
Sid’s face turns to deadpan stone as he glares through her for tossing him such an obvious lie by omission. “What is it really?”
“It’s the Order’s codification mainframe. It makes whatever BuzzWorthy has look like a pocket calculator.”
“Who’s Wyatt?”
“We’re not exactly sure.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“The recording was originally believed to be a prank by some insider with knowledge of the Comfort Eagle system. Graveyard combed for the perpetrator until someone realized Google was a search engine in ninety-nine. After the trade center even the most skeptical analysts agreed that the message was authentic. So they started looking for Wyatt. For years they came up with nothing at all. Most of the analysts were beginning to think the message was wrong, but recently they discovered some oddities.”
“Oddities? What are oddities?”
“Weird stuff I can’t really get into because I don’t understand it that well myself. You have to understand the codification agents that run Comfort Eagle are really advanced, Sid. These guys very successfully manipulate the masses with song lyrics and blockbuster movies. It’s a level of psy-ops that most of us can’t comprehend. They cause shifts in birth rate, unemployment, violent crime, church attendance, all kinds of things that would surprise you. They’re also mostly pretty strange. They make a big deal out of things like words with no etymological roots, or toy fads people remember for toys that never existed. A bunch of them are obsessed with finding a fake video game called Pollybevis—or something. I always say it wrong.”
“Nerds.”