#Justice

by Leon, Mike

  INT. THE VEIDT INSTITUTE - DAY

  Dr. Sartorius pours himself some tea from a pot on a hot plate in a tiny little side room adjoining the recreational area. In following him through a few rooms at the facility, Bruce has learned that the man is unusually friendly and also unusually long winded, but in an especially obnoxious way in which most of his ideas are expressed in a series of fast moving run-on sentences interrupted by other run-on sentences.

  “Are you sure you don’t want any? It’s Earl Grey. I find tea keeps me sharp through the day, but doesn’t keep me up all night like coffee, so I made the switch. You really need to strike that balance.”

  “No thanks,” Helen turns down the tea. Bruce has never been a tea man either.

  “The tattoos all the patients got,” Bruce says. “We thought that shit was a serial number, but that ain’t it, is it?”

  “A serial number?” Sartorius says. “Good lord, no. That would be dehumanizing. Those are medical tattoos. They’re intended for emergencies really, but we use them pretty casually around the clinic.”

  “That’s not like any medical tattoo I’ve ever seen,” Fleabag says.

  “How many medical tattoos have you seen?” Bruce comments.

  “I was in the corps. Some guys get their blood type, chronic conditions. Not this James Bond spy code stuff.”

  “Hmmm,” Sartorius purses his lips. “I never really thought about how it looks to someone without any context. I guess you do have a point.”

  “You read back the tattoo and whatshisface popped right out of his trance,” Bruce observes.

  “Correct. One of the first things we do with new patients is assign them a passphrase which we can use as a trigger to bring them out of any remote experience. We condition the phrases through a series of hypnotic suggestions and the phrases are then inscribed directly on the patients for quick reference in case of emergency.”

  “Emergency? You mean in case one of them sees something they’re not supposed to?”

  “More like if their physical body is in immediate danger. Not all of the patients are as calm as Randy and Doris. Sometimes we have to restrain them to keep them from hurting themselves.” Sartorius pauses for some consideration, then adds “Or others.”

  “So that’s all this place is? A big nursing home for remote viewers?” Helen asks.

  “Not entirely. I’m not thrilled with the connotations of the nursing home term. I mean around here we call it the n-word, you know? I mean it’s not THE n-word, but it’s the other n-word. No offense.” Sartorius directs his justification at Bruce, who blanks for a second, unsure if anything the doctor said could actually be construed by anyone as offensive.

  “None taken?” Bruce says.

  “These people with these abilities, past even a minimal level, they need round the clock care. I saw it when I was working with the British government—across the pond, as they like to say—and after that project ended I came to R&D and I said ‘guys, we have a unique opportunity here.’ It comes together perfectly. We provide necessary medical care, easily beyond the quality of what any of these viewers would receive in a more conventional setting—I think we can all agree on that—most of these manifestations would be dismissed as symptoms of schizophrenia or dementia in any other mental health facility for Christ’s sake. So we take care of them, free of charge to families and healthcare providers, thanks to your generous benefactors, and while they’re here we get to . . . observe.”

  “What are you observing?”

  “Fascinating things, Mr. Freeman. Absolutely fascinating things.”

  “You ever observe anybody turn into a evil looking ghost monster that walks through walls and pushes people out windows?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What Mr. Freeman is trying to ask is if you’ve seen anything beyond expectation here at the facility. Can any of the viewers do more than just view?”

  “You mean telekinesis?”

  “Anything at all.”

  “No. Never. But I should tell you we can’t see what they see. We rely on the viewers’ accounts for data, and those accounts are very often unreliable. So many of the patients experience severe psychosis.”

  “Why do they all go crazy, doctor?”

  “That’s one of the few aspects of the condition we do understand. They’re lost in what they see, even when they come back. It has a profound effect.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Can’t they just pull it together?”

  “That’s easy for you to say, but imagine if your entire life was like a series of dreams, and you kept waking up from one into another, never sure if you were waking up in the real world or a facsimile. Eventually you would forget whole dreams and with them whole worlds. It’s a little bit like that, but even worse. The stronger viewers aren’t anchored by their place in the physical world. They’re almost constantly adrift, out there somewhere, looking at people and places far away. When we try to communicate with them it only confuses them. We might sound like a voice in their head if they can hear us at all. A number of them don’t seem to have any concept of where their real body is located even when they do briefly return to it. Others don’t return at all, or live in a juxtaposed state, seeing two places at once, alternating, seeing one and hearing another, or any combination of those things.”

  “What about the patient who assassinated a regional council candidate last year here in Toronto? He was one of the more disturbed viewers, I’m guessing?”

  “Alex Hinter, and no, actually. We were treating him for relatively limited manifestations. When he told me he had viewed that politician initiating a nuclear war in the future, I dismissed it as a probable nightmare or psychotic episode, but now I’m not so sure.”

  “Wait. Are you implying that some of them can see into the future?”

  “Well, no. Although I wouldn’t rule it out as a possibility. I am very probably the world’s foremost expert on this phenomenon, and I’ll be the first to tell you we do not have the foggiest notion what makes it work or what limits it may reach.”

  “When we landed here, you already knew we were coming. You said you were expecting us.”

  “That’s a parlor trick, not time-travel. I only needed to know you were on your way to know that you would be arriving.”

  “And who told you we were on our way?”

  “That would be our most gifted patient. Would you two like to meet the somnambulist?”

  INT. F4PL0RD’S APARTMENT - DAY

  Sid stands in the messy rear bedroom of F4pl0rd’s apartment while the hacker clicks through a series of digital boxes and other computerized doodads with Jamie gazing suspiciously over his shoulder. The room looks like a fast food garbage dump, with rolled up bags from a half dozen different burger joints strewn around F4pl0rd’s keyboard and a hip-high stack of pizza boxes in one corner that Sid estimates must be weeks old for the simple fact that no human could ingest that much pizza in a shorter span. None of this interests him though. The object of his attention is a green and white nylon flag that takes up most of a wall opposite the computer setup. The flag is an image of a black cross with a white circle at its intersection, framing a stylized logo that looks like the letters KEK written both horizontally and vertically, and with each K inverted so the design can be read right to left or left to right.

  “What is this thing?” Sid asks.

  “It’s the KEK flag,” F4pl0rd answers. “The flag of the Nation of Kekistan.”

  “Where is that? It sounds like the Middle East, but I’ve been there, and it’s not there.”

  “We are a disparate and dispossessed people.”

  “It doesn’t exist,” Jamie scoffs. “It’s a made up country for miscreants and racists.”

  “Kind of like a made up gender for deviants who want to use the wrong bathroom?” F4pl0rd says.

  “I’m not a deviant.”

  “Do any of you people do anything real?” Sid asks. “Or are your whole lives bullshit? I mean you’re
pretending you’re some kind of non-human he/she. He’s from a made-up country that fake rapes cartoon girls in video games. More stuff you made up on the internet put you in the crosshairs of a guy who imagines himself into existing. What the fuck? Seriously, what the fuck? What’s wrong with all of you?”

  “Fuck that,” F4pl0rd says. “I’m all about not believing in any of that made-up Cultural Marxist trash.”

  “Here he goes with the snarl words,” Jamie says.

  “It’s not a snarl word,” F4pl0rd snarls. “It’s the truth. This brand of Frankfort School politically correct postmodern nonsense is destroying western civilization. You can’t even say normal words anymore without worrying about a Twitter lynch mob going after your job or some blue haired gender studies grad calling you a white nationalist in a think piece that gets four thousand shares before lunch break.”

  “Please. Your toxic brand of paleoconservative late capitalism is the only thing destroying the country. You people had the mic for two centuries and now CEOs make two hundred seventy one times as much as most workers. Millennials with college degrees can’t even find work above minimum wage service jobs.”

  “It’s not our fault you retards get college degrees in holistic music therapy. I’m a millennial. I went to trade school for CS and I’ve got a downright cushy gig.”

  “Because you’re a white cis male.”

  “So are you!”

  “That’s misgendering.”

  “You have a dick.”

  “How sure are you about that?” Sid interjects. “Like on a one to ten scale?”

  “At least a six,” F4pl0rd replies, not sounding all too certain himself.

  “You’re a transphobic racist piece of shit!” Jamie says.

  “Here we go with the phobias and the isms. Everybody’s a sexist racist transphobic homophobic because they don’t agree with your talking points.”

  “Your whole subculture is based on racist frog memes and cyberbullying people who aren’t like you!”

  “At least it’s funny! Your whole subculture is based on inventing new ways to be victimized so you can blame us for it!”

  “Inventing? Did we invent Nazi Pepe? Or tits or GTFO? Or dindu nuffins? Or We Wuz Kangz an Shiet?”

  “No. Cause left can’t meme. Besides, we only do that stuff because you fuckers tell us we can’t. We don’t actually mean it.”

  “You still say it. If you say it, you mean it!”

  “Fuck that! I say a whole lot of stuff I don’t mean. It’s just for the lols!”

  “Hate speech and bigotry are never funny!”

  “Fuck that! They’re funny at least half the time!”

  “Do you hear this?” Jamie says, looking to Sid in provocation.

  “I think you both sound stupid,” Sid says. “We’re not getting anywhere with the IP address either.”

  “I already tracked it back to AT&T,” F4pl0rd says.

  “Really? I thought there would be more typing or something.”

  “This isn’t TV.” F4pl0rd pulls a cheap cell phone and another boxy electronic gadget Sid cannot identify from a drawer under his mousepad. “It’ll take a little while to get an address.” He begins dialing.

  “What are you doing? Ordering a pizza?” Sid says.

  “No. I’m hacking the ISP.”

  “But you do that on the computer. . .”

  “You do part of it on the computer. Most of it is old fashioned legwork. I set up a malware app on an FTP with a landing page. I’m spoofing my number so it looks like I’m calling from inside the company. Now I call tech support and work my magic.”

  “Huh?”

  F4pl0rd’s magic is truly impressive. He responds with a tired sounding monotone as someone picks up his call. “Hi, Winston. Pat from marketing. I’m working on that thing for Mr. Kennard.” He’s pulling names from a chart on his desktop monitor which he acquired while he and Jamie were arguing. “I can’t get this thing he linked to me to open. He’s gonna be pissed if this isn’t done before his three o’clock. Can you tell me what the problem is?”

  Sid and Jamie watch in silence as F4pl0rd talks his way through this transaction in a completely different persona than the one they met when Sid kicked the door in. It’s as if, for these few minutes, he is no longer a fat slob with a neckbeard half-buried in Doritos bags and weeb toys, but a smooth talking high level exec—the kind of guy who sells ketchup popsicles to Eskimos wearing white gloves, the kind of guy Sid absolutely cannot stand. They watch and listen as F4pl0rd calls the VP of the company a ‘real pain in the left nut’ and proceeds to direct the nameless peon from the tech support line to navigate to a web page he provides and click a link found there. “Oh? It’s working now? Maybe it was just my connection. I’m on a hotspot. Who knows? Thanks. How late will you be here today? Ok, cool. I’ll call back before then if I need anything.” And then F4pl0rd disconnects the call.

  “What was that?” Sid says.

  “That was me getting some guy in the basement of the AT&T building in Dallas to click a link that installs my remote desktop software on his work machine.”

  “And that tells us where the IP is?”

  “No. That lets us restart his computer.”

  “Why do we want to do that?”

  “Because he’ll have to log back in after it reboots and now we have a key logger on the system, so we get his username and password that way.”

  “So now we just log in and get the address ourselves.”

  “No. Now we watch TV until five o’clock when Winston goes home.”

  “Why can’t we just do it now?”

  “Because they’ll realize they’ve been hacked when they see the computer moving around. Pro-tip: Always call a domestic department for this shit. Americans go home at five, but hajji never sleeps.”

  “See what I’m talking about?” Jamie says. “Racist.”

  “He makes some compelling points,” Sid says.

  INT. THE VEIDT INSTITUTE - DAY

  The patient Dr. Sartorius refers to as the somnambulist resides somewhere behind a keycard door in the basement of the facility. Bruce would hardly call it high level security, as anybody with a handgun could probably take this whole place alone and shoot the bolts out of the door. Most of the locks in this place are here to keep the patients from moving between rooms, not to keep soldiers out.

  “We’ve been conducting some trials of a synthetic formula designed by myself and Doctor Gorsky for a few months now,” Sartorius says. “The objective is to see if we can stabilize some of the more unruly patients, though focusing the viewing ability seems to be an incidental little bonus. In tests, it appears that anchoring the viewers gives them more control over what they see. They can focus better. The results are mixed overall, but Max has shown marked improvements since taking the formula. A few months ago he was in a permanently comatose state. Now he’s communicative beyond anything Stargate ever hoped for.”

  The doctor slides his keycard through the reader next to the door and waits for the little red LED indicator to alternate to green. Then he leads Helen and Bruce through the doors into a quiet little room which is well lit, despite any eerie vibes previously conjured by Sartorius’s eerie description of its occupant. Other attributes are all quite sterile. The walls and floor are white. There are no decorations or personal effects. There are only two objects inside: a hospital bed and a stainless steel box which Bruce identifies as either a large freezer, or a coffin, or maybe something in-between. Bruce wonders if it is full of explosives, or if some kind of evil thing is hiding for them inside. He keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop in the form of a death trap or a laboratory full of sick human experiments, but so far they just keep being wrong about this Sartorius guy.

  “He needs this sensory deprivation tank to focus the visions now,” Sartorius says. “But he comes up once in a while so we can have a chat.” The doctor draws a small bottle of darkly colored liquid from a rack attached to the rail of the hospital bed. He ins
erts a syringe into the top of the bottle, carefully filling it to a measured dosage. “Max is the most capable remote viewer we’ve ever encountered. I think that goes for all of the other programs too, Russians included. With our current course of treatments he’s getting even stronger.”

  “How long ago did you start the treatments?” Helen asks.

  “About six weeks. Why?”

  Helen’s gaze shifts communicatively to Bruce. The timing matches up perfectly with the start of the blogger murders.

  Sartorius raps on the side of the drum not too loudly. Bruce prepares to draw his gun just in case, though nothing happens immediately. A moment later Sartorius knocks again and opens the blank lid. Inside, the somnambulist rests in a bath of clear salt water.

  “Max,” Sartorius says. “You have some visitors.”

  The somnambulist does not move. His expression never changes. He does not speak a word. He floats at the surface of the water, still as a corpse, the whole scene conjuring the discovery of some ancient mummy in its sarcophagus. His skin glistens from the water that fills the tank. His face is clean shaven and his flesh is smooth. If this is the transient, he looks a lot cleaner than the monster they’ve been fighting for the last twenty four hours.

  Sartorius presses down on the syringe plunger, emptying the needle of air, and squirting a thin stream of formula into the air before lowering the needle to the sleeper’s arm. “We hope that the formula will lead to a major breakthrough in treatment at the very least, and possibly even some progress toward harnessing the viewing ability, but we’re limited by the components in the current synthesis. In larger doses it is quite toxic.” Sartorius carefully injects the sleeper with the formula. With no other sign of motion, the somnambulist’s eyelids raise and his dark eyes shift over to Bruce and stay. Bruce feels unsettled quite quickly, as though the sleeping man’s gaze is a ray of anxiety. It won’t stop him from what he needs to do.

  “The code on his arm,” Helen says, stepping closer to get a good look down into the tank over Bruce’s shoulder. “We need to see it.” The medical tattoo is currently obstructed, as the somnambulist’s arm rests against his body, hands folded over the tight pair of underwear which is his only clothing.