by Landon Wark
"Well, we are at the forefront of 1980's technology," another replied. "Nobody does 1980's like us. It would be stupid to change streams now."
"Speaking of the 1980's," Ray chimed in, "I need to get out of here. Go play in the snow, if you know what I mean."
Looking at his watch, Phil pushed out his chair. "Christ, bro, you know there's, like, a bunch more designer drugs that are a million times bett—" Phil muttered.
"Stupid to change streams," Ray interrupted. "It was good enough for my dad, it's good enough for me."
"Hey, can you guys save me a seat?" Bob muttered, thumbing through his phone.
"Everyone's asleep in Europe, Bob. And no one wants to suck you off."
"Europe?" Ray regretted the word coming out of his mouth immediately.
"Yeah. Bob's lost—like—fifty million over the past week an-a half in bum-fucking-sylvania. That's your area, right Bob? Bum-fucking?"
"Haha. I'm glad the loss of that much company money amuses you," Bob said flatly.
"When it's you losing it? It's fucking hilarious," Ray moved towards the door.
"You guys wanna see something fucked up?"
"Nobody wants to see your sex tape, Bob."
"Just... Look at this thing. It's not that the money is just gone, it's that... The plan was to buy up these properties from some of the struggling regional muppets. We slap on a coat of paint and let them sit there. Government there is so desperate for investment that the taxes are almost nil. We get the money off our books around tax season. If the muppets can't pay the rent, who cares? But..."
Ray glanced at an email chain on the phone. "The muppets aren't struggling as much as you'd like."
Bob shook his head. "Across the region, it's the same thing. Property is way up, but..." After a few well-placed flicks of his fingers Bob's phone a series of charts rolled by. "Almost all of retail is completely gone. Food. Alcohol. Automotive. Electronics is still good..."
Phil grasped the phone. "So, nobody has trouble making the mortgage but is buying absolutely nothing else?"
"Let's go." Ray prodded. It was a strange problem, but not his. Who cared?
"Maybe everyone got really responsible. That's a marketing problem."
"Muppets aren't that smart. They can't be." This was said with the same conviction as the assertion that velociraptors surely could not open doors.
Something bit in Ray's brain that would stay there for the rest of the night; through the evening at the talentless strip club when he should have been focused on the forced smiles on the woman in front of him, something which always tugged on the delicious schadenfreude section of his brain. He looked around lazily. It was a Friday night. Shouldn't there be more girls?
Half-drunk, half blitzed out of his mind, he staggered into his building from the company town car, sidestepped the begging muppet outside. Wasn't there supposed to be door security on? Fucking muppets were disappearing from the whole world.
Once securely encased in the trappings of his townhouse Ray flipped open his laptop. Within the depths of his emails trash bin, a mere two days away from being swept into digital oblivion was a video attachment from one of his own regional buyers. He claimed it was being pulled and banned from any social media because the creators were a cult. The subject line of 'URGENT: THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING' had raised his eyebrow at first, but he had dismissed it the same way as any other stupid internet video he had ever been sent: "God damn, muppets are easily impressed". He had not even watched to the end of the first time. This time he paid attention to the cringe provoking words "MAKE MAGIC YOURS" splashed over the title bar and even scrolled backward after his attention was diverted by an ad for an online legal advisor.
Reluctantly he pulled a pad and pen from their corner on the desk, tapping the expensive metal of the pen against the edge of the table as the video began again.
The camera shook slightly as the operator adjusted it before moving to a chair positioned behind the table on which the camera sat. He nestled into place with his forearms on the table. The pleasant Slavic face smiled before he began speaking in a language which anyone listening might mistake for Polish, Ukrainian or miscellaneous. A series of subtitles began to pop up along the bottom of the screen.
"Hello, I'm Lukindore98 and today we're going to learn how to make a fifty cent Euro coin from... nothing. As always, no editing or digital effects are being used in this video. If you don't believe me, you're welcome to try for yourself."
The narrator paused for a moment before retrieving a handful of coins from off camera and placing them on the table. As his narration continued he held up each coin in turn.
"We are currently working on a video about producing two Euro coins using a similar technique, but because those are made of a composite of materials it's a lot more complicated and you can likely do the fifty cent coin much faster. This spell is based on research done by Mr. McAllister and several of his Adepts. I'll put their names in the comments."
He swept away the coins.
"Now, I realize that those of you listening in other languages might have problems distinguishing the spell from just... me talking so I'll play a little tone at the start and end of the spell. And there's a link to the documentation below. If you're looking to make your own documentation there's a link to my old videos about using Latex and reading linguistic notation there are well. All right, let's get right to it."
There was a tone and then the narrator began to speak. After nearly forty-five seconds a small portion of the air on the table solidified into a small metal disk.
"Okay, now there are several parts of this spell that are pretty important. One part in particular, if you mess it up you can cause scorch marks on your table. And for that reason we don't recommend you do this on, say, your hand, or around flammable materials."
He went on, expounding each section of phonemes and presenting several coins that had come out either without markings or deformed edges.
Raymond's eyes remained open as the sun crept over his pale face. He felt sick. Not from the hangover.
There was a smaller version of the pen he had used to write out the... spell(?!) sitting on his table. It was incomplete, missing the metal clip and only about seventy percent of the size, but the one in the third video had been a perfect replica and...
Who the fuck is going to buy pens? The thought interrupted, breaking into his brain with irresistible force.
The stationary market was going to tank! He made a mental note to tell his broker to sell every last one of his shares of Staples.
He rolled over in his bed as he ticked down the list that Bob had listlessly rolled over the day before: Produce. Automotive. Sell all of those too. Except real-estate. They couldn't make a whole building, could they? Muppets still needed money to pay rent... Jesus Christ the currency markets! He was going to have to find out where this stuff was happening and sell anything, everything. And what was going to be left? There was a big pile of money coming his way... Until it all got diluted away by a flood of fakes... or bought things that could just be... made... summoned(?)... conjured(?).
His limited imagination struggled to come up with what the world would look like if this thing kept spreading.
This townhouse would not exist... Well, it would, but... the girls at the strip club wouldn't... and no security... No keeping out the fucking muppets!
What good was everything if some muppet could just put his hands all over it? If they could have it without paying?!
Ray rolled out of his bed, hitting the floor hard and suffering a wave of nausea. Fuck that. Fuck that.
For a moment he considered just bowing out. Hide under a blanket for a few years.
And just let the muppets win? Fuck that. Fuck that.
This world, his world was a gradient, a food chain and desire was its hunger. Hell, desire was the human spirit. Get rid of that and... the world would start dying. No work. No money. No distinction between him and the soulless, ambitionless muppets that flood
ed the world.
He caught a look of himself in the glass of the window. He was no muppet! But, the day when he would be was beginning to take shape on the edges of that limited imagination. A horrendous pit formed in his stomach as he saw his eyes become a little dimmer.
He stood up and staggered over to his laptop, head throbbing with a single thought. Somehow the regional muppets had managed to keep this shit offline for at least three weeks. There were all sorts of execs in China who were churning out all sorts of internet scrubbers. And they could just shut everything down if they needed to. It would mean tanking the economy, absolutely tanking it, but it wouldn't be the first time he had survived something like that. That sort of thing was easy, but it could still get out of hand the old fashioned way. Once there was the scent of free pens in the water the muppets would congregate with their pathetic mouths open.
He did have a few connections in the area. It was a good (only?) place to invest the cash he would have coming his way. There were others out there who would do the same, at least if he made them realize what he had come to realize. There were ways to stop all of this, or at least slow it down until he had managed to have his fun and then bow out.
Take your feet off the stage, as one of his pinko college professors had said.
And after you were off the stage, who cared?
Jonah McAllister Builds an Army
As the video came to an end with a redirection to the documentation links Aegera tossed the tablet onto the nearby sofa, her point made. Jonah's brow wrinkled to the point where she thought he might not be able to see at all.
"There's five videos that were brought to me. So far it's been entirely regional."
"That's surprising," Jonah said.
"Whatever internet blockade the government has up to keep people from posting to international sites is keeping these off too," she said. "The locals' paranoia about news of their civil unrest getting to... well, whoever's gonna give a damn in the world today. But it's only a matter of time before someone manages to get a thumb drive over the border and into a computer."
"Are we causing civil unrest?"
"I—Well, no more than what existed before we arrived. I thought that's why we were in this place. It was in trouble."
"Yeah."
"You—Jonah?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm kind of worried. This place may be in trouble, but I don't think the people here are going to see us as the hope they need, at least not in the way you're imaging."
"How so?"
"I've seen the way some of them look at the cops. Out of the corners of their eyes. I'm getting the feeling that there's not going to be any kind of quiet awakening like you might want." She waffled a little in her mind about the phrasing. "It's great to be able to make bread from nothing, but the reason that some people don't have bread isn't because of some famine or economic instability. It's because someone knocked it out of their hands."
Jonah shook his head slowly. "We've been over this. It's impossible to separate out the warmth and food parts from the fire and brimstone parts. It's like ammonium nitrat—"
"Well, while you're trying to grow crops I'm worried that we're making bombs for revolutionaries. And this—" She motioned to the tablet sitting on the sofa. "Is not making things any better."
"Do you know the guy in the video?" Jonah asked.
"No. It might be one of Tom's recruits."
"Huhn." The grunt came out matter-of-factly as Jonah stood from his stool at the workbench lining the wall.
"You're not worried?"
"About what?"
"About things getting out of hand!" Aegera said in exasperation. "About what happened at the house happening again! That guy said your name! Why the hell are we still using your actual name? Call yourself anything! Fucking... Gandalf! Fucking Harry Potter! I don't know!"
Jonah paused mid-step. "I shouldn't need to use anything else. And I can't change human nature. If we keep doing what we're doing, keep bringing in more recruits, get the word out... Eventually, they'll have to understand."
He started back towards the room in the back where he slept.
Aegera watched after him for a moment. "And if they don't want to understand?"
"Just stick to the plan and they'll have to understand," he said before disappearing through the door.
The plan was:
After receiving a demonstration on the street, in a back alley or wherever, was out of the way of prying former Eastern bloc eyes; a person would be offered a complimentary book filled with the basics of the art they were trying to teach; how to create food, clothing, duplicate the basic items, etc. Inside this book there was stamped a time and a place to come for a more in-depth journey through the methods and such. This phase was known as the Initiate phase. Within this phase, on Jonah’s instruction, Aegera had designed a series of interviews and trials (of questionable effectiveness) to weed out certain undesirables such as investigative reporters and officers of the law as well as to determine who was fit to move on to the next phase. Of any given group about seventy to eighty percent were told they would not be admitted to the next phase, but told to return anyway for some further instruction and to try again, though it was already certain that they would not be allowed to advance.
They turned out to be mostly okay with that, only being interested in a way out of their humdrum existences. A little magic in the world went a long way Aegera supposed and any further questioning of the mechanics of the universe just raised problems for them.
Fair enough.
The next phase was known as the Adept phase and it comprised the bulk of the training, including words and phrases for attack and defense as well as travel and stealth. If she had to guess at the purpose of this rank Aegera would have called them the technicians, those chosen to explore the mechanics of the words and to keep an eye on the Initiates. And finally there were the first rank, the so-called Acolytes (the name still confused her), those who mastered not only the words, but also the ideas behind them, the ones capable of improvisation and originality. These were hand chosen from the ranks of the Adepts by Jonah McAllister himself. Out of the hundred or so Initiates Aegera had collected from the streets, bars and universities in their journey across Europe, only she and Tom had been declared of appropriate skill and even then they were split in two. Those who dealt primarily with the new finds, in this case Tom, were known as the Outer Assembly and those who had the ear of Jonah McAllister, who received his orders and carried them out, were known as the Inner Assembly. The Inner Assembly consisted of Aegera alone.
She was responsible for all those underneath her, for checking and rechecking, for making sure that, by the time any outsider joined their ranks, he was already in full awe of the things they were capable of, that he would not report back to his superiors without showing his full respect for the abilities of Jonah’s Adepts and Acolytes and then coming back into the fold. Anyone who joined was to be theirs and theirs alone.
For the most part she was satisfied. There was only one person she did not trust entirely, and that was Tom Nightshade.
“Anyone who takes the writings of the Great Jonah McAllister will never want for food,” he announced to a crowd assembled in a back alley. “Nor for wealth, nor for anything in the material world.”
Several hands went up and he shoved the thin books at them.
Aegera folded her arms. Part religious sermon, part self-help seminar the demonstration had all the promises of a late night infomercial and all the idol worship of a tent revival. If Tom was good at one thing it was getting (and holding) people’s attention.
She passed out books to some attendees in the back, including some she had brought in herself from a nearby tavern, without taking her eye off the stage. Perhaps it was the way he plucked his eyebrows that caused her to distrust him. Men never did that sort of thing back home. Nor did they wear make-up. Maybe it was the leather he dressed in or the piercings through his ears.
He had come t
o them Thomas Bergeson from their efforts three months earlier and while his personal appearance was somewhat odd (at least to her); his flamboyance had made for an excellent display. Originally from England he had surpassed the rankings even before they had been fully formed and Aegera had not been able to thoroughly check him before Jonah had appointed him as a recruiter. Recruitment had gone up since he had joined, but his habits caused her some concern.
She had followed him several times, under a cloak of non-detection. While she was certain he would never rat them out, his use of the abilities he was gaining was disturbing. While nightclubs were no longer the forbidden places they had been in her old body, the ones Tom frequented set her teeth on edge. There were one or two she refused to enter, even if she could not be seen. She was uncertain of what went on inside, but it certainly skirted the laws of the land, not to mention those of good taste.
When she brought this up with Jonah, he seemed not to hear and simply muttered that Tom’s tastes were his own and that as long as they didn’t interfere with the running of the Assembly he would allow him to pursue them.
She buffered her concerns, telling herself that it was merely an artifact of her rural, conservative upbringing and put an end to her surveillance. Still, there were tickles in the back of her mind.
Whether the cause was rational or not, Aegera still did not entirely trust the man who had taken to calling himself Tom Nightshade even as she watched him with the potential Initiates.
He was in the process of showing them what he called “flair”, in this case a fiery sword spinning with rhythmic intent when there was a commotion at the rear of the crowd, a few paces from where Aegera stood. She turned around in time to see nearly half a dozen uniformed officers pushing in through the crowd. Her mastery of the regional language was still very much a work in progress, but what she could make out sounded like calls for the crowd to disperse. A single phrase stood out in her mind as ‘unlawful assembly’.