THREE: ARTIFICE
You flop out of the pod onto the floor. Your friend yanks you to your feet.
"Did I win?" you ask, squinting in the light as your senses re-adjust to reality.
"Well, it looks like you didn't lose, anyway..." your friend says. "But whether or not you earned any badges in your little game isn't real key right now."
"What's 'key', then?" There's still a slight coating of Spielgelee
on your face. You use your shirt to wipe the residual from your eyes; once it starts to crust it's a bitch to get out of your lashes.
Women often speak jealously of your eyelashes.
"Come on, bro, we's gots to get the fuck up outta here," he says. Sometimes his propensity for faux street talking is charming. Sometimes.
"Hey, what's going on, huh?" Your friend pulls you by your shirt and you stumble forward. "Wait, where's the line? Where the hell did the line go?" The immediate area is deserted.
"Game Inertia," he reminds you, as he often must in these situations. Your familiarity with the subject doesn't protect you from its effects. Some people claim to have the ability to lucid game, but you've never managed it. Besides, it seems if it would kind of ruin the experience. It would, however, probably be convenient to be able to tell if, ultimately, you were in-game or not, especially in those hazy moments after emergence.
So you aren't in line anymore. You recall that the "house dream" is a recurring nightmare of yours, one you're always relieved to wake up from. Games tend to pick up on that sticky tendril that slithers throughout the recesses of your consciousness. It's become so unpleasant that you're starting to consider quitting.
You're in the third mall, actually, the one you forget about until you're there. It's probably because the place is always so desolate, and you find empty gathering places disconcerting. Most of the storefronts are boarded up and patched over with plywood sheets and cardboard. Garish "Under Construction" signs litter the view, although it never appears that any constructing ever goes on. The few stores that remain open are unfamiliar junk shops, mostly, bereft of name brands and without the kind of stuff you'd want to buy. The light is harsh, no matter where you are.
There's an arcade, but you almost wish there wasn't; it's a pitiful locale, a few clusters of broken games and cabinets that appear to have been frankensteined together from the corpses of other hardware. There's a pinball machine, but the table sucks and its always fucking broken.
Whenever you're in the third mall, you get the same feeling as you do when you enter the guts of a theater. This is all backstage. This is the bowels of commerce. This is not meant to be seen.
"Can you Rappelez-vous me, please? That game was fucking hard."
"Look, we've got to hurry. We've been here too long." He breaks into a run, and this sudden action propels you back into ambient space-time. You're late, again, for that class you always miss, which is bad enough, but you're also being pursued. They're after you over a perceived slight, but they don't care whether you and your friend were the actual perpetrators. You're not sure what happens when they catch you and you're determined to never find out.
You break into a sprint, and for a moment there is nothing but blur as you struggle to keep up with your friend. He's heading toward the center of the mall, rushing into the courtyard and planting himself behind a large blue dumpster filled to the brim with what looks like chunks of drywall. You come in hard, practically dislocating your shoulder as you slam in next to him.
"Subtle," he says, poking his head around the corner.
"You're the one who took off fucking running in the middle of the goddamn arcade," you pant.
"Well, subtlety's never been one of my strong suits, either," he says. "Now, self-preservation..."
"You really think they're here?"
"What I think and what reality dictates are pretty incongruent, you know?" He's on his haunches now, ready to move despite your clearly labored breathing. "The probability that they aren't here is significant, but the probability, statistically speaking, of a highly negative outcome should they catch us, is overwhelming. In such an equation, the only safe thing to do is remove yourself as an integer all together." He bolts off toward the entrance of a large anchor store.
You duck out from behind the dumpster, hustling toward the store, crouched low like you're entering a live fire zone. Your friend crosses the threshold and disappears into racks of clothes that have been arranged with no great care in the corner of the store, which has the air of an abandoned warehouse.
As you beeline for his location, a small group of shoppers almost trip backwards to avoid you. They give cries of disdain; you've clearly interrupted a very sacred moment in their commercial lives. You find the behavior of such people in times of similar crisis curious. They stroll about with a kind of hollow determination, stuck somewhere between too afraid to run and too stupid to know they should. For not the first time in this never-ending chase, you consider that it might be you who's the blind one. This hesitation stems from a seed of belief, you figure, that these people can understand implicitly what you cannot; that there is no point in running.
Still, you've been running for so long that the anxiety generated by stopping would probably outweigh the pain of a little required displacement.
You're well into the anchor store now, following your friend into the racks. The store is unorganized and cluttered, with articles of apparel strewn about between large piles and half-filled brackets. There appears to be no order beyond the certainty of clothes. A few older women are picking through the piles, one stares intently at pairs of pants.
"Hey!" you whisper when you've lost sight of anyone. "What the fuck?"
"Did you see them?" Your friend's voice is detached, close but not immediate.
"If by "them" you mean old women trolling for underwear, then yes, absolutely, they're very close and I'd like to get away from them now."
"Pants," your friend's voice replies. He sounds further away now.
"What?" You're beginning to feel exposed, beginning to jealously covet the security your friend has apparently already found.
"They were looking at pants, not underwear, don't fucking lie to me. I can see everything from in here."
"Well then why did you ask me if I could see anything," you whine.
"Look, I'm not going to stand here and do a god damn vaudeville routine with you when we're in the middle of desperate flight." An arm emerges from the wall rack next to you and hauls you in.
You're in what appears to be some sort of drainage tunnel; the floor is covered in damp eveningwear.
"I can barely see a goddamn thing," you say to your friend, who's hunched over, smoking a cigarette.
"You aren't even trying to look," he shrugs, and moves further into the hole. You trudge along after him. The ceiling begins to decline, and becomes so low that you're crawling through wet suit coats and tacky dresses. Sequins begin to stick to your face. It has become so tight that any movement at all is difficult.
"This reminds me of a dream I once had," you say. "More of a hallucination, really."
"Oh yeah?" Being in front, your friend is fording a path through the flow of synthesized fabrics, and having a hell of a time with it.
"I guess it was somewhere in between. I was sick as hell, had, like, a 103 temperature, I was just in my room in bed. I was convinced that I was a detective working for Scotland Yard, but I was actually a mole for the IRA. I was sending and receiving coded messages for a network of agents throughout London through my television and VCR."
"Well that sounds just exactly like this situation," your friend offers.
"No, but, I was in this haze for, like, a good eight hours, and the whole time I was convinced that my base of operations was a big pile of dirty laundry. I tried to get off the pile, and I'd just end up rolling into a bigger one."
"I'd say that shit sounded patently absurd, but then that would call into question the entire premise of this situation..."
"Yeah, it would," you say, and a ripple of chained memory stirs in the dusty corners of your head. "Yeah, it would, wouldn't it?"
"I keep having this... fucking dream," your friend says quickly. You get the sense that he's eager to change the subject.
"Oh yeah? Is it "huge pile of awkward clothes" related?"
"Only in the sense that its completely fucking suffocating. I'm in this room, this... white room. I've always been in this room, right? Like its everything else that's just the dream... I'm in this fucking white room and there are these... faces. They aren't really faces, but it's hard to... if I called them "static engrams" would that help your visualization?"
"Nope. Just call 'em faces. Makes you sound less like L. Ron Hubbard."
"Well there are these faces, right, that kind of come out of the wall and... say shit."
"What kind of shit?"
"I don't fucking know, it's a dream, it's nonsense, whatever I imagine it to be. But it always makes me feel the same way."
"Oh yeah, and how's that?"
"Like I just killed my own mother." Your friend stops moving for just a moment. "Like I just killed my mother, and I don't even care. The voices totally eviscerate my reality to the point where I'm disinterested in it. I'm just... fucking empty. And that's always when I become aware of the machine..."
"What machine?" you ask, as for some reason your nerves light up all at once.
"And here we are." Your friend bursts through the last mound and you both tumble out of what appears to be a laundry chute in what appears to be a hotel hallway. You must have been in one of those old escape tunnels they built during the war; they're still around if you know where to look.
The hallway is long, so long in fact that you can't see the end of it. All you can make out is a single point in the frame where you can see no further. It strikes you as uncanny.
"That's uncanny," you say.
"What is?"
"The hallway," you say. "You know, how it appears to keep on going infinitely."
"WFT are you talking about?" he replies. You look again and realize your mistake. The hallway actually ends almost immediately in front of you. A mirror you were staring into created the illusion of infinity. It is rather small, actually, and hangs above a little table decorated with a vase full of plastic daffodils.
"Let's go in this one," your friend says, jiggling the nearest knob to see if its unlocked, which it appears to be.
"What, we're just going to barge in?" you say.
"This is a friendly neighborhood," your friend says, nonetheless opening the door gingerly, as if he expects something to spring out at him. "Besides, you want to wait out here for them to catch up, be my fucking guest."
"You think they're still behind us?" You follow him into the maw, its darkness absorbs you immediately.
"Not gonna find out." He shuts the door behind you, and you're in total black. It was quiet in the hallway, and you didn't notice anything while entering, but your world is now filled with absolute noise. It would be described as musical by any self-respecting rivethead; a mass of crashes and static mixed into the electronica equivalent of black metal. Your eyes start to adjust to some unseen light source, and you find that you're not at all alone.
It's packed tight in here, actually, you can see the shapes of humans writhing in a mass about the room. In the low light you can barely pick out the familiar form of humanity as they hang in the strobe and then acquiesce back into the horde. They seem to be decorated in accordance with the music: piercings glimmer and black vinyl sheens: heads painted in blacks and blues. Pale faces, expressionless, struggle to be seen against the dark.
"Petals," you think. "On a wet, black bow."
The room's smoky as hell, so you venture to light a cigarette. There's too much noise to hear your friend. He's up close to a raven-haired girl with whom he seems pretty familiar. Although you have no idea where in the holy hell you are, this is the type of place you feel the most comfortable; loud, anonymous, a place where you can truly be invisible if you're so inclined.
Someone shoves you from behind, and before you can react, you're plunged into the dance floor. Almost instantly you're locked into the swell of bodies as they jostle and mold about you. The music picks up pace, becomes more frenzied, kids begin to bounce, the bass goes into full gabber; the room goes off like a box of ping pong balls loosed down the stairs. It's so tight that you're losing your breath. You begin to try and fight it, throwing out limp shoves in the hope that a hole out might suddenly afford itself. No one reacts to anything you do. Your cigarette falls from your lips and disappears. You submit utterly to the crowd.
It's not so bad when you let yourself go. Now at least your body is moving, even if not by your own accord. Flesh grabs at you and releases; you focus merely on keeping your head up lest you drown beneath the waves of black boots.
It takes a little time and a couple of bruises, but eventually you're spit out of the mob. You find yourself toward the back of the party; it would be a pretty tough haul to get back to your friend, and a touch impractical. You light another cigarette and take stock of the surroundings. There are a few loose groups huddled in private clusters, and a couple of doors. One leads to what looks like a kitchen; you see rows of bottles on a counter just past a copse of people. Another gives way to a staircase infused with tasteful track lighting, and is empty, which at this moment is about as attractive as anything could be.
You hurry up the stairs and pop into a deep, slender room with a ridiculously long couch opposite a small television console that looks to be at least thirty years old. There's only one other person here aside from you.
She's watching the screen intently, or at least she appears to be at first blush. She does not acknowledge your presence as you approach. It's difficult, at first, to comprehend her ensemble; she moves her head to take a drag and the space behind her shudders. Your eyes trail to the wall, which looks to be paneled and pierced repeatedly by small black projectiles. It hits you; the wall is covered completely with electric outlets, which are almost all filled by thick plugs that snake their way down to her body. She's wrapped in the wire, it's the only thing she's wearing. They snake around her and up her spine, where they seem to burrow into her head.
Her face is completely white, lips, cheeks, eyebrows, everything. Even the pupils of her eyes are blank, which is only interesting in that, as far as you know, costume contacts that completely cover the iris leave the wearer unable to see.
You wonder if maybe your presence has gone unnoticed because she's currently blind for fashion, when she turns and stares you straight through.
Shit... shit.
Shit.
"I had that exact same idea," you spurt. If this were chess, you just stuck a bishop up your nose as your opening move. Youre not smooth; the fact that you know it has helped you with women in the past. But even an ironic sense of self doesn't seem like it'd be much use against this creature. You're not punching your weight here, shithead, so try not to say anything retarded.
...try not to say anything more retarded than you already have.
"Did you," she says, her eyes returning to the screen. The words are beige, white print on a white background, barely filling any space at all. You divert attention to the screen; the movie is Japanese, a middling entry in the late-nineties surge of the arterial spray genre. It may not be the best movie, but it was your first exposure to a kind of visceral cinema that thrilled your teenage psyche in ways that you were not entirely comfortable.
"Yeah, uh, I remember... I remember I had the basic idea for the plot of this movie, like, a couple of months before I saw it..."
"Are you suggesting that Yamato stole this story from you," she says.
"No, of course not, it was just interesting... sort of... synchronicity..." you say.
"Synchronicity. That's Jung, isn't it?" she says.
"Well... yeah, but... I wasn't suggesting any supernatural-"
"I was really into Jung for a while. In high school. The immature mind is drawn... to the impossible, don't you think." It isn't a question. She isn't talking to you. Not really. "I think it is, or at least might be. There is always room for doubt. I am not so interested in the impossible, as it occurs to me that the word is empty of meaning. Anything that can be conceived by a cognizance is possible, never mind the probabilities involved. The litany of history bears this out; that we are even here, in this thing called "the present", is evidence of the power of inevitability in the face of remarkable odds."
"You like to hear yourself talk," is your feeble defense, a pathetic neg right out of a shitty Neil Strauss rag.
"You like to listen to me talk," she replies. Her direct address makes you go all prickly.
"...yeah," you say. Nice.
"Are you familiar with Rare Earth Theory?" The prospect of an actual god damn question thrills you.
"Sure."
"Proponents of the idea usually invoke it to suggest the preciousness of our world, that it somehow implies that we are special, perhaps even deigned, to be here. I do not share their opinion. Do you?" You stare at the screen as if your life depends on it, as if looking into her eyes at this moment would give up the whole of your ghost. The scene is the one where the main dude has just walked in on his boss raping his sister. In his frenzy, his mad blood-rage released by such deep wounds, he hacks them both into pieces, mostly on screen, in some of the most lovely murderporn ever set to film.
"No," you say. "No, I do not share their opinion."
"Do you disagree with the idea itself, or its positive spin?"
"I can't disagree with an idea that has any sort of legitimate evidence to back it up. I just don't see anything good about its implications."
"Is lack of proof 'legitimate evidence'? I seem to remember something from a philosophy class about that being a fallacy of sorts."
"You'd have to ask a philosophy major. That's not my subject, really."
"That's unfortunate," she says, and then says nothing more. What are you even doing here? She's basically already put you out of your misery; it would be prudent to just... walk away. To disappear. With this one... it's best if you just say completely off her radar. Still... this is America, baby, who the fuck is prudent?
"If rare earth is true, if we are an anomaly, then it means that the deck is stacked entirely against us. It means that life is so improbable that every second more we exist, the likelihood that outer space will somehow kill us becomes greater, until..."
"- the probability becomes overwhelming," she finishes the thought without effort. "It becomes a question of when and not if. That's quite a responsibility for a human being to be burdened with. I suppose it isn't so different from a prescient knowledge of death and its wide implications. In the end, Rare Earth is just another stopping point for the mind on the way to oblivion."
"It doesn't even really seem to matter if the theory is true or not. Even if there is abundant life in our universe... catastrophe is always a sliver of a moment away, cosmically speaking."
"Do you ever consider the possibility that we could be easily vaporized at any moment by one of the billions of large rocks that cross our orbit?"
"Yeah..." you say. "Three or four times a day."
"So..." your peripheral sees her head turn towards yours. You look back, despite your fear. "Here we are then..."
"Yeah," you say. "Here we are." Your voice cracks. She motions toward the screen, and you turn, looking into a bright white static.
Something about it compels you; maybe its her desire for you to take an interest in it, maybe its the hypnotic undulation, or maybe it's simply an invincible urge that comes from somewhere below. You approach the television, crouch down on your hands and knees, just staring into the shifting white. It soon becomes apparent that you're not looking at a blank screen, as you can delineate slight isometric lines that converge and coalesce into a coherent picture. It isn't a white screen but a picture of a white room. The camera pans down slightly, revealing what looks to be some sort of card, hovering in the air. There's tiny writing on it, but the resolution makes it impossible to read.
"Take it," she says.
"What?" you say, glancing back at her. She's no longer looking at you.
"Take it," she repeats. "It's yours, anyway."
You reach up to the screen, and then through it, and as you feel the actual texture of the card, Souvenir Vrai rears its ugly head. You pull the card out of the screen and look at it:
You Might Love Them, But Do Not Trust Them (OVER)
And on the other side:
They will do what they want.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck. No matter how many times this happens, it never fails to take you by surprise. You should have realized you were still in-game when you ended up in the third mall.
"That's good advice, you know," you hear her say, but you're too transfixed on the screen to pay much attention. The camera, or rather the simulated camera of this simulated reality, pans down further, and begins to crest upon the top of something black and gnarled. You get to see about an inch of twisted steel before you feel a hand grab your hair. It smashes your face into the screen with what you will recall as astonishing force.
You flop out of the pod onto the floor. Your friend yanks you to your feet.
"Did I win?" you ask, squinting in the light as your senses re-adjust to reality.
"Well, it looks like you didn't lose, anyway..." your friend says. "But whether or not you earned any badges in your little game isn't real key right now."
"What's 'key', then?" There's still a slight coating of Spielgelee
on your face. You use your shirt to wipe the residual from your eyes; once it starts to crust it's a bitch to get out of your lashes.
Women often speak jealously of your eyelashes.
"Come on, bro, we's gots to get the fuck up outta here," he says. Sometimes his propensity for faux street talking is charming. Sometimes.
"Hey, what's going on, huh?" Your friend pulls you by your shirt and you stumble forward. "Wait, where's the line? Where the hell did the line go?" The immediate area is deserted.
"Game Inertia," he reminds you, as he often must in these situations. Your familiarity with the subject doesn't protect you from its effects. Some people claim to have the ability to lucid game, but you've never managed it. Besides, it seems if it would kind of ruin the experience. It would, however, probably be convenient to be able to tell if, ultimately, you were in-game or not, especially in those hazy moments after emergence.
So you aren't in line anymore. You recall that the "house dream" is a recurring nightmare of yours, one you're always relieved to wake up from. Games tend to pick up on that sticky tendril that slithers throughout the recesses of your consciousness. It's become so unpleasant that you're starting to consider quitting.
You're in the third mall, actually, the one you forget about until you're there. It's probably because the place is always so desolate, and you find empty gathering places disconcerting. Most of the storefronts are boarded up and patched over with plywood sheets and cardboard. Garish "Under Construction" signs litter the view, although it never appears that any constructing ever goes on. The few stores that remain open are unfamiliar junk shops, mostly, bereft of name brands and without the kind of stuff you'd want to buy. The light is harsh, no matter where you are.
There's an arcade, but you almost wish there wasn't; it's a pitiful locale, a few clusters of broken games and cabinets that appear to have been frankensteined together from the corpses of other hardware. There's a pinball machine, but the table sucks and its always fucking broken.
Whenever you're in the third mall, you get the same feeling as you do when you enter the guts of a theater. This is all backstage. This is the bowels of commerce. This is not meant to be seen.
"Can you Rappelez-vous me, please? That game was fucking hard."
"Look, we've got to hurry. We've been here too long." He breaks into a run, and this sudden action propels you back into ambient space-time. You're late, again, for that class you always miss, which is bad enough, but you're also being pursued. They're after you over a perceived slight, but they don't care whether you and your friend were the actual perpetrators. You're not sure what happens when they catch you and you're determined to never find out.
You break into a sprint, and for a moment there is nothing but blur as you struggle to keep up with your friend. He's heading toward the center of the mall, rushing into the courtyard and planting himself behind a large blue dumpster filled to the brim with what looks like chunks of drywall. You come in hard, practically dislocating your shoulder as you slam in next to him.
"Subtle," he says, poking his head around the corner.
"You're the one who took off fucking running in the middle of the goddamn arcade," you pant.
"Well, subtlety's never been one of my strong suits, either," he says. "Now, self-preservation..."
"You really think they're here?"
"What I think and what reality dictates are pretty incongruent, you know?" He's on his haunches now, ready to move despite your clearly labored breathing. "The probability that they aren't here is significant, but the probability, statistically speaking, of a highly negative outcome should they catch us, is overwhelming. In such an equation, the only safe thing to do is remove yourself as an integer all together." He bolts off toward the entrance of a large anchor store.
You duck out from behind the dumpster, hustling toward the store, crouched low like you're entering a live fire zone. Your friend crosses the threshold and disappears into racks of clothes that have been arranged with no great care in the corner of the store, which has the air of an abandoned warehouse.
As you beeline for his location, a small group of shoppers almost trip backwards to avoid you. They give cries of disdain; you've clearly interrupted a very sacred moment in their commercial lives. You find the behavior of such people in times of similar crisis curious. They stroll about with a kind of hollow determination, stuck somewhere between too afraid to run and too stupid to know they should. For not the first time in this never-ending chase, you consider that it might be you who's the blind one. This hesitation stems from a seed of belief, you figure, that these people can understand implicitly what you cannot; that there is no point in running.
Still, you've been running for so long that the anxiety generated by stopping would probably outweigh the pain of a little required displacement.
You're well into the anchor store now, following your friend into the racks. The store is unorganized and cluttered, with articles of apparel strewn about between large piles and half-filled brackets. There appears to be no order beyond the certainty of clothes. A few older women are picking through the piles, one stares intently at pairs of pants.
"Hey!" you whisper when you've lost sight of anyone. "What the fuck?"
"Did you see them?" Your friend's voice is detached, close but not immediate.
"If by "them" you mean old women trolling for underwear, then yes, absolutely, they're very close and I'd like to get away from them now."
"Pants," your friend's voice replies. He sounds further away now.
"What?" You're beginning to feel exposed, beginning to jealously covet the security your friend has apparently already found.
"They were looking at pants, not underwear, don't fucking lie to me. I can see everything from in here."
"Well then why did you ask me if I could see anything," you whine.
"Look, I'm not going to stand here and do a god damn vaudeville routine with you when we're in the middle of desperate flight." An arm emerges from the wall rack next to you and hauls you in.
You're in what appears to be some sort of drainage tunnel; the floor is covered in damp eveningwear.
"I can barely see a goddamn thing," you say to your friend, who's hunched over, smoking a cigarette.
"You aren't even trying to look," he shrugs, and moves further into the hole. You trudge along after him. The ceiling begins to decline, and becomes so low that you're crawling through wet suit coats and tacky dresses. Sequins begin to stick to your face. It has become so tight that any movement at all is difficult.
"This reminds me of a dream I once had," you say. "More of a hallucination, really."
"Oh yeah?" Being in front, your friend is fording a path through the flow of synthesized fabrics, and having a hell of a time with it.
"I guess it was somewhere in between. I was sick as hell, had, like, a 103 temperature, I was just in my room in bed. I was convinced that I was a detective working for Scotland Yard, but I was actually a mole for the IRA. I was sending and receiving coded messages for a network of agents throughout London through my television and VCR."
"Well that sounds just exactly like this situation," your friend offers.
"No, but, I was in this haze for, like, a good eight hours, and the whole time I was convinced that my base of operations was a big pile of dirty laundry. I tried to get off the pile, and I'd just end up rolling into a bigger one."
"I'd say that shit sounded patently absurd, but then that would call into question the entire premise of this situation..."
"Yeah, it would," you say, and a ripple of chained memory stirs in the dusty corners of your head. "Yeah, it would, wouldn't it?"
"I keep having this... fucking dream," your friend says quickly. You get the sense that he's eager to change the subject.
"Oh yeah? Is it "huge pile of awkward clothes" related?"
"Only in the sense that its completely fucking suffocating. I'm in this room, this... white room. I've always been in this room, right? Like its everything else that's just the dream... I'm in this fucking white room and there are these... faces. They aren't really faces, but it's hard to... if I called them "static engrams" would that help your visualization?"
"Nope. Just call 'em faces. Makes you sound less like L. Ron Hubbard."
"Well there are these faces, right, that kind of come out of the wall and... say shit."
"What kind of shit?"
"I don't fucking know, it's a dream, it's nonsense, whatever I imagine it to be. But it always makes me feel the same way."
"Oh yeah, and how's that?"
"Like I just killed my own mother." Your friend stops moving for just a moment. "Like I just killed my mother, and I don't even care. The voices totally eviscerate my reality to the point where I'm disinterested in it. I'm just... fucking empty. And that's always when I become aware of the machine..."
"What machine?" you ask, as for some reason your nerves light up all at once.
"And here we are." Your friend bursts through the last mound and you both tumble out of what appears to be a laundry chute in what appears to be a hotel hallway. You must have been in one of those old escape tunnels they built during the war; they're still around if you know where to look.
The hallway is long, so long in fact that you can't see the end of it. All you can make out is a single point in the frame where you can see no further. It strikes you as uncanny.
"That's uncanny," you say.
"What is?"
"The hallway," you say. "You know, how it appears to keep on going infinitely."
"WFT are you talking about?" he replies. You look again and realize your mistake. The hallway actually ends almost immediately in front of you. A mirror you were staring into created the illusion of infinity. It is rather small, actually, and hangs above a little table decorated with a vase full of plastic daffodils.
"Let's go in this one," your friend says, jiggling the nearest knob to see if its unlocked, which it appears to be.
"What, we're just going to barge in?" you say.
"This is a friendly neighborhood," your friend says, nonetheless opening the door gingerly, as if he expects something to spring out at him. "Besides, you want to wait out here for them to catch up, be my fucking guest."
"You think they're still behind us?" You follow him into the maw, its darkness absorbs you immediately.
"Not gonna find out." He shuts the door behind you, and you're in total black. It was quiet in the hallway, and you didn't notice anything while entering, but your world is now filled with absolute noise. It would be described as musical by any self-respecting rivethead; a mass of crashes and static mixed into the electronica equivalent of black metal. Your eyes start to adjust to some unseen light source, and you find that you're not at all alone.
It's packed tight in here, actually, you can see the shapes of humans writhing in a mass about the room. In the low light you can barely pick out the familiar form of humanity as they hang in the strobe and then acquiesce back into the horde. They seem to be decorated in accordance with the music: piercings glimmer and black vinyl sheens: heads painted in blacks and blues. Pale faces, expressionless, struggle to be seen against the dark.
"Petals," you think. "On a wet, black bow."
The room's smoky as hell, so you venture to light a cigarette. There's too much noise to hear your friend. He's up close to a raven-haired girl with whom he seems pretty familiar. Although you have no idea where in the holy hell you are, this is the type of place you feel the most comfortable; loud, anonymous, a place where you can truly be invisible if you're so inclined.
Someone shoves you from behind, and before you can react, you're plunged into the dance floor. Almost instantly you're locked into the swell of bodies as they jostle and mold about you. The music picks up pace, becomes more frenzied, kids begin to bounce, the bass goes into full gabber; the room goes off like a box of ping pong balls loosed down the stairs. It's so tight that you're losing your breath. You begin to try and fight it, throwing out limp shoves in the hope that a hole out might suddenly afford itself. No one reacts to anything you do. Your cigarette falls from your lips and disappears. You submit utterly to the crowd.
It's not so bad when you let yourself go. Now at least your body is moving, even if not by your own accord. Flesh grabs at you and releases; you focus merely on keeping your head up lest you drown beneath the waves of black boots.
It takes a little time and a couple of bruises, but eventually you're spit out of the mob. You find yourself toward the back of the party; it would be a pretty tough haul to get back to your friend, and a touch impractical. You light another cigarette and take stock of the surroundings. There are a few loose groups huddled in private clusters, and a couple of doors. One leads to what looks like a kitchen; you see rows of bottles on a counter just past a copse of people. Another gives way to a staircase infused with tasteful track lighting, and is empty, which at this moment is about as attractive as anything could be.
You hurry up the stairs and pop into a deep, slender room with a ridiculously long couch opposite a small television console that looks to be at least thirty years old. There's only one other person here aside from you.
She's watching the screen intently, or at least she appears to be at first blush. She does not acknowledge your presence as you approach. It's difficult, at first, to comprehend her ensemble; she moves her head to take a drag and the space behind her shudders. Your eyes trail to the wall, which looks to be paneled and pierced repeatedly by small black projectiles. It hits you; the wall is covered completely with electric outlets, which are almost all filled by thick plugs that snake their way down to her body. She's wrapped in the wire, it's the only thing she's wearing. They snake around her and up her spine, where they seem to burrow into her head.
Her face is completely white, lips, cheeks, eyebrows, everything. Even the pupils of her eyes are blank, which is only interesting in that, as far as you know, costume contacts that completely cover the iris leave the wearer unable to see.
You wonder if maybe your presence has gone unnoticed because she's currently blind for fashion, when she turns and stares you straight through.
Shit... shit.
Shit.
"I had that exact same idea," you spurt. If this were chess, you just stuck a bishop up your nose as your opening move. Youre not smooth; the fact that you know it has helped you with women in the past. But even an ironic sense of self doesn't seem like it'd be much use against this creature. You're not punching your weight here, shithead, so try not to say anything retarded.
...try not to say anything more retarded than you already have.
"Did you," she says, her eyes returning to the screen. The words are beige, white print on a white background, barely filling any space at all. You divert attention to the screen; the movie is Japanese, a middling entry in the late-nineties surge of the arterial spray genre. It may not be the best movie, but it was your first exposure to a kind of visceral cinema that thrilled your teenage psyche in ways that you were not entirely comfortable.
"Yeah, uh, I remember... I remember I had the basic idea for the plot of this movie, like, a couple of months before I saw it..."
"Are you suggesting that Yamato stole this story from you," she says.
"No, of course not, it was just interesting... sort of... synchronicity..." you say.
"Synchronicity. That's Jung, isn't it?" she says.
"Well... yeah, but... I wasn't suggesting any supernatural-"
"I was really into Jung for a while. In high school. The immature mind is drawn... to the impossible, don't you think." It isn't a question. She isn't talking to you. Not really. "I think it is, or at least might be. There is always room for doubt. I am not so interested in the impossible, as it occurs to me that the word is empty of meaning. Anything that can be conceived by a cognizance is possible, never mind the probabilities involved. The litany of history bears this out; that we are even here, in this thing called "the present", is evidence of the power of inevitability in the face of remarkable odds."
"You like to hear yourself talk," is your feeble defense, a pathetic neg right out of a shitty Neil Strauss rag.
"You like to listen to me talk," she replies. Her direct address makes you go all prickly.
"...yeah," you say. Nice.
"Are you familiar with Rare Earth Theory?" The prospect of an actual god damn question thrills you.
"Sure."
"Proponents of the idea usually invoke it to suggest the preciousness of our world, that it somehow implies that we are special, perhaps even deigned, to be here. I do not share their opinion. Do you?" You stare at the screen as if your life depends on it, as if looking into her eyes at this moment would give up the whole of your ghost. The scene is the one where the main dude has just walked in on his boss raping his sister. In his frenzy, his mad blood-rage released by such deep wounds, he hacks them both into pieces, mostly on screen, in some of the most lovely murderporn ever set to film.
"No," you say. "No, I do not share their opinion."
"Do you disagree with the idea itself, or its positive spin?"
"I can't disagree with an idea that has any sort of legitimate evidence to back it up. I just don't see anything good about its implications."
"Is lack of proof 'legitimate evidence'? I seem to remember something from a philosophy class about that being a fallacy of sorts."
"You'd have to ask a philosophy major. That's not my subject, really."
"That's unfortunate," she says, and then says nothing more. What are you even doing here? She's basically already put you out of your misery; it would be prudent to just... walk away. To disappear. With this one... it's best if you just say completely off her radar. Still... this is America, baby, who the fuck is prudent?
"If rare earth is true, if we are an anomaly, then it means that the deck is stacked entirely against us. It means that life is so improbable that every second more we exist, the likelihood that outer space will somehow kill us becomes greater, until..."
"- the probability becomes overwhelming," she finishes the thought without effort. "It becomes a question of when and not if. That's quite a responsibility for a human being to be burdened with. I suppose it isn't so different from a prescient knowledge of death and its wide implications. In the end, Rare Earth is just another stopping point for the mind on the way to oblivion."
"It doesn't even really seem to matter if the theory is true or not. Even if there is abundant life in our universe... catastrophe is always a sliver of a moment away, cosmically speaking."
"Do you ever consider the possibility that we could be easily vaporized at any moment by one of the billions of large rocks that cross our orbit?"
"Yeah..." you say. "Three or four times a day."
"So..." your peripheral sees her head turn towards yours. You look back, despite your fear. "Here we are then..."
"Yeah," you say. "Here we are." Your voice cracks. She motions toward the screen, and you turn, looking into a bright white static.
Something about it compels you; maybe its her desire for you to take an interest in it, maybe its the hypnotic undulation, or maybe it's simply an invincible urge that comes from somewhere below. You approach the television, crouch down on your hands and knees, just staring into the shifting white. It soon becomes apparent that you're not looking at a blank screen, as you can delineate slight isometric lines that converge and coalesce into a coherent picture. It isn't a white screen but a picture of a white room. The camera pans down slightly, revealing what looks to be some sort of card, hovering in the air. There's tiny writing on it, but the resolution makes it impossible to read.
"Take it," she says.
"What?" you say, glancing back at her. She's no longer looking at you.
"Take it," she repeats. "It's yours, anyway."
You reach up to the screen, and then through it, and as you feel the actual texture of the card, Souvenir Vrai rears its ugly head. You pull the card out of the screen and look at it:
You Might Love Them, But Do Not Trust Them (OVER)
And on the other side:
They will do what they want.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck. No matter how many times this happens, it never fails to take you by surprise. You should have realized you were still in-game when you ended up in the third mall.
"That's good advice, you know," you hear her say, but you're too transfixed on the screen to pay much attention. The camera, or rather the simulated camera of this simulated reality, pans down further, and begins to crest upon the top of something black and gnarled. You get to see about an inch of twisted steel before you feel a hand grab your hair. It smashes your face into the screen with what you will recall as astonishing force.