Another Job

The warehouse door was open. There it was, one of the most advanced cases Felix and Matt had ever seen. The rollers of this particular machine had hauled themselves off their frame. There were scrape-marks left where it had dragged itself across the shop floor. The ‘mouth’ was gorging itself on great bales of paper while the rear end was weaving the beginnings of a cocoon.

The Foreman shook Felix and Matt’s hands. “Brian, I spoke to you on the phone. I’m so glad you’re here” he said. So, uh…” the Foreman clapped his hands, “what can you guys do…?” He hovered nervously round the pair. Some yards away a huddle of workers was also watching. One of them said:

“Who ya gonna call…?” as if Felix and Matt hadn’t heard that one before.

“I’m not sure yet” said Felix, pondering the situation. “Matt…?” he turned to his colleague, who just shrugged. Back to Brian, Felix said “every case is unique. How long has it been…?”

“Since it…”

“Since it started being actively anomalous?” said Felix.

“It started this morning” said Brian, “it was a limited run before the evening papers… What do you think caused this?” he added.

“Commodity fetishism, innit…?” Matt chuckled. 

“What’s that…?” Brian asked, perplexed.

“You do know your Marxism, right?” Felix deadpanned.

“I’m sorry…” said Brian, now quite panicked. He didn’t.

“Commodity fetishism” said Matt, twirling his beard, still grinning “it’s when stuff comes alive.” Brian nodded as if he understood. They looked back on the machine-caterpillar still gorging away.

“So, what are you going to do?” Brian asked again.

“Not sure” said Felix. He walked toward the caterpillar slowly. “There’re two… general options” he said. “We can destroy it…”

Brian quibbled, “But…?”

“You want to stick around” said Felix sharply, “and see what comes out of the cocoon?”

“Well, no…” said Brian, following after Felix.

“We could deactivate it” said Matt, also in tow. Brian audibly smiled at that. “But you’d still have a big heaping mess” Matt added, “a dead mechanical insect on your hands.”

Brian sighed, his face fell. “Do what you have to.”

“Oh we will” said Matt with an even broader smile.

“We’ll want an engineer” said Felix, absently to the Foreman. “You can stay too, if you want, but…” he turned on his heel and realised the crowd had gathered round them. “You lot can all go home.”

“Are we still getting paid?” asked one of the workers.

“Get a union, boys” said Matt. “And girls” he added, noticing the gender mix.

…

“So” said the Engineer, “are you all commies in your department?” She glanced up at Felix with a defiant look. Felix tried not to look phased.

“No” he said eventually. “Matt here is an accelerationist.” Matt was circling round the meta-beast, tentatively. The Engineer just shook her head and said:

“But how’d you end up working for the Man?”

“Same way you did” said Felix, nodding up at the control room where Brian the foreman was negotiating with several staff members.

“There are those who say that since the ascent of social democracy the state has become contested” said Matt. “Not me” he added. “I’m in it for the monsters.” Matt grinned. He was holding a strange device, pointing it at the caterpillar. “Readings are off the chart.”

“Literally…?” said Felix.

“Almost” said Matt. “Look” he walked over to where Felix and the Engineer were standing. He showed a set of readings to Felix. The Engineer leaned in. Felix frowned:

“You know much about noumenometers?”

“Humour me” said the Engineer, irked but deadpan.

“No” said Felix abruptly. “Do you have schematics for this machine?”

“Of course” said the Engineer.

“Stress tests…?”

“The supplier comes in and checks it annually” said the Engineer, still taken aback.

“OK” said Felix. “What we’ll need to do is put up a reality anchor as a frame, stabilise the situation and dismantle the whole thing, carefully.”

“What…?” said the Engineer, incredulous.

“What’s your name?” Matt asked.

“Amber…” said the Engineer, now looking concerned.

“The thing is, Amber, this is a particular infestation of late-capitalism that seems to be concentrated on the means of production. You might have heard of some cases.” Amber said nothing but Matt had her attention. “Fixed plant, raw materials, equipment, is all getting up and taking on life.”

“An imitation of life” said Felix.

“It’s all down to quantum fluctuation” said Matt, “tremendous leaps of improbability, localised in… things like this.” He pointed to the machine. “If we can find the source we can switch it off. But in this case the source is the entire body of the machine so what we do is…”

“Put it in a box” said Felix. “Nice mansplain” he added, smirking.

“Thanks” said Matt. “It’s just a set of special metal alloy panels that absorb the Hume Rays.”

“Hume Rays…?” said Amber.

“It’s what we call them” said Matt. “Hey, why do we call them that?”

“I don’t know” said Felix. “But if we call the depot now we should be able to get them up by end-of-day.”

“You're kidding...?”

“I'm kidding” said Felix. “We've got some in the van, we should have it up in no time.”

Amber thought about it for a moment then shook her head. “And what has any of this got to do with communism?”

“We don’t make the rules” said Felix with a silly grin.

…

A little over an hour later the trio were standing in the near dark. “Keep some room for the cable” said Matt. They’d put up a box round the mecha-monster. Felix held a torch while Amber and Matt heaved equipment inside through the makeshift door. The caterpillar, now half-cocooned, had calmed down a lot. It was looking more and more like it should have done, a pile of broken machinery. 

“What’s the levels’ like?” Matt asked.

“Almost one-for-one” said Felix, consulting the noumenometer in his other hand.

“Really…?”Amber asked. Matt had been filling her in on more of the (non-confidential) details of the job. “Is reality a one-for-one chain of causality?”

“Dude, she has a point” said Matt as he laid down the last of the tools they’d use.

“It depends on the time frame” said Felix, “but for the duration we’re operating at sub-real levels of causation.”

“Let me get this straight” said Amber. “If we brought the generator inside and closed the door everything that then happened inside here would be…?”

“Inevitable” said Felix, fixing her gaze. “We’d better leave the door ajar then.”

“Are you sure about this?” Matt asked.

“Its fine” said Felix. “Look” he pointed to the junk in front of them. “If anything happens we’ll get back-up” he added. “We’ve dealt with the ice-cream cows, hanging-file bats and so many scaffolding vines” he said with a sly smile, “I’m sure we can deal with this.”

“But you do have back-up?” Amber asked, deapan.

“We’ll start with the joins” said Felix.

 Matt and Amber got started with a pneumatic bolt remover. The first bolt fell to the floor with a muffled clink. Suddenly there was an almighty sound, a cross between a moo and a roar. “What was that…?” said Felix. Before anyone could find out the floor began shaking. “Quick! Out…!” The trio darted for exit. The earthquake continued, getting louder, loose objects clattered all around. The ground outside the warehouse was falling away. There was another moo/roar. The warehouse lifted itself off the ground and began to walk.

Eleven

To begin with no one paid it much attention, literally, for the first three weeks the only views or followers the channel got was bots. Why would anyone pay much attention to a direct-to-camera diary hosted by an individual, a boy in his late-teens¹ called 11B-X-1371, especially when the initial videos were between two to seven minutes long and mostly referenced pop culture or personal minutiae?

           The first video of interest was posted on the 18^th of January 2017. The video featured a prank² derivative of the ‘Big Stranger Rodeo’ where the Individual jumped on a stranger’s back, in this case a boy of similar age in an unknown hallway. It was the first video that was not delivered direct to a fixed camera, the first to be recorded by someone other than the Individual (though this person has not been identified) and the first in the manner that would come to define the channel, which was renamed “Fear No Darkness.”

            The immediate result of the video was am uptick in views, more than 100 in 24 hours after posting. This led to the Individual in the following video putting out a call for suggestions for more ‘pranks’³. The video following was posted on the 20^th of January 2017, showing the Individual attempting to steal a ball from an informal game of basketball⁴ (also derivative⁵). In subsequent weeks the Individual posted videos of himself:

1. Eating raw cinnamon
2. Dropping a cola-bomb in a busy supermarket
3. Giving a nazi salute at a Rememberance Day service
4. Egging a woman pushing a pram from what appeared to be the back of a moped.

The last episode was posted on the 7^th of February 2017 and got 1,000 unique views in 48 hours. The channel was logged at GCHO three days later and a cursory investigation conducted, indicating that the channel and user were both operating behind multiple proxies, with the ultimate location being a site in Belize. The site then placed under continual surveillance.

By the end of February the site’s output was dedicated almost entirely to self-described pranks. The pranks also changed in content and tone. The Individual (by this point known to followers/viewers as “Eleven”) was filmed:

1. Attempting (and failing) to ride a moped over a brook
2. Surfing on a tea tray down a set of stairs
3. Releasing a pig in a mosque
4. Using a medical stapler to attach his scrotum to his left leg.

The channel was taken down after the last video, dated the 3^rd of March, two days later⁶. An APB was placed though the Individual was impossible to locate⁷. The Individual reappeared on March the 24^th 2017 on a largely self-constructed site called “Where is the Rider?” The Individual has been subject to numerous denials of service since but for a period was able to return to online broadcasting. The videos made by “Eleven…” became progressively more racist, violent and/or self-destructive, which in turn encouraged more and more outlandish suggestions from viewers. This culminated on the 23^rd of May 2017 when the Individual posted two videos in twelve hours, in the first he appeared to amputate his left hand, followed by one where the hand reappeared, the Individual apparently unaffected, recounted news from that day to prove the date and time. There were a combined total of 95,000 individual views for the videos on that day alone⁸. The case was handed to a specialist unit, called the Special and Metaphysical Crime Squad. A D-Notice was imposed on the media and denial of service re-established.

After this point no site directly hosted videos of the Individual however a train of videos emerged on a number of forums⁹ and formats, shared widely¹⁰. Known examples include the Individual:

1. inserting a chili in their anus
2. deliberately crashing into a brick wall riding a moped
3. having a swastika branded onto their thigh
4. shooting themselves in the foot then sticking the foot into boiling vinegar.

As before the Individual, AKA “Eleven”, would reappear unharmed however no such person was identified or apprehended in real life. By July 2017 however, after reverse engineering the share-route the videos took, the source of the videos was eventually narrowed down to a university campus in Central London.

Though a search of the campus, students and staff did not turn up an “Eleven…” a scan of the IT mainframe found a rogue subroutine, called 11B-X-1371, that had been entered into the university’s intranet on the 1^st of January. No one knows who entered it but the programme was designed to create the ultimate YouTube star, a completely fictional entity based on a composite of internet celebrities. While the phenomenon itself has been successfully contained online there has been a proliferation of actually existing devotees of 11B-X-1371, fans committed to bigotry, violence and self-abuse until the ‘Mad Rider’ returns. So far there have been twenty-three known casualties. The case continues.

1 Slim-to-medium build, short sandy hair, blue eyes, the Individual speaks with a mostly non-regional English accent.

2 It was listed as a ‘prank’ in the video description.

3 To be left in the comment section. The Individual specifically requested viewers not “DM” him.

4 The court was later found to be just off the Camden High Road, between Camden and Holloway.

5 And not one of the archived suggestions left in the comment box.

6 In which time it accrued over 4,000 unique views.

7 The suggestion for the staple video came from a site user known as “Tokyo Fist.” The user was put under surveillance but found to have no connection to the Individual.

8 The prank was suggested by a viewer called “Jimmy Vespa” who also apparently won an unknown prize. The Individual said “this time you can DM me.”

9 Including a members-only sub-reddit called “The Mad Rider…” a later nickname for the Individual.

10 An average of about two hundred thousand shares for each video.

Eddie Versus Dangerous Dave

A stupid smile spread across his face. “Are you OK, Dave?” I asked. He leaned back in his chair, slowly, and I realised he was more than alright. Still, I tried: “Dave…? Dave…?” It was no good. He pushed the chair back, stood up and spread his arms, stretching very slowly. It was all too familiar. Lara noticed; then Ali, Evan and Steve. Dave started walking. I realised he got up half-an-hour before, mentioned something about being bored and went missing for a bit. He came back and sat down not saying anything, very quiet. He must have taken it somewhere then.

‘It’ went by a few names, Quark, Timewarp, Drop, 3AM Eternal. Dave was the first of our group to try. He had a sixth-sense for scoring, where to go who to ask; also when to go clean. He was forever getting patted down in nightclubs but I don’t remember him ever getting caught – good old ‘Dangerous Dave.’

He wanted to share the latest buzz with his friends. “You have to take it to know” he’d say. “There’s no contact high with this.” We eventually turned on one afternoon in our house in the second year of university. Dave had already persuaded the others, Lara, Ali, Evan, Steve. I came home from a morning lecture and found them in the kitchen. He was telling the others, “run your hands under the tap… hold them up… now watch the drops fall.” He'd been trying with me for months. I didn’t want to be stuck in my room dodging bliss-zombies so I gave in and it was good. People wouldn’t take it if it wasn’t I suppose.

I was a typical first-timer apparently. I got caught up staring at the railway line down beyond the bottom of our garden. The trains flowed like fluid metal singing in a clear pipe. The sky was fascinating too, watching the banks of clouds like waves dragged along by an invisible force. This gave way to night and the small dusting of planets and stars tracking light across the sky. It all happened in what seemed like twenty minutes. Stargazing, I felt Dave plant a hand on my shoulder. He looked at me with a patronising grin:

“Come inside. You’ll get cold.”

Forty-eight hours of normal time sped by before the effects wore off. It helped that my first experience was at home. If we had taken it somewhere else we could have caused trouble. One of the side effects is people living through normal time cannot physically touch the user. There are lots of theories as to how it works. Most of them involve misinterpreting Einstein. Back then it was a legal high. Users were merely a nuisance to the sober. When Dave got up at the reception and drifted slowly through the crowd to the dance floor it was illegal. A ripple of embarrassed laughter billowed over the room, followed by gasps and angry stares.

“I’m sorry” I said to our silent accusers, “I don’t know what’s going on.” It was Lara’s Sister’s wedding. We hardly knew anyone there. We were practically crashers. One of Lara’s Aunts referred to our table as the ‘ravers from university.’ Unfair but it was the consensus, probably why someone shouted:

“Yeah, you do!”

I stood up, as if that would help, and followed. “Dave” I said, “knock it off, it’s not funny.” I tried to grab his arm but my hand glanced off him. He was definitely on. The hubbub reached the top table.

“I’ve had enough” said the Voice. It was the Best Man, a human spud called Eddie. He was bowling toward us in anger. I also knew him from university, a sport science student who turned top-heavy steroid abusing personal trainer. He had wanted to ‘have enough’ for years. He hated us ‘druggies.’

Evan lived with him for a bit after university in a flat-share-of-convenience. Though our group went separate ways we always stayed in touch, Dave made sure of it. One evening, after a reunion night out, we crashed round Evan's place. Eddie often prowled around the house at night, eating a chicken or drinking a shake. He usually wore a silver dressing gown. This time though it seemed he was asleep. We tried to be quiet, sat around the front room, but it seemed we woke the beast. Eddie almost fell down the stairs, yelling in unintelligible fury. We all stared at him, silently, waiting for him to peter out or hit someone. Eventually he looked at Dave and asked “are you high?”

We were only drunk but he squinted at Eddie and eventually said: “Hang on… you’re a massive Dairy Lea.” Everyone laughed, except for Eddie of course, mostly because it was true. Standing there top heavy in his silver dressing gown Eddie was a massive Dairy Lea. If we hadn’t laughed Eddie might have torn Dave to bits like a chicken.

Back at the wedding, Eddie started bellowing and pointing at Dave though it had no effect. He still retreated in the face of Dangerous Dave’s silent serene smugness and the protestations of his girlfriend, I assumed, grabbing his arm and insisting it wasn’t ‘worth it.’ Dave stopped in the middle of the dance floor. Eddie snorted, shook off his girlfriend and drew back to punch Dave. He hit him. 

There was a colossal clanging sound. Eddie howled in pain and recoiled. His blow rebounded like bone on steel. There was general pandemonium. Eddie fell back, slowly, slowly. Everything was slowing. The pandemonium faded. The whole room practically stopped but the six of us, our table, we were moving through normal time. I think Ali said something like:

“What's going on?”

For a moment Dave did not answer. He seemed awestruck. He looked our table, then at me and eventually said:

“Wow, so there is a contact high.”

Fearful Contents

Gentlemen… Ladies… This is a, um… I would call it fascinating this… artefact, if it were not for its fearful contents. This is the original copy… This is a photo of the original copy. Take a look, please, it’s interesting. We will, of course, be working with a printed translation. But, of course, this, the original copy is very relevant to the work we will be doing.

It is, as you can see, a codex, five hundred pages in all, not huge. It is handwritten and encrypted. It came to the United Kingdom in June 1939, with the personal effects of a Polish refugee, a Professor Voynich, who until then had been a professor of Medieval Romance Languages at the University of Danzig, now Gdansk.  It was stolen, yes, University property, but, by that point no one was really asking questions. Professor Voynich gave it to Oxford University. It was then taken, months later to the British Library, where it was transcribed for decryption.

The Professor was used to complicated translations but not to ciphers. He reckoned the base language was Florentine Latin, and he was proven right, but only after portion of the document was used to test the decryption machines at GC&CS, Bletchley Park. The first full decryption and translation was carried out in 1949. It was only then that anyone began to grasp the full import of this document.

To get to the point, this is a medical inventory, but with a difference. Now, the, uh, author, whoever he or maybe she was, they almost certainly lived in the Republic of Florence sometime during the Thirteenth Century. It’s possible that they lived somewhere else and spoke some other language and that may have chosen Vulgar Latin as a basis for their cipher. I doubt it. At the moment we are unable to deduce much about the author or their motives. But the truly remarkable thing about this book is references to diseases and treatments that the author could not have possibly known about; a simple example, smallpox, which the author describes as:

“A malady of Non-Living Replicates that is inhaled; similar to influenza, causing muscle pain, malaise, headache and prostration but leading to pox lesions and in extreme cases violent haemorrhage of the skin. It is fatal in one third of cases.”

It was a lucky guess as to the cause of smallpox perhaps… probably not though. The author makes frequent reference to “non-living replicates” throughout the manuscript, clearly referring to viral infection. As a matter of fact the author refers to the smallpox vaccine, calling it a “treatment through counter-malady using the pox common to cattle.”

I know what you’re thinking, this is prognostication; make a dozen predictions, get one right and you’re a seer, everyone forgets the rest. Even after close examination this appears, or appeared, to be the nature of the text. The cases are not ordered by subject groups, by alphabet or chronologically. In fact there are a number of entries that clash or contradict what we know about history, our history. There is, for example, a whole series of entries referring to biomechanical diseases and injuries, I’ll, uh, list a few: Tri-Spherical Cognitive Dissonance… Persistent Involuntary Gear Spasms… Progressive Arterial Plastination… These are all well and good but, according to this book, these conditions all arose in the nineteenth century.

So, for a long time, the manuscript has been a tantalising mystery. Possibly a vital resource, certainly a tremendous fascination, if only it could somehow be brought to some order. Well, what we have now, it’s a… it’s a recent development, only a model, developed by the nerds in Data Extrapolation over at GCHQ. Yet again it was a side-product of another project. The manuscript was used to test algorithms for mass data harvesting, the project coming out of the NSA, Full Spectrum Coverage. But in running this the nerds have stumbled upon a possible answer and it’s one that appears to work. It’s based on the nature of history and causality.

Human activity makes history. People act consciously and in doing so change things. Most human activity however is negated. Different individual actions cancel each other out. Time’s arrow means there is no way of establishing what a world-changing event is and what isn’t, we cannot go back and review, we cannot run experiments side by side… Except we sort of can. The book can be explained, although the explanation begs further questions, if we use four separate timelines. They are:

1)      The Council of Nicea disbands without reaching agreement. Instead of establishing Catholicism the Western Empire develops early capitalism.

2)      The Vikings remain in North America, establishing a permanent independent Kingdom of Vinland.

3)      The Russian Red Army prevails in Warsaw and four weeks later makes contact with the Red Army of the Ruhr.

4)      Our timeline. 

How did we come by those four times lines? There are, surely, a practically infinite number of events to chose from. With so little to go on, we don't know who wrote the book and the University of Gdansk lost much of its records in the course of the war, the nerds went for the one solid set of facts they could use. Professor Voynich was of course debriefed by the military on arrival. He was also kept under MI5 observation for much of his life. Again there's a large number of possibly defining facts, however:

1. He was a practising Catholic. He died in 1987 and is now buried in an RC graveyard in Kensnal New Town.
2. His father was an ethnic Russian, as you can tell by the name. He was a travelling merchant representing a soap and perfume company. He met his future wife, as Norwegian woman, fifteen years younger than him, an heiress, onboard an Atlantic steamship.
3. When Professor Voynich was younger her served in the Polish Army under Josef Pilsudski. He participated in the Battle of Warsaw.

If this is real, and we must keep our wits about us, there is, let me stress no way of proving it one way or the other, but, if it is real then it is the first glimpse of the predicted multiverse. If it is real then before long we need to get to grips with just how an unknown Florentine was able to perceive all this. I mean, given that events listed in the manuscript happen prior to what we know as the Renaissance. Perhaps whoever wrote this was copying from a previous source or sources, which would at least explain the non-linear nature of the text, not to mention the information within. There’s also the question of causality and the flow of information. In a unitary universe there is no way of sending information back in time. It would place effect before cause. Information can flow between universes however, we just don’t know how.

But there’s something more important. Speculations aside we must remember our loyalties, so to speak, to our timeline, to the people that live in it. The manuscript predicts both diseases and cures that have arisen in the course of our history. There is an entry, it is on the last page of the document that you should all have, the, uh, selected highlights I have been referring to, one that should be great cause for concern. It runs:

“This is a disease of a man-made Non-Living Replicate, one of the first. It had been designed as a weapon and forged in the biological workshops of Pan Slavia. It mutates at least once in every one thousand generations, making protein-treatment very hard to apply. It is borne in human fluid. It raises general body temperature. It drives the affected mind into a common frenzy. The afflicted are almost always compelled to violence, thus spreading the disease. They are capable of speech but cannot be reasoned with. Unlike most maladies this disease physically sustains, rather than degrades those afflicted, who remain constantly active, disdaining food and all forms of rest. During an outbreak there is no practical length of time in which this disease can be quarantined. The only sure and certain way of containing this blight is through destruction of the afflicted.”

According to the manuscript the first outbreak will happen this year. It may already have begun.

Gregor

As Gregor woke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed. His eyes peeled open and cast about, vision was blurry but eventually focused. He was where he had been, in a pile of leaf litter in the bough of a tree, but something was very wrong.

He wheeled his limbs about, gaining no traction until he toppled onto his front. Gregor had become enormous. He collapsed under his own weight, face down. His weirdly stunted proboscis was funnelled into the Earth but, stranger still, he smelled almost nothing. The chemical silence was deafening. He hauled himself up on his limbs again: “urgh!” he exclaimed, grunting with effort. The sound shocked him. He’d never made that noise before.

Gregor began crawling around on the forest floor. Where was everybody? Questions rattled around his mind. What was going on? His mind that was once a simple relay was a now a tangled warren of pathways that set off a clashing torrent of thoughts and feelings. Where was he? He felt what he later realised was, a combination of fear, abandonment and deep revulsion. What was he?

He was heavy and large and covered in a strange, soft dermis. His pincers were digits. His carapace was missing along a pair of legs. Gregor tried to climb a tree but the friction was gone. He felt hungry. He tried eating sap, then fungus, then a handful of leaves but these things tasted foul to him. Eventually there was nothing left to do except curl up in a ball to retain heat.

Sometime later his feelings simplified to terror when he found three ape-creatures standing over him on their hind legs. Two of them were tall, one of them was short. They made noises at him; sharp noises that made him cover his ears. He realised later they were trying to communicate with him. More ape-creatures came and two of them managed to pick Gregor up. They wanted him to stand like they were doing. They were also keen to cover him in a pelt a bit like the ones they were wearing. He fell down a few times and the pelt kept slipping off but they were eventually satisfied. They took him slowly, out of the wood and put him in a box. The box started moving. Gregor felt queasy. He would have been sick but there was nothing to regurgitate. He eventually passed out.

When Gregor came to he was in a cave, a square cave, very clean, odorless and cold with an artificial sun dangling from the ceiling. Gregor was wearing a new pelt and had a strange tube burrowed into his arm. More ape-creatures came and went. They touched him, looked him over, measured him, they shined a light in his eyes; all the while they kept making their noises at him. It was hard to get used to. Later they took the tube out and brought him food and water though it took some getting used to. The food they offered him was often warm but had to be broken down with the bony protuberances in his jaw. Gregor was in the cave for a long time. He began to decipher what the noises meant. It was communication.

They wanted to know about him, particularly what he was doing when they found him. Gregor told them he had been living a normal life, eating leaves and drinking rainwater, scuttling up and down trees and rocks but the ape creatures, who called themselves humans, said this was impossible. The showed him something. They gave him a reflective square. One of them said “look.” He did. He realised eventually he was looking at himself. He was an ape-creature, a human.

In time he learned that he was human all along. The other humans, who called themselves doctors, told him he had a name, a word that applied to an individual. His word was Gregor. Despite misgivings Gregor slowly came to accept his humanity. His dreams of being an insect were just that, dreams, delusions brought on by a mental breakdown.

Gregor left the cave, called a hospital, and was settled it a place called home. Home was a small set of rooms, darker than the hospital, warmer, mustier and lonelier. They even settled him into his old job, a task to do as part of the human hive. Gregor worked in telesales, apparently, which meant ringing people up offering them something they didn’t want. Gregor settled into his new/old life. He never felt comfortable in himself, his dreams were still uneasy, but this was his life now. He accepted it.

A year on, a year was a succession of four seasons, Gregor was in his kitchen, a place where humans mixed foods together and warmed them up to prevent poisoning, stirring a pot, when he saw something scuttle across the table next to him. Gregor jumped and lashed out instinctively with the spoon. There was a tiny cracking sound. Turning the spoon over slowly guilt seeped into horror. Gregor realised he had killed one of his own.

Flight Engineer

I'm a pilot. It's not a line of work you'd expect to see apparitions. The airline I used to work for though had a haunted 737. I have flown with the ghost, even seen it up close. It's a slim, small man, younger-looking with pale, cropped hair. He wears a cap and uniform with purple and gold epaulettes, hence his name, the Engineer. We sometimes see him in the cockpit, looking lost. There’s nowhere for him to sit. The 737 never had flight engineers, it was all done by monitor. When I have seen him his skin he has had a translucent grey hue, as if from in a black-and-white film. Sometimes people meet him gliding along the passenger isle or 'working' on some mechanism on the plane. I always thought ghosts must be bored having to go through the same motions over and over, a job you can never leave. He's harmless though he can upset the passengers.

The first time I heard about him was when passenger, a puffy, white South African tried to get his attention. He had already complained about the food and about his head-rest and the quality of the film selection. The Engineer ignored him. This did not go down well. I was a junior at the time, just qualified. While the pilot got on with important things like flying the plane I was pulled out to soothe this poor man's feelings. Afterwards the Senior Flight Attendant, whose name was Noelle, apologised:

"I'm sorry" she said. "I ran out of things to say. He wouldn't stop. I could hardly tell him it was the Engineer."

"The what...?”

"You don't... you don't know...?"

"Know what...?"

"God, you are new" she said and patted me on the cheek, a little patronising, but I didn’t mind so much. I’m sure I wasn’t the only crew member to have a slight crush on her.

So the Engineer went through the motions on this particular plane. No one knew why he was there, what he wanted, or even who he was, though there were some good guesses. I remember talking to an aviation enthusiast called Roger, who investigated the Engineer. He took eyewitness descriptions of the ghost and made a photo-fit. I know because he was hanging around Heathrow Airport lounge trying to talk to company flight crew. He showed me the photo-fit and a picture of a young man called George Blake, who used to be a flight engineer. He went apparently missing West Berlin shortly before the wall went up, though Roger didn’t say whether it was murder or misadventure. Mr Blake looked quite like sketch of the Engineer though. Roger was certain; goodness knows how he got the photo. I wasn’t so sure.

The Engineer was bound to the plane and to his work, a minor inconvenience and an interesting tale. But something changed on the way into Brandenburg Airport. We were about ten minutes from arriving in the stack. I was poring over the dashboard, getting ready to resume control of the plane when a hand appeared over my shoulder. I jumped then turned in my seat. It was the Engineer, stood over me. He had a half-blank, half-anxious expression, looking back and forth and pointing intently at something on the dashboard. There was a sudden exclamation from the cabin door:

“Oh my God…!” My co-pilot, Darius, had just come back from the toilet. “What…?” He was flabbergasted, shocked, almost as blanched as the Engineer. He was new and clearly had no idea. I said:

“Wait…” which he did. The Engineer was glancing back and forth. He wanted to tell me something. Eventually he managed to slowly mouth:

“Look…” I wasn’t sure if I heard him or not. I realised he was pointing to the internal pressure dial. It seemed fine though the indicator was flickering. Something in me took this seriously. I said:

“What should we do…?” The Engineer pointed down. “OK…” I then got in touch with Traffic Control and sent the plane down several thousand feet. I knew I’d done enough when the Engineer smiled and disappeared.

It turned out there were three stress fractures in in hull, only small ones, the onboard computer missed them all and any breaks can be dangerous. The plane was grounded for repair. A few years later the 737 was decommissioned and, as far as I know, it seems the Engineer has been permanently retired.

Climbing Mount Literature

Mr Heroic Protagonist and his friend Mr Sensitive Companion stood together in awe at the foot of Mount Literature. Mr Companion was reverent, Mr Protagonist was eager. He stood, hands on hips and said:

“Let’s begin.”

“It’s going to be hard work” said Mr Companion, shyly. Protagonist had brought his friend along as a foil. He replied:

“I don't like work, no man does but I like what is in the work; the chance to find yourself, your own reality for yourself not for others.” That was why they were here. They were going to climb Mount Literature using only rope, pegs, helmets, crampons and quotes cobbled together from the vast Plains of the Internet. “Here’s what we will do” said Protagonist. He fetched a map. “If the weather holds we shall make our way here” he pointed, “to Exposition Plateau, where we shall make camp. Then we shall strike out for Plot Point Ridge up Denouement Face. Once over that we should easily make the summit.”

“So it goes” said Companion.

“Steady, Companion” said Protagonist. “We must save some quotes for the descent. Bring McGuffin and make haste while the Sun shines.”

Companion tugged on McGuffin’s reins and the donkey trudged into motion. They began their ascent up the winding paths of the foothills. Companion was not completely happy. “I’m worried about the climb” he said.

“If you have the guts to be yourself” said Protagonist, from over his shoulder “other people will pay your price.”

“That’s what I am worried about” said Companion. “I’ve left my Wife and Child behind, which adds to the peril. Also, I’m worried about some of the quotes we bought in the Global Village. The shopkeeper told me ‘you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.’ I wasn’t too pleased but he said ‘I am not bound to please thee with my answers.’”

But Protagonist wasn’t really listening. “You speak an infinite deal of nothing sometimes, Companion. Men of few words are the best men” he said, striding on. Companion stopped, with a sour expression:

“The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on.”

Protagonist turned to his friend. “Forgive me. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.” He smiled and gave his friend a manly hug. Companion couldn’t stay mad at him. The only people for him were the mad ones. That’s why he followed Protagonist, despite his doubts.

The pair (plus McGuffin) made it to Exposition Plateau, safely across outcrops of metaphor and screes of accumulated symbolism. That evening, as the sun set they made camp, Companion said “I suppose I better ask you why we are making this trip.”

“It’s very simple” said Protagonist. “The Author needs our words and actions to bear out a heavy-handed metaphor.” Companion nodded. “Look over there” he pointed down below, “who’s that?”

“That’s Shakespeare” said Companion.

“Indeed it is” said Protagonist. “And who is that?” he asked, pointing to another figure.

“That’s Kurt Vonnegut.”

“Correct” said Protagonist. “And who is that?”

“Him...? The Greek-looking guy?”

“He is Greek” said Protagonist. “That's Homer” he added. 

"Ah, a man of many modes..."

“Which one of them is furthest away?” asked Protagonist. Companion looked for a long time but he could not tell. “That’s the thing with digital data” said Protagonist, “it’s infinitely storable and infinitely repeatable. Data does not degrade. Memory cannot fade. Time is irrelevant, flattened across the Plains of the internet.”

“But why are we climbing Mount Literature?” asked Companion.

“To see what’s beyond, in the Valley of History” Protagonist pointed to the Internet, “we are spectators moving through Curated History. Over there” he nodded toward the summit, “where all the world’s a stage, we are history.”

“It sounds plausible enough tonight” said Companion “but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.”

At dawn the pair struck out for the peak, leaving poor McGuffin behind, tied to a rock. “Do we have enough quotes to last us?” Protagonist asked.

“A reasonable amount” said Companion. He knew it wasn't though. They'd talked too much on the way up and would struggle to get down at best. But Protagonist strode off all the same, still confident; all progress depends on the unreasonable man Companion figured.

The slopes soon got too steep for maps, too steep to walk. The pair put on crampons, took out their ropes, their hooks and their sturdiest quotes. Above them now was the peak but before that Plot Point Ridge. It's walls beneath were almost sheer, footholds few. Beneath the spur words were becoming inadequate. Even Protagonist seemed unsure. He glanced back at his friend, flush with fear, he exclaimed:

“Fight till the last gasp!”

But almost within arms-length of conquering the ridge his grip failed. His rope broke. Companion watched helpless as Protagonist tumbled. “I let go!” Lost in oblivion, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Alone on the mountain now, Companion clung on. There was no way back except the way his friend had gone. Companion climbed. The walls fell away. Friction disappeared. Geometry was subverted. Companion could not tell up from down. Logic may be unshakeable but it cannot withstand a man determined to live. Without even knowing how he planted a first hand, then a second across the spur and hauled himself with what remained of his strength to safety.

After catching his breath and recovering some sanity Companion renewed. The rest of the climb was fairly simple. He reached the top of Mount Literature and gazed down on the far valley. He saw true time, not the curated version. It stretched back vast distances. He saw everything. The whole process of near-unbroken agony and pointlessness so that humans may one day know the price of everything and the value of nothing. He fell to his knees and gasped in horror:

“It is a great misfortune to be alone.”

In the Marshes

Me with a new bit of flash fiction in the Dimeshow Review. The picture is from here.

A senior researcher explains visual dissociation

The best actors don’t act, they believe. They don’t act as if they’re a boxer, gangster or drug addicted saxophonist, they believe they are a boxer, gangster or drug addicted saxophonist. The same goes for undercover agents.

The most difficult jobs require deep, prolonged cover. There are those who are able to maintain an identity for years on end, but everyone has their limits. Even after the completion of the case there is a tendency for agents to go off the rails. Untreated, 63% of all undercover Field Agents require some sort of counselling and/or early retirement, which, as you can imagine, is a tremendous burden to the Department.

The solution is Visual Dissociation. Like all great inventions it’s really very simple. It works along the same likes as Verbal Dissociation. This is something you may well have tried. If you look at a word for long enough, perhaps repeat it out loud or in your mind, the chain of letters will begin to dissociate from the sound and the meaning attached. For a short while the word becomes completely unfamiliar.

Can this be repeated with other signs and signifiers? The answer is yes. Research has shown it is possible to erase someone’s identity through prolonged exposure to images of their face. This is true of the face, not the body. Though people feel like they occupy their body, it is the face that functions as the avatar. The meaning of a person is channeled through their face. Put it another way, no one could pick out their elbow in a line up.

The process of visual dissociation can be hurried along by mind-altering drugs though they are not necessary. Either way you start by exposing the subject to pictures of their face, pictures they know and have seen before. Begin slowly but prolong the process, both the amount of time the subject spends on each photograph and the length of the session.. After 24-36 hours the subject is usually develops a profound ambivalence towards their image, some even begin dissociating at this point.

Unless the subject is fully free of their moorings the next step is to start the dissociation. The subject is shown pictures of themselves inserted into scenarios they know unrealistic or impossible. When the subject questions this they are told, emphatically if needs be, that the scenario depicted happened and is real. The scenes depicted gradually change from neutral and mundane to embarrassing, upsetting, compromising, obscene and horrific. The subject is eventually repelled by their former identity and become ready to assume a new one. The process of deconstruction and rebuilding can again take up to another 24-36 hours.

The total process cannot go much longer than three full days. Visual Dissociation has a 60-66% success rate. Any longer and the odds of permanent psychosis shorten dramatically. Any longer than 96 hours and the subject is guaranteed to break down irreparably, requiring termination. Visual Dissociation is still a top secret process, for this reason it is not advised for existing agents willing to go undercover. It is best used on recent recruits, particularly Category D.