Vicious Aliens (continued)
Cycle 12
CYCLE 12
Blue, blue, electric blue
That's the colour of my room
where I will live
Blue, blue
Pale blinds drawn all day
nothing to read, nothing to say
Blue, blue
I will sit right down
waiting for the gift of sound and vision
—David Bowie, Sound and Vision (fragments)
It was only much later that I heard Benzo’s story. We were on the verge of infiltrating the castle in the Black Forest, the last remaining stronghold of The Enemy. By then, Katherine Shellstein aka. Murray Bolex, knew that she was going to die. Dulcinea decided that it was safe for the manuscript to be passed on to me.
Shellstein had transcribed Benzo’s story based on several conversations that she’d had with a former resident of The Apthorp, whose identity was shielded by a pseudonym. The real Benzo has never been known to me or anyone I’ve subsequently spoken with about him. The secrecy surrounding the identity of Benzo, who I’m told was a poet by trade, has become notorious within our small circle of friends. I cannot say with certainty what is true and what is false in his account and Bolex was unable to corroborate many aspects of Benzo’s confessional. A few introductory notes might be helpful…
SHROUD—Synthetic. Human. Radiation. Output. Detection. Originally designed during ‘The Drift,’ after Japan and China had finished nuking each other. Manufactured by AGL, AnthropoGenicLabs, the dominant industrial firm of the German-American economic zone or the ‘Freiland.’
NPs—NOVO POLICE, a sort of Stasi or Gestapo unit that was said to operate in the United States of Germania. The name is a reference to the Estado Novo, the government that has been in control of Portugal since António Salazar founded it in 1933. Before The Drift, it was the second largest European economy after Nazi Germany (JS)
Benzo’s Story
I paced restlessly outside one of Central Park’s last remaining entry points. Columbus Circle. Above me, jets split the sky, their engines wailing like saxophone solos. A group of SHROUDS stand guard at a lookout point several blocks away. Scouts for gangs. Some were free agents. Unaffiliated. Others were hardcore survivalists belonging to clans scattered across the city.
The SHROUDS were abominations. Vampires. Fresh blood circulating through their veins. A bunch of Buffalo Bills. Empty husks filled with fluid designed to mimic skin and absorb radiation. Rumors were some of the early models contained human remains. Plastic skulls with deep recessed eyes like lifeless Halloween masks. A flat robotic visor underneath so there’s egg-size voids where the eyeballs should be. Worse were the people underneath. Creepers. I hope their radiation detectors malfunction and they fry like frogs in scalding water.
Hookers and addicts stand around the monument and statues, some setting off firecrackers by the base of the column. A teenager pisses on the shattered likeness of the one who discovered The New World. Experienced Johns come around to pick up the hookers. They make arrangements hastily and walk off toward the park. The air is foul in Midtown. Anyone that still gives a shit about their lungs is wearing an oxygen filtration tank. I’m not too concerned. I’ve done enough damage to myself already. Besides, those battery belts are too heavy to lug around. I’m wearing an old decontamination get-up that’s past its prime but will get me through the night.
I usually come here to score but some desperate mariners will trade other favors for drukqs and I don’t mind sharing. I’ve got problems but cash flow isn’t one of them. The mariners dance a short while until they spin off to find other partners, spiralling away in trails of darkness thick as smoke, ensconced in shadows. They hug each other, gyrating to a swing time beat. I will not be indulging my other appetites this evening. I have an appointment with a contact known as ‘The Heavy Metal Kid.’ He refers to me as ‘Benzo.’ We both use aliases to protect our business from prying and eyes and ears. I’ve known The Kid for years. He’d been one of my early go-betweens in the days when NOVO was still active. The Kid was a broker. He passed on names to the NP through informants in the artistic community. I made a good living off The Kid.
After The Drift, Nazi Germany collapsed and the NOVO flamed out. Sure, there were a few Werewolf units that continued to operate but by and by, they went dark. These were not times in which ideological groups flourished. Survival was the only game. The Kid and I stopped communicating. I was convinced that he’d either been killed in the radiation riots, starved to death, or had eliminated his own map. Then out of nowhere, The Kid resurfaced. He claimed he was working for a new, unnamed outfit—possibly an offshoot of NOVO. They employed him as a broker, but they weren’t into catch and kill. They were hijackers. Co-opting the marks. Blackmail? Coercion? I wasn’t sure. The Kid refused to tell me much. He seemed intimidated. Told me not to ask too many questions. I wasn’t that interested. As long as these sickos kept paying me I was satisfied being blind, deaf and dumb.
Work was busier than ever. Steady. The Kid and I were involved in regular barter and exchange. We were both hardcore addicts by this point so that eliminated any significant ethical quandaries about betraying close friends. The Kid and I would go on real benders after payday. I’m talking all-nighters, weeklong wasters, VIP night clubs, burlesque shows and brothels, freakout parties. Money talked and we were making piles of it. We were lost in a time tornado of uppers and downers, playing out every perverse fantasy we’d ever entertained in a collapsing society. Nothing was off limits. People were desperate; throwing their mothers off trains and selling their daughters downstream. But like all things, we knew the good times would come to an end. We were running out of people to double-cross. Had sold out most of the other residents. And while our mysterious benefactors informed us that they were pleased with our work, I had an uneasy sense that the joke was on us. In the past, when I had informed on ‘Deviants,’ ‘Communists,’ or Jews, they would usually vanish in short order. I, myself, kept a fully-packed suitcase by the door in case the NOVO came knocking in the middle of the night, not knowing whether I would be betrayed by the same people I was selling out.
This time was different. The residents of The Apthorp weren’t being arrested and sent packing to prison camps or used as industrial guinea pigs. No one was going anywhere. Yet, despite this, The Kid was more paranoid than usual. He would ramble on about “soft kills.” The little he told me sounded scrambled and schizoid. There were three distinct types that he described. I don’t know whether these types were his own creation or whether they represented different layers of the nameless group we were working for. He threw around different terms for them like “operators,” “controllers,” and “agents.” From what I could tell, they all functioned exclusively and independent of one another. “But who controls the controllers?” I would ask, half-serious.
The idea of partitioning knowledge within an active operation is nothing new. The Kid said the agents were kept completely unaware of the activities of their operators, and the very same operators had zero knowledge of the work of the controllers. That all seemed plausible. But things got real looney when The Kid would go off on strange tangents about parallel timelines. He told me that this group was able to manipulate time. That we were living in what he called ‘basic time,’ but that a war had been fought in ‘past time,’ in order to control ‘the future.’ I would nod along and pretend to understand him when he revealed that the people we were selling out were being used as operators and that they paired operators to specific agents. For example, only a poet could operate a poet. Only a filmmaker could operate another filmmaker. A sculptor a sculptor, a painter a painter. The controllers were assigned to specific accounts. They managed colonies. The Kid was a vendor for these controllers, using insiders like me as gateways to entire communities.
He told me the people we were dealing with were cruel beyond belief. They didn’t just kill their enemies—they could go into the past, plant an idea in your head, or erase your existence entirely. Insanity tends to be infectious, and The Kid’s paranoia became my own. I started seeing copies everywhere. I no longer recognized my friends or any of the other residents. Something about them had changed. They weren’t quite how I remembered them. I knew people couldn’t be copied, rewritten or replaced but I was afraid that some nameless illness was rapidly spreading around me and its incubation could not be held in check. It seemed as inevitable as time itself; that yesterday comes before today and today is followed by tomorrow. I felt like a joke was being told and I was the last to know. There was no escaping it. The joke was time itself and everyone had already heard it. Perhaps you’ve heard it too?
Yeah. I know how this must sound. I know I sound nuts. But the fear was real. I worried that I would be the last one left in the laugh-house. The Apthorp suddenly felt like the belly of the beast. An entire building inhabited by agents and operators. Meanwhile, our cravings were getting worse and the drukqs were harder to find on the street. The pills were stamped on, cut with other noxious substances. They were less and less pure and our highs had turned dark. The all-nighters were more like nightmares; psychosis dreams of rage and violence. We had exhausted injection sites. Even the cracks between our toes were blackened and pus-filled. The streets seemed different. The faces were more desperate, flashing a sickness that I recognized. I was seeing everything twice as if a holographic printing press had copied over everything I had ever experienced, blurring it in the process. The dark doubled outline of a photographic negative. The knowledge that this would happen over and over again clouded the seconds, minutes and hours. It was almost like a bodily awareness of transformation, a burnt metal taste in my mouth or a new pollution smell that had overtaken me.
The Kid said that we’d been poisoned by a bad batch of the vicious cocktail we’d ingested. By then, he was too far gone. He would try to speak sometimes and the words wouldn’t even come out. “Just in time,” he kept repeating. Then he’d blurt out the word “Golem,” in the violent grip of drukq withdrawal. When he finally strung together a sentence, he claimed that we were, in fact, agents ourselves. That we were being operated against our will. I didn’t know what to think. Over the last few months, in rare moments of lucidity, The Kid had told me his theory that we’d been injected with something called an “engram,” a punishment for traitors. “Traitors?” I asked. “Traitors to humanity,” he responded. The engrams wouldn’t kill us. The poison was specifically designed to cause us to remember who we really were in our past lives, before we’d been turned. The punishment was a jolt of awareness, a straight shot of recognition that would intoxicate us, causing our true identities to fold into our false ones.
Our false identities were getting burned up one by one in a giant furnace, he said. We were being purified for all our sins. What was happening to The Kid? He was getting all religious and philosophical in this deranged state, talking about the devil, destiny, and his soul as if it no longer belonged to him. He had sold himself to Golem. The entity we’d dealt with for years finally had a name. Maybe it was The Kid’s way of resigning himself to his own mortality or maybe it was the paleness of his mind that had finally come to dominate his flesh. I became more convinced of the “time illness,” because I was seriously sick myself. I could feel the gauge on this film strip called life starting to buckle. We were both preparing ourselves for the big sleep. But we would not go gently into that good night. No. The Kid and I still had time for one last party.
There I stood in Columbus Circle, at one of the remaining entry points to Central Park or Carnival Park as it was now called. Up above, a jet split the sky into perfect halves, its engine screaming like a saxophone. A group of SHROUDS stood watch nearby, ever vigilant. The mariners went off toward the park, dancing to a swing time beat, spiralling away in trails of darkness thick as smoke. I had one final appointment with ‘The Heavy Metal Kid.’ We were going to have one hell of a debauch, like two libertines in our time of dying. We would take our anger out on this crumbling world, had readied ourselves to “storm the reality studio and retake the universe.” I vaguely remember hearing these words before. Were they my own? Had I spoken them in this life or a previous one?