Ceramic DM – Summer 2005
Round 1, Match 3
By RangerWickett
Being woken up by El-Hadje was like playing Starcraft online and suddenly getting a pop-up ad mixed with a spam email. At least he didn’t have a virus. The asylum was very sterile.
“Time for work.”
El-Hadje’s voice was clipped, thickly accented with Nigerian or Sumerian or something.
I rolled in my cot, pulling the blanket closer. “Why the hell is it so cold?”
“Time for work,” El-Hadje said again. “You see, um, lots of work?”
Shivering, I finally opened my eyes and glared at
the old man. He was grinning widely, and I saw that Robert was leaning against the wall, trying to sleep despite the nightmares he always had. The lights were painfully bright, gleaming off El-Hadje’s gold teeth. I’d asked him once how he could afford gold teeth, and he had said something about slam dunks.
I squinted at him. “You’re lucky you don’t speak English.”
El-Hadje hesitated, then nodded happily. “Yes! Lots of work. Is good we inside, yes? It is, ah, cold, yes?”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Cold like space.”
He was putting on his uniform, complete with his bagger’s hat. El-Hadje had been in the asylum a long time, and Batwarden let him get away with a few personality quirks like wearing things other than his uniform.
“Yes.” El-Hadje tied his apron, adjusted his hat, and left, laughing. As the door swung open, I could hear the morning screams of the other inmates.
With El-Hadje gone, Robert stared at me like he wanted help, but he never said anything. Knowing I’d get chit from the keepers if I didn’t get to work on time, I got off the cot and got dressed. It was like a straight-jacket without the straps – very stylish, but nowhere near as well coordinated as El-Hadje’s.
“How do I get out of this shicken-chit outfit?” I asked Robert.
He shivered.
Part One: Supermarket Asylum
Nothing interesting ever happened in the supermarket. It was always the crazies on the outside bringing their troubles into our world. Normally we would never have seen normal people, but the psychs thought that social interaction with those who were not criminally insane was good for us, so we had work. It was a well known fact that food service is the neutral ground between the everyday man and the lunatic.
I had been arrested a year earlier, caught by the FBI just before I could get back to my dad at the North Korean consulate in Atlanta. I remember them saying they wanted to talk to me about pirating some music. I had laughed and told them it hadn’t been “some music,” it had been all music. Ironically, though it had erased all chance of me getting an innocent verdict, it had been just perfect to allow me to enter a plea of insanity. Normal people just like hip-hop, or pop, or rock, or oldies, or Inuit love songs. Only nuts like everything.
Despite the cold, I needed to do business, so I hopped into the netnet for some quick music downloading. I kept my netnet hidden under my personal book collection, assuring that no one would ever find it. I had gotten them smuggled in – both the books and the netnet – in exchange for getting a friend a copy of a musical jingle they played at the 1910 World’s Fair. Retro was once again the new thing in advertising.
The netnet was one of the silver beaded ones, equipped with wireless magnetic hooks so I could toss it up on the ceiling and jump online in a cinch. Robert, poor braindead bastard he was, was the only person who could pin anything on me. The proximity sensors I’d bought (paid for with a jazz remix of the Roman Imperial Anthem, c. 215 A.D) would give me more than enough time to get out of the net and activate its hide feature. In a pinch, the whole thing would cling to the ceiling, flattening itself so it could be mistaken for a cobweb.
I settled into the neuroactive mesh of the netnet and loaded my Artanis avatar. From the Starcraft-T game site I was able to ditch the avatar and slip out of the asylum network – it may sound simple to some of you, but I’d never been big into the hacking end of computers, so it took me a while. The netnet NPU knew what songs I needed to pick up, and it sent out spiders, giving me time to visit my father.
“An ice storm is coming,” he told me.
He could not hear it, but I had Amidst The Badger’s “Lucky Fallout Bastard” playing. It added a bit of charm to the old garden in the center of the Korean consulate.
“I can see,” I said.
The garden was coated in a thin sheen of ice. I had visited the garden at least once a week since my institutionalization to train with my father. For once I was glad that it was the digital version, not the real one, since the ice would be hell to spar on.
I giggled at the ice pun. My father’s avatar sneered at me, and with just that provocation the fight began. Another benefit of fighting online: the heavy metal soundtrack, in this case an epic war song by The Jimi Hendrix Experience in an alternate timeline where World War III had started in the late 60s.
We slammed fists and shins into each other, threw each other into trees and shattered the bridge over the frozen pond. My father never talked. I think he was afraid he would catch some of my insanity.
I was preparing for my first aerial dive kick when the system began to glitch. I lose all physical sensation, so I misjudge the force of my attack and drive my leg through a tree.
“Time out,” I said. “Something weird’s going on.”
My father cancelled the garden program. “There are many people nervous about the ice storm. It has been manifesting on the net already, though the weather is still a few hours away. Power may go down.”
I shuddered at the thought. Once I’d been taking a shower in the public facilities and Patrick had turned off the lights as a prank, then started his heavy breathing routine. I had ended up spending ten minutes in a defensive stance in the dark, naked except for the organic soap lather, before I realized no one was going to attack me.
“I’ve been on edge,” I say. “I need some organic coffee.”
“Take your meds, Chou.” Then he logged out, leaving me only a few moments to get back to the Starcraft boards before his system security fried my brain.
If I had any friends in the asylum, I would joke to them that the only mental problem I have is the first half of the Oedipus complex.
* * *
I had one more stop before logging out. My father had handed over most of my personal belongings when I’d gotten caught, including all my Starcraft trophies, but I’d liquidated my other assets and hidden them in a safe deposit box in a Decatur bank. I had a security contact named Tyrone inside the bank willing to break in and get my safe deposit box, including the millions of dollars I had accrued by selling pirated music, but he was asking for money up front. And, sadly, he wasn’t a music fan.
“Five thousand,” he said.
We were in a virtual of Little Five Points, a shady, artsy cluster of restaurants and shops where I felt comfortable, and older people like this guy were always on guard. The live feed flickered between the early morning sun frying the sidewalks, and the digital freeze that was creeping across the netnet.
“Like hell,” I replied. “I’ve got . . . well, I’ve got lots in there. What are you waiting for? Just get it, I’ll give you six thousand, and we’ll be good. And don’t think of trying to just steal it yourself. It’s rigged to fry the cash if I don’t provide the right password.”
Tyrone said, “Five thousand is for the gear to even get the box. Me doing the job is another ten. I know how to get in, but I need the right equipment.”
I cursed his mother in Korean, then said, “Fine. I’ll see if I can drum up that much cash.”
“Better hurry man,” he said. “We’re changing security systems in two weeks, and I might not be able to get it once they install the new system.”
* * *
Lesley snatched the c-stick out of my hand, greedy to listen to all the karaoke versions of Backstreet Boys songs. A little mainstream, but full of good spirit.
“Keep it under wraps,” I told her, and she nodded with a snarl. She headed into the warehouse, and I tried to mentally prepare myself for the storefront.
Forcing a grin onto my face, I shoved the double doors open and strode through, letting them flip shut behind me. Usually, the first thing to assault me was the cleaning supply scent that permeates the entire facility and has mild psychotropic powers, but today I was struck first by how intensely cold it was. I had once heard that a clerk had died in the frozen food section, that they had found him coated with that white frost you see on the sides of ice cream cartons. The walls here were coated with that same frost.
If nothing else, the cold suppressed the neurotoxins in the cleaning solution vapors, but to be safe I hurried to the produce section. My watch showed only two minutes left until my shift started, barely enough time to eat my daily organic peach.
The aisles were crowded beyond reason. I saw no children, and few elderly people – Wednesdays were senior citizen discount days, and the store seriously transformed into senior singles night every Wednesday evening, as the geriatric folks pulled out their best suit from the 70s, dusted them off, and tried to pick up chicks in the diaper aisle – and Christmas had been months ago, so there was no excuse for this level of manic shopping.
Pam – the front service manager on duty, who used half her paycheck for food and the other half for her weave – flagged me down, and when I reached her she discreetly shoved a packet with my meds into my palm. “Get a till and go on register six.”
Pam probably did not even know if I spoke English. I gave her my grinning nod and headed for the cash room.
About a third of the other inmates were at the registers, either checking out or bagging. Everyone else was either answering customer questions on the floor like the good drones we were supposed to be, or they were sleeping to prepare for the night shift. Or they were like Robert, too catatonic to work, the lucky fraghead.
The entire front service area was bright, gleaming with intense fluorescent lights reflected on ice. Occasionally I noticed another gleam – the gold of El-Hadje’s snaggled teeth. El-Hadje was helping Edie – renowned for the French Maid Massacre – and whenever he stopped to stretch, he grinned, waved at me, and shouted something incomprehensible.
Trading pirated music was easy in an asylum. The managers were so concerned with making sure the lunatics didn’t give away free food that they’d never notice a guy like me handing over a c-stick when I passed back their credit card. In exchange, the customers would occasionally ‘forget’ a bag of groceries, and the bagger would take the bag to the freezer. On my breaks I had enough time to swing by the freezers, take out whatever I’d bartered for, and hide it for eventual trade to the other inmates. They might have been paranoid hackers, drug-fried thieves, and unpatriotic murderers, but they understood that I got them things, so they generally didn’t give me any chit.
Patrick was my bagger this day, though, and I didn’t trust him enough with the drops, so it was a slow business day for me, which was probably for the best. With my luck the store would run out of yogurt, and one of the managers would check the freezer to see if any had been returned, and they would end up stumbling across a stash of VR hentai music videos, or occult textbooks, or – even worse – brand name foods from the competitor, Red Market.
It amazed me that I never had to ask for information – people in line were always volunteering it. At Christmas they’d talk about what they were getting their kids. On Martin Luther King day they’d say how guilty they felt that things weren’t the way he’d wanted them to be. They’d mention their birthdays, their kids’ birthdays, the birthdays of their kids’ friends. If all the other cashiers got talked to the same way I did, it was a miracle none of them had killed any customers. At least, not that we knew about.
Right now they were talking about the weather, and for once the weather was something special. Most of them had gone on the net for their morning news, and had seen everything coated in ice. It was only affecting the Atlanta metropolitan area network, but most of the users were too old to be comfortable flying across the world to get their news someplace sunny and dry. Weather reports said the city would be hit by a crippling ice storm this evening, dropping enough sleet to bring down power lines and close the city. We had already sold out of portable generators, firewood, milk, and bread. The milk in particular amused me. They all knew they needed to stock up for the impending power outage, so they bought all the perishable food they could.
“Ooh.” The voice was high pitched and far more excited than anyone had right to be in a grocery store.
I looked over the register, and behind the crowd of people in line waiting to buy such emergency rations as butter and tilapia fillet I spotted a Jewish kid. He was maybe fourteen, and was staring at the Sports Illustrated on the magazine rack, on the cover of which a topless blonde was covering her own rack with just her hands and a football she had caught with the aid of her cleavage.
The kid grabbed a friend and pointed him toward the breasts that were so enthralling. I watched, not really needing to devote much effort to scanning canned goods. Unfortunately for the kids, the first kid’s mom saw what they were looking at and gasped. She pressed her way through the crowd, grabbing the magazine and forcing her way to stand in front of me.
“I’m sorry sir,” she said, “but do you condone children seeing these sorts of things?” She shook the magazine at me.
“No ma’am,” I said. “Not during ice storms. Swimsuits and snow make for a confusing message for children.”
“I want to talk to your manager.”
I shrugged and shouted for Pam, then pretty much ignored the issue, except to toss the kids a VR porn c-stick. What can I say? I’m sympathetic to the plight of the youth.
Hours passed with nothing more eventful than Pam putting an opaque plastic sheet in front of the swimsuit edition. El-Hadje was being louder than usual, and the store kept getting colder, until actual fog started filling the aisles. One of the cashiers panicked and had to be taken away so the doctors could explain to him that the fog couldn’t hurt him. Between the manic food-buying crowds and the ice that was starting to freeze together the buttons on my register, though, I was a little worried for my own safety.
Things were still busy when it came time for my break, so I had to wait for Patrick to head off before I had an excuse to leave – we didn’t have enough baggers, because apparently the lunatic mind is more suited to customer interaction than it is to dealing with plastic bags. But when Patrick finally went to go to the bathroom, I followed him, unpleasant as he was.
He whistled as he pissed – “Jailhouse Rock” – and when he finished he walked into the handicapped stall and locked the door. I could hear him breathing heavily, so heavily that it looked like smoke was pouring out of the stall from his foggy breath.
I was trying to get hot water to come out of the faucet when the restroom door opened, and a citizen walked in. This was the Employees Only restroom, and for good reason.
“Get out of here!” I shouted at the guy, but Patrick had already pushed open his door. He coughed vapor and scrambled for the clueless man. He managed to bite the man on his lips and rip something out before I reacted.
I couldn’t use all the same moves as I did online, but the principle was the same. A kick to his leg knocked him down, and another to his chest stunned him. The customer screamed and ran out of the bathroom, and Patrick glared up at me.
“You’re gonna be sorry when Hajji hears about this.”
I shrugged and went back to the sink, careful to listen if he was going to attack me. Which of course he did.
Patrick was one of the mundane inmates – not really crazy until he got here and got meds shoved down his gullet. He had just gotten placed in here to dodge prison, and had not been smart enough to throw away his pills. Because he was just a thug, I expected him to try to hit me, or maybe pull a shiv, but when I turned to block his attack I got flashed in the face by Bluetooth, an Ice used by cops to stun criminals. It shocked my brain into activating the implants that would normally let me go on the netnet, and if I hadn’t had a wireless connection it would have left me unconscious for a few hours while my mind tried to figure out why the universe was empty.
Still, it did shock me, and when I recovered enough to log out, I found myself in a headlock, my face being pressed toward the toilet Patrick had not flushed. I struck backward and gouged at his eyes, and he stumbled away. Before he could rush me again I yanked up the toilet seat, kicked into the hinges to knock it loose, and smashed it into Patrick’s face. He fell limp, and the urine-colored ice covering the restroom tile cracked with the impact.
“Where the hell did you get a Bluetooth?” I said, but I’d knocked him out, so I just riffled through his clothes. He had another Bluetooth charge in his pants, and a felt pen. Pens weren’t allowed in the asylum, so I gave him another look-over. Finally I spotted the map he had drawn on his shins, complete with a big A for the asylum, and an X with two R's for the nearest railroad.
I hid Patrick’s body in the handicapped stall and went back to work like nothing was up, but I watched El-Hadje more closely. The African man had been my cellmate, along with Robert, for a year now, and he had never seemed the type to take revenge, at least not compared to Anthony “Usher” King, the gangslord. His two personalities had each run their own gang in east Atlanta, and they said he had ordered his other personality’s girlfriend shot, which sparked the gang war that brought him down. He was one of the few inmates whom the meds actually helped.
On my dinner break I hit up a conversation with Usher. It was getting dark, and the crowds were more insistent, to the point that they were buying even the expensive brands because they needed taco seasoning, and the generic brands were sold out. Usher and I met in a cubby where sometimes the women hung out to put on make-up. It had a window to the outside, the closet thing to a mirror in the asylum.
“Have you seen anything suspicious?”
Usher held out a hand, and I passed him the collected works of John Tesh. “The netnet’s fritzin’,” he said. “I know you’re fond of it, but you betta’ plan what you’ll do without it for a few days.”
“Patrick attacked me earlier. He had a map of the neighborhood.”
The grin on Usher’s face worried me.
“I’m out of the loop,” I said. “Right?”
“Yes,” El-Hadje said. He peeked around the corner of the cubby. “People, they, ah, crazy, yes? Lots of work. I you saw my lots of work? Netnet.”
I gaped at him. I was pretty good with deciphering his gibber, but what he’d said made no sense for a completely unusual reason.
”Wait,” I said, “you did that? On the netnet?”
“Lots of ice, yes. Work, burr, hard.”
Usher smiled. “In half an hour, the power goes down, and we’re getting out. The trains should still be running, so we should be able to get to Savannah before anyone starts looking for us. You want in, Chou?”
I considered it. I had another year at least before the psychs would consider saneing me, but if I could get my safe deposit box, I could bribe my way out of here with a clean bill of sanity. I didn’t want to be on the run.
“I’m in,” I said. “But a quick question. Patrick flashed me with bluetooth. I know I didn’t smuggle that chit in.”
Usher grinned. El-Hadje frowned, then nodded and smiled. “Yes. Bah, big boss, no? Rattle and hum, yes? I, ah, go. Big freeze, yes.”
I had only ever smuggled in my own netnet connection, to make sure no one could give me competition. I had no idea how El-Hadje could be accessing the netnet, and he had never shown any skill in programming. Of course, just because he didn’t speak any English or Korean, I had assumed he was as braindead as half the other people who were committed here.
El-Hadje left, and I stood to go back to work, but Usher grabbed my wrist.
“You’re getting out, man. Don’t get a grudge because you have competition now.”
I laughed. “Not a chance. Vendettas are unhealthy. You learned that lesson twice.”
I pasted on my medicated grin and slipped into the shopping crowds, letting them carry me to the doors that led to the warehouse. Beyond the warehouse were the living quarters, and I needed to get there to alert the authorities before El-Hadje froze the netnet. I had been faking contented insanity so long, the managers and psychs here would never believe me, so I had to hope the cops would just respond to a bomb threat and be here in time to catch the escapees. I certainly did not consider myself a criminal, and after spending a year here I knew that letting the loonies out would be a bad thing.
As I pressed through the crowd, I picked up a few frozen organic bananas to help clear my head.
Lights were starting to flicker in the warehouse as the ice storm – maybe the real one, maybe the digital – began messing with power lines. The floor was frozen, and while the shoppers had coats, we inmates weren’t allowed them, so no one bothered me. I reached my room, nodded to Robert who was still sitting and shivering against one wall, and got out my netnet. I was stretching it out so I could climb in, and my back was to the door, when I saw movement
reflected in the silvery beads on the netnet’s web mesh. Something behind me was moving, and I had not heard it over the roar of the air conditioning.
I spun to face my attacker, expecting El-Hadje, but it was Robert. I had never seen him stand to his full height, and he was over six feet tall, balding and wide-eyed, hardly the brain dead man I was used to.
His voice was surprisingly friendly and nerdy. “I had an idea you would do this. I’m sorry, but I can’t let you mess with the plan.”
“Does everyone here fake being crazy?” I asked.
He grinned maniacally and swung a meaty fist at me. I staggered back out of range and fell into the netnet, but it was not fully stretched, so it tangled one of my arms. Robert grabbed my head with both hands and tried to head butt me, but I kneed him in the groin, then pulled the bluetooth out of my apron and flashed him. He staggered, spasmed for a moment, and then fell down.
“Some criminal mastermind,” I laughed. “You’ve probably been using my netnet while I was at work too. Nicely done, bastard.”
He twitched a bit, but looked fully catatonic. Of course, he had fooled me before, so I went to my stash and found another goody I had smuggled in. It took a little work to make his hands grab the knife, but the sterile gloves the supermarket made us wear would keep my fingerprints off it. There was a nice pool of blood around each of his wrists before I felt comfortable logging on.
As I expected, he had a wireless connection of his own, and he was waiting when my avatar manifested. He had created an avatar of a lightning-taloned griffon, whereas I was just in my sparring outfit. We were alone in an icy wasteland, and the visual processors were breaking down in the distance, rendering clouds in green wiremesh.
I held up a hand to forestall an attack.
“Wait, Robert. I overreacted. I’m sorry.”
The griffon looked confused. It cawed out, “I don’t trust you.”
“You probably shouldn’t. Look, you’ve been piggybacking on my connection, so I’m just going to download a few quick files to your brain, okay? You like Disney music?”
He cried out at me and scrambled forward on paws and talons. “It’s a Small World” was beginning to play in his head as he swiped at me with a talon, and I blocked the strike with ease. My own soundtrack was playing something off my randomized fantasy movie soundtrack collection, and I got into a nice rhythm of dodging beak strikes and claw swipes to the beat of the music.
Finally, in frustration, Robert took to the air, his wings swinging him into a frozen sky. He circled overhead, waiting for an opportune moment to strike. I decided not to give him the chance, and
leapt into the air, preparing for a diving kick.
That was when my body stopped working. I was left floating in the air as the gravity was disabled.
Robert swooped past me, giving a mocking cry. “I’ve been hacking your system for a year now. Hell, they put me in here for programming people’s minds to make them insane. Did you really think you could defeat me online?”
“Um, no.” I couldn’t move my body, so I just followed his path with my eyes. “That’s why I slit your wrists before logging on. Oh, and your jugular. I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long. You really might want to log off.”
El-Hadje’s hacking was taking effect, the world starting to break down as the netnet connection faltered. Robert logged off in a panic, and I sent an urgent text message to the area police stations, reporting a bomb threat. Not the best course of action, especially since when the system crashed, if I was still online I would go unconscious and be trapped in a dark room with a perhaps not-dead Robert. But I couldn’t move, was stuck in a stupid posture mid-kick, and couldn’t log off, so I had nothing better to do than send out some emails.
Which is why I’ve sent this email to you. As you can see, I’m in a bit of a tough spot. With luck, the cops will realize I was just trying to help, and they won’t press charges. They might even let me out of the asylum. But that still doesn’t help me get my safe deposit box. My Nigerian friend El-Hadje might want to take revenge on me, and I need protection. If you’ll just transfer $5000 to my account, I’ll be able to get my safe deposit box, and I’ll gladly share my millions with you. Please just help out a poor Korean Starcraft player who’s fallen on hard times.
Oh, and buy organic.