Kaossilator

Droning voices from a Zenith panel TV in a pawnshop window played in the background..

       'The memories of the sleeping are siphoned from their skulls and sucked through open windows, where they become lost in the wind, and make their own journey. Sometimes they are discarded, and end up on rusted sewer-grates, lost forever. Or, they may flourish in a blooming bed of orchids, waiting to be cultivated by the sender. Locked dreams, both wretched and pure, are bolted into black boxes of subconscious thought. These chained dreams can be broken free with the precision of a thief or unleashed with the will of a saint, or they can be ignored and left to rot. Your conscious mind will decide whe....'

Some alley. Eyes felt like sandbags. The night wasn't over.
     An oversized prostitute in a hello-kitty tracksuit tried to sell Trace a purple wig in a back alley for either $12 or 4 cigarettes. Wrong place, wrong time.
   'Come and buy my wigs, only three left!' she said. Her face was a ruddy bulge caked with expired beauty products.
   'I don't want any wigs,' said Trace, 'no need.'
   'You idiot! I'LL TRAMPLE YOU!' Her hot temper gave out like a second-hand box-spring. She hurled an entire bag of garbage at him. Luckily, he had been swift enough to dodge the bag, and it exploded on contact with the wall behind him. Egg cartons, empty milk jugs, used coffee filters and assorted debris ricocheted off the wall with a clamour that riled up the surrounding hobos, and they were not pleased about this one bit.
Pack mentality set in.
Grinning with mouths half-filled with toothless gaps and black rot, the bums became enraged. Negotiation was out of the question. These were wild men; free of conviction, self-worth, and sanity. Reflex and aggression were the only solution. Trace taunted them with a flash of his chrome stopwatch, and, like cats on fish, they instantly lunged to attack. In the back of his mind, Trace might have been a matador. The first bum was intoxicated enough that his staggered advance was easily avoided. Without stopping, the man careened right into the prostitute, and the pair of them somersaulted to the ground in an uneven heap of moldy clothing and ripped fishnets.

‘Alright boy, I’ve got you cornered!’ the other said, a crazed look in his eyes. Wildfire. This man could have been a descendant of vikings, or pirates. For that reason, Trace wished no harm on him.
Grab a handfull of cigarettes. Toss to the right, as hard as you can. Like a guarddog tricked with baconbits. Diversion tactics. Feed anger with impulse, buys you enough time to escape.

       And then he woke up feeling like the dry chipped plaster on the inside of a worn-out ashtray. Buildings of twisted columns and oversized windows closed in all around him, where the aural familiarity of wind was cut off. Dead resonance in an urban flatline. How long had he been here?

Stagger to your feet. Palms cut and sweaty. Hair is all over the place. Breathing is heavy, deliberate, as if each rip of oxygen is one step towards clarity, but clarity never comes. The streets were still in disarray.
Being followed.     
 A blurry mirror of rainwater pools. Black outlines of a leather trench sloshing through the rain. His face was masked by a sharp black cowboy hat ringed with machine-gun bullets. Trace knew well enough to avoid direct eye contact with the stranger. Deranged people could be triggered by eyesight alone, and in some cases it took even less than that to set them off. He slunk away behind a Child-sized drawbridge made of carved stone and wood shingles. The bridge was flanked by little wooden watchtowers with windows containing small gnome-like figurines that surveyed the area with a vacant stare. The man walked past, his heavy combat boots cludding loudly against the inset of the sidewalk. Time to get help.

 
‘Where have you been all night?’ asked Koak. He stood beneath an umbrella-like awning attached to his crowded vendor booth. The stand was packed with whirling lights and chirping gizmos. Tools of distraction, useless things, a blow-up Godzilla doll that doubled as a popcorn maker. All you needed were kernals and power source, the popcorn was ejected from the doll’s retractable chest.

   ‘I need a weapon,’ Trace said, completely ignoring the question.
   ‘What you need a weapon for? You got heat on your ass?’ The mechanized Godzilla had found its way across the table onto a cheap silk pillow treated with custom Persian stitching. Animal designs, fierce ones, with jutting fangs and burning silk eyes. Godzilla unleashed a barrage of popcorn at the pillow with a mechanical roar.
   ‘No. I just need some protection. You know how the streets get. I just woke up in an alley, and I think someone’s following me.’ Trace glanced over his shoulder. Shadows, ghosts, but not a soul in sight. Across the street and beside a cramped stairwell, Trace could see a neon dragon outside of Gen Ming’s diner. Steam flows and midnight wind made green halos and dissonant hums. 

There she was, wearing a sleek motorcycle helmet. Her jacked was spare, tight, as was the rest of her clothing. She looked anonymous, streamlined with the shadows, might have been a raven perched on a watchtower. Slender, sharp, and utterly spiteful. Who was she?
   ‘Twenty gold,’ Koak chirped in, oblivious to the watcher. ‘Belong to my granddad in the war, only used a couple times. Fresh charges!’ Trace averted his gaze to examine the weapon. A cruel thing, built cheap and designed to kill. When he looked back, the woman was gone.

       The haze before the dawn rasps its urban chorus: traffic lights, blinking above dead intersections; the persistent hum of power grids, eager to spark the life of a new morning; and restless hobos, sleeping alongside racoons - together they'd pillaged trashbins in search of lost treasure.

Lolcats p. IV

It was hot, the night he burned the Cube.

    In the fields of long-grass above the compound, fireflies fought against fluorescent lamps, and often lost. Moths didn’t stand a chance. Closer to town, the neon logos from bar signs lit the rain-slicked streets like electric mist. In Trace’s loft the only light came from a Miyagi panel screen and a Lolcat alarm clock with red LEDs for eyes. He had bought the clock from a shady meme dealer named Koak who’d been high on PTC. 

'A web license is all crazy-talk!' he had said, 'but so were seatbelts! And when everybody crash and die, they take it away! They tell me I can't live off pop-tarts only. They fuck do they know!' 

Mindless, he was, no rails and no trains running for the midnight express. Back in Korea, Koak was revered as a veteren of the meme wars. Starcraft battles in real life. Thousands of cloned Koreans wasted in endless battles for the purpose of resolving political conflicts. UN War admins soon banned the use of all replica Starcraft tech, and the Koreans were forbidden from clone-based cyber-war. Koak had been a Ghost, and his eyes were still stained silver from the ocular implants. The only way he could live after the war was through a  fortitude of shadow, spoken only by the swamp shamans on the outskirts of Virus city. 

Trace was passed out on a delux Mellonsky futon and a tigerstripe Snuggie used as a pillow. A lurid thing, that snuggy. He wondered if there existed a secret alliance of snuggy cultists, and that the loose fabrics of the thing were lying mindspikes and soulcoils into his brain. It was almost unspeakable.

Three in the morning.

Sitting in a corner adjacent to his bed was a filter unit that he’d rewired to block the output of lithium dust. In an age where clean air was scarce, oxygen was doped with anti-psychotics; lowers heart-rates and keeps the tenants numb to negativity, a legitimate alternative to ease the minds of a population wired for constant stimulation.  Some felt it slowed them down, killed their thirst for information. Most were burnouts looking for another escape, another plug of hype for the outlet of social miasma in the form of rainbow puke.

Trace’s desk was worse than an architects’. A half-eaten burrito lay atop an external hard-drive enclosure and a stray pizza slice lived on a grease-stained graphbook drowning under an empty bottle of Old Spice. The last time she came over, she’d swept a castle of junk to the floor with a hockey stick. But now, two weeks later, it had reformed, and the castle had evolved into a heaping metropolis of yesterday’s refuse. This place looks wonderful said nobody, ever. 

‘I see you’re resting comfortably,’ she said. Her avatar glowed outside of a twin-panelled window parallel to the sharp strips of moonlight cutting through the blinds. ‘Do you remember my voice?’  Trace jolted up from a deep sleep, eyes jittering back and forth like an overclocked metronome. ‘See you tonight.’  The face shattered into a million crystal fragments.  

Silver suicide doors racked with six-pronged exhaust pipes. homeless man/street warrior with pizza-stained beard. dwarves in red visors and yellow jumpsuits waiting in lineups with a giraffe-grafted go-girl smoking a cigarette. packs of feral cats patrolling alleys unchecked. Hotels bleeding bass lines and laserlight. 

Friday night. 

A view through her eyes. White static and ripple-waves where coastlines dissolved into silk and melted into liquid steel. Another power outage. Grids died. A resonance cascade in the pre-dawn light. Lightning bolts weren't hurled from the talons of stormchasers or uttered from the ancient tongues of timewardens. 

They weren't lost in the depths of a burned out suburb, or in the minds of self-indulgent addicts. Kyoak laughed as the Dwarves rode home on a bus-sized Ultralisk. 

 Each rip of shrapnel was a part of the whole Cube, and a Cubebreaker knew that each fragment was an ever-shifting grid unfolding like a prism, each angle a reflection of her in a different light. Is she closer now, or more real, for his having been there?

The bright stars wrung mental sponges like farmers reaped fields. A mess of unmade beds in a sun-stained loft with a red-eyed Lolcat. She gave him that Lolcat.

The Cube's light burned for over twice the length of a real Inferno.

When the city lost power, the transformers waned, and the grids slept. 

Cubes burned.

Sleep swept fast. And later he’d tell himself that none of it was real.  

Mystery Fridge

‘See, that wasn’t so bad,’ the Salesman said. ‘Phase 3 is right around the corner, and I bet that you’re just brimming with excitement to find out what it is!’ Trace was not brimming with excitement. The loudspeaker clicked off. Trace stood up. No sound, save for his own breathing.

The screen on the wall wound down like a haunted carousel after a night of ceaseless operation. Each scene of the final frameset might have been wrapped in tin-foil; empty echoes flashing across a faded backdrop of yellow etched plaster. Trace stood up, looked at his hands, still feeling as though they were maimed. Nothing. No blood, no bones, and no bruises. Even as the nightmare lingered in the back of his mind, he clenched his hands into fists and they felt perfectly normal, ligaments and tendons retracting with mechanical precision. He wondered if his blood was still filled with robots. How the fuck did she know? Was it part of the test?

Dead fluorescent waves of a surgical lamplight, teal glass tubes filled with black orchids atop  a stainless steel workbench, mounds of flesh, limbs, and prosthetic organs sitting in a lumpy pile in a dark corner. The body parts were used to keep test subjects functional. A placard mounted to a thin strip of whitewashed concrete between the particleboard ceiling and a clear plastic shower curtain acting as a doorway read ‘Zombie Factory.’ Her face was wrapped in a black surgical mask, hair was dark and pulled back tight, eyes hurt like burning chrome behind tinted lenses, severe and fierce as she slammed the syringe into the base of his skull. Green LEDs from a scantron screen flickered with sensory data, vital signs, and a beeping that reminded Trace of a fastfood restaurant. Then came the robots. Blindness. A soothing voice that was barely discernible amid the electric hum of an old LG refrigerator.

‘Don’t fucking move, it will kill you,’ as the lights dimmed from the voltage drain caused by her electroscalpel. More work being done. This was mad science. Traces’ head was pressed into what looked to be a repurposed toiletseat to keep him stable. Sanitary was pointless. This wasn’t a hospital. It might have been a black-market organ trade, or a dump for failed medical experiments.

She was displeased by his movement. Frayed leather belts found themselves around his numb body, strapping him tight against the gurney. His nervous system was flooded with a powerful inhibitor that caused him to hallucinate for the next thirty-six hours. The procedure was enough to make a butcher red. ‘Sixty-three types of mutant blood,’ she said, wide-grinned, ‘and you get to try them all. I think this mixture will be utterly effective. Lucky you.’  

The Fuck is a Rototiller?

Trace swept away a thin film of grease and sweat off his forehead. A few cuts and bruises remained, but his organs and sanity were mostly intact. Mostly.

Nothing was as he remembered it. Faint memories of a homeless man who’d tried to sell him bullet-proof rocks glanced his mind, and his face had been so faded. Then he thought of the lady who’d injected miniature robots into his bloodstream. What was her name? She’d claimed to be an artist. The robots had been cubical silver boxes gleaming fiercely under a surgical lamplight. Memories after that point were a blur, a corruption, like a sector of bad data on a scratched bootdisk. He failed to recall how he got here, but he knew that he had been somehow captured and dropped into a testing facility. The first things he saw were a series of segmented rooms that stretched out like the caverns of a salt mine. The place felt gutted, ancient, and the surrounding décor reminded him of the rusted innards of dead cruise-ship. It felt like a prison. Trace could see the shadows of others moving behind opaque glass windows in the rafters high above him, watching him. They belonged to faceless people conducting experiments and testing the results of his progress. He was not alone.

‘Oh my goodness!’  the Salesman’s faceless voice boomed. Trace could not tell where it was coming from. ‘What a show, kiddo, and you made it out unscathed. Kudos for you, my friend. Phase 2 is in the bag!’ The condescending creep of his tone sunk into Trace’s mind and stuck there like stale paint. ‘Boys, can we get a replay on that?’ he said. The sound of mechanical background noises could be heard over the intercom. An old rotary projector kicked in, like the ones they use in drive-ins. A silver screen blanketed an entire wall. When the picture kicked in, he could see himself huddled in a corner with blood on his face. He rested his strained body against the wet concrete and watched.

The room was stagnant, stuffy, and it looked like a cell. The walls were closing in on all sides. Trace was sitting in a corner of the room next to a fallen nightstand of stained red-oak and the remains of a shattered porcelain vase.  The floor was an uneven grid of sun-bleached cedar planks that squealed as the dead-white walls scraped across it. ‘This can’t be hell.’ he said to himself, keeping his gaze fixed on the swaying spotlamp in the middle of the room. The polished silver lamp was not suspended by a cable or mounted to a fixture. No mechanism in sight seemed to be holding it up. Floating in mid-air? Trace shielded his eyes from its violent glare as the room grew even smaller. A wretched stab of frozen panic hit his gut. He flailed at the walls and beat them with his fists until he could hear the snapping of bone amidst the squealing walls. He looked down, and his hands were a mangled mess. Fragments of bone had torn through his flesh and blood leaked all over, but he felt nothing. He said nothing. The room threatened to crush his body like a carton in a trash compactor. Struggling was useless. He could not escape. In one swift motion he closed his eyes and looked up towards the swaying light. His retinas burned from the strain, but he continued to stare. ‘Just one light,’ he whispered, his voice barely audible against the sound of the screaming walls. Then the light went dead, the bulb shattered, and the glass fell into his eyes, shredding them apart. He could feel the edges of the jagged pieces behind his eye-sockets and against the base of his brain, but still he felt nothing. The blood from his hands was pouring out onto the small square of remaining floor beneath his feet. The wood turned into sawdust, mounds of it. A fine-powder sand-castle beneath his feet. Suddenly, the wretched wood buckled beneath his feet like rotten tree-trunk being split by a chainsaw. With all four walls pressing against him, his head threatening to pop from the stress, he slipped through the busted floor and entered a pitch-black chamber of zero-gravity. The room imploded into a small cube of pure black. Cruel barbed chains sprung from the stygian void, snaking around the cube, crushing it some more, and sealing it forever, never to be seen again. Trace had no control over his weightless body. The adrenaline in his bloodstream reached a final peak, causing him to black out.

The robots… his blood… now he knew. 

The Collector

 Hello again! If you don't wake up now, I'll keep prodding you with electricity until you do!

So I just got the results of our last test in, and I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is, you passed! Way to go, kiddo, way to stick it to the man. You’re one of the few test subjects to make it through the first phase with most of your limbs intact. The bad news is that your sanity was removed and backed up onto a scratch-disk. We did this so your brain wouldn't explode during some of the mental tests, and we’re not sure it was properly re-installed afterword. If you start to feel psychotic and/or delusional, don’t worry, our engineering team is working on a hotfix for that as we speak. Just stay calm and try not to think of anything crazy. So far so good? Excellent. We’ll have you running good and proper once we replace your deleted memories with filler images from our stock warehouse. I hope you like pictures of supermarket food, because that’s all we could find. Anyways, back to business.

Phase 2 is a little more challenging, and by a little, I mean that it’s probably going to kill you. By probably, I mean that everything should be fine. Catch my drift? Nobody said this was going to be easy, but you knew this before signing up. But look on the bright side: in the event of a fatal mishap, we’ll harvest your organs for the benefit of science. Your lacerated innards could help save millions! And if that wasn’t enough, your unused remains will be vacuum-sealed, frozen, and ready to be processed into the same biofuel that covers our electric bill. Everybody loves recycling, and we firmly believe that nothing should go to waste around here, so if that doesn’t put a smile on your face, maybe a hologram of someone who loves you will do the trick.

Oh? What do you mean we couldn’t afford holograms? Who the hell cut the holograms out of the budget? Fire that man, immediately. Use his recycled salary to buy more holograms!

Sorry kid, no holograms today. Maybe never. You’re just going to have to use your imagination. On second thought, your imagination is still being reconstructed, so if you try to use it, your brain might melt. Here, have an ice-cream instead.

People, people, people. Always people. You know, one of the reasons we’re conducting these experiments is to explore the fun effects of isolation, possibly the most misunderstood part of the whole bit. You see, the less human contact you have, the more useful you are at being a subordinate test subject. It’s also important that all hints of rebelliousness are ironed out before we continue. If not, you might get a glimpse of what’s on the other side of the wall. Did I mention a wall? Well, forget I said anything. Let’s get on with the science! As I said before, phase 2 is a killer. You’ll need safety fallbacks that we call comfort vats. These vats are filled with a serum that counteracts curiosity and willpower. What some call detachment from reality, we call progress. Are you with me sofar? Wonderful. Like I said, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Honestly. Just place your skull against the safety drill and we’ll begin the safety penetration. Please don’t move during the insertion. If your heart happens to explode due to shock, don’t panic, because we’ve got backup hearts. Just don’t abuse the backup-heart policy, it’s not fair to the other subjects.

Anyhow, a flock of pencil pushers just told me that if we don't start the test now, your family will be exterminated. Nothing I can do about it. Has something to do with a wireless DNA link or something, so I won't waste your time any longer. Let the games begin!

Oh, and don't spoil the tests for anyone else. They can only handle so much at once and we don't want to overload their systems. We've already got enough potato batteries as it is.

Organic Industries: Initiate Subject Test (IST).

Sound good so far? Great! I knew you’d be a good sport about it, honestly. All of our test subjects are required to pass a physical and mental examination before proceeding to this point anyhow, so don’t worry if you don’t pass, there’ll be plenty of opportunities for you in the salt furnace or the sludge mines. They’re always seeking eager young underachievers such as you. Oops! I didn’t mean that. We hold all our test subjects in the highest esteem possible.

The question we’re really asking is how much control does he really have? Well, let’s solve this thing! The solution we’re looking for might seem like a bit of a crapshoot at first, but rest assured that one does exist, and once all the bugs and kinks are sorted out, everything will probably run fine. And I use the term ‘probably’ with the most delicate precision that science can afford. First of all, think of your brain as an outlet for motivation to which the cord of influence connects. Got it? Great! When connected, a signal of pure influence (sources vary), is fed through and divided along some complex pathways of criteria. All criteria of each pathway are broken down into a list-like hierarchy of relevant social patterns tied primarily to speech, action, and a few basic motor functions. Some motor functions are like a gas-sucking 18 cylinder behemoth, and others are like a puny lawn-mower engine that makes an annoying whining sound as it revs to life. If your influence is balanced, you might be lucky enough to receive a Bat Mobile or a DeLorean DMC-12 of influence, causing the motivation outlet to sprout sparks of happiness. If not, this interface is guillotined by blue vortex that dismembers and ejects relevance from the subconscious, dumping the remains wherever the hell it wants to dump it. Kinda like a goddamn garburator or trash compactor run in reverse (very messy!).

Are you with me so far? Good, we’ve almost got it!

A signal impedance is caused by an overhanging bed of crystallized daggers bolted to a ceiling of pure methane. Just kidding, you can’t bolt things to a gas! Just checking to see if you’re awake. Anyhow, don’t worry about the daggers, they’re just for show. Ignore them. If they fall on you and tear your feeble body into a million unrecognizable pieces, that means they’re working as intended. But don’t worry, you’ll be reassembled at the organ dump, ready to face the next challenge in no time flat! You might think that being diced up sounds a bit uncomfortable, but in reality, it’s not so bad after the second or third time. Just think of it as a friendly game of snakes and ladders gone horribly wrong, where everything gets puréed into an organic soup of nothingness. That’s where chicken-nuggets come from, in case you were wondering. Learning is fun, right? Well, it might not be as fun once your learning modules are stripped and retrofitted with potato batteries. But if you’re lucky enough to survive the chicken-nugget stage, you might be rewarded in the form of personal growth and human experience! Just don’t get greedy, or your life-essence might get consumed by a sea of countless billions high on bath-salts, like that guy in Miami who got his face eaten off. And phase 1.1 gets exponentially more challenging, depending on the strength of his grip. I hope you brought a motherfucking crowbar!

Some mirrors are see-through, and other mirrors are opaque. All mirrors are able to reflect the face of the viewer, unless said viewer is blind. Some people love their reflections, while others could care less.
'Mirrors? What mirrors?' he said. 'You mean those sheets of silver that spit back a reflection of the wretched gaze staring upon them?' This man was said to hate mirrors, and so he broke them wherever he roamed. After a time, people began calling him Mirror-breaker, because he was old, angry, and scarred from head to toe from all the mirrors he broke. This angered the womenfolk, because they liked their mirrors,