by Jae Vogel
"So glad you have some of your memory back. We'll get to more of that in a moment, but first, I'd like to reassure you that we have evidence that you possessed addictive drugs beyond your means to acquire. And what's more is we have official statements from a one Priscilla Rael which states that you habitually showed up on a wide variety of substances, and that if affected your ability to perform daily tasks at your work."
"Perform daily tasks... you know what I do for a living, right?"
"Solis Virtual Theatre Entertainment is no joke. All actresses need to be in peak psychological condition. Your immediate supervisor has issued a statement against you, and we managed to collect evidence from your locker at work, which indicated that you may be at risk for poly-drug abuse."
"I don't believe this shit. Show me the blood panels from when I first arrived."
One of the nurses produced a sheet of paper with a bunch of obscure chemical readings and numbers on it. I didn't understand a lot of it, but I read through the paper stubbornly, until I got to an area at the bottom that described opiate levels.”
"This can't be right,” I mumbled.
“The first step to addressing a problem is admitting you have one," the male doctor said, though his speech was not passionate or sincere in any sense of the word. I got the distinct impression that this man couldn't have given less of a fuck if I was strung out in front of him that very moment.
"Of course,” he continued, “we will get to your rehabilitation program in a bit, but for now I have some very important questions for you."
I looked up at him and tried my best to figure out what the fuck was going on, but he wasn't going to give me anything except whatever cold, clinical treatment he had been peddling for the last thirty-five years.
"I need to know how you did it."
I stared at him blankly, not sure exactly what he was getting at.
"Did what?"
Some papers were shuffled, and the two nurses on either side of him looked like I was busy putting the two of them on. He adjusted his posture and then straightened his collar.
"I need to know how you modified the architecture of the simulation."
"Look, I don't know what you think happened in there. All I know is that one minute the guy was fucking me, and the next, he was threatening me in some kind of jealous rage. I'm not sure what the folks at Solis think makes good entertainment these days, but apparently it includes masochism and dubious consent.”
"Oh, I'm not too sure about that,” he said. ”You see, I've studied the tape, and I know for a fact that you're lying."
"Lying?"
I turned my head to either side to see if those two fucking rat-faced assistants of his were picking up on all of this. I was rewarded with exactly zero response for my efforts. There was nothing to be gained from playing the victim here because I was already being painted as the perpetrator. The cards were stacked.
"Show me the fucking tape,” I said.
The doctor nodded to the nurse on his left and she went out into the hall. A few moments later, the wall panel opposite of my bed had been modified into a projected screen. A tiny holographic projector from overhead shot a rainbow spectrum out through the air, and suddenly I was watching two characters fuck in high definition on the other side of the room.
"Class fucking act, whoever that is,” I said simply.
"That is you on the last performance you did before we brought you in for treatment."
I knew that's what it was, but I didn't feel like giving these people any sense of give whatsoever. It was always a bit more convenient to believe that since the woman didn't look like me, it wasn't exactly me that was being fucked on the screen. The problem was that my sense memory actually betrayed the level of dissociation that I was able to commit myself to within my own mind. When he fucked the woman on the screen, I knew what she felt, because in truth, he had actually been fucking me.
"The mind doesn't always want to associate with traumatic events, but the body never forgets."
I looked away from the screen to see the doctor observing the sex scene with a dispassionate, analytical look on his face. As I was watching him, he turned to catch my eye. I blushed and looked away, but it wasn't because I felt any kind of attraction to him. I wasn't even that embarrassed that he was watching some representative aspect of me fuck on screen. The embarrassment had to do with the fact that he had known what I was thinking without my having volunteered that information.
"It's common for sex workers like yourself to use dissociative methods in order to distance yourself from the work that you perform. It's really a societal problem. Society demands it, but they also simultaneously reject those who work in the field in order to preserve their own concepts of purity, a bit of an inherited disposition from the Victorian Age, I'd say."
"Cute theory,” I said, “but I don't see how this is relevant to my supposed modification of the sim.”
"Keep watching..."
It pained me to look, but I did as he directed. Every second of the tape to follow was unbelievably uncomfortable, right up to the knowledge of how the cinematographer chose to represent the camera angles of the deep throat scene. It was so gut-wrenchingly obvious that the woman on screen was being suffocated by that fucker, that I began to feel a righteous sense of fury build up inside of my body. I wanted him dead, and I didn't care about whatever consequences might come of it. That woman was being treated poorly and there was no way that there was any excuse for that level of abuse.
Then it happened.
Just as the woman on screen was about to pass out from asphyxiation, there was a change in the color of her eyes. They ceased to be colored bright blue, and darkened somehow into a muddy hazel color. A lens flare also accompanied the shift in color and it seemed as though there was an inborn luminescence from within the eyes of the actress on screen. At that moment, I realized that the facial structure of the woman on screen was not the same any longer. The fullness of her figure had diminished. Her jawbones had tightened in some areas, and squared off in others. In short, the woman on the screen stopped appearing to be my ‘Angel’, and started to look more and more like… me.
And that wasn't the worst of it.
It was hard to tell exactly, because there was an unreal amount of distortion on the tapes, but it looked like the woman had an aura around her - an autonomously originated light source that was independent of the scene itself. For the benefit of analyzation, this section of the tape was slowed down to a crawl. I was able to see the transformation in graphic detail, as well as the kill shot to follow.
The explosion of the glass that I recalled from my memory actually started at one crucial point, about three feet above my head. The whole thing happened so quickly, even from the perspective of the slowed down pace, that I almost missed it. Fortunately, the tape was put to a pause right before the man was murdered. The glass behind my shoulders had already shattered in a wave of force, but what was more interesting was a bright white line, headed straight for the forehead of the man on screen.
"I've never seen anything like it," the man said, walking over to the wall, and obviously staring directly at the projectile about to collapse the man's skull into his body. "Run the tape forward just a bit."
The nurse complied, and he stepped out of the way of the projector; his eyes still trained on the screen. I stared dispassionately at the wavering projections on the back of the man's white jacket. Then, in slow motion, I watched as the stream of light pierced the man's forehead, collapsing the skull beneath the power of its strike.
The video stopped.
"That right there is a standard indicative of sniper fire from a high velocity, high caliber round of ammo. Are you familiar at all with guns?"
I shook my head.
He paused momentarily, as though he didn't believe me.
"Run the tape."
I watched as the glass wall behind my body shattered inward toward the room itself. My body, which had been pressed up again
st the window at the time, fell backward, while what was left of the body of the man was thrown backward, into the bathroom. I turned my head to this side.
"Enough."
"Not quite," the man said.
I looked at the screen once more, just in time to see a light shoot downward from the building across the way. The camera flashed as though the receptors behind the lens had been shorted. The final image on the screen showed a figure of a woman, radiating light, with wings that shot outward into the distance on either side of her body.
“Oh come on… you're saying that's me?”
"Well, I don't know who else it might be. Your consciousness is the only one that is operating that element of the Sim."
He stood there with his arms at his side, and examined my reaction to the footage. On the screen behind him, was the still shot of the woman falling toward the ground. To either side was heavily pixilated, and for all purposes sabotaged imagery along the edges of the clip. However, regardless of what your opinions were on the distortions of the tape, the figure with the wings was not something that could be contested; it was definitely there. The question of course was whether or not I was that person, or to what extent my will had anything to do with the transformation of the Sim.
Suddenly, and quite urgently, I needed a hit of heroin. A joint, hell, even a gutter fucking snipe. I didn't care; this was getting out of hand, and I wanted out.
"Look, I don't remember any of that. Looks like news to me."
I got up out of the bed, then collapsed toward the wall, bringing an onrush of rat-faced nurses to my side, in order to prevent my body from fully collapsing to the hard floor beneath. I caught myself with my own arms, and pushed them away.
"I've got it! Just lost my balance…”
With some effort, I was able to push myself up into a standing position. Just because my body would comply did not mean that my mind had anything to do with the whole thing. The room literally swam in front of me as vertigo seized me. I grew dizzy, and clinched my teeth together, while digging my nails into my skin in order to get a hold on my body.
The pain helped some, but the obvious theatrics were not enough to convince the two nurses. If anything, it seemed to set their own nerves on edge, as they tried to determine whether or not I was a danger to myself or others.
"Look," I said, directing the attention to the man in the room, and away from my own failing body. "If I'm to believe you, you’re suggesting that I assassinated a virtual entity and disrupted the morbid fantasies of a few hundred of Solis's regular patrons. I'm well aware that Priscilla has fired me, so why not just take damages out of my final check and leave me the fuck alone?"
He shook his head.
"It's not that simple. You see, you weren't the only actor in that film."
"What, you think I hired someone to come in and hack the fucking thing?"
He scratched his chin, and tilted his head to the side. Both of the nurses turned their eyes away from me.
"Look,” he said, “it is well known that Solis provides high quality entertainment -- but what is not so well known is that they provide, shall we say, ‘immersive’ entertainment for a higher tier level of customer."
The room could not have gotten any smaller.
"I see you understand the implications of my statement,” the man continued. “While you may have miraculously woken up after your fall into the abyss, the actor which was eliminated by the bullet which flew over your head was not so fortunate."
A wave of disgust rose up inside of me, and I covered my mouth involuntarily to prevent myself from vomiting.
"That was a… person?"
"Oh, I think we both knew that, Ms. Jayne Daux."
“Wait. You let a person do that to me?"
“Now calm down, we have contractual agreements which cover all sides. I'm afraid we can't be faulted if you didn't read your contract carefully enough. However, I'm sure now that you've come through the other side of that terribly obstructive habit of yours, you'll be more careful in your future arrangements."
“You let that... thing, chock me to death with his fucking cock! You did that!”
My hand instinctively grabbed the nearest throwable object, which happened to be an unopened, plastic container of applesauce.
“You!”
My aim was terrible, resulting in applesauce running down the surface of the screen. All the while, the man stood unfazed, staring at me with disappointment. He made a flipping signal with his finger, and two men came from the hallway to restrain me. The nurses quickly gave me a shot in the neck, and the floor rose up to meet me.
"We'll be in touch, Ms. Daux,” was the last thing I heard.
Chapter 4
I woke up outside my piece of shit apartment with the worst hangover I've had in recent memory. The last thing I remembered was that bullshit health team inside of Gratis.
I made my way inside. Looking around, I was able to get a glimpse of the apartment's condition through the dim light of a series of windows along the top of the apartment.
‘The Bunker’, as I affectionately referred to the room, was noting more than a single studio basement somewhere far enough away from downtown to where I could afford to direct most of my income toward drugs. Well, back when I had an income anyway.
The light wasn't much, and so I sat there in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, wondering just how I was going to make all of this work. Turning to the left hand side, I saw that the place was in worse condition than usual. I sat up, trying to get a closer look, and realized that the room had been completely torn apart.
The first thing that flashed through my mind was to look through all of the places where I had stashed my junk.
Black tar, taped in the door of the closet. Gone. Pot, shrooms, Kava and Valium in the drop-out bottom in the base drawer of my nightstand. All gone. Didn't even leave me the set of papers. They even took the MDMA that I had taped to the inside of the toilet tank. Even the goddamn jar of pot butter in the fridge was gone. The fuckers.
Beyond that, all of my books were out on the floor, opened, their pages spread all over, everywhere. When I checked beneath my bed for a bottle of whisky I may or may not have hid back there a few weeks ago, I found that they had actually split my mattress open. Whoever ‘they’ were.
The man's face who flashed through my mind was the smarmy doctor at the Gratis clinic, but I couldn't see him going through my room and leaving everything in this trashed condition. Beyond that, my mind flashed to a number of my rip off friends, who might have stopped by to see how I was doing and then sacked the place when it seemed like I might not be back any time soon. That sort of thing wasn't personal - it was just in the circles I ran in. Sometimes people ended up disappearing for one reason or another, and when they were gone, it made sense to go in and take a look at their things to see if you could use any of it for yourself. Sort of like a parting gift, offered freely from one person to the other, except on your own schedule.
I had no idea how long I had been gone.
I went over to my phone and turned it on.
Oh God...
The last time I went into work was just before the end of the last month - I knew, because I always ran out of pharm scripts just before the end of the month. My phone told me that it was now the fourteenth of November, which meant we were well on our way to winter. I also realized that it meant I had a chance at scoring, if I went to the Pharm Distribution Unit closest to downtown.
I shuffled through the loose papers that lay scattered on the floor. Old paintings, pieces of trash and bullshit candy wrappers. Clothes that hadn't been washed at any point in recent history. Used drug paraphernalia and empty bottles of booze were everywhere. My wallet was easy enough to find. Not like I had that much shit to sift through in the first place. One of the advantages of being a minimalist. Problem was, once I opened up the wallet, it turned out empty. A simple glance down at the floor and I saw what I had missed in my earlier search.
My
ID, pharm card, insurance card, and library id were all shredded, and charred. Only a conspicuous corner of my pharm card remained undamaged. The rest of the documents had been set on fire using my ashtray as a fire pit.
“Fucking fuckers!”
I wound up my arm, gripping the phone tightly in my hand so I wouldn't break the only resource I had been left with on the concrete wall of the Bunker. My voice echoed around me, and then died. I collapsed to the floor and tried to pull my thinking together.
Junkies lose shit all of the time.
I had actually lost my pharm card before, in a drunken wrestling match with Hep about two months ago. At that time, and by Hep's suggestion, I had actually programmed the number for Card Replacement Services into my phone for safekeeping. It was a pain in the ass to get a new card sent to you, but they did manage to issue you a PIN number that you could use to get what you needed, so you wouldn't have to go through withdrawal before you got hooked up with another card.
My fingers were searching through my phone just as quickly as they were able. Within a few minutes, I had made contact with the automated system they used to filter callers.
“Please enter your Government State ID number, followed by the pound sign.”
# # # - # # - # # # # (#)
"One Moment Please."
Shitty fucking saxophone music came on the line. I swear, whoever designed these systems had the worst taste in music ever, and for some reason, banality was determined to be the most palatable method of soothing the irritation caused by calling the place to begin with.
"The Government State ID Number you have entered has been put on Probationary Stasis. Please stay on the phone, Law Enforcement officials will be there shortly to address your concerns."
My pupils dilated, and suddenly I remembered. I remembered running through my own apartment. Ripping up my cards and burning my own shit. I remember a struggle happening, and suddenly the room began to grow very small.
"Thank you for holding. Please remain calm. A Law Enforcement Officer will be with you shortly, and will be able to address any concerns you might--“
