The Rage Room

by Lisa de Nikolits

  “Restoring the world to its natural state might not have been the best thing,” I commented. “It’s a muddy mess.”

  “You may jest, and things will be tough for a while, but they’ll get better.” Sting Ray Bob was confident.

  “Where’s Minnie?”

  “In a padded cell. She lost her marbles when it all went down. And here’s the thing, Mama’s been dead for decades! It was all an illusion.”

  Something occurred to me. “What do you guys look like for real?” I asked, and there was silence.

  “The thing is,” Sting Ray Bob said, “we are geniuses, you realize that? Remember the old saying about not judging books by their covers, etcetera etcetera.”

  “Listen, you guys.” I was struggling for words. “You, for some inexplicable reason, had faith in me. And you got me my kids back. And you taught me the meaning of life. I know we don’t know each other in any kind of social sense, but I’d like to think that we’re friends as well as business partners or guinea pigs or whatever. I don’t care what you look like.”

  “You say that now,” Jaxen said. “Fine, here we go.”

  45. JAXEN IS MOTHER!

  JAXEN VANISHED BEFORE MY EYES. And in his place appeared Mother! Mother! Tall, hefty, somewhat mannish Mother with her long grey hair, prominent nose, and close-set dark eyes. Mother had always been proud of the fact that her older self resembled Patti Smith in her seventies. And here she was. Jaxen was Mother.

  I sank down onto my cot and covered my face with my hands. Where to even start? “You know I killed you?” I muttered.

  She sat down next to me and patted me on the shoulder. “Your actions have been very interesting, Sharps,” she said, and her tone was gentle. “It was fascinating to watch your amorality unfold.”

  “Fascinating? I KILLED YOU!” I screamed, jumped up, and then rushed as far away from her as I could, which wasn’t very far.

  “If my life had been sacrificed for the cause, then I would have been okay with that.” She was calm. “We all wanted to see what you would do. In fact, me most of all.” She sighed. “Sharps, I told the Eden Collective about you. I told them you’d make the perfect subject for this project. I also truly thought this could help you.”

  “Help me? How?”

  “Well, you did kill your children. We gave you the chance of redemption. I red-flagged you years ago, but when you killed your children, which by the way none of us had any inkling you’d do, we realized that not only could we use you, but that we had to.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Do you have any idea how I felt? I’d let them down. I felt like I’d killed them myself. I left you and that woman with them.”

  “Left them with us? We were their parents!”

  I realized, as I said that, that my argument was sensationally flawed.

  “But,” she continued, “short of kidnapping them, what could I have done? It didn’t exactly work out, me kidnapping you. It’s not like I was a contender for the Best Mother Award, although I tried my best. Children are fresh slates, so I must have done something wrong.”

  I sat down next to her. “No, Mother, you didn’t do anything wrong. I’ve never been right. You know it and I know it. But I tried so hard too. I tried harder than anyone I know to be the perfect dad and husband. It’s all I wanted—don’t you see? To be the perfect man.”

  “And,” Mother said, “according to Ava, you are exactly that.”

  I stared at her. “What do you mean?”

  “You are the embodiment of what man is. You and your actions are the embodiment of the quintessential, primal, patriarchal persona, from start to finish, top to bottom. It’s as if you were distilled to have all the qualities of a man. But,” she hastened to add, “this doesn’t mean you are without good points. You did love your children; you did love Celeste—well, you tried. You did the tough work by going back and trying to save them, to make up for what you’d done. You repented, you chose alternative action, and you fought your baser nature, and that’s what also makes you the perfect man. Don’t you see, Sharps?”

  I groaned and rubbed my eyes. Even here, even now, I couldn’t ditch Ava. “What about Sting Ray Bob?” I asked. “And Janaelle?”

  “I’m Sting Ray,” came the reply and a willowy woman appeared, with a broad smile. She had deep coffee-coloured skin, a long rustic mane of greying dreadlocks, a prominent nose and teeth that seemed unusually large, but perhaps I was just imagining it. “Sting Ray Barb, not Bob. Not sure I was too happy that you mixed me up with your Hockney man, but such is life. I designed a way more handsome avatar, but your cortex blocked my suggestions. All your visions were influenced by your own memories, hopes, and fears. They came as much from you as us. That’s why you saw your mother as a big muscle man. That’s what you wanted her to be.”

  I wondered if that had anything to do with my father, but I didn’t have a single spare brain cell to think about that.

  “And Janaelle?” It was the question I’d been dying to ask the most, and it was the question I was most afraid to ask.

  “She’s out there.” Mother pointed to outside the tent. “Her name’s Noelle. And be nice to her, Sharps, no matter what you think. She’s really into you.”

  “Of course I’ll be nice!” But I was petrified. Janaelle was gone. Who would be in her place? “Does she even have steel legs?”

  “Of course she does,” Sting Ray Barb said, and she sounded annoyed. “You can only take visual distortions so far.”

  “Where is she?” She pointed and I took a deep breath and looked.

  The woman turned to me as if she sensed I was looking at her. She was short, the same height as Janaelle, but that’s where the resemblance ended. This woman had spiky platinum hair, and her face was covered in piercings. And she was as broad as she as high. She could probably hoist me with one arm no problem, whereas I’d seen her as a delicate flower. She was dressed in camouflage, not a long-skirted dress. Her features were stronger, with broad cheekbones, sensual lips, and heavily-lidded eyes. She looked exotic, a warrior who could snap me in two like a toothpick, should the whim take her.

  “You liked the dress idea,” she said, coming up to me. “That came from you. Camo, that’s more me!”

  She grinned, flashing silver incisors. When she smiled, her face opened like a flower, dimples creased her cheeks, and she was transformed to stunning. Up close, her eyes were green with gold flecks, and she had the longest eyelashes I had ever seen. She was incredible, but she wasn’t my Janaelle.

  “What on earth were you doing with me?” I asked, and she laughed.

  “Enjoying every minute,” she said. “I got to date the prom king, the quarterback hero of my fantasies. Any regrets from your side?”

  I hesitated and she saw, and her face slammed shut. I tried to find the love I’d felt for her, but it wasn’t there. She wasn’t Janaelle, and I couldn’t help that.

  “I thought you had faith?” I challenged her. “Would a person of faith be so duplicitous?”

  “I am a woman of faith. There is only one Creator and Her Name is Truth and we shall set Her free. Namaste. That never changed. I abide by and respect the fundamental principles of human morality and a sense of order within the world that was created by a being more extraordinary than we can ever imagine.”

  “So what now?” I asked, not interested in her or her theology. “How do I get back to my kids? Do I just go over to the house and see them? Say, ‘Hey Mother, I’m home. Isn’t this weather crappy,’ and pretend like I don’t know about any of this shit?”

  Sting Ray Barb nodded. “We can take you back to just as you were about to leave to go to Jazza’s place. You’ll feel a strong sense of déjà vu for the first few hours—you may even feel some dizziness and nausea—but it will pass and then your lives will be connected.”

  “Isn’t there a way to avoid the jump? Why mus
t I go back?” I sounded whiny and I knew it.

  “The time circle has to close,” Sting Ray Barb said, and I thought I saw Mother and Noelle exchange a glance. “It cannot remain stranded, unhinged like that.” Was she lying to me? Yet again I was powerless to challenge their assertions.

  I nodded and looked around the skanky campgrounds. The rain continued to pour, and I was damp to the bone. The aging canvas tent didn’t offer much by way of shelter. I wondered where they’d got it. Probably from some war museum. All their equipment looked antique and quaint, like it came from the early twentieth century.

  “This world’s rough,” I commented. “I preferred the luxurious model we had before.”

  “At least this is real,” Mother said. “Nature’s recalibrating; the Earth needs to heal. And we’ll get used to this. It’ll be interesting to have a real winter. All of life’s going to be a Real Life adventure, Sharps, in a real life way!”

  I suppose she was right, but being cold and damp for the rest of my life didn’t thrill me.

  Sting Ray Barb laughed and those unfortunate teeth laughed with her. Big horsey teeth. How come Sting Ray Barb didn’t have the standard issue teeth? That was weird. We all had the same teeth. I was mesmerized for a moment, and all I could think was all the better to eat you with. I was losing it. I shook my attention away from her teeth. “I gotta say, this has been a lot to take in,” I said. “And I have some questions, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, Sharps.” I could hear that Noelle was trying to be patient, but there was an undercurrent to her tone as if I was yesterday’s news slapping her in the face like a wet fish. “We’ve got all the time in the world to sit here chatting while the real world burns.”

  I ignored her sarcasm. Maybe she was upset that I wasn’t attracted to her, but she’d lied to me about who she was and I had earned my right to know the truth. “How does it work, what you’re doing? Why unplug the world? And why did you need me to time travel and succeed? Why did you access the data in the rage rooms? I still don’t understand. You owe me that much at least.”

  46. WHY TIME TRAVEL?

  “I’VE GOT THIS,” STING RAY BARB SAID. “Going back in time, a decade or so after she’d been in power, Minnie and the Sacred Board realized that the sun was dying. Sayonara solar power and, therefore, goodbye to the only world we had left. The rest of nature was long gone, all we had left was the sun and, alas, our great solar star was quickly heading towards extinction too.

  “The Sacred Board appointed an emergency commission to look into alternate ways of harnessing energy and—guess what? It turned out that we had to look no farther than our own noses. The winning idea was human. Electricity from humans was the way to go—body power. Think about it, Sharps! Our bodies are potential torches, brimming with energy, so much so that spontaneous human combustion is a real thing. And what creates more power and electricity than rage? Nothing. That was the real reason Minnie invented the rage rooms. She wanted to monitor her subjects—keep an eye on what was happening, how her subjects were feeling—and give them an outlet for anger, but more importantly, she believed there was a real possibility that gathering the electrical output could create a viable resource to fuel the world.”

  “And did it work?”

  “Yes. Because by god, there’s so much anger out there! You’ve got no idea. World energy problems solved! The sun was weakening, but it was still around, which meant that Minnie had time to stockpile a reservoir of energy that would be ready to rock when the great celestial light kicked the bucket. But you know what they say, Sharps, about the best laid plans of mice and men.… The sun rejuvenated! Scientists are still scratching their heads as to the hows and whys, but the sun rebounded with ten-fold its original energy. Minnie kept the rage rooms going because people needed them and also because, as she put it, the sun had proven a streaky player in the game. Who knew when it would snuff out and leave us in the dark? Hence the continuation of the rage rooms. Thank god she did, or we’d have lost access to our data and our subjects.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But what did the rage rooms have to do time travel?”

  “Nothing at first.” Sting Ray Barb said. “The rage rooms were just the rage rooms. And time travel was just a hypothesis that Minnie quashed as soon as it raised its ugly scientific head. Too politically dangerous, she said. It made her vulnerable to attacks from timelines she couldn’t control, and also, according to her ethos, time travel was interfering with God’s Will and Mama would have none of that.

  “Meanwhile, my mother and her professor friend, Doctor Horvarth, came across a largely redacted time travel hypothesis, and of course, to them time travel was irresistible. They had to test it out. The first attempt ended in catastrophe. The volunteer subject couldn’t successfully reintegrate on return, and she died. But the collateral data showed a massive energy spike when the woman jumped. Huge! My mother and Dr. Horvarth realized they had discovered the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The guinea pig was Jazza’s mother by the way, for which she received a posthumous medal from Head Office.”

  “And that’s why Jazza had to be saved. He’s the son of the big hero.”

  They all nodded. “His mother is one of our most revered heroines in this war,” Sting Ray Barb said, “but the whole thing had to be kept a secret and not just because jumping killed people. Of course all the heads-of-state knew that the energy harnessed in the rage rooms was a great source of electrical power—and we were quietly skimming and collecting as much of the excess as we could—but they had no idea that the output, when combined with time travel, was excessive beyond all expectations. One jump produced enough energy to power a small city for a month.

  “It had to be kept a secret because of the ethical issues. I mean, people would have to be sacrificed in order for the rest of the world to survive. It was like that old movie, Soylent Green. ‘Green is people!’ In that admittedly fictional instance, people were recycled into food. In reality, human sacrifice for the greater good isn’t really anything new but it is morally questionable, no doubt.”

  “So your solution was to use ‘expendable’ humans like me?”

  “Generally speaking, yes, but I knew you’d survive,” Mother said. “All the data pointed to it. I hoped you’d use the opportunity to go back and make better choices, Sharps. I hoped it would help you. I’d never have put you through it had I believed it would kill you.”

  “Sure, Mother.” I glared at her with hatred. “Exactly what data are you referring to?”

  “You need to have a unique gene coupled with a compatible psychological, intellectual, and emotional profile. You’ve heard it said all humans are 99.9% identical? That was true at one point, but as soon as scientists were no longer limited by the amounts of sequenced DNA available for study, we were able to discover there’s a gene for almost every trait, including time travel. We each carry three billion pairs of information inside us—isn’t that beautiful?”

  “Stunning. But seriously, there’s a time travel gene?”

  “Yes,” Sting Ray Barb admitted, but her tone was reluctant and her gaze was vague. “It’s got more to do with cell capacity for dis- and re-integration. It’s hard to explain. Anyway, we identified a location with an intermittent magnetic field that generated plasma by way of a coronal discharge. That was one of the two thing Dr. Horvarth discovered we needed when Jazza’s mother took her ill-fated ride. The perfect location turned out to be St. Drogo’s train station because it has the weakest temporal structure in the city. It has the most effective geographical coordinates to bridge time. It’s just a junction where the veil of time is most transparent, most fragile.”

  This was too much to take in, and my brain felt fuzzy, but Sting Ray Barb forged on and I tried to focus on what she was saying.

  “Dr. Horvarth further calculated that we needed to create the same kind of environment found in the Integratron in California. It’s a M
ultiple Wave Oscillator that was invented by Georges Lakhovsky, a scientist who believed that ultra radio frequencies were a cure for cancer.” She noticed my blank look. “I find the history of all this fascinating, but I know we don’t have the time—ha ha, bad joke! What you need to know is that we flooded St. Drogo’s with the same radio frequencies as the Integratron because it was designed for time travel.”

  “But wait! What do you mean? Integratron is the corporation I work for.” These guys were losing me more and more with every utterance.

  Mother barked out a laugh echoed by Sting Ray Barb and Noelle. “Oh, Sharps! Ever naïve! There’s no originality in today’s world! They ripped off the name! And of course it’s ironic that it’s the glaring antithesis of the very thing from which it stole the name. Our world hides behind bloated catchphrases that espouse goodwill and spirituality while essentially selling useless junk to the masses with aching holes in their guts, wanting more, more, more. Of which, Sharps, need I remind you, you were a primary purveyor?”

  “How about we get back to the discussion we were actually having.” I glared at Mother. “Did anyone ever actually time travel from the original Integratron?” I was curious.

  “No, but we believe the scientific theory was sound. The Multiple Wave Oscillator,” she continued, “is a combination of a high-voltage Tesla coil and a Split-ring resonator that generates ultra wideband electromagnetic frequencies. Van Tassel, the guy who designed the Integratron, had a theory that electromagnetism affects biological cells, and he believed that every biological cell has a unique resonant electromagnetic frequency. According to Van Tassel, the generation of strong ultra wideband EMF by the Integratron resonates with the cell’s frequency and recharges the cellular structure as if it were an electrical battery. Van Tassel claimed that human cells ‘rejuvenated’ while inside the structure, but we’ve taken it a couple of steps further. Well, my mother and Dr. Horvath did.”