Black Jack

by Rani Manicka

  Ashan’s face swung toward Bumi. Her hands were cupped over her mouth and her horrified eyes were transfixed by the screen.

  ‘But this is a very special decision,’ the virtual character explained. ‘If you decide he shouldn’t die, the boy will remain as a useless vegetable until he expires in the next few weeks, but if you decide to help by terminating his suffering, you will be prompted for your passport number and address, and one hundred US dollars will be posted to you. Nothing will be asked in return. The game allows one vote per person. Watch a live feed of the subject now.’

  An oblong button began flashing.

  ‘Do you want to watch?’ Ashan asked her.

  She could not speak, only nod.

  The screen opened up to a boy. A real boy. Black lying in a white room, surrounded by sophisticated machinery. He appeared to be hooked up to some of it.

  ‘Whoa! What the fuck?’ swore Ashan.

  ‘That’s a lie,’ Bumi shouted, her face contorted with fury. ‘He doesn’t need those machines.’

  ‘You have one minute to decide,’ a computerized female voice chimed in, and the clock began a countdown. Fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven, fifty-six, fifty-five…

  ‘Quick, quick, press the no button,’ Bumi cried in a panic. Unbelievably, there were already more than two hundred yes votes.

  ‘Please enter your country of origin and your passport number now,’ the voice instructed.

  Ashan looked enquiringly up at Bumi. She covered her face with both hands and tried to remember. ‘One. No, no, six. No, wait.’ And suddenly the numbers that she had not looked at for years, in a passport that had long expired, arrived in an unexpected rush in her head. She snatched her hands away from her face and said them clearly.

  With lightning-quick strokes - Bumi did not think human fingers were capable of moving that fast - Ashan typed the numbers in and pressed the enter key on the keypad. The number ‘1’ appeared inside the no box. The first no.

  ‘Thank you and have a nice day,’ said the voice. The screen became a purple wall with a rotating black cube in the middle of it.

  Bumi’s heart was beating so loudly she could hear it. She felt her knees give way and her hand grasped Ashan’s shoulder. His reaction was fast. He shot out of his chair, grabbed her by the waist, and gently guided her to the chair he had vacated.

  ‘Sit, Aunty,’ he advised.

  She sank slowly into the chair.

  ‘Shall I get you some water?’

  Bumi shook her head slowly.

  ‘What’s going on, Aunty? And who’s the boy?’

  ‘I don’t know what is going on, but that boy is my son,’ she said slowly. The words were strange and bitter in her mouth. She shouldn’t have had to hide the fact before, when she had had him.

  ‘Oh! I didn’t know you had a son. My mother never mentioned it.’

  ‘He is adopted. The issue never came up in conversation with your mother. ‘

  ‘Look, shouldn’t you go to the police? This is well illegal.’

  ‘I can’t. If I do they will kill him instantly.’

  ‘But you can’t let them play with his life like that. There are a lot of sick people on the net. Hardly has the game started and already there are two hundred yes votes. At this rate they’ll end up killing him.’

  ‘Will you vote no for me?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  She looked at him. ‘Now. Please.’

  ‘Err…can’t remember my passport number off the top of my head. But I’ll do it as soon as I get home, OK?’

  ‘Thank you, Ashan. You are a good boy. God will be kind to you.’

  ‘Glad to help, Aunty.’

  ‘Will you ask your mother to vote too?’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  ‘Listen, if I say conspiracy theorists to you, what comes to your mind?’

  ‘Kook, nut, lunatic, tinfoil hat, a bit strange…’ He stopped when he saw Bumi frowning worriedly and realized it was something important, possibly connected to the boy. ‘You want me to Google it for you?’

  ‘Google it?’

  ‘Er… You want me to type it into the search engine and see what comes up?’

  Bumi was lost even with ‘search engine’. She had no idea, but she quickly agreed with this suggestion. ‘Yes, yes, do that.’

  He typed the words in and reams of stuff appeared on the screen. At that moment the door opened and a lanky youth with a backpack entered.

  ‘Wait one moment, Aunty,’ Ashan said, and went to serve his customer.

  Bumi cast her eyes down the page and a name jumped out at her. She pulled the cursor the way she had seen Ashan do, clicked on it, and found herself on a green and black page. They seemed to her magical colors, why, she couldn’t say. There was a photograph of a blond man; attractive, possibly in his late fifties. There was something wrong with one of his hands. Bumi had seen that type of deformity in the first Lady Carrington - arthritis. She peered closer. Courage. He had courageous eyes.

  Ashan came back.

  She pointed to the picture of the man. ‘Will you help me write to him?’

  ‘David Icke?’

  Bumi nodded.

  Ashan shook his head. ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Aunty. This man is like a broken record, banging on about pedophiles in high places.’

  Immediately Bumi recalled the sly references she had overheard Lady Carrington make about their important friends with their odd nicknames and their preference for ‘little people’. Unbidden, the memory of that one time many years back when she was still employed at Lord Carrington’s stately manor came back. She had opened the door of a guest bedroom that should have been empty and seen a naked boy lying on the rumpled bed. He had turned his small, white face in her direction and looked at her blankly, the way children sometimes do. He could not have been more than ten years old. His mouth was red and swollen. She had stood there staring, startled by the sight, when a man deeper in the room had drawled in a bored voice, ‘Shut that door. You’re letting the draft in.’

  Shocked to her Indian core, but indoctrinated into her servile position by the fear of losing even that lowly position, she had immediately obeyed. Not my place, she had told herself, scuttling away as fast as she could. She had never told a soul. Even now the hot shame of having done nothing that morning was raw. She looked into Ashan’s dismissive eyes. ‘If that is what he does, then I admire him greatly. It takes a great deal of courage to stand up for what is right with no thought for one’s own safety.’

  ‘Well, that’s not the worse part,’ Ashan maintained, his eyebrows rising. ‘This is a guy who believes the world is run by reptilians!’

  One week ago that would have caused her to think David Icke was more than a little mad, but she could not forget the eyes of the man who had offered her tea in her own house. It was like talking to a snake or a crocodile - there was nothing but the emotionless calculation of a cold-blooded predator. Or the strange cables that appeared to come out of his trouser legs. ‘How do you know it isn’t?’ she asked.

  Ashan looked at her as if she had lost it, but saying nothing, he politely helped her write the letter and send it using his email address.

  ‘One last thing, Ashan.’

  ‘Yes, Aunty?’

  ‘Can you think of any reason why anyone would put their coat into a microwave oven and turn it on full blast?’

  ‘Well, if one was a spy, it would destroy any RFID chips hidden in it.’

  ‘RFID?’

  ‘They are tracking devices that can be so small they would fit into the dot on the top of the letter ‘i’. Often they are placed onto the labels of clothes.’

  The explanation didn’t make any sense to her, but she put it at the back of her mind, thanked him profusely, and took the bus to work.

  The milk and morning papers were sitting neatly by the side of the front door. She picked them up and quietly let herself into the darkened apartment. Both Lord and Lady Carrington were still as
leep. During the time of the first Lady Carrington she had had to iron the newspapers, but the new Lady Carrington had declared such gestures exercises in ridiculous affectations. She put the papers and the milk on the table and sat in her coat on a chair. Soon she would make the one slice of nearly burnt toast with a scrape of butter and marmalade for Lady Carrington, and a couple of soft boiled eggs and soldiers for the Lord, but for now she stared at a spotless tile on the floor and thought of the unreal turn her life had taken.

  If a man smite thee on one cheek, smash him on the other!

  - Motto of the Satanic Order

  Shekina cleared a space in her mind and called them, first Teddy, then the biotech. Ten minutes later, Teddy opened the door to her quarters and came into the room, his face vacant.

  She stood up. ‘Take me to an ops room. I need to do a session.’

  Wordlessly, he turned around and led the way.

  They met no one in the corridors, but if they had it would not have mattered. The biotech was already waiting inside the ops room. His state was such that he appeared to be in a trance. As if they were all parts of a well-oiled machine, unspeaking they strapped her securely into the chair, attached the EEG headband and the heart monitor wires, and administered the first dose of psychoactive drugs into the IV line. The lights were turned down and brainwave tones were sent through her headphones. Shekina focused her mind on the vector coordinates she had memorized. The image of the cabalistic tree of life was projected onto the screen. When the flower on the screen started to spin she concentrated on it until the vortex of its spinning absorbed her.

  At precisely that moment Teddy launched the electric shock that coursed from the trip seat into her body, and she flew at incredible speed toward her vector intention. In seconds, she was very deep in the ground inside a DUMB (deep underground military base) corridor. She stood in front of a thick door. Experimentally, she put one leg through the door. Her foot disappeared through it, but did not land anywhere. She tried the wall and got the same reaction. She put an arm through and felt a sucking sensation. The room was a trap.

  She looked behind her into the empty corridor. Then she took two steps back and jumped into the room, calm, cool, and fearless. To land on the floor like a cat. Alert, precise and aware that the only way she would leave that room was badly. She straightened quickly and scanned her surroundings. There was no danger inside the room. Her eyes met Black’s. He was watching her with dismay.

  You should not have come, he said in her head. This room is a trap.

  She moved forward and stopped about four feet away from the bed. ‘I know.’ The incomprehensibly marvelous eggs had said, ‘When the time comes give her to him.’ That time was now. The eggs were waiting to hatch.

  Why are you here?

  ‘I have very little time. Let’s not waste it with chit-chat. I am giving her to you now.’

  What are you talking about?

  ‘It is my duty to protect her, but the eggs are more important than any of us. I have disobeyed my masters and will sacrifice myself for the eggs.’ She looked fierce and fearless. She seemed not to be a young girl but a woman of great magical powers.

  He saw her become very still and a change came over her features. The boldness fled from her eyes, and softness fell about the contours of her mouth. A drop in her shoulders made her appear almost smaller. Suddenly it was his Dakota - not the pale thing he had found crouched over the hourglass but a brighter, more vivid version. He felt a flutter in his chest. A shame that she should see him in his helpless form. He had been a hero in her world and now he was nothing.

  ‘Oh!’ she gasped. ‘Your beautiful hair. It’s all gone,’ and with childlike innocence ran to comfort him. But when she tried to put her hand on his shoulder, it went right through. ‘Ugh,’ she cried in shock. ‘What’s happening to me?’ She was so unschooled in the ways of her other alters that she did not even realize that she was an astral projection. His eyes moved to the computer screen and her eyes automatically followed. He made the words.

  You are traveling in spirit. It’s OK, don’t worry. I do it all the time. But it is dangerous for you here. You must leave now.

  ‘I don’t know how I got here. How can I leave?’ she whispered fearfully.

  It’s all right, don’t worry. One of the others will come back soon and all will be well again. How are you?

  ‘I’m fine, but what’s happened to you? Are you ill?’

  I’m not ill. This is what I am like in the real world.

  ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, greatly surprised. She hugged her arms around her thin body, and looked around the room. ‘But why are you imprisoned in this windowless room?’

  It is supposed to be a game. The world will decide whether I live or die.

  She turned to him quickly. ‘That’s a horrid game. I don’t want you to die.’ She stopped, puzzled. But she never wanted anything. She looked into his eyes. The thought of his death actually caused her hurt.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

  There is nothing you can do. This is something I agreed to do. Never mind that now. The story of Milarepa, did it have any significance for you?

  At first, she looked as if she was about to say something else, but then she allowed him to distract her. ‘Our demons are our fears. To defeat them we must invite them to stay, and integrate ourselves with them,’ she said woodenly.

  He wrote on the screen. What do you fear, Dakota?

  ‘The others.’

  So you know what to do.

  She began to shake her head at the prospect. ‘No, I can’t do that.’ She was still shaking her head, when her face began to change and Shekina fought her way through. Her eyes were stormy with some great effort. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered hoarsely, ‘but I can’t hold on anymore.’

  Then her beautiful face contorted and she was sucked out of the room as if she was no more than a thin rag in the path of a powerful vacuum cleaner. It was as Green had shown him: the world was not as the TV had led him to believe. The powers that should not be had the technology not only to net, but to store the electromagnetic part of humans.

  Shekina was flung violently back into the trip chair. There were new electrodes placed on different points on her body to record her nerve impulses. The theme song of Dakota’s favorite movie came through her earphones, Somewhere over the Rainbow...And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true." But it was through a device on her head, through the mastoid bone inside her head, that she heard Schooner Klaus’s voice.

  ‘Hello, kitty, it’s your programmer here. Click your heels, it’s time to go over the rainbow and look into the white light.’

  Shekina fought hard not to look, sweat poured from her chilled skin, but she was no match for the tritone, two specific notes that when played together could alter her brainwave activity to cause her severe pain or put her in ecstasy. This time it was ecstasy and, against her will, her eyes, unnaturally blue with drugs and intense emotions, opened wide to the excruciatingly bright light.

  They were getting rid of her and bringing Dakota back. Poor Dakota. The pain was always for her. Then it all went black.

  ‘Who’s been a naughty little kitty, then?’

  With a heavy load and a long journey

  - Confucius, Lunyu (475BC- AD220)

  Bumi knocked briefly, pushed open her neighbor’s back door, and entered it. Renuka, the lady of the house, was standing by her stove. Something was bubbling in a pot.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, concerned. She had known Bumi for many years now and she had never seen her so disheveled and distracted.

  ‘Have you got a computer?’ Bumi asked.

  ‘Yes, Anand has one upstairs. But I don’t know how it works.’

  ‘Please, you must help me. This one favor is all I ask. If I open it for you, could you please vote on it for me?’

  ‘Vote for what?’

  ‘You see, a little boy’s life is on the line. He is very dear to me. I know it
sounds odd and it is the most unbelievable thing, but there is a barbarous plan to kill him according to how many people vote to save him on the net.’

  ‘A barbarous plan to kill someone?’ Renuka said, perplexed. ‘This makes no sense, Bumi.’

  ‘Please, you have to believe me.’

  Renuka looked worried. She didn’t want to get involved in anything that could endanger her own family. They were quiet people who kept themselves to themselves. Her husband would be very annoyed with her if she brought trouble upon their family. She wondered if it was even safe to allow Bumi to use Anand’s computer.

  ‘I promise you it won’t get you or your family in trouble and it won’t cost you anything. I’ve voted too. Come on, I will show you.’

  Against her better judgment Renuka agreed and the two hurried up the stairs and into Anand’s untidy room. Immediately, she began to apologize but Bumi shook her head impatiently. ‘He is a teenager. It would be unhealthy if his room were clean.

  ‘We need your passport number.’

  ‘Why?’ Renuka asked, already regretting her decision to allow her friend to use her computer.

  ‘Because each person is only allowed to vote once.’

  Renuka went to her bedroom, opened a locked cupboard, and from a rubber-banded bundle of all her family’s passports extracted hers.

  They switched on the computer, got connected to the Internet the way Ashan had shown her, and went to the Play God site. She was shocked to see that the yes figure had already risen to 390 and the no figure was only 3. Silently, she thanked Ashan; he must have voted for him and his mother.

  When prompted at the right time, she hit the no button. Renuka read out her passport number and Bumi carefully keyed the numbers in. The screen flashed the ‘Thank you for voting’ message and filled once more with the live feed of Black. Bumi’s shoulders slumped. Seeing three hundred and ninety yes votes had frightened her. She had only a few friends left so there was no way she could even hope to reach that figure. She thought of David Icke and prayed that he could help.