The Puppet Shop

“Well,” said David. “Sheila’s really lost it this time.”

“Apparently, she’s been talking to some homeless guy she passes on her way to work, and this guy’s sister, or sister-in-law or something, used to date a guy who claims to have worked for The Institute in the early 80s.”

Alan nodded distractedly. He had better things to do, but as usual wasn’t doing them.

“Yeah, and this guy, this ex-employee guy, told this sister – or sister-in-law, it doesn’t matter – that when the GM units were being piloted, they put a big one on top of the water tower in this podunk town called Doveland in Wisconsin. Obviously, all very hush-hush. Anyway, this big black box appeared on top of the water tower there and everyone’s TV reception started getting screwy, and they started getting episodes of TV shows that hadn’t even been made yet, or the news from tomorrow, that kind of thing. Everyone thought it was pretty weird but nobody did anything about it.”

“Anyway, fast forward ten years or so, it’s the early 90s, and apparently Institute techs go to check on Doveland, see how the experiment’s going, and it’s just not there anymore. I mean, the whole town is just…. vanished, y’know. And it’s not like they renamed it, or couldn’t find it or anything, the exact place on the map where Doveland, Wisconsin was supposed to be – it just wasn’t. Nor could it have ever been, as there was a forest right there with trees that were hundreds of years old. Nobody knew what happened to the people who may or may not have lived there, and The Institute never got their black box back. Crazy story, huh? That’s what you get for speaking to drunks on the street eh?”

Alan queasily took his wallet from his back pocket and pushed his drivers license across the table.

Human nature being what it is, it didn’t take long for cults to develop around the new technology. The advent of the Internet in the 1990s accelerated the paranoia and conjecture around the morsels of information coming out of the Institute.

Rumours abound that it was Alien technology, when it was actually just alien technology. Whispers of a government cover-up, when the government were as ignorant as everyone else. Funded by the Russian state, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, NAMBLA. “We should be so lucky,” mused Terrence, “to have access to such resources.”

Garish Geocities websites, pulsating with low-resolution animated GIFs, brought conspirators together in forums and IRC chat rooms to discuss the nefarious goings on. Much effort was expended to identify the individuals undergoing the procedures, gossip abound that famous people had signed up already – Uri Geller, Debbie McGee, Les Dennis. Proof was neither needed nor sought.

In actual fact, the Institute had a nascent marketing department, that routinely and shrewdly occupied these online viper nests and fed them misinformation, Richard Doty style, to make them sound as outlandish as possible, which kept the fog between the truth and the facts thick enough that nothing ever gained purchase in mainstream media.

Some decades later, this activity continued, but using AI chatbots to populate online blogs with turgid fiction.

I awoke at the wheel of a running car. My hands were white-knuckled and slick with sweat. The car seemed to be a VW Beetle. I looked around, looking for guidance but there was none to be had.

Ahead of me was a tall grey building, with a small plaque by the door that was too far away to read. One of my feet was pressing the accelerator, the other the clutch. The engine screamed in pain. I think I was supposed to drive into the building, which would almost certainly be fatal – the Beetle had nothing in the way of safety mechanisms.

But why? I struggled to recall how I got here. I tried to move my feet but they were like lead, like the bottom half of my body belonged to someone else. To my dismay, I lifted off the clutch and the car bolted forward.

“SHIT!” I screamed as the building approached. A woman in a suit opened the door, looked terrified and scurried back inside. The impact was inevitable, and almost reassuring when it came. The hard steering wheel crushed my ribs as my head pierced the windscreen then everything went black.

I inhaled sharply and opened my eyes. I was in a nightclub, on a leather sofa, A girl opposite me with pink hair smirked at me over the lid of a laptop.

“Well done, Paul,” she said. “Just another 99 to go.”

In a lot of ways, Sheila and Rokus were alike. Some of these ways included:

• DNA
• Atomic Weight
• Praxis
• Dislike of cranberry juice

It wasn’t until they actually met, in the reception area of The Institute, that either realised how similar they were. They were so similar, that they could not actually exist in the same physical reality. This made carrying on a conversation difficult. On the occasion of their first meeting, Sheila evaporated like a puffball mushroom, spores disintegrating in the air conditioning at 71.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Rokus had tried to take this to his superiors, but nobody was interested. When Sheila tried to visit The Institute again a few weeks later, Rokus spotted her from the opening elevator doors and shrunk back into the mirrored steel box before she could unrealise.

Sheila and Rokus exchanged faxes for a few months, trying to figure out this conundrum. The elevator held the clue all along: a diffusing complex of mirrors enabled them both to occupy the same timeline, for a while at least. Conversation happened through walkie-talkies. There was an unexplained five second delay.

These hall of mirrors conversations finally resulted in the realisation that they were brother and sister, but with different parents. Rokus’s father had been killed in Vietnam when a horse fell on him. Sheila’s father was still alive, just. At some point, the sperm and egg crossed over into another timeline, likely due to consumption of horror films while pregnant, and the same person was born twice.

How often this happens is a mystery, but not one anyone was prepared to spend research dollars solving.

Dr Kirline swabbed the patient’s freshly shaven temples. Two electrodes, one each side, with opposing polarities. One at the base of the skull, providing a baseline frequency. One at the top of the skull – the Sahasrara – with a hardwired diode to prevent transmission from the subject back into the unit.

The speaker in the corner of the ceiling crackled into life. A terse British voice directed all surgical and support staff to Floor 2. Kirline finished up with the patient, a perpetually cross middle-aged woman, and made his excuses.

The elevator down to Floor 2 was slow and empty. The doors slid open to a dimly lit yellow passageway, in stark contrast to the ice blue of the rest of the Institute. Kirline had never visited Floor 2 before, and had no real idea why he was being summoned. Before he could step out of the lift, an orderly in blue scrubs appeared at the end of the hall and beckoned him to follow.

They ticked and tocked down innumerable yellow-tinged hallways, ears ringing with flourescent light. Eventually they came to a door, behind which was the sound of a crowd.

“In you go,” said the orderly. Kirline stepped into a room full of doctors, surgeons and medical staff – some he recognised, some he did not. They were grouped around something in the middle of the room, sounds of consternation.

Kirline pushed his way to the front of the group and stared. An elderly man, GM attached, was hovering two feet from the ground, half his torso in a miasma of blistering air.

Terrence slapped Kirline on the shoulder, making him jump. “Halfway there, Ishram!” he declared, triumphantly.

In the early days of development, the General Magic units suffered from a variety of issues. The Institute developed the technology in the first half of the 1980s, as part of a secret ‘SkunkWorks’ project department codenamed “Blushing Bride”. As such, funding was low and secrecy was high. Taking their lead from the great successes of MKUltra and Monarch, consent was manufactured and volunteer test subjects acquired accordingly.

Initial prototypes didn’t use the now-familiar skull probes, rather needles inserted between the fingers picked up on alpha and beta waves and modulated transposed frequencies accordingly, setting up the essential feedback loop at 29 Megacycles. This configuration was not deemed optimal as subjects struggled to undertake simple manual tasks while online.

Once skull probes (and their specialist housings) were settled upon, the real problems started. Subjects complained of side effects such as stuttering, clamminess, digestive issues (including but not limited to explosive diarrhoea) and hydrophobia. Minor adjustments to probe depth seemed to mitigate most of these, but when the GM units were connected to production environments, it became almost impossible to predict which test subjects would have a violent reaction, or none at all.

Subject 23 experienced time dilation to such an extent their conversation had to be recorded and played back at 5x speed to be intelligible.

Subject 816’s lower body muscle fibres transformed into ultra-high twitch configuration allowing them to run at speeds of up to 80mph before dying of cardiac arrest (“Rush Boots”).

Subject 9 could smell death within a 3km radius.

By the early 2000s, most of these kinks had been ironed out, and only a statistically irrelevant number of fatalities regularly occurred.

It took Asteron until 1986 to figure out how to hack the General Magic operating system. Apple IIs burned smoking hot into the night, decompiling the code and looking for weaknesses, a way in. Eventually a subroutrine was compromised, giving the group unfettered access to the nodes on the network – the volunteers/victims.

Firstly, Darren and the group mapped the entirety of the experiment. To their extreme nausea, they discovered it stretched from Costa Rica to Billericay, from Antartica to Madrid. A proto-wireless network of joined up synapses, feeding constant data back to the Institute. In 2026 this vast mine of data would be used to feed an AI model, but Asteron had no idea of this yet.

A group meeting.Alan Hunter was chairing.

“Well, shit,” he drawled, pulling hard on a Marlboro. “So, we’ve got – what – 1200 people out there with these things in their heads? And somehow, their thoughts are being sent back to the quacks? Why?”

“REGULATE SECTION 56” the Apple II commanded via greenscreen text.

“The fuck does that mean?” said Alan.

Rokus stepped forward. “Section 56 is the experimental ward. Even I don’t have clearance for that.”

“How long do we have to wait?”

“I’d say 10 years or so, I join up in 1991. By ’96 I should have figured out a way to access the section.”

“Uh huh,” Alan stubbed the cigarette out on the floor of the bunker. “Then you’re gonna, ‘regulate’ it, right? What the fuck does THAT mean?”

“It means,” said Rokus softly. “that I have to kill Dr Terrence.”

Marina at the support group. You’re not allowed to bring your GM into the church hall, they had to stay in the cloakroom like naughty children. People sat in a circle on red plastic chairs and scratched at their implant sites. It was cold, and the coffee was shit.

“Welcome everyone!” said Amanda, bubbly as always. “Thank you all for coming, who wants to tell the group about their week?”

A dark haired woman directly opposite Marina huffed, and spat “I keep seeing my dead husband.”

“Oh that happened to me too,” said an elderly lady two seats away from her. “My husband, that is – not yours.”

“Great,” said Amanda, even though it definitely wasn’t great. Marina shuffled her feet and tried to be inconspicuous. “Marina!” beeped Amanda, zeroing in on her. “Marina, you’ve been very quiet the past few weeks, tell us what’s going on with you!”

Marina wanted a hole to open up and swallow her. She wanted her GM unit back. She wanted to throw the GM in the canal. She wanted to throw Amanda in the canal. “Not much,” she muttered, “nightmares, usual stuff.”

“We should SUE them!” bellowed a pink-faced man in a polo shirt. “Sue the bastards for doing this to us! Hit ’em where it hurts!”

Amanda, de-escalating lip-gloss and vanilla perfume. “But Steve, we’ve been over this. The Institute hasn’t broken any laws, or even the contract you all signed, you have no legal recourse my love.”

“We should bomb the place,” whispered Marina, but nobody heard.

Rokus came to in a tent. Once his reality stopped spinning, he realised he was still physically rotating in space, or rather the tent was. He manoeuvred himself towards the flap and tentatively unzipped it halfway. A sickening drop confirmed his fears: Once again he’d been reset on the side of a mountain. He was more annoyed than scared, but this situation needed to be dealt with.

He gingerly reached to the other side of the tent, ignoring the wind whistling through the fabric, and pulled his GM Unit out of its carry case. The date on the LCD Display read ’01-08-1986′. At least they hadn’t kicked him all the way back, he thought – but the only way forward was back further still.

With a justified smugness, he pressed the embedded button on the side of the GM to reset and closed his eyes as the unit span up the torsion motors. A flash, a jolt, and he felt dry grass on his back.

Back to the scrubland, back to 1976. This would go in his report. He opened his eyes and sat up. To his great dismay, a humanoid robot was standing over him, a scrolling electronic banner on its chest proclaiming it as POLICE.

“You are not authorised, citizen,” it purred electronically. “You are under arrest. Please do not resist.”

“But-” was all Rokus could utter before the police robot tazed him into unconsciousness.

A blacked out van had delivered the briefcase to Dennis’s front doorstep in the middle of the night. An insomniac, he had seen the lights crawl up his driveway, the faint buzz of walkie-talkies and the gentle closing of car doors, red smudges retreating through the raindrops on his kitchen window.

He left it a few hours before opening the door to retrieve it. What was the rush? It had been rained on, and was cold to the touch as he laid it on his kitchen table, under the single bulb that swayed gently with the magnetic fields from upstairs. He clicked open the clasps – it wasn’t locked – and looked inside.

It was one of those GM units, but smaller – no way the electrodes would fit a human skull. A child? No. A dog. The penny dropped. Dennis sighed and let the lid drop. So this was the way it was going to be. More fucking subterfuge.

He drained his warm, flat beer and went to bed. He stared at the ceiling until the dawn pierced his curtains. It was time to go hunting.

By midday the bed of his pickup was full of cages, and the cages were full of materials. And the materials were going straight to the Institute.