The Puppet Shop

The Puppet Shop has now completed.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it.

If this is your first time here, start reading at the beginning, or the middle, or anywhere really.

Asteron was broadcasting in the usual manner; a signal intrusion blasting over the evening news, the sheer strength of the signal overwhelming airwaves.

“Unplug your soul!” the digitised voice demanded. “Turn off, tune out, drop table!”

Sheila/Rokus, Darren, Marina and some NPCs lounged on mouldy sofas under a bridge as the city burned behind them.

“You were not born to be a puppet! You were not crafted by the divine to be strung up by your electrodes, the hands of the Institute playing you in their own little dramas and dioramas.”

Darren’s eyelids were heavy, his insertion points infected. They had run out of medicine around March time, it was June. Somewhere in the distance, a high rise collapsed.

“Refuse, Resist!” the digital avatar implored. The irony of course, was that some kind of actual human connection would have been much more effective, Maybe next time.

“Grab your mind weapons, lay seige to the Puppet Shop!” bitcrushed the avatar.

Sheila/Rokus slid off the sofa and into a pool of waste. Comatose. Darren pinged his ring pull. Nothing happened.

Marina’s whole life had been a lie.

The Institute, as part of preliminary checks for suitability, scanned her memories and determined up to 80% of them were in fact implanted. By whom, when or why was irrelevant – to the doctors at least. To Marina, it was a sickening crunch.

Perhaps that was why she was keen to join the programme in the first place. If memory isn’t real, and the future is just memories waiting to happen, why not abandon time’s linearity altogether? It worked for Copernicus, and Plato, and Hans Christian Andersen, after all.

She scratched her forearms. Hallucinatory lice lived there.

Disconnecting from conventional reality was easier than she had thought, almost too easy, Once the electrodes had been implanted and she’d had her first precognitive dream, she felt like she’d come home. The Institute’s grey concrete corridors taking the place of the warm woollen glow of the childhood she never had.

It had taken her all of three days to accept the facts:

• Her name was not Marina Colleby
• She had not been born in 1976
• She had never been to Hoot Hoot Owl Land

Asteron had good reason to want to stop The Institute. It wasn’t just some philanthropic aversion to human experimentation – although that certainly left a bad taste in the mouth.

Their motivation was somewhat more… existential. Namely, a future nuclear crisis leading to untold casualties. Of course, Terrence and his team didn’t intend for this to happen, 50 years hence, but equally bore the burden of accountability for not factoring it in, human nature being what it is.

Asteron, then, had a plan. Once decoded, the cryptic internet messageboard posts finally resolved to this; work the loops, drop Terrence in the midst of a nuclear holocaust and get back in time for tea and cake.

Why Terrence? Because it was his beautiful, brilliant, deadly mind that stored the idea, the spark that caused General Magic – and the inevitability of human psyche and deeply integrated digital technology that nobody really understood – to bring human civilisation to an end.

So there it was, and Sheila and Alan and Darren and all the other pawns on the chessboard finally understood their role. Dr Terrence had to be isolated, thrown into a loop of his own, and ejected in 2056 just as the bombs dropped.

“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.