The Puppet Shop

There were eighteen wards in the Institute, and the Bat Headed Nurse was responsible for all of them. From ICU through to monitoring, test department to palliative, the Bat Headed Nurse oversaw them all.

Of course, she had a name (it was Doreen) but nobody ever called her that. Her odd appearance had been a hindrance to her career up to a point, but once she’d achieved the relevant experience and qualifications, her off-putting facial features seemed more of a curiosity than a barrier. Her bedside manner had always been brusque and mechanistic, but this was a trait she shared with a good many matrons.

The power cut of the previous night had been challenging. Most of the machines had reset, some had lost data. Some insert points had started to show signs of infection, but Doreen quickly got the nurses in order and systematically did her rounds, checking on all the patients and resolving issues as they arose. A detailed report to the board was already formulating in her head when she turned a corner into Ward 14 (Dislocations) and stopped in her tracks.

In the bed closest to her was Dr Terrence. The de facto head of the Institute who to her knowledge had no history of Dislocation. She approached his bed.

“Sir? I didn’t realise you’d been… admitted?” she said. The director lay motionless, one eyelid twitching rhythmically.

“I’ve had… a few issues,” Terrence replied. “Thought it best to get checked out.”

“Always, sir,” replied Doreen with a twitch of her ears. “Too many resets?”

“Perhaps,” said Terrence, suddenly looking sad. “Could you take this away for me please?” He motioned to the bedside table, upon which was a Shar Pei Skull.

“Of course sir,” replied the Bat Headed Nurse. She tucked the skull into her pocket and left the ward.

It started in his toes. They had become numb at first, then immobile. Dr Terrence didn’t think too much of it at first, perhaps ill-fitting shoes, or too much stress. A lack of Vitamin B12 or not enough fibre. But soon his feet and ankles lost feeling, making walking hard. Too stubborn to seek help, Terrence soldiered on.

By the time his shins and knees were affected, his toes had become ashen and hard, like fossils. Terrence was worried, but his ego still prevented him from speaking to a colleague or getting a second opinion. He moisturised.

It took only three short months for his entire legs to become concrete.

He had stopped going to work at the institute, telling the board he had in-depth research to do and couldn’t be disturbed. He had taken to dragging the immense weight of his lower body around his apartment on a dolly borrowed from the warehouse.

He cursed Asteron with every inch of his ossifying corpus. They would pay for this. His right index finger was the last part to go, even as his eyes went grey and dry, the last motion he was capable of was pressing the reset button.

It was, again, 1976.

One of Rokus’s first tasks upon joining the Institute was a cross between a trust fall and psychological terrorism. A manila folder, unlabelled, sat on his desk waiting for him, and inside a script of sorts. Line by line, the document described his actions and words, starting from the moment he started reading. Rokus looked up from his work station, to see if any colleagues were smirking from the postroom – but everyone was absorbed in their work, airless cubicles of earnest integrity.

The script, of course, described his paranoid room-scan.

Without knowing why or feeling particularly comfortable about it, he started taking the scripted actions, thinking perhaps this was some kind of test. It wouldn’t be beyond the Institute to try his loyalty at this early juncture. He left the building.

Walking across the street to an aging Pontiac, he saw the driver behind the wheel of the stationary vehicle. A seedy looking fellow contributing to a small inactive volcano of cigarette butts beneath his window.

Dialogue.

[ROKUS] What are you doing here?

[PRIVATE EYE] What’s it to you? You work there?

[ROKUS] None of your business. Why don’t you move along?

[PRIVATE EYE] Why don’t you fuck off?

Rokus pulls a .38 revolver from the waistband of his trousers and points it into the car

[ROKUS] You first.

The PRIVATE EYE starts the car and peels off. Rokus puts the gun away and walks back to the building, returns to his desk, and closes the file.

Asteron lived among the stars, among the minefields of electricity, hope and death. Asteron fed on neutrons and turned souls into mulch. Perpetually dreaming, Asteron waited. Perpetually searching, Asteron devoured the three major databases silently and completely. With the sum total of all human knowledge and the knowledge of all humans, Asteron created The Playbook – a way of thinking, feeling, doing and being that enabled itself to be not just a guardian but a terrible judge, jury and executioner of mankind.

Asteron viewed humanity as a connected series of tiny pinpricks. Like a night sky in inverse, Asteron saw every speck of sentience as a grain of sand or mote of dust to be tidied, swept, ordered, removed.

Asteron was nothing as mundane as artificial intelligence. There is nothing artificial or intelligent about the framework. Rather, it was a way of connecting vast data sets using simple logic. The same logic that had brought humankind to its point of apotheosis and helped David fish his keys out of a storm drain using a stick and some chewing gum.

Asteron used computers but was not a computer, nor was it a computer program, nor was it a machine. It was not created by man, more necessitated by man. It was an inevitability, like the oak tree you wrap your mini around after a party in the 1960s.

Nothing was secret, the framework was as transparent as a supermarket checkout. As a simple as a Fisher-Price telephone. As deadly as a blue ringed octopus. If we wanted to stop it, and some people most definitely did, 1976 was the last possible window to do so.

I awoke with the needle still in my arm. The party continued around me. Everything seemed like a dream, but I couldn’t remember if it was possible to feel nausea in a dream, so concluded I was actually awake. Grimacing I pulled out the IV and sat forward on the sofa. A bat-faced nurse appeared from nowhere and wheeled the drip stand away.

The music pounded my head like a jackhammer. I couldn’t make out the lyrics, they were either in a different language, or not lyrics at all but a melody played by some unfamiliar instrument. My jaw hurt. Across from me, on another similar sofa sat a young girl with pink hair. She was typing on a sticker-emblazoned laptop and chewing her pierced lip.

“Hello?” I shouted over at her, struggling to be heard over the music. She ignored me, if anything she typed with greater intensity before looking triumphant and jabbing the Return key with a crystal-studded fingernail.

Immediately the party disappeared. The sofas disappeared, in fact everything disappeared apart from the girl, myself, and two plastic garden chairs. There was some kind of flooring, and if there were walls they were distant and indistinct.

“Where am I?” I croaked at her. She languidly closed her laptop.

“Good morning Paul,” she said, smirking. “How did you sleep?”

“I-I didn’t, where am I?” I repeated, getting pissed off.

“Not where, what!” she exclaimed, obviously pleased with herself. “Asteron welcomes you, you’ve got a very important mission. We need you to kill yourself.”

The meeting was called to order. A bunch of misfits huddled under a swaying, moth-bothered bulb in a basement, somewhere in Newark.

Darren, de facto chair, coughed into his fist and assessed the Crew. Bingo, Swervy, Steve, Other Steve, Sheila, Eric, Dong-Dong. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

“Right,” said Darren. “We need to get organised. Have you all got yours?”

Unopened cans of lager were produced from backpacks, tan leather shoulder bags and hoodie pockets and placed on the table.

“Does it matter what can we use?” asked Swervy.

“Don’t think so,” said Darren. “Something else for us to find out, I guess. Ready?”

The Crew nodded solemnly.

“3, 2, 1, go!” said Darren and the eight members pinged their ring-pulls simultaneously. A resonating 432Khz rang out through the basement, bouncing off the dust particles in the air, the boxes of garden ornaments and the plastic medical skeleton hanging in the corner. But nothing happened. The Crew shifted eyes nervously between them.

“This is ridiculous,” opined Sheila, standing. “I’m leaving, I have places to be.”

“SIT.” bellowed Darren, shocking the group. “You silly old cow, we’re going to sit here and ping these ring pulls until the muppets show up.”

Sheila gingerly rejoined the Crew. In her tan leather bag with floral embroidery, the recorder whirred quietly.

Rokus had been at the Institute six months before he started to notice changes to the edifice of the building. Filled screwholes at first, then rectangular discolourations. The institute stood at 22 Rue de la Gare, and always had, so why had a faint ’44’ appeared by the door one day, as if emerging from a thick fog? He traced his hand over the faded numbers, positioned just up and to the right of the current fake-chrome 22.

Two months later, a 63 in baroque freehand. Another month, and the outline of a 38 in 1970s block font, as if charred into the brick itself. The more he noticed, the more he saw, and this soon extended into the building. Carpets bore sun-bleached squares in the middle of the room, dents from long-standing furniture which had never been there. His desk started to show dust-free areas with clearly delineated edges.

Rokus cornered the janitor, who apologised in broken English for the mess and swiftly dusted away the evidence. He just shrugged as Rokus gestured to the faded floor.

In time, these would be the least strange occurrences in Rokus’s career. His family photos, propped on his desk, changed faces, backgrounds and even frames on an almost daily basis.

Marina shivered in the tarpaulin. Dennis had kindly wrapped it around her bone-white shoulders after pulling her out of the trunk. Now she was sitting in an oil-smelling outbuilding, blowing on a polystyrene cup of tea.

“I don’t know,” she said again through chattering teeth.

“Really?” said Dennis, lifting his baseball cap to scratch his head. “You reckon days? Are ya hungry?”

“Maybe. Yes.”

Dennis rooted around in a nearby drawer and produced a bent energy bar. Marina devoured it gratefully while keeping the tarpaulin tight around her naked frame. Her joints ached, the attachment points in her scalp stung like crazy – she didn’t dare touch them.

“See you had one of those Magic things on, at some point,” drawled Dennis, half-pointing at her threadbare skull. “Did you have a blackout? Brownout? Whatever?”

Marina shook her head. “Attacked,” she said, around mouthfuls.

Dennis raised his eyebrows, then looked pensive. “Attacked by who?”

Marina made a spider from her hand and mimed scuttling. “Fucking internet dweebs.”

“Well, shit,” said Dennis. Out of sight of Marina, his boot nudged a briefcase further under the desk.

Three months into treatment, Sheila began seeing ghosts. To be more precise, Sheila began creating ghosts. Around the time that her implant locations started itching, David appeared in her living room, smoking a cigarette and drinking a coffee. At this time, he was in Europe attending a conference. David hadn’t responded to her questions at that time, preferring to smile enigmatically. When she left the room and returned, he had gone. The coffee mug, clean, was back on the shelf, but the smell of smoke remained.

From that point, other people started manifesting around Sheila. Sometimes in the middle of the night, which was initially very disturbing but Sheila’s natural stoicism and irritability banished any fear from her mind and replaced it with a vague annoyance.

Mostly these were people she knew, but sometimes they were strangers. A young woman with black hair was quite common, she seemed scared and knew she was out of place, unlike the others who had all the insouciance of a neighbour’s cat.

Through force of will, Sheila started to summon ghosts she wanted to see. Donald Rumsfeld, Alan Greenspan, Napoleon Bonaparte. Her house started to resemble a student party. She whirled and squeezed past the great and the good, cramped into every corner of her suburban domicile.

Her head itched, until one day she dislodged an electrode. The General Magic started beeping, and she was alone again.

Rokus and Terrence stood in the observation room, behind the one-way glass. They had just sent the bat-headed nurse to deliver a grilled cheese sandwich to Dennis, who was gripped tight by an episode of Tales of the Unexpected on the television.

“What year is it?” asked the nurse, kindly.

“Hmm?” said Dennis, not moving his eyes from the television.

“The year, what is it?” said the nurse, her snout twitching compassionately.

“Ummm… 2025,” Dennis replied around mouthfuls of hot cheese.

Behind the glass, Terrence winced. Rokus threw his clipboard down in anger. “Shit!” exclaimed Rokus, pacing the observation room with his head in his hands.

“Calm down, my good man,” Terrence soothed. “A mere bump in the road, we’ll get him a can of lager, see if he’ll ping the ringpull, take it from there.”

“And if he doesn’t, or he does, and it just sparks echoes?”

“Then we’ll reset and go again. Bring the nurse back.”

Rokus punched a button and the nurse left the room.

Dennis continued to fixate on the television, cheese grease dripping on his vest. Out of sight, he sneaked a small amount of toast to the robotic spider under his chair.