The Puppet Shop

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.

There is a term for paper degradation due to acid decay – Slow Fire. The fibres, particularly of old and valuable records, literally burn themselves away and there is no cure. More broadly, the concept of the Slow Fire represents the inevitable and immutable reality of entropy. Information, property and concepts will (and do) decay and disappear in time.

Tempus Edax Rerum.

I believe this is fundamentally the motivation behind Asteron. I also believe framing Asteron as a “terrorist organisation” in the mold of The Weather Underground et al is not helpful. While their methods are extreme, jarring, and barely understood at this time, their driving belief system seems to be that the Slow Fire must be stopped, or mitigated, by any means necessary.

Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions – “Who are Asteron?”, “Why do they do what they do?”, “How can we stop them?”. Rather, should we be looking to solve the same problem but with more palatable methods? If we don’t make an effort to align with the group’s core motivations, we will continue to suffer the impacts of their modus operandi – namely, the reset back to 1976.

“OK, cut.”

A microphone is unpinned from a lapel.

“Was that OK?”

“Really good Professor, thank you. We’ll let you know when we’ve done the edit and the broadcast is scheduled. The institute thanks you for your time.”

Shuffling tweed, a closing door.

“Not good enough,” said Harry Planter through gritted teeth, punctuating each syllable with a solid punch to Dennis’s face.

They’d been in the shipping container for two days straight in the July Californian sun. It smelled of stale urine and dehydrated meat. Dennis had been picked up at the Mexican border after ill-advisedly attempting to flee with the blueprints. How he thought he’d get away with it, tracked as he was by his GM unit, was anyone’s guess. Dennis wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

“You see,” said Harry, lighting another cigarette with swollen, blood-stained hands, “it’s my little girl’s birthday today. She’s five. I’ve hired a clown. He’s going to make balloon animals and shit. Real class act. None of your Gacey bullshit.”

Dennis just stared.

“I just need you to tell me who Asteron is, and where they’re holed up. Then I can get to my daughter’s party, you can be on your way, and we’ll say no more about it.”

Dennis leered at him, straining against the zip ties on his wrists and legs. “Fuck you, man.” He spat bloody sputum at Harry’s cowboy boots. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and you can’t torture a guy for shit.”

Harry raised an eyebrow. “Okay tough guy, let’s play it your way. Tell me where Asteron is, or no birthday cake for you.”

Dennis’s demeanour changed in an instant. “Okay, okay, calm down man. Look – I don’t know who Asteron is, or what it is, I just know there’s been meetings, and we’ve talked about The Institute and like, bringing it down, but they never got into specifics.”

Harry scuffed the cigarette butt out with his toe. Keeping his eyes on the ground, he muttered “It’s vanilla sponge.”

A tear rolled down Dennis’s cheek.

During his tenure in the Weather Underground, Alan was part of a plot to blow up The Institute. They had a man on the inside, some black dude who’s brother was a Panther. This was back in the early 70s. The Weathermen determined that the Institute was using animal testing, was likely a puppet of the government and a front for MKUltra-style experimentation. They weren’t completely incorrect.

Nonetheless, the first attempt in 1970 to plant a fertiliser bomb in the basement failed in its early stages when the Volkswagen Beetle used to transport the device refused to start. Some of the more conspiracy-minded Marxists among the group immediately suspected government interference, but Alan was more pragmatic – the car was just shit.

The next tactic was to get Alan inside, and to use his powers of clairvoyance and remote viewing to determine the true nature of the Institute’s work, and the best part of the sprawling complex to hit with explosives.

Of course, as the records show, as soon as Alan was plugged into a General Magic unit, his third eye snapped shut and any powers he may have had became subsumed in the wider protocol. The mission was aborted, and the Weathermen bombed The Pentagon instead.

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.