The Puppet Shop

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.

Charlie had fought in World War One, Two and Three and he was tired of fighting. In 1976 he had invented what is now known as the Internet by accident when trying to fix the alternator in his VW Beetle. One of the many things he would end up regretting, but as things currently stood he was a salt and pepper 49 year old, working in a car dealership in Delaware.

A young couple were hovering around a Cadillac outside, but Charlie had bigger things on his mind than commission. It was 1986, every day for a year. This would not always be the case, so he had to stay focussed. He picked up the telephone and dialled his friend Alan’s number. Alan was only 5 years old, but nonetheless picked up.

“Hello?” said Alan, the sound of cartoons in the background.

“Alan, it’s Charlie. I don’t have long, it’s nearly time for me to split again. Do you have it?”

“Sure mister, I have it,” trilled the child gleefully.

“Good man,” said Charlie, exhaling with relief. “Now bury it under the roses at the front of the house like we agreed, right?”

“Sure thing, bye!” The line went dead.

Charlie trusted Alan, he’d always buried the GM every time before, and it would be there to collect on the next time round, and give Charlie another chance. He would keep digging every 1986 if he had to.

He heard a scream from the lot. The young couple had opened the boot of a Pontiac and the woman was crying hysterically.

When Marina was a little girl, she used to stare up at the clouds that skimmed across the summer sky. She was 27 years old now, and couldn’t remember the last time she’d looked up beyond her own head height. The implant locations itched.

A wise old teacher at her primary school had warned her of this – that growing up literally takes you further and further from nature every year. Your body gets taller, your sense organs inch away from the grass and the leaves and the bugs. Your hands have to travel a greater distance to pick up a caterpillar. The teacher advised her against it – growing up, that is – but non-plussed, she had gone back to crafting dolls out of Play-Doh.

If you combine all the colours of Play-Doh together, you get an off-putting purple-brown lump. This is how Marina felt at this moment.

Her brother had convinced her, at age 15, that dogs couldn’t look up. They can, of course. But now, at age 27, Marina could not.

The Institute promised to help her, they had technology to separate the Play-Doh colours, they said – to give her back her yellows and reds and blues. To unhinge her neck and enable her once again to look at the clouds in the aching blue sky.

So that was why she signed up, why she had to carry this bag everywhere, and be careful not to tangle the wires in her bra straps. After three months had passed, she just felt self-conscious and purple-brown.

But then she met Dennis, when he opened the boot of the Pontiac, and everything changed.