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wafflebloggies · 1 year

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4. a place that remains unchanged

back - next They said you could never go home again.

Whoever had first said so, Antonio guessed their home probably hadn’t been the HR Department. On a site big enough to have two official zip codes, in a building big enough to require its own proprietary SatNav, in a zone within a zone within two smeary tempered-glass doors and past a number of warning symbols which most humans never got to see (certainly in combination) in the course of a normal and safe lifetime, Antonio’s first home was a tricky place to visit if you didn’t belong. Humans, with their dependence on things like light and a reliable source of breathable air and geometry that made logical sense, tended to struggle if they were left to wander around in it for too long. For which reason, and a whole host of others, they weren’t.

Humans had to keep records, and check biometrics, and make sure the people who were allowed in to the HR Department were people who really should be there. Antonio, who wasn’t a person, didn’t pay much attention to them. The few he met on his way to the Entry saw him coming, a big husky guy with a big friendly smile on his big friendly face, his neat-and-tidy black clothes and his serene ambling walk, as easy to stop as continental drift, and got out of his way about as fast as Mrs. Hernandez’s cat, with maybe a little less scrabbling on the squeaky tiled floors.

The eyes of the Entry raked over him, pinged green and let out a happy double-beep. The Entry hissed open, slow and sticky, both doors juddering crankily, and Antonio headed inside, nearly bumping into a couple of late personnel who were heading for decon, gas-masked and goggled and crinkling along in their grubby bluesuits. He smiled at them as he passed and left them behind, disappearing into the dingy clutter that filled the rooms beyond.

“Creepy fucker.”

“Shh!”

Most of the outer layers of the HR Department existed in a state of permanent nomadic flux. The humans who had work to do here did it anywhere they could, camping in odd corners and places they felt relatively safe, the equipment they brought with them hastily unpacked and shoved wherever there was space. Antonio passed benches scattered with discarded racks of tubes and petri dishes, overturned chairs, mini-fridges leaking melted goop, X-rays pinned crookedly to the walls with peeling tape, and multiple empty boardrooms where meetings seemed to have broken up in an emergency, or never ended up starting at all.

Inner, deeper. Through the screaming halls, the hair room, half an acre of blackened paisley carpet, through a minor plumbing problem which turned the tiled floor into an endless greenish lake, Antonio splashed on, humming a peppy little tune in his light, pleasant tenor. Certain things, hungry in the dark, heard him coming- cracked doors- twitched ceiling tiles- saw him and thought better of it. Other things sensed him coming a long way off and cleared the path in a hurry, shrinking from his shadow.

Antonio still remembered being new, and how amazed he’d been that there was anything else in the world besides Mother's light. He remembered how dull and ashen dark the world had seemed at first, beyond its reach. He remembered having to grow used to the world outside, to slowly learn the contrast of nights and days, slowly begin to see the subtleties of sunlight and shade and colour the way humans did, with their five narrow senses.

He could, with some effort, see the HR Department the way humans saw it, too. He knew that to them it was mostly cold and damp, ghastly humid in strange thermal hotspots where the heat and wet had rotted wood and melted plaster and taken the paint right off the sweating black walls. He knew the air smelled and tasted generally like an old carpet that had been rolled up without being dried properly and then put in a garden shed for several years. He heard the weird noises in the darkness, and with a little imagination he recognized how worrying they might sound if you didn’t know whether they were cries of fear… or hunger.

And even though Antonio might have admitted that a small struggling part of him felt less settled than it usually did, and that the gloomy halls and noisome voids felt less comforting than, say, the last time he’d made the trip… well, it had been a while, and he believed- he wanted to believe- that a visit back here would put him right. In his heart, his bones, or whatever he had instead, he knew that he belonged. Here, so close to Mother that if he were to look fully with his true senses he would have been struck blind in an instant, if he needed the reassurance he could still open his real eyes just a very, very little tiny smidge of a fraction and see by the blazing glimmer all around him that he was home, walking in glory, in the heart of her light.

Inner, deeper still. Humans did not work here. They came here, when they had to, very carefully, very quickly. If they were lucky, and stuck to the many stringent safety protocols, most of them also managed to leave.

Down a long, lonely hallway, where some of the discoloured metal panels had shorn off of the wall and a lot of the rest were buckled outwards in wild hooping arcs as if the whole corridor had been subject to explosive decompression, Antonio and his cheery humming bopped along, a little echoey, his wet black lace-ups leaving grey prints on the gritty floor. Overhead, so many of the tiles were missing that the ceiling looked like a maniac’s chess set, a crazy checkerboard barely hiding the steel skeleton above.

Antonio turned a corner and passed by yet another heavy, nameless steel sealer door, this one standing half-open on a lightless void. Not so many paces past, he slowed as an indefinable sensation of being seen squirrelled up his back with chilly fingers and crawled right to the top of his head. He turned, carefully, squinting into the dark.

As he stood still on the threshold of the heavy door, a single sharp point of red light appeared, flickering, much closer than he expected. As he backed up an instinctive step, the light stuttered, steadied, and circled into a ring- another- a third. Like an eerie triple sunrise, the trio of glowing red circles brightened and lifted together in a rough pyramid stack, until they loomed high over Antonio, bathing his upturned face with an eerie scarlet glow.

“Sup.”

“Oh… hey, Jared,” said Antonio, unenthusiastically. “How’s it going?”

“Eh, yunno.” It was a smooth lazy breeze of a voice, supremely unbothered, underscored by a faint metallic twang. The lights of Jared’s three segmented eye-rings slid away into the shadows as he spoke, vanished entirely, then whipped back into view like a pendulum, upside-down and swinging gently back and forth, right in front of Antonio's face.

“Haaaaanging in there.”

Antonio forced a laugh. “Man… good one. Well, anyways, I gotta be-”

“Antonio, right? How’s it been, jellybean?”

“Oh, great! You know, just tickin’ along, only I gotta-”

“Working hard? Or-” Clink-clink-clink-clink swishhhhhh, and the eyes reopened in quite another direction entirely, down near Antonio’s ankles in the mottled dark. “-Hardly working?”

You didn’t talk to Jared. It was a Rule. You didn’t talk to Jared, just like you didn’t keep secrets. Antonio looked desperately towards the far end of the corridor, seeking a polite escape, but the problem with the Rule about not talking to Jared was, it didn’t say anything about what to do if Jared tried to talk to you.

“Y’know, I’d love to stick around and chat, but I’ve actually got a thing-”

“Hey, shot in the dark- you don’t happen to have any jerky on you, do ya?”

“No, I-” Antonio paused, blinked. “What?”

“Yeah, not our brand, though. Between you and me...” the lights spiralled quickly up Antonio’s body, stopping by his ear, “...our stuff kinda tastes like old tennis shoes. Literally any other kind, like, Trader Joes, Red Truck... oh man, I saw Tillamook County’s doing these teriyaki-style wagyu strips now? I would literally kill to try that stuff. K-I-L-L. Though if you wanna be picky, it’s not technically a jerky, it’s more of a biltong. No? Oh, well, you don’t ask, you don’t get.”

“Sorry, man,” said Antonio, taking a couple of not-too-subtle steps backwards. “Uh, look, any other time I’d totally be down for a catch-up sesh, but I’ve really gotta jet.”

“Aw... well, okay.” Jared’s eyes drew back into the recess of the doorway, tilting in a mildly disappointed way. “Great job on the commercial, bee-tee-dubs. Little preachy, maybe... but I get it, I get it, you gotta stick to the pitch, right? Anyhoo, props, that was some solid work.”

“Hey, thanks,” said Antonio, and despite his pressing itch to be gone he was unable to keep the note of surprised gratitude out of his voice. Whether purely out of the discomfort of the situation, or the weird way he’d been feeling lately, or just because a simple, ordinary compliment was the last thing he’d expected and kind of a rare thing in itself, he was genuinely caught off guard. “Seriously, dude... thank you. That means a lot.”

“Anytime, Antoni-oni,” said Jared, now somewhere almost entirely out of sight that gave his voice a hollow, distant echo, like he was talking directly into a steel bucket. “Say hi to your little buddy for me.”

A final flicker, and the lights blipped into darkness.

“I’ll see you around…”

Antonio waited until he was pretty sure Jared was really gone, then turned and headed again down the long, pressure-scarred metal hall. It wasn’t really too long a trip from this point, and he padded along in silence.

He didn’t feel much like humming anymore.

–

After a few more corners, the hallway started to change and taper down through a narrow twist-and-turn, the walls crowding with grubby white ceramic pipes, like pale veins lining a long dry throat. As Antonio ducked under the last cracked angle of the ceiling, he found himself stepping out at last onto the debris-littered floor of a long, low, dim room, seemingly endless, full of slanting beams.

In this muffled, colourless space, heaped as it was with drifts and piles of grey dust, even the usual noises seemed far-off and stifled. Antonio picked his way carefully past bare recesses and empty hollows, under the watery grey light, over strange shapes buried beneath the thick dust, half-familiar, half-formless.

A door, one of many, sealed from the outside with a thick, crash-bar handle. Latched, in the same way you'd put a child-lock on a trashcan- not really for any reason of security, more so to stop any of the hungry and inquisitive things roaming these halls from getting in and making a mess with the contents. Some of the other doors here looked as if they could have been sealed tight-shut for a hundred years. Others hung open on tall little cells, like wax pockets in a comb; vacant nodes, nothing inside but bare concrete walls, indistinct shadows, eddies of dry grey dust.

A peeling bit of Dymotape that didn’t look too old clung to the smeary plate above this latch, carelessly applied, already coiling itself into a little spiral. Antonio reached out, smoothed it down flat with a thumb.

[G0008]

Antonio shot the latch, took a good deep breath, and pulled the heavy door wide open, already smiling his biggest, widest, friendliest smile.

“Hi, Mark.”

#muse arg #dftm #don't feed the muse #mark mayhew #antonio geist #alex bale #the cynical critic #jared the IT guy #my writing

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wafflebloggies · 1 year

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10. a heap of broken images

back - next “So, Mark, this is Jared…”

Mark, it had to be said, did not look as if a large, near-invisible shadow-creature looming up out of the darkness and regarding him with a trio of eyes like the functional parts of a red-hot gas stove was a welcome addition to the list of concepts he was already struggling to grasp. He stared up at Jared in speechless silence, and when Jared’s eyes gave a friendly tilt, dropped several feet and whipped towards him, he sucked in a breath so sharp that Antonio was concerned he might have inhaled his own tongue.

“Look who it is! Double-M-hockey-sticks! It’s cool, we go waaaay back.”

“Uh?” managed Mark.

“Oh, yeah-yeah-yeah, I’ve been watching you for what, like, a year now?”

Mark made a noise.

“Gotta say, you’re taller IRL,” said Jared, happily. “Probably a perspective thing, right? Also way better res, which, like, no joke, literally every single cam in your house is ANCIENT at this point. Stone age. I kept bugging ya boy to replace them- no hate, ‘Tone- I was like, hey, I’m just your eye in the sky here, it’s not like I can just snap my fingers and your actual hardware gets upgraded with the power of heart or whatever. But he was always like... oh, hey, you good?”

This last, because Mark had just sat down suddenly with a thump, his knees having apparently decided they were even less keen on the way this conversation was going than the rest of him.

“It’s okay, Mark,” said Antonio, coaxingly. “Jared monitors all the hosts, twenty-four-seven. It wasn’t just you.”

When Mark finally found his voice, it was quite a lot shriller than usual. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

Antonio thought about it, reaching for Mark’s backpack, which had fallen off his shoulder as they’d scrambled inside the door. “I mean, yeah, it was, but I guess I can see why it doesn’t. Jared, hey, uh… I know this is kind of a big ask, but…”

Popping the inner zip, he upended the backpack over the nearest free desk. With a slithering scuffle of plastic wrappers, a small landslide of bright packages and baggies slid and tumbled over each other into a rough pile on the dusty melamine surface.

“We need a way out.”

Jared’s eyes gleamed. A long slender thing, like a steely finger with far too many joints, snickered indistinctly past Mark’s ear and pinned one of the little packets (a crowded graphic-design abomination, featuring sugegasa-wearing cows somersaulting cheerfully through flames), whipping it up into the shadows.

“Buddy, just call me Healthy Community, because I have got you COVERED.”

–-

Where there was a will- and an entire bodega rack’s worth of premium dried beef products- it turned out there was a way.

Jared called them dead zones. The cameras covered almost everywhere within the HR Department, Jared’s endless ranks of shiny black eyes, in corners, in ceilings, down blind alleys and empty rooms and well-trodden corridors, but with care and a little assistance to even out the odds, a path could be walked between them. The places between were cramped and confusing and nearly as difficult to travel as they would have been to find without Jared’s help. They were not the safest places, even within this hungry, malignant landscape, and they certainly weren’t the easiest to explain.

Here was a well of dank air, some fifty feet across, stirred in a slow, endless spiral by the movement of some enormous fan or turbine, deep enough below that it was far out of sight of any travellers along the narrow path that spanned it, a clanking catwalk of green steel. Condensation dripped from the pale heights, made the metal slimy underfoot.

Mark managed a couple of wobbly steps out over the void, then slid to his knees against the spindly safety rail, a sad arrangement of metal rods and chickenwire which overall came off as less of a barrier than a polite suggestion. Antonio, following with a surer step, resisted the urge to hook a fistful of the back of his sweater, just in case. He didn’t think Mark was likely to actually pitch himself over the railing, but he did appreciate that the last twenty or so minutes had been quite a lot for any human to handle.

“Hang in there, Mark,” he said, brightly. His voice echoed, a thin distant relay pattering back to them through the slow whirlpool of air. “Not much further.”

Mark forced his hands wordlessly through his hair, found a squashed fragment of delicate orange wing stuck somewhere over his ear, and flicked it away from him in disgust.

“Uh, yeah, sorry about the butterflies,” said Antonio. “Honestly, they’re usually pretty chill, I’ve never seen them just go for the eyes like that.”

Words weren’t evading Mark, but the ability to put more than two of them next to each other in a coherent sentence seemed to be. “That- the- why-” A struggle. “Why a horse??”

“It’s just a horse, Mark,” said Antonio, testing the railing before leaning his elbows on it, like a casual sightseer above Niagara Falls.

Mark clearly felt this wasn’t enough information. He made another struggle with his hands, shaping a sort of invisible sculpture on the theme of horror, bewilderment, and indignation, a shape that cut off sharply in the middle, and then squeezed both palms into his eyesockets, speaking indistinctly through his fingers.

“Just a- just- where’s the rest of it??”

“Do you think that’s really an important question right now?” asked Antonio. He meant it as a reasonable, honest query, but Mark only fixed him with a baleful eye through the gap in his hands, and said nothing.

They moved on. Through the empty hallways, through Jared’s dead zones, through a scorched and blackened sector where quite a mess had been made and the cameras still hung obliterated from the walls, Mark stayed silent. To Antonio, there was something puzzling- increasingly worrying- about this measured silence, and he didn’t think it was just the influence of his own quietly screaming nerves. He was good at reading Mark, even when he was at his most impenetrable, and he recognised this feeling of grim, plodding pertinacity that was coming off him in waves. This was Mark doing something he didn’t want to do- something he knew had no good object, no good ending- something he knew had to be done, regardless. He might as well have been making a video reading hate-comments, or cutting up raw liver, or any other uncongenial, unrewarding task demanded of him by the Muse. He looked as sullen and morose as ever, trailing along after Antonio as they travelled slowly through the safer zones of the HR Department. The nearest he got to an energetic reaction to anything on their long walk was a slight flinch and glance back as they heard the dogs pass distantly down a blind turning, the heavy patter of claws, the hungry, cheated howls.

Finally, the Long Egress. Jared had explained, in the vague way in which Jared tended to explain anything, that this seemingly endless grey concrete tunnel had been put in place as a sort of evacuation line, a last-ditch way back to the outside world. Walking it, Antonio wondered if the original architect might have planned on using it themselves, since it was quite clear that nobody else ever had. Whoever had designed the vast building that housed HR, if they had been human, it was a fairly safe assumption to make that they hadn’t done it entirely of their own free will.

It’s best to avoid asking questions or looking at things you aren’t authorised to see.

The bulkhead lights set into the walls every hundred yards or so created pale dim pools of light like so many oases, leading them from one to the next, all the way down the long last straight. Down here, even the lights were caged.

It’s all in my head, and I shouldn’t worry about it.

Antonio felt that they had been walking for years by the time they reached the end. His shoes had run out of moisture and left no prints on the scratchy poured concrete. Every step he took felt leaden, a further pull away from something dragging gently at him, something hooked into his heart-roots, difficult to ignore. They had been walking in silence, the only sounds the scrape and echo of their steps, the thick electric hum of the lights, a quieter low static buzz that seemed to live in the walls, and Mark’s difficult breathing and occasional hitching cough. Antonio didn’t mind these noises, as it made it easy for him to know that Mark was still behind him.

No ceremony, no fanfare, just a flat final wall that grew slowly from a pale dot to a short grey oblong as they walked towards it, a last pool of light, the long hallway terminating in a single pale grey door. Someone with a sense of humour had screwed a sign to it, an ordinary industrial yellow-and-black safety sign that read DANGER – KEEP OUT. Someone else had scrawled underneath; IT’S SCARY OUT THERE.

Antonio put a hand on the door, which had a thick push-bar, wreathed in old cobwebs and cranky with disuse. He looked back, and saw that Mark had stopped a little way back along the hallway and was just standing there in the last-but-one pool of light, looking at him.

“Mark? This is it, buddy, come on.”

Mark coughed, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and didn’t move.

“Mark?” Antonio stepped away from the door. As he moved towards Mark, Mark stepped back, mirroring him. He put a hand to the strap of his backpack, gripping it like a rosary, and suddenly Antonio felt a cold and eerie twinge of deja vu, of a week ago, of standing in the soft-lit hallway with Be Joyful Always, Pray Continually over his head as Mark begged him in a quiet, frantic monotone, pleaded, promised anything for his freedom.

I've done everything you've asked. You can have my channel, my house... just let me go.

Just now, it looked as if nothing could have been further from Mark’s mind.

“You must think I’m pretty fucking stupid,” he said.

Antonio stopped. The bug in his middle, which had been quiet for a time, stirred restlessly as he looked across the distance between them into Mark’s sharp, careworn face.

“So what is it?” Mark put out a hand and rested it against the concrete wall, either to take some of his weight or to reassure himself it was there. The flat light cast stark double-shadows, Antonio’s own falling across the door at his back and stretching down the hallway towards Mark, Mark’s slanting away as if it was shrinking from his. “What’s the trick? Because this whole ‘super secret escape’ thing is getting really old now. Maybe I’d have fallen for it when I was five but if you think I believe you’re just going to let me walk out of here, that sludge in your head must be way past expiry.”

“Mark, you have to trust me,” said Antonio. “I’m- I’m just trying to help you.”

Mark blinked a couple of times, grinned at him, in the same way skulls grinned, nothing behind it but a vacant stretch of teeth. Whether Antonio had struck a nerve, or Mark had just reached some internal breaking point, he dropped his hand from the wall and started walking forwards.

“Trust you. Trust you? You, and that- that thing in my basement- my muse-”

The sheer amount of pure spitting venom he managed to inject into one syllable was astonishing.

“-you’re the same. You’re the same thing, you’re just a- a part of that fucking blob that can walk around and look like a person. I knew that as soon as you first showed up- you think I’m going to trust you now?” He stopped, almost face to face with Antonio, his fear and aversion and bitter anger struggling with each other in his face, his hands curled around his backpack in front of him as if it was a shield.

“Mark, I- I’ve felt- I’ve been-”

Now it was Antonio’s turn to struggle. His chest was crawling, the heat in his face and hands rising, the difficulty squirming under his skin pushing him not to shut Mark up or stop him being a problem but to explain, to try to dispel the terrible disdain in Mark’s eyes. He stumbled on, aware his voice sounded choked and strange, terribly afraid to keep going but far, far more afraid to stop.

“When you were gone, I… I started to feel... different. I’ve been feeling... really weird. Mark, I have… thoughts that don’t make sense- sometimes I don’t want things to happen even though I know I should, I don’t want to do things I know I have to do- I think there’s something wrong with me. No, I- I know there is.” He held out his hands, open, pleading. “I don’t know what happened, but I- I know somehow, it started because of you.”

He swallowed.

“I’m different, I’m different to how I was, because of you. And I want to- I want to be a good friend, Mark. I’m doing this because I… I want to help you.”

“Bullshit,” said Mark.

Oh, it felt cold, it felt freezing cold in his guts and it hurt, and maybe this was how come humans could hurt each other so easily, that Mark could take every honest, vulnerable word he’d pulled painstakingly out of the core of him, these fragile little things ripped out of their shell new and raw and utterly defenceless, and hurl them so easily right back in his face. Antonio felt them start to shrivel and die in the chasm between them, but he kept quiet and just looked at Mark, who was knotting his fists in the fabric of his backpack, his jaw set hard, mouth slightly open, eyes hot and full of contempt.

“Mark,” he tried, “please, you have to-“

“No, I don’t. I actually fucking don’t, I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to believe a single word you say. I listened to you for a year. I let you manipulate me, I danced like your fucking puppet, I did everything you wanted, for a year. I let-” He bit the word off.

“Mark, I haven’t even known you for a y-“

“Shut up,” said Mark, his voice deadly and as flat as the lights. “You can’t hurt me anymore. Not with my- my mom, not with-” He stopped himself again, his mouth working. “There’s nothing left, the only thing you have on me is this- this shit inside of me, this-” He let the pack dangle to the bruised fold of his elbow and held out his arms, wordless, the flat bulkhead light ghastly on his darkened veins, the black splatters of the dog’s blood and his own still staining the front of his ruined sweater. “This- this infection, this mold, I- I can feel it, I hear it in my head-” He shuddered, furiously, helplessly. “If- if you wanted to help me you’d get rid of it but you won’t, you won’t because the only thing you want is to keep me, keep stringing me along for whatever sick fucking plan-”

“Okay, but I’d need to touch you.”

“-shut up- whatever sick- whatever-” Mark seemed to hit a kind of a glitch, sticking like a scratched-up record and stopping in place. He blinked a little volley of dazed blinks, a rapid-fire Morse code message of utter confusion. “What?”

“Here,” said Antonio, holding out his hands. “I think I can do it, at least I can try. It’s just, you told me not to touch you.”

Mark stared at him in disbelief, his hands falling to his sides. He looked poleaxed. The backpack slipped gently down his arm, dropping to the ground at his feet, but he made no sign he even noticed.

“And you listened??”

For the first time, Antonio saw with stark clarity the shape of himself as he must have appeared to Mark through the past almost-year. A looming shadow, a threatening, suffocating, hounding, malicious, grinning thing that never rested and never relented, if the deal Mark had made with his Muse was a poisoned spring, Antonio had been the hand forcing him under the rank surface, forcing him to drink until he drowned.

Months too late, without words to even form the idea, he was desperately sorry. The thing in his chest- bug, alien, sickness or mistake- it was his, his guilt, his to fight and deny or accept, and for once, the choice was his own.

“I know I don’t have any right to ask you to trust me.” He kept holding out his hands, palms up, looking into Mark’s face where incredulity was fighting a pitched battle with something else, something Antonio wasn’t sure he’d ever seen there before.

“Please, Mark,” he said, quietly. “Just let me try.”

The lights hummed, the walls buzzed. Mark stood still in silence for so long that Antonio started to wonder if he’d frozen again, but at last he started to move. There was no great change in his expression, no lessening of the fear in his eyes or the clear mistrust in the thin downwards line of his mouth. As he moved, it seemed to be in spite of himself than out of any thinking, reasoning decision.

Slowly, without looking away from Antonio’s face, Mark lifted his hand and reached out.

#muse arg #dftm #don't feed the muse #mark mayhew #antonio geist #alex bale #jared the IT guy #my writing #the cynical critic #this part kicked my ass

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