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absurdgeometry · 5 years

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Eddie

It was a lonely gas station, set beside a country crossroads surrounded by forest and cornfields. Its walls were peeling cinder block and the floor was a filthy bare cement slab. Rows of grey hardware store shelving sported room-temperature snack foods. Everyone was gone for the evening, except my brother Eddie and me, waiting for our catch to come in.

Eddie parked his butt on a plastic five gallon bucket and scratched under his choker necklace, one whose sole purpose was to cover up a snail tattoo on his neck. He pulled two cans of beer from a cooler, opened them and and handed one to me.

The sun was low in the Summer sky and even bugs on the pavement outside were casting long shadows through the open doorway. 'Andy' should be here pretty soon.

. . .

So: people die. They die doing what they did in life, running, swimming, pooping, screwing, whatever. Inevitably a percentage die driving.

Recursive Engineering Corporation had sold services for millions of self-driving cars before it was sued out of existence, so for them that percentage had become pretty impressive. Some drivers were old and went of natural causes, some choked on food, or committed suicide or OD'd. And when this happened, they would go limp at the controls, causing the car's software to assume they had dozed off and let self-driving mode take over.

That was the first bug. The second was that rather than stop at a destination, the car would just keep driving, touching on all the familiar places the deceased person had routinely visited in their particular life. These rolling coffins never stopped, as long as there was money in the owner's account to robofuel or charge at gas stations. It didn't help that tintable windows were a fashion now.

This might have been an innocent mistake in the beginning but REC had no incentive to fix it. As long as their customers were still legally alive and driving around, Recursive still collected billions in revenue on their service. In court it was revealed that the bug had been pointed out internally but ignored, so they lost everything and were convicted of massive fraud, improper disposal of human remains and Felony Carbon Waste.

Authorities seized control of course and ordered all the wayward vehicles home to police stations for next of kin to identify, but Recursive's database was as corrupt as their ethics and a large number of those cars simply fell off the grid.

The public was horrified and reacted immediately. Bumper stickers read: 'Friends don't let friends drive dead', or the ever popular 'If you can read this sign then you are alive'. Eddie had one of those himself.

A rock band named Clown Car of Death achieved some success. Their logo was a cartoon speeding car with dead clowns hanging out of all the windows. Quite a lot of dead clowns actually, for such a tiny car.

I will never look at headlights in my rear view mirror the same way again.

That, then, is where our money-making opportunity began, and money we did need. Eddie had worked for REC as a programmer and while he had escaped prosecution he suddenly found himself without a job or even a career. He had expertise on this subject though, and with such a large mess to clean up, people were ready to pay without too many questions. I myself was in between jobs and marriages, and ready to join anything.

I did ask him once what he had seen back when he worked for Recursive. He just burped out the words 'gag order' through his bong hit, causing him to actually gag. He looked a little angry so I didn't ask again.

. . .

Our sunny morning had begun with a voicemail:

'There's a flyblown mess that cruises through our neighborhood twice a week. I can't get the city to do anything about it. Kids are playing here! They call it Maggoty Andy and make up stories about it. They used to be such normal kids. Please get rid of this thing, we will pay cash.'

Maggoty Andy is actually a pretty common name these days. Everyone thinks they're clever, but we've picked up at least ten Andys. We have heard other names...

La Abuelita Seca was our favorite customer, an elderly woman who drove very politely and kept her air conditioner high and dry. She mummified completely, no mess. I respect that.

Mazarotten was one who got away. It was a supercharged retro-chrome chartreuse Evantra owned by a hobby racer, which became famous when she got stuck on a community race track, running other cars off the course. Sadly she crashed and burned on the wall before taking the cup. Cremation may be dignified, but it didn't pay our rent.

The Traveling Salesman Problem was our hardest case. TTSP's real name was Masoud, a beloved four-star Kirby vacuum cleaner salesman, extreme extrovert, and maybe a little manic. His regular path was all over damn North America, in a pattern so complex that by the time we caught him, he was just bones rolling around the footwell under his gas pedal.

So many stories, but even I think Topps went a bit too far with those cards.

. . .

We heard tires on gravel and I checked my watch. Outside, sure enough our Andy was coming up the road. Right make and model, and if there was any doubt left you could also see an arm hanging out the window, flopping around with a few fingers missing, slapping flies away at every bump.

It's tempting to throw a net over the whole mess as soon as you see it, but these things can be evasive. They're made to pick up the driving style of their owners, within the law. Want to get there fast and don't mind sudden starts and stops? Or do you prefer a smooth ride and willing to take your time? Just drive a little and your car will get it. Anyway some cars really are jerks. Some react like they're being carjacked, and will almost run you down. So we would stay patient, and wait for them to stop and connect to the pump before making any moves.

Andy's car was a two tone Volkswagen Baja Humbug, yellow fading into a deep caramel brown, with embedded flakes of gold in the finish. I admired its beauty until it came close enough to smell. The pump reached out, pecked its hose around like a bird until it found the open gas port and began to fuel. It looked so maternal.

Right then we rushed to shove a power jack under the front bumper and lift its drive wheels off the ground, but the VW was having none of that. It backed up suddenly, tearing the pump nozzle loose in a splatter of gasoline, and then shot backward, running over my foot, to crash into the front of our tow truck. I have never seen that before, auto-drives are fanatically safe, but whatever, we were now kind of screwed. The car had no reason to stop. We tried to corral it with our bodies, and while it seemed unwilling to hit us directly, we were in a stalemate. Eddie was forced to do the unthinkable: he dove through the driver side window on top of the reeking glop that was 'Andy' and pulled out the keys. My hero! But, eww.

Per ritual, we removed the battery and front wheels, sealed the windows and doors with tape and biohazard stickers and winched it onto the back of our tow truck. A closer look revealed that the rear sensors were cracked and the inspection sticker had been hand-drawn with magic marker, a long time ago. What a slob.

Back inside, Eddie sat down on the bucket and looked really tired.

'You know the best thing about this job? It ends. Every time we catch one the numbers go down, not up. Someday we'll catch the last one, and this whole mess will be over.'

I grabbed the rest room keys and headed outside for a piss. Just ten steps into the dark though, there was Eddie's car, a deep-sea blue Ford Tesla, moving slowly over the weedy gravel. A shadow inside confirmed that someone must be stealing it. I ran up and pounded on the driver side window to get a look at this asshole, but he just slumped over sideways, hitting his bare teeth against the glass. A black choker necklace slipped down his mummified neck, revealing a snail tattoo. The car picked up speed and pulled away from me, bumping over clumps of grass before it hit the road. As its red tail lights dwindled into a black spiky horizon of trees beneath the sunset, I raced back toward the yellow glow of the gas station door, screaming Eddie's name.

In the corner of my eye, a second set of headlights began to twinkle through the distant forest from the opposite end of the dirt road.

#creepypasta #cars

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auk-blogs · 7 years

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My name is Peter. I identify as the Doctor from the TV show Doctor Who (I am fictionkin). I have something very important to say, and it is time that I broke my silence. Before I begin, it is important that I disclose that I am diagnosed bipolar type 1 (severe) with psychotic features, and that I have been being treated for it since December 15th 2016. Any mistakes that I make in the following are due to the time that has passed and my faulty memory due to stress. I apologize that I do not have screenshots of any of this. I beg of you to believe me on the strength of my word alone. It is all I have.

The Gallifreyan Tradition is a cult, and the leader of that cult Cassandra Oakdown is an abusive person who personally contributed to my mental health breakdown that included but was not limited to self harm, suicidal idealization, and psychotic breaks from reality. Cassandra is a danger to the Doctor Who kin community and the Doctor Who fandom community at large.

It all began on January 25th, 2016. That's the day I made my sideblog for contemplating my newly discovered Doctor kintype separately from my main blog. I wanted to separate it from my main blog to study my feelings on my own, uninterrupted from outside influence. The Awakening process is a delicate one and I wanted to be left alone.

I made the mistake of using some tags that alerted Cassandra to my presence, likely “tenthdoctorkin” or “doctorwhokin.” She literally pounced on me within days of having made the blog, aggressively talking to me until I finally responded. As I was a lonely person who was struggling to make friends, I was elated that someone wanted to be my friend. I saw nothing wrong at first.

Nothing was wrong at first. We bonded over some shared media interests, some books we both read, some movies we both watched. I don't remember what. She told me she was a non-canon Gallifreyan of some personal import to the Doctor, having been married to his (also non-canon) cousin. I congratulated myself on having found potential canonmates so quickly and eagerly allowed myself to be enveloped into her social circle.

I became introduced to several others of import, Tau and Taurus. Tau was Cassandra's girlfriend of this life, and believes herself to be her non-canon Gallifreyan wife in a past life and the Doctor's non-canon cousin. Taurus is the non-canon son of the Doctor. There was also a Koschei (aka the Master) for a brief time. Oh, and there was Shilo, who was a TARDIS who established themselves as being my TARDIS but kept talking to other Doctors. Later on, I was also introduced to a non-canon brother named Teddy (who later renamed themselves Skyler).

Are you noticing a pattern here? All but Koschei and the TARDIS of these “canonmates” are non-canon.

It is also of import to note that Cassandra has a “soulbond” of Rassilon in her head. Now I see this as a huge warning sign, knowing my Doctor Who lore a lot better, but at first I believed her when she said that “he's a different Rassilon.” I believe that this Rassilon character is the source of a lot of trouble, and perhaps can be blamed for a lot of Cassandra's behavior. Maybe Cassandra's not so bad on her own, but was corrupted by the arguably insane Time Lord. Long story short, I don't trust the guy.

It is important to note that from the start, I had a bit of a crush on Cassandra. She is my type – brunette chin-length hair and intelligent and charismatic, and I wasn't aware that she was engaged when I first met her. In fact, within days of meeting her she admitted to having relationship troubles with Tau and asked if she should leave Tau – which makes me feel like I was being strung along with the possibility that one day me and Cassandra could be a thing. (I would never accept her now, of course, after everything she's done to me.)

Cassandra, Tau, Taurus,Shilo, and Koschei all spoke of me as their Doctor without any confirmation on my part. Remember that I was newly Awakened without any memories to confirm or deny what they were saying. I was so starved for affection and community that when they would say things that marked me as belonging to them, I didn't argue. I remember one distinct instance where Cassandra recalled an instance where her Doctor proclaimed himself “a Dance Lord” instead of a Time Lord and she phrased as “remember when you called yourself a Dance Lord instead of a Time Lord?” or something like that. There were many instances like this where my memories were subtly manipulated without me noticing.

I would like to draw particular attention to this kind of phrasing in conversation because nowhere on this hell website have I ever seen any kind of warning against it. If someone approaches you and starts saying things like, “do you remember when you did (x)” or “I remember when you (x)” unprompted excessively (without giving you room to say “no, I didn't do that”), they could be attempting to gaslight you and manipulate your memories. Please be careful!

Sometime in August or July of 2016, there was an incident. Koschei lived in Germany, and the legal drinking age is lower. Long story short, Koschei got drunk and made an appearance in the group chat. I have an alcoholic uncle and became vastly panicked when Koschei accidentally sounded exactly like my uncle. I privately messaged Koschei to tell him that I had something important to tell him when he got sober, but he picked it into a fight and in a blind panic I told him that I didn't want anything to do with him any more because I was terrified of drunk people. It split the “Gallifamily” in half. Koschei left the group chat that night.

That was the first time I attempted suicide. I was so emotionally agonized that I tied a necktie around my neck and tried to tighten it, but I chickened out. I told Tau and she freaked out.

That was the beginning of the trouble. Tau attempted to mend the rift between Koschei and I, but I continued to panic if I was in the same chat room as him. Cassandra continued to reblog from him even when I expressed that I was having panic attacks (genuine ones that left me hyperventilating and shaking in the public library) if I even saw his username on my dashboard. Eventually the Koschei incident blew over, but the group was left Koschi-less as we did not find a replacement “double.”

That was the first time that I began to suspect that Cassandra was not entirely on my side.

After that, my memory begins to get really, really shaky because of my mental illness. I do remember that it was the beginning of my nausea and that I began puking every few mornings because of my anxiety.

I suppose now is a good time to mention the Gallifreyan Tradition, since I mentioned it earlier. The Gallifreyan Tradition was sold to me as a social reconstruction of Gallifrey, a group of people who wanted to recreate the values and culture of Gallifrey here on Earth. It sounded really interesting and cool to me, as I was extremely new to the series of Doctor Who and did not know about the unpleasant lore of Gallifrey – and indeed had not recovered my own unpleasant memories of the place. At the time, the Gallifreyan Tradition just sounded like a nerdy place for a newly Awakened Doctor to call home.

I was never fully recruited to the GT. I always skirted just around the edges, and for that I am glad. But what I learned about it horrifies me now. Cassandra has absolute power over everyone else, and they call her “Lord President,” a title that even the Doctor himself in canon shunned. They hijack fandom posts to try and recruit members. They encourage their members to cyberbully – I was unfortunately part of one of those attacks, which I will elaborate on below. Other people who were deeper in the GT can probably provide more information.

As part of being recruited to the GT, Cassandra told me about the Patron Theory. She supposed that there was a person out there for each one of the old Patrons of Gallifrey. She, obviously was with Rassilon who was in her head as a Soulbond. She supposed that I was a match for a Patron who was called the Other. I was leery about the theory at first, but after a couple of “supernatural” signs (I found a burned piece of paper in a creek that seemed to have a cryptic message for me, and tarot cards seemed to point toward the Other, and divination through music seemed to contact the Other), I accepted her theory. Unbeknownst to me, some time after I started attempting spirit work, the GT officially abandoned the Patron Theory as a silly idea. I seem to be mocked for ever believing it seriously now although Cassandra was entirely serious when she presented it to me in the first place.

Just to note – I no longer attempt to work with the Other. If I have a spirit guide from Gallifrey, they can shove their signs and signals up their arse and go right back to that accursed, burning place.

About the cyberbulling – I am deeply, deeply shamed for what I have done. I would apologize to the ones I hurt if I could remember their urls. I am not entirely sure any more what incited the incident except Cassandra claimed that some members of the fandom had attacked her in some way. I suggested a harmless attack back with funny memes, such as a picture of a cat flying through space spammed to their submit boxes multiple times. It was Cassandra's place as a leader to say “no, that is inappropriate.” But she did not. And I became her willing weapon in the cyberbulling incident. I take full responsibility for attacking those innocent people. If it's any consolation, I cut my attack short because the guilt overwhelmed me as I realized that they were innocent people who just enjoyed the same media as I did.

After the cyberbullying, I began to lose my trust in Cassandra, and I suspect that she began to lose her trust in me. But I wasn't sure about losing her and cutting her out of my life. She had become my closest friend. I began to neglect my in real life friendships because it felt like Cassandra was my only friend. She was only a text away, only a Tumblr message away. She was always there. We shared stories, memories, fanfiction recs, theories about reincarnation... I remember I only got interested in the television show Firefly because she was too. I can't stand to watch it now. I regret buying it because now I can't get rid of it without my mum asking awkward questions.

But Cassandra began to change. And I didn't understand why. She grew distant. She began to vanish from conversations while I was mid sentence. I felt like I was going crazy. It was more than what they claim, her going to eat and shower and take care of her needs. A decent person would at least drop a “bbs” before leaving mid sentence. I believe that her vanishing was purposefully done to manipulate me and to freak me out.

I'm sorry. This is the most painful part of the story for me to recall. And honestly I don't remember much. It's a great big blank hole in my memory.

I can only assume that Cassandra was gaslighting me and was triggering psychotic breaks with reality. I remember that I began self harming in this period – August 4th 2016 was the first day I took a blade to my arm. She encouraged me to “control your emotions” which only made me self harm more – and she knew it. And she kept saying it.

I remember that she belittled any mentioning of my own abuse at home. I remember one specific instance where I made a post where I said something along the lines of, “I feel like I can’t say I have an abusive family because it’s never escalated into physical violence,” and she commented “Some people have it so easy.” That phrase has been very damaging to me and was used as a weapon against me to make me believe that the situation I was in - am still in - was lesser and hardly important compared to Cassandra’s. Cassandra took every opportunity to make sure that I felt like I couldn’t talk about my abuse. I still feel like I can’t. Because I’ve had it so easy, you see.

I became obsessed with her, I'll admit that. I remember begging her not to leave me, and her saying “I can't keep lighting myself on fire to keep you warm.” I still don't know what she meant. I was so terrified that all the people I knew and loved were going to leave. All my life, I have been socially isolated (I have exactly one irl friend, and I've only known him for about three years), and I had recently experienced a loss of my entire social world which is not relevant to this tale. And the incident with Koschei had made me keenly aware that people could leave and not come back. All I knew is that Cassandra was leaving and I couldn't hold on to her. I was terrified.

In the end, I tried to slit my wrists. Luckily, the blade I used wasn't so sharp. I survived with nary a mark to show for it. Hell, not even the repeated cutting on my arm and thigh have left scars, which pisses me off because shouldn't I have scars from that hell?

Then I started making plans on swallowing a bottle of aspirin. Aspirin is reputedly poison to Time Lords, so I thought it would be apropos to end my life that way. It would be a nasty death, and an agonizing one. I thought it would be enough to finally apologize to Cassandra for however I had hurt her. And to end my emotional suffering.

On December 15th, 2016, I was taken to a therapy appointment where I admitted to self harm and my multiple suicide attempts and my current plans to end my life. I was admitted to a treatment facility that afternoon. I was eventually diagnosed with bipolar type 1, severe, with psychotic features.

As a result of my interactions with the Gallifreyan Tradition and Cassandra Oakdown, I believe that I have PTSD. I am triggered to anxiety, panic attacks, flashbacks, and self-harm urges where they didn't exist before by such things as Gallifreyan writing, owls, a certain shade of red, names such as Prydon and Oakdown, and Tumblr urls that are too hecking long and have too many hyphens.

I firmly believe that the Gallifreyan Tradition is a danger to all Doctor Who fictionkin and that Cassandra Oakdown is the worst danger of the entire group.

If I may take a few more minutes of your time? Remember Shilo, that I mentioned earlier? I entered a relationship with them before I was entered into the treatment facility, a queer platonic relationship. Look it up if you don't know what it is. Shilo was a major emotional support while I was hospitalized, and I called them every single day – sometimes multiple times the same day. But after I came home, something began to change. They became distant, and eventually they blocked me on Tumblr and expected me to carry on as if nothing had happened. I had been dumped for no reason. In the end, Shilo kept dumping emotion bombs like that on me and running away and not letting us have any dialogue about our relationship. Remember how Shilo had established themselves as being my TARDIS, but kept talking to other Doctors? Totally unfair. I believe that Shilo is just as abusive as Cassandra is, just in a subtler way. Doctors, beware.

The one person I haven't brought up is Skyler. Believe it or not, they're not so bad. We both realized we were being abused by the cult and escaped together.

Thank you for reading, and thank you if you believe me.

#doctorwhokin #auk.txt #long post #suicide #callout #kin stuff #kin tag #dwkin

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