Nina
Diseased memories poison the mind
Infect the brain
Infect it with blood
Bloody sticky slippery blood
Blood spattered on the floor
Blood sprayed on the walls
Slaughtered splattered spattered and sprayed
And coagulating in brains guts and gore
Psychopath assholes go postal and it’s another apocalyptic blood orgy by a suicidal army-of-darkness faction wading through gore in an attempt at the Guinness Book of World Records. First the unreal staccato popping of assault rifles, then shock, hysteria and screaming, the smell of gunpowder, the smell of fear, the smell of death, and, when the magazines are empty, the kamikaze vests go off. Shrapnel, ripped flesh, sticky warm entrails, brains and blood all over the floor, all over the seats, all over the walls. Nina is shoved and pushed along in the frenzied stampede. She trips over body parts and slips and falls in a stew of butchered souls, of slippery sticky warm bowels and exploded brains, her face landing on a piece of another face that still contains an open lifeless eye. She remembers this. All of it. The memories violate her. The images contaminate her mind, they pollute her brain. Like a cancer they infect her soul. They’ve stripped her of the person she was before. She wishes she could rip them out.
“Nina?”
“Oh, Audrey! It’s you. You startled me.” Nina looked surprised at her friend, then down at her hands and noticed she’d been folding her paisley teal scarf. She wasn’t sure why.
“Nina, I’ve been here for the last ten minutes,” Audrey said, concerned.
“Yes, I know. I’m sorry, but I just had another flashback.”
Round and round the brain goes
Corrupted and infected
Round and round the brain goes
Infested and polluted
Round and round it goes
Stop!
Round and round poisoned daily
Stop!
Round and round poisoned nightly
Stop!
Round and round poisoned daily nightly
Stop! Stop! Stop!
It had been two months, but still the venom in the flashbacks and nightmares haunted Nina.
“But…” Audrey stopped herself. Again. She kept avoiding it. How could she tell her? How could she tell Nina that she hadn’t been there? Well, okay, Nina had been there, but not there. The army-of-darkness assholes had busted into the Ritz concert hall on the orchestra floor and that’s where the slaughter happened. That’s where Audrey had been, dancing on the orchestral killing floor. Nina had been up on the balcony, and when the shit hit the fan she’d been carried along by a frenzied stampede to the fire-stairs, and straight down to the street. Crushed by the mob maybe, but no shredded meat-grinder gore in her path. No showers of torn flesh sprayed in sprays of blood in her face. That was Audrey’s face. But the chip on Nina’s forehead had linked to Audrey’s. A fuse must have blown somewhere and short-circuited something because suddenly there was an immediate and direct mind-to-mind Audrey-to-Nina brain current, no filter. Not supposed to happen. Brain-to-net-to-brain direct is impossible, the corporate techs insist. There are a thousand fail-safe traps in the way, they say. Maybe. But maybe adrenaline screwed with digital and tripped the fuse and switched off the traps. Maybe. Still, it happened: memories, images, horror, terror, digitized and mixed and mashed and parceled out between two fused minds.
I am me
You are me
Digital fuckup
Fecterated degenerated
And fused our shit together
“…am I too early?” Audrey asked instead. She felt she had to say something.
“No, no, not at all...I’m all packed.” Nina gestured towards an open suitcase that wasn’t packed. “Well, almost, but hey, thanks for coming to take me home. I just couldn’t handle being released to my parents. They get so freaked out about me it just makes it worse. At least you understand.”
Understand? You’re the one who’s been here, but I’m the one who was there!
Audrey scanned the dismal little room. Just the smell of the place creeped her out. It was unpleasant, institutional, skeevy. Okay, it could be worse. Nina was only one card short of a deck, not straightjacket-padded-cell totally loco. She had a private room, visitors allowed, and not too many rules as long as she stuck around and did her pills. But the real reason all this spooked Audrey was that she knew she’d been only one little step from qualifying for involuntary herself.
Where am I?
In the ward
What do you want?
Nothing
Just relax
Let us care for you
A pill for breakfast
Two for lunch
Two more after dinner
Sweet dreams after those
Voluntary, involuntary, whatever, Audrey never did seek help for post-traumatic stress disorder. Having grown up with a shrink for a father, she was allergic to analysis; it was bullshit. And she had her own drugs. So was she in denial? Had she suppressed the horror? Or channeled it into something? Like deepFreaking the net on tripTabs?
“Did they return your chip?” Only a cyberJock mindSurfer like Audrey would have thought to ask.
“Yeah, here.” Nina dug into a side pocket in the suitcase and apathetically handed it to Audrey. “Please, wipe it clean it for me. I’ll give you my password. I don’t want anything from that night to be stored anywhere in my memory.”
“Nina, you know the password isn’t enough. I can’t do anything unless you’re wearing it. The chip’s neuro-net needs to be connected to your mind’s.”
“But then I’ll be reliving all those memories again! I can’t, I just can’t.”
“Well, when you’re ready…but…” This really isn’t fair to Nina. Or is it? No, I have to tell her. I have to get it over with. Audrey took a deep breath. “We need to…talk about that…I’m sorry Nina, I’ve been avoiding it, but I suppose I have to do it, have to tell you, and now is as good a time as any. It’s hard, so I’ll just come out and say it. Those memories of yours? The thing is, they’re not really yours…”
Nina seemed to ignore what Audrey’s just said. She finished packing her suitcase.
“Actually…” Audrey hesitated a moment, “…those memories are mine.”
“Audrey, what the fuck are you talking about? What do you mean they’re yours?”
“What do you remember of that night?”
“Audrey, if you mean the Ritz, I don’t want to remember. I’m trying hard not to—remembering is what landed me here.”
“Nina, you were on the balcony, I was on the dance floor. Our chips must have fused for a moment, I don’t know why, I’m not sure I can explain it, but it was like a wormhole connected our minds.”
If you know what you see
But you don’t see what you know
Have you fallen into the rabbit hole?
If what you see is not what you know
If what you know is not what you see
Have you fallen into the rabbit hole?
You know what isn’t shown?
You see what isn’t known?
Then you have fallen into the rabbit hole
“That’s ridiculous, Audrey. It’s bullshit! Listen to yourself! I know what I remember.” Mind-connecting wormholes? It made no sense. Audrey sounded like she was high again, falling into another dreamWater induced rabbit hole. And falling into a rabbit hole was the last thing Nina wanted right now. Or needed. Instead she inspected the closet, then turned and bent down to look under the bed. Audrey wasn’t sure if this was paranoia acting up or if she was just checking for wayward socks. Or just not dealing with what she had just told her. Nina’s expression was pained and distant. Her neurological tremor was obvious. She shut her eyes, then her suitcase.
***
Audrey slipped from Real to SIM (simulated reality) and lay on her stomach on the forgotten digital dock on the forgotten digital lake. She hadn’t met Nina here in ages, and it used to be such an important routine for them. They had always liked meeting here. A first version SIM freeware website, the dock and the lake now lay in a dusty ancient corner of the net, way north of page ten-thousand in search engine results; no one else came anymore. They’d been hanging here in this secluded site, just the two of them, since they were SIM enraptured kids. An eternal glistening forever-summer sun washed everything in bright technicolour optimism. The surf rolled in, rolled out, over and over again, always the same waves, the same sequence, the sun sparkling in the same places in the same patterns. The regularity of the ancient program was strangely comforting. Audrey dipped her hand in the imaginary water, watched the fractal ripples and counted the seconds until the fish jumped. Poor Nina, I haven’t been there for her. Two months had passed, and they hadn’t seen each other, hardly communicated, since then. Maybe her crap memories are now far back in her rear-view mirror. Nina slipped in and Audrey sat up to face her. The unforgiving sunlight over-exposed their faces like some long ago faded memory. Audrey was struck by how drained Nina looked, even with this archaic simulation software’s bleached-out out details. At least she was wearing her chip again and she was enrolled in summer session at the University, making up for her lost semester.
“Hi Nina, I’m so glad you came. I’m really sorry it took this long. We should have done this sooner, a lot sooner.”
“Time passes, Audrey, and things change.”
Yeah, time passes and things change, Audrey thought wistfully. “But it doesn’t mean we have to become strangers.”
“Maybe I’ve been afraid...” Nina’s eyes seemed to look through Audrey.
“Afraid? To talk to me? Nina! You’re my best friend!”
“Or I was…I don’t know, it’s just that, well that last time, when you picked me up, what you said…”
“I’m sorry, Nina, but weird as it is, it’s true...”
“…what you said made me feel there’s someone in my head, but that it’s not me.”
“Nina, I know it must be really freaky, but there’s an explanation…”
“Yes, but you don’t know what it is, do you? And anyway it doesn’t matter because what happened, or what you said happened, made me feel completely invalidated, like I’m not me if what I know I experienced, I didn’t. I’m still not sure…”
Everywhere, anywhere, elsewhere
Is it true?
Where you there?
Was it you?
Everywhere, anywhere, elsewhere
It could be you
Might be you
It wasn’t you
“…it’s all so bizarre, so creepy, it felt scary, and I thought about it, a lot, I obsessed, and then summer school started, and the class I’m taking got me thinking some more...”—Nina’s major was in YouTube Anthropology—“…it’s about the last North American election, you know, when Walt Disney Inc. was elected president.”
“And?”
“During the campaign there was no way to tell what was real and what wasn’t, what speech, what holo, what website, what SIM, what video—it was totally a Disney election, a Mickey Mouse fantasy of illusions.”
“Yeah, no wonder Mickey Mouse won.”
“Exactly. So, like I said, it got me thinking: Real, not Real—how can you tell? Especially if stuff is broadcast directly into your mind through your chip. Did you experience what you think you experienced? Or is it what someone wants you to think you experienced? Someone’s in your head, but it’s not you, right? SIM or Real? I mean, it has to be high quality SIM, but there are plenty of corps and oligarchs out there that can afford it.”
“I see what you’re getting at, Nina, but it’s pretty paranoid,” Audrey looked at Nina skeptically. “Are you taking your meds?”
“Audrey!”
“I’m sorry Nina, I didn’t mean it like that, but I’m usually the one who’s paranoid, not you.”
“Paranoia has nothing to do with it! Think about it. How do you know any of it happened to us? I mean, the whole Ritz thing. Because, well, if what you experience isn’t necessarily what happened, has it occurred to you that maybe it didn’t happen, none of it, and something else did?”
“Nina, I was there, you were there! And it was all over the news!”
“I was there, but you say my memory was modified. So what about yours? How do you know yours wasn’t? And the news? What if it was all deepFake?”
“Nina, you worry me!”
“I do, or is it what I’m saying?”
Worry?
What me worry?
Worry is a rabbit-hole
Worm-hole
Sink-hole
A-hole
Fuck-hole
Big-hole
Little-hole
No-hole
Man-hole
Fox-hole
Chuck-hole
Loop-hole
Knot-hole
Cubby-hole
Key-hole
Peep-hole
Port-hole
Worry?
What me worry?
No, not me
Because everything disappears
Into a black-hole
Where it’s the old story
Where you don’t know
If you’re a butterfly dreaming it’s you
Or you dreaming it’s you
Or a butterfly
Or you haven’t got a clue
And instead it’s a tadpole
Or some such shit
Down a shot of dreamWater
Wire me up
Connect me direct
That way I’ll never know
“Audrey, we walked into the Ritz, we walked out…isn’t that all we really know?”
“But outside, when we got out, we were there, weren’t we? And the streets were full of CivDef and cops and emergency vehicles…you can’t deepFake that”
“Yes, something happened in the Ritz, Audrey, but what? You still can’t explain why our two chips connected. So what if maybe it wasn’t just our two chips? What if it was everybody’s…”