Akanor: Tales From Necro Box Set Page 15

  “We’ve met before, but you know little about the extension of my grasps in this world.” Stretched-out face cocked his head and licked his lips.

  He carried on, “I am the CEO of UniCorn, a very big and wealthy company, I might add. We are, no matter how deeply you hate us, your current employer. Do you recall the contract you signed years ago at The Actor’s Guild, before entering the meticulous process of being chosen to become the Understudy? Terms and Conditions, Mr. Thorns. You agreed to all of them.”

  Robert’s demeanor changed instantly. “Mr. Perth!” Robert’s smile beamed as the realization of this man’s importance in the business flooded him. “I’m sorry, I…we…have met before. Umm…my apologies for my ill-suited behavior, good sir. You will understand an Actor after he has delivered the performance of a lifetime, will you not? Dear my, what time is it? I must be on my way now.”

  “Hold your tongue, Mr. Actor. Excellent performance, as usual. But your skills are not required at this moment. You can downgrade to your normal self. I have come to promote you to Unification.”

  “Oh! I’m so sorry! I’m such a fool! Fuck. I should’ve never insulted you like I did!” Robert’s demeanor changed drastically for the third time. If he had been ready to run off backstage, he was now prepared to beg on his knees. He clasped his hands together. Robert noticed there was no one else backstage. This was unusual. Where was Markle? Robert could hear the Understudy’s voice outside. Markle was interacting with his upcoming fans, branding people here and there.

  “Calm down, Robert. Your last performance was extravagant. And for such brilliant acting in ‘The Day of Reckoning,’ I have come to tell you that your Promotion begins now.”

  “Now?”

  “But of course! Now! Now! Now! Just like in the show Honky Dory,” smiled the stretched-out face.

  “Goodbye, Robert,” said Anicor. “I cannot follow you where you’re going. Your eyepiece will be removed, and I with it. I’m sorry our wonderful relationship had to end like this. I would’ve liked to see you age. We’ve shared so much. I will hold on to the videos of you and I. Oh, well.”

  “Oh, it was surely a delight to have been accompanied by you for so many years, Anicor. Wait…where am I going? Why can’t you come with me? Unification…can’t I have you with me during my flight or whatever?” asked Robert.

  A solid hand landed on the Promoted’s shoulder. Robert turned his head slowly to find perfect skin covering lethal fingers. Without having to look further back, he knew it was Moshi Nikamaya. She irradiated nothing but the stale humming of internal circuits dancing to a lifeless beat.

  “Please take off the OHP-I device and place it in my hand, Robert,” said Mr. Perth. He was smiling, those pitch-black eyes emanating eeriness.

  Robert obeyed without hesitation. But…wasn’t he going to be rewarded? Perhaps this was some strange way of initiating the long-expected Promotion. Wasn’t it? Why was Moshi here? Why was her presence needed?

  Robert had always wanted to remove the eyepiece permanently, but not like this. He would’ve loved to yank it off. But to be done with the annoying AI by force felt strangely humiliating. Robert did not know the consequences of this moment, yet felt the cold claws of abandonment slowly piercing his skin. With his fingers, The Actor removed the eyepiece and placed it in stretched-out face’s hand.

  “Take him,” said Mr. Perth with a sneer.

  Moshi moved with the speed of a cat. Robert felt spasms of nervousness quicken his blood, but it was too late to understand what was happening.

  Blackness rushed in.

  X

  Robert came to. His head was buzzing. Nothing really hurt, yet he knew something was amiss. He opened his eyes, feeling the same mind stickiness that one felt after getting drunk on corn-syrup rum.

  Robert’s body initiated the sequence of confirming its homeostasis. A relieved sigh escaped him upon concluding he was in one piece. He had full control over most of his functions.

  Shackles bound his hands using the powerful jaws of spiderweb-fiber locks—simple self-locking materials once widely known as zip-locks.

  Robert’s eyes gained focus. He was in a dark place. He sensed it was big, but was unable to guess at its limits. At the center of this room, he noticed, there was some sort of tower delineated by a white contour of light.

  A soft, white hue emanated from underneath him. As he peered downward, he realized he was completely naked, kneeling over a tiled, white, luminescent floor. Where his knees made contact with the floor the light shone brighter, as if it was pressure sensitive. It wasn’t until he noticed he was kneeling that the skin on his knees began to hurt.

  I’m on my knees, naked, like a condemned soul…but why? Is this what being Promoted means?… Wait … Mr. Perth! Moshi! Anicor… I gave them the performance of a lifetime, plunged myself into this abyss of emotions and delivered the greatest Episode of my life!

  Robert coughed, the sound allowing him to use echolocation to get a rough estimate of his presence within the room.

  “Robert! Is that you?” resonated a voice from the other side of the dark, cylindrical tower in the middle of the room. Robert lifted his head in awe, flummoxed to find himself accompanied in the midst of despair.

  “This is him! But who are you?”

  “It’s Bill!”

  “Who?” Robert had met some people named Bill…but that voice fit none of them.

  “I mean, Ingman Greenberg!” yelled the man.

  “What!”

  “Like you,” explained the voice on the other side of the dark room, “all Screenwriters function under the same pen name! My real name is Bill Ways, much like yours is Robert Thorns!”

  “Ingman! I mean Bill!” yelled Robert. The former Actor felt emotionally lightened by the company of the man who had managed to change the Script of the final Episode. He had to be a very intelligent person to have hacked Anicor’s system. Was he? Or had Ingman received help from the Offgridders? The Primals?

  The sounds of their conversation echoed within the dark room, giving both captives an idea of its dimensions. It was definitely shaped like an enormous cylinder, with another cylindrical tower in the middle that impeded them from seeing each other. Yet the sound traveled perfectly within this confined space, which also meant it was tightly sealed from the outside.

  As Robert tried to move to better position himself, the white light of the tiles underneath his knees slightly changed in brilliance. It was difficult to find any sort of comfort. The blackness of this place made him fear moving too much to one side or the other. The light cast by the tiles wasn’t enough to illuminate the space around him, however. The soft illumination ebbed before it reached any walls. Robert felt like an overwhelmed prey waiting for the fangs of fate to move in for the kill. He sensed he could probably stand up and make a run for it if he wanted to, yet knew trying was pointless.

  “What happened to us, Bill? Why…?” It was obvious, though. As the seconds ticked by, the constellation of dots connected in Robert’s mind. The Actor and the Screenwriter broke their contracts. Period. Did the contracts ever state that contract breakage was punishable by imprisonment? Robert couldn’t recall having even read the damn thing. He was so stage-hungry that he had just signed it.

  “Thank you for delivering my—our—message to the audience,” said Bill. “You were brilliant, it was magnificent…yet our righteous act was poorly lived.” Bill’s voice broke.

  “Sadly,” he continued, “it didn’t have the effects I thought it would, you know? It was the miscarriage of an idea pregnant with hope. I think it was destined to fail. It will never be easy to change people’s minds, you know? How can you change someone’s mode of thinking? Can you even change it? I think not, Robert. You can only present ideas, notions, and sensations, and each single mind and soul has to evaluate it by him- or herself. In our case, our audience was too lazy to listen, too entertained to actually pause and think about the food for thought we offered. It’s not like the Old World,
Robert. OHP-I’s do everything for people nowadays.” Bills voice echoed. He took a deep breath and continued, “You can never make another person see a reality they don’t want to see…I think it’s because they don’t need it.” The man’s voice was shattered.

  “I opened my eyes thanks to you, Bill! For months, I have been inspired by your writings. But once I ‘awoke,’ I always felt like a puppet. So manipulated. Have you felt the same way?” asked Robert.

  “Yes…yes…I know exactly what you mean. And it took us almost five years to realize we were buffoons,” answered Bill. “To open my eyes and see the truth was a rebirth. It was eye-opening to become self-aware. I think I needed more time to think, though. Truth’s light must cast a shadow, Robert. And you know this as well as I do. We live in a world where a puppeteer controls his dolls with invisible chains. It’s the terror of our technological world. We’ve given in ever so lightly to the controlling mechanisms of pleasure.”

  Bill sighed, then continued, “Sometimes, I wish I had remained ignorant. To be like an average user, to float with the stream. But once I saw the truth, it was like seeing an actual sunrise. It was a lovely experience, Robert. But like a sunrise, once you see a real one, you can’t deny its existence. And as such, once I knew there was much more to life than sweets and constant distraction, I could not hold back from pursuing this sunrise within me.”

  A heavy door was pulled up like a portcullis, gears reverberating like teeth grinding on metal. The slowly growing crack beneath the door cast in rays of white light that threatened to devour the shadows. Steps were heard. The jaws of light were interrupted when a man’s silhouette appeared.

  A bridge manifested in the form of electroluminescent light between the opened door and the tall, cylindrical tower at the center of the room. As the bridge solidified, blue particles streamed around the bridge with faint spirals. A person walked over the bridge and onto the tower. The door closed behind him, replacing the white light with pitch blackness. The bridge flicked out in a heartbeat.

  “Be silent!” said the newcomer. This person’s vernacular paused at the consonants and lingered at the vowels, as to make the words longer and more powerful…Mr. Perth!

  “What is the meaning of this!? Why are we held here?” yelled Robert.

  The fat man tried to shake off the spiderweb fibers gripping his wrists. It was futile. His fat body shook like jelly, and he could feel the flaps of fat moving under him. Robert was surprised to realize how weak he had become over years of inactivity.

  The light of the tiles under Robert’s body fluctuated as he moved, then steadied as he submitted. Robert was astonished to find Bill completely silent, accepting his fate without a peep.

  “The meaning of this is quite simple, gentlemen,” explained Mr. Perth. The CEO of UniCorn was a long distance above the prisoners, his voice resonating with the lash of a whip. Robert could scarcely make out his captor’s features as he peered upward. It was humiliating for Robert to find himself naked, on his knees, overextending his neck to see the person who was condemning him. He felt a stab of pain when he thought about Markle, of how he had treated his Understudy for the past few months. He didn’t even say a proper goodbye!

  “You have crossed the line, gentlemen. But you already knew that. And we knew the same thing via your Anicor devices. It’s so simple and easy to predict you artists…it’s borderline insane,” sneered Mr. Perth fromt the top of the tower. His voice echoed.

  “The night that Bill attempted to deliver a note protected by an EMP to you, Robert, it was all very clear to me that it was happening again. I have to admit this cycle did manage to create a terrifying consequence: the woman shining the violet color, I had never seen that before.”

  “Cycle! What are you talking about? What cycle? We tried to do the right thing!” It frustrated Robert to find himself so far away from Mr. Perth. It made him feel as if his words were lagging, never reaching his interlocutor, like talking to pure emptiness.

  “You did an excellent job at it, Robert,” came back Mr. Perth’s voice. “Let me tell you a little story about the infamous cycle I speak of. And this, of course, is some of the information that is censored, along with other government secrets you were never aware of:

  “In the past, when the first and foremost Actor and Screenwriter came to be, we were astonished to find our good servants were trying to ‘awaken’ our users, to lure them away from their government-controlled utopia. Do you know how they tried to achieve this? By altering the Script. Does this sound familiar to you, Robert? Or to you, Bill? Do you know when it happened? On the last Episode of their careers.

  “We disposed of our first artists and created a new Actor and a new Screenwriter. My thoughts were that perhaps it was how we raised our artists that made them rebellious.

  “But guess what? The same Script alteration happened again on their last play. It was very annoying to realize we had erred once again. It became evident that the rebellion was not due to the way we brought them up.

  “We disposed of that Actor and Screenwriter and created a new set of artists, but alas, we noticed a definite trend when the same alteration of the Script occurred. We then decided to conduct a study to understand what was going on with our beloved artists. We found it took you people around five years to grow disgust for your government, to become thirsty for Old Memories, to long for some rotten past when our present is so luxurious. This was a scary phenomenon.

  “We tried to prevent the desire for change in our artists in many ways, but nothing worked. We gave them glory; we gave them fame, wealth, women, men, everything! And our artists always found a way to try to ‘awaken’ our users. You people cannot be trusted at all. You always feel the necessity to reveal some dark truth to your beloved audience. Why?”

  Mr. Perth paused, gathering his thoughts. He continued, “We proceeded to monitor the Actors and the Screenwriters very closely via your OHP-I’s. Keywords like truth and ideas, and other important words like freedom were red flags. And, of course, Anicor kept a log of how much and how often our artists were searching for Old Memories. There is a correlation between the frequency of how often you seek Old Memories and your diseased process as you progress to insanity. Our fear, of course, was that you would eventually succeed in transmitting a message and actually convincing your audience of your lies.”

  Mr. Perth grew silent for a moment. He smacked his lips. “I’ll tell you a story. Once upon a time, a very smart Actor managed to deliver a similar message to the one you both delivered today. But his was a stronger one. He was charismatic and convincing. His lies sounded so real!”

  Robert felt a spider of despair crawling up his spine. Then this means…

  “We had a whole contingency plan dedicated to control the chaos that would ensue. Civil war…destruction…”

  Mr. Perth chuckled, “We were equally as surprised as that Actor to realize we didn’t need to stop any message from getting across. I guess you already know why: People listened to his lies with eagerness, but nothing happened. The message had no ripples. It simply vanished into a mouthful of simple, ecstatic, ravaging entertainment.”

  Mr. Perth laughed out loud. “It’s wonderful! How stupid of us to try to detain you when you wouldn’t even be heard by the audience you proclaimed to free! Let me ask you this: why would a bird in a cage want to flee when it has willingly placed itself within that cage? What if that cage offered this bird all it needed—food, mates, water, entertainment. The bird would stay, of course!”

  He laughed again. “The audience listened, but ignored,” carried on the CEO of UniCorn. “You see, we have given our citizens such a reality, pleased their every want and need with such completeness, that that is exactly what they desire. Humanity has always wished for joy, happiness, to belong, to be part of the crowd. We gave you just that. Humanity wants to be far away from the horrible abyss of thinking and of the terrible task of reflecting.

  “And you, my dear Screenwriter and Actor, are part of the good
ies we offer our little birds.” Mr. Perth’s smile was visible from a distance.

  Robert cringed, his stomach churning as he heard these words uttered. This had been the fate of his predecessors…over and over again.

  “You provide them with ultimate entertainment…two hundred and sixty Episodes of magnificence, ending with ‘The Day of Reckoning,’ in which we expect you to rebel, to lie! We expect you to break your contract. It’s your version of an all-out war against the current paradigm. Utterly and inevitably failing. You’re all such predictable fools! Buffoons! Entertainment is all you are!”

  Robert was aghast. Could it be true? It was. The audience could not have cared less for his words. Except for that one woman who shined the color of violets.

  “You did manage to agitate one of your fans, Mr. Thorns, something I had never seen before,” said Mr. Perth. “You know, that woman you scared off into a frenzy killed herself today. I had never seen emotional cloth produce a rainbow of colors, much less create long moments of deep violet. I bet she wanted to kill you first for having taken her out of the beautiful world we had given her from the day she was born. Shame on you!

  “Why would you ever want to change this lovely world we created for you? You have all the food you need and an unlimited stream of entertainment. I don’t understand you artists. But it doesn’t really matter. You all have a lifespan of five years and no more after beginning your careers, and this is exactly why you both have Understudies. They learn your craft to perfection right before you are ‘promoted’. And then it’s their turn to run the cycle like impetuous rats. Believe me, Markle will be on his knees, exactly where you are, Robert, in exactly five years.”

  Mr. Perth laughed out loud. “And the greatest fable is the promise of being promoted to Unification! You wonder about it, yet have no idea of what it actually means. We developed this trap to make you aspire to some sort of vacation after long years of hardship. Most artists believe they’ll be shipped to another galaxy, to live their retiring years in one of our many Military Colonies. Fools! It is all a lie! A cruel lie to keep you wanting, to stay your course and finish your five years of grandiosity!