Vanadium Dark Page 10

  Orlando was a ruin.

  What am I looking at? Why is it showing me this?

  He decided to rewind. He wanted to see the tanks in the street, the explosions. Not this silent aftermath, this inscrutable apocalypse.

  As soon as he hit “rewind,” the frame jumped and shuddered. Things changed.

  He paused for a moment, and looked around.

  The smoke was gone.

  The damage was gone.

  The bodies were gone.

  Orlando had cars, paved roads, and pedestrians talking on their phones. Billboards glowed, not flames. He panned the Vanadocams around, amazed.

  War undone by the push of a button.

  “Sir, I'm sorry, but it's been ten minutes now.”

  “Oh, right.”

  He shoved the experience into a mental locker, not having the energy to deal with it. He doubted he'd ever have the energy to deal with it.

  He took some anhydrous caffeine and went back to work.

  His flow was disrupted, badly knocked askew. He made mistakes. He had to retrieve past cases and make corrections. Joyce's occasional disapproving stare deepened into a steady glare.

  Viktor’s mind kept picking the lock on that mental locker.

  Kept on trying to get at what was inside.

  He wanted to rationalize what he'd seen as a delusion, but he wouldn't because he couldn't. He felt entirely sane.

  If anything seemed a delusion, it was the world around him. What was on the Vanodocam goggles now seemed like the real world with everything else a fable.

  Time passed, and his focus steadily ebbed. He saw nothing else unusual on the goggles. He wasn't sure if he wanted the day to end or to keep going forever.

  Finally, he heard Joyce beginning to shut down for the day. All cases were diverted to a late-night staff, who were instructed only to notify him in case of emergency.

  He only had one active case left in his inbox: identity fraud of a government official in New Mexico.

  He laboriously started work, his eyelids feeling heavy with sleep need. As he punched in the coordinates, the color in front of his eyes changed from pacific blue to blast furnace red.

  He found he had no more capacity for surprise.

  None at all.

  Zero.

  Another bloody scene filled his vision. This time, he watched the clearing floor of what appeared to be a cattle-rendering plant.

  They were not rendering cattle. Masked and gloved workers flayed a succession of dead people. They worked systematically. On one side, bodies were stacked to waist-height. On the other, skinned corpses were piled like kindling, red traceries of veins mixing with yellow fat and fibrous cords of muscle.

  The operations of skinning went on and on.

  Incisions were made into pale pink skin. Fingers worked themselves into the subcutaneous tissue and began pulling the skin away. It came away in solid, uniform sheets, white on one side, red on the other.

  Half-coagulated blood sprayed from arteries uprooted like little trees.

  An old woman was defleshed and degloved, the worker casually knocking her glasses away before ripping her face off her skull.

  A small infant was skinned with a sharp flensing knife, pink skin peeled away. The remains looked slippery, bloody, and small—completely unlike a baby.

  The pile of the skinned grew higher, while the pile of the un-skinned shrank. Finally, when Viktor thought the grisly scene might end, another worker drove in a forklift loaded with fresh bodies and dumped it to the ground.

  Many of the bodies were slimed with shit and piss. The workers paid no attention to this, and often their fast-working fingers dripped brown as well as red. They worked like machines, like automatons. One raised his head, arms coated red to the elbow, and said something. His friends simultaneously flapped their lips in what Viktor thought was laughter. The man had told a joke.

  The removed skin was piled in a large container marked V23. Maybe it was a waste bin.

  The red-armed man said something, and again, the crew laughed. He had a beard. His appearance troubled Viktor. Had he seen him before?

  Finally, the second load of bodies was whittled down to none. All the skinning crew stood, as if waiting for something.

  Viktor panned the Vanadocams around the warehouse, across a floor that was as bloody and slippery as a whaling ship's main deck. A man approached the group from a distant door, dragging something behind him in a cloth sack.

  As he got closer, Viktor saw the recessed chin, the sunken eye cavities, the curiously redacted nose.

  One of the workers said something.

  The thing grinned, showing an incredible number of teeth.

  He dragged the bag into the center of the floor. He pulled open a drawstring and dumped the body of Viktor Kertesz on to the ground.

  He was looking at his own corpse. There could be no mistaking it.

  He canted the camera until he looked straight down at himself.

  The two Viktors looked into each other’s eyes. One of them had a dead man's stare. The other merely felt like screaming.

  The noseless man gestured and walked away. The red-armed man smiled, drew the flensing knife from his belt, and went to work on the Elephant Handler's corpse.

  Again and again the knife bit deep. Viktor's skin suddenly felt itchy, and he found himself subconsciously touching the places where the knife sliced his twin.

  Finally, he saw his own skin pulled away in a nearly unbroken sheet.

  His face came away from his skull like a Halloween mask, complete with eyeholes. Two eyeballs stared straight up in a mock-startled expression, now that there were no folds of skin to give them cover.

  The bloody-armed man said something. Everyone laughed.

  He took the knife, jammed it into Viktor's eye socket.

  Laughter.

  Hilarity.

  Balancing the gelid mass of the eyeball on the slender blade, he extracted it from the socket. A trailing filament of nerves and fibers plopped on Viktor's cheekbones.

  The man looked up, directly into Viktor's view. It was Gideon's face.

  Viktor could endure no more. He wrenched the goggles off his head like they were a parasitic insect, located a small garbage bin underneath his desk, and vomited into it.

  He heard Joyce asking him something. He ignored her. He was good at that now.

  After a few minutes, he picked up the goggles and looked through the eyepieces.

  Just an unremarkable day in New Mexico.

  * * *

  He left the zoo, walking with an ass-dragging slump, beaten down by the day.

  His phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, this is Anita Spitz, from the office of the Secretary of Defense. Is this Viktor Kertesz?”

  “Yes, it is.” Fuck off.

  “Secretary Wilson wishes to remind you that your services will not be required tomorrow. Transfer Analyst Heidelman will fill in at your post.”

  “Alright. That's fine.”

  There was an awkward pause from the other end, as if the woman had expected an argument and was now wondering how to repurpose all her sharp retorts.

  Viktor sighed and killed the call.

  “Not my day,” he muttered, checking the time before putting the phone back in his pocket. Quarter to ten. Not quite enough time to visit DC. But with a free day tomorrow, he felt that he should do something. Going to bed was out of the question. He was too agitated. Too disturbed. He was going to spend the next three hours awake no matter what.

  So he went to the Pentagon food court and got a coffee.

  “Can I have something to read?” he asked the barista.

  She handed him a completely blank sheet of paper. Not a single word. Not a single picture. “Put it in the slot in the left when you're finished. A charge of three new dollars applies if you damage it.”

  He sat down and lightly brushed the sheet of polypaper.

  Words appeared in the middle of the white page.


  NEW YORK POST

  WASHINGTON TIMES

  SUN

  OTHER

  FOREIGN-LANGUAGE PAPERS

  He selected OTHER, and the polypaper's words dissolved and reformed into a range of smaller, more fringe-oriented publications.

  He just needed something to take his mind off things, something that wasn't boring.

  A weekly called SCAR SPANGLED BANNER caught his eye. He brought up the latest issue.

  SCAR SPANGLED BANNER – ALL THE NOOSE THAT'S FIT TO PRINT

  Child Sex Slavery Rings in Washington – Updated Dossier on Kiddie Predators in the Senate

  Blue Code of Violence – Are Police Academies Breeding the Next Generation of Serial Killers?

  Project Elephant: Lie Upon Lie Upon Stinking Lie

  National War Zero: Why Audie Murphy Was a Scumbag

  The third display of journalistic integrity caught his eye, and he started reading.

  PROJECT ELEPHANT: LIE UPON LIE UPON STINKING LIE

  by Dan Kolde

  Have you ever been in conversation with someone and realized that you are talking to an idiot?

  Here's an easy way to tell: they express support for the freedom-raping Constitution-shredding Spycams'R'Us bullshit government pork project known as Project Elephant.

  Don't worry. Most idiots are safe. Just speak slowly, and use simple words. Don't make eye contact. Make sure the idiot isn't about to walk into an open manhole or play in traffic. If he gets lost, Project Elephant might be necessary to find him, causing further curtailment of our essential liberties.

  There are a disturbing number of idiots in the world.

  We're living in 2045, yet some people still believe that the Vanadocams give reliable evidence, even though it has been established beyond all doubt that Anzor Khujadze could not have committed the crime he was charged with, unless you believe he was in two places at once and that he magically teleported several bullets into his gun. But never mind. Here's Project Elephant with a video. Off to Leavenworth with you, lad.

  Or how about the well-documented fact that Sun-Hi Shin herself planned to disavow the Vanadocam network before she was shot. Quotes from her private letters are easily viewable online. “The return of slavery to America.” “… has potential to be the greatest incidence of evil ever seen in this country, including the bombing of New York.” How d'you like them little green apples?

  Her shooting came at a useful time, didn't it? As she was ready to blow the lid off the device she helped create, she took a bullet to the head. Interesting how that happens.

  Both Anzor Khujadze and one of Shin's personal assistants say Sergeant Kris Osterman was behind the shooting. Well, in 2030, Osterman worked a detail for Project Elephant and apparently joined one of their training camps in the Texas Midlands. How often do you hear the mainstream media comment upon these facts?

  Against this obvious evidence of malfeasance and deception, why are we funding these shit-heels?

  What has Project Elephant accomplished for us? A lower crime rate? You could achieve a lower crime rate still by throwing every man, woman, and child in America into a bottomless pit.

  Or how about recent rumors swirling about mismanagement and staff crises in the Project Elephant hangout at the Pentagon? Sources say that one Elephant Handler has suffered a breakdown, and another one has taken to abusing speed, amphetamines, and has the highest error rate ever recorded by the Project.

  Bang-up job, guys. We're letting you spy on our kids in high school locker rooms, paying you 330 billion a year for the pleasure, and you're hiring incompetent, drug-addicted morons to do it. And you still haven't caught the New York bomber.

  In fact, I'm ready to go one step further. Even if you had, it still wouldn't have been worth it.

  I've been fighting this shit for nearly twenty years. The government's tried to stop me using every trick in the book and a few that aren't, but I'm still here. I've taken so many smears and slanders that I think I must be all smear, all slander. I made stupid decisions when I was younger. That doesn't matter. I could be Hitler, Stalin, and Kris Osterman all rolled into one, and Project Elephant would still be a cancer that needs to be taken out with a mother-fucking shotgun.

  If you support Project Elephant, you are an idiot. Sorry. No way around it. Hopefully the person who read this article to you spoke nice and slowly. There are some comics on page 31 that you might enjoy. Nice, pretty pictures. Cheerio.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dan Kolde is a lawyer, public speaker, and activist. He spent three years in a penitentiary for an incidental role in the 2032 Chicago Bomb Plot, an experience he describes as “transformative” and “my personal Golgotha.” He is the current head of One-Eyed King, a pro-freedom group with chapters in Phoenix, San Antonio, and Indianapolis. His published ebooks include Vindicating Anzor and Elephant Poacher – One Man's Search for the Truth. For more information on the OEK or to book an appearance, contact...

  “You can't kill a cancer with a shotgun, dumbass.” Viktor muttered, putting the polypaper down and taking a sip of coffee. After binging on concentrated anhydrous caffeine, even a double-espresso did nothing for him—like little half and quarter penicillin pills for a man dying of typhoid. His body absorbed the drink with no impression.

  He realized he was almost certainly the drug-addicted Handler mentioned in that article. Always nice to have fans.

  He wondered how the leak happened. Was someone in the Pentagon feeding stuff to Scar Spangled Banner?

  You should have gotten in contact, Dan. I could have told you some shit, like how my boss is skirting right on the edge of breaking the law. And how either I'm going totally insane, or the machine is going totally insane. Less than an hour ago, I watched myself get skinned by the man who is apparently my co-worker. Next to this, the Anzor Khujadze video is exemplary legal evidence.

  He read some other articles then put the polypaper away.

  Their oddness fortified him to confront the oddness in his own life.

  Was it true that The Vanadocam Network was fallible? That it reported things in error?

  Logically, he didn't think so.

  But are you sure?

  No. Of course not. But the fact remained that the Vanadocams had never been demonstrated to make a mistake. Project Elephant and independent researches performed hundreds of small tests of its reliability. It was absolutely dead-on in every detail.

  Yes, there was Anzor Khujadze. Viktor knew of a few other cases where Vanadocam evidence appeared to contradict other evidence. But the Vanadocams were reliable, whereas traditional evidence was shifty and unreliable. Project Elephant was steel. DNA, fingerprints, and forensics were quicksand.

  You're begging the question, he thought. Trying to pull yourself into the air with your own shoelaces. You can't prove the Vanadocams work by starting with an assumption that the Vanadocams work.

  And neither could he accept his own madness. Calling himself mad was just a cop out, a get out of jail free card to rationalize the day's horrors.

  Nothing he did seemed like the actions of a madman. The only time he ever seemed mad was when the Vanadocams were involved. They were the problem, not him.

  Vanadocam. He had a bad feeling every time he heard the word. He was one of Pavlov's dogs now. Those four syllables made him cringe like a thrashed whelp, whether he thought them or spoke them aloud.

  Once, voyeurism made him feel powerful.

  Now he felt violated.

  The whole thing is poisonous. Absolutely toxic. He headed back toward his quarters. And I'm part of it.

  He made sure to stock up on Sycorax at the counter before he left. He'd been without it for a few days. And the last few days had been nightmares.

  In his suite, he ordered Dan Kolde's books and downloaded them to his phone. He put the phone into a portable projector and fired the books’ pages in bright light against his dark walls.

  He stayed up late, reading. Kolde was insane but fascinating—his
words were like clock-springs of thought, loaded with power and rusty enough to take the skin off your hand in the process.

  Viktor knew that if he'd read these books two months ago, he would not have been offered this job.

  Vanadocam-assisted background checks were carried out on all prospective Handlers. They certainly paid attention to reading material. Browsing even vaguely subversive books would have landed him in Secretary Wilson's “don't bother” file.

  He wondered if he'd been a sheep all his life: brilliant intelligence analyst, class valedictorian, summa cum laude... and a stupid, fucking puppet.

  Maybe this was the goal of Project Elephant. Maybe it had nothing to do with actually catching criminals. Maybe it was just a way of easing the public into a comprehensive system of control and monitoring. Baby steps. The Vanadocams were just the hors d’oeuvres. Tomorrow might hold the main course.

  Viktor took a Sycorax and fell asleep. He had black dreams, but no hallucinations.

  * * *

  Gideon let himself into the Zoo.

  The scabrous bitch— what was her name? Joss? Joy? —said good morning. He did not say anything back.

  He spoke very little but thought a lot. Sometimes, he thought that he had a higher thought to speech ratio than anyone on earth who possessed a tongue and vocal cords.

  His thoughts were hard to express in words. Speech had a beginning and an end. His thoughts pin wheeled around endlessly, like a perpetual motion machine. No section made sense without listening to the whole.

  And he found speech tiring. Primitive. An incongruous stone flint-axe in a world that should have moved on.

  “Here's your first case. It's a category seven.” Joyce. That was her name, not that he ever planned on speaking it.

  He set to work.

  As he'd found the other day, operating the Vanadocam Mainframe was like mainlining a liquid dream.

  As he spun the camera, inverted the y-axis, and changed the resolution depth, he felt like God, reshaping the world. A film director who could orchestrate reality.

  He'd been waiting for something like this all his life, even before Vanadocams were invented, even before Project Elephant was conceived, even before New York was made dark by a mushroom cloud.