ethanride

Paranoid Android

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 02:15:32 GMT

She was all quiet, her head down, her view hidden by the strands of her hair.

According to the police guarding her, the eyewitness had not moved or spoken since she was escorted here to the station.

Slowly approaching her, pulling a chair and sitting across from her, I started to unwrap my greasy Chinese food take out.

“Sorry about this, but I haven’t eaten anything the whole time.” I apologized as if she cared, but, of course, we all knew she didn’t, or even noticed that I was there at all.

Opening the box of food as I flipped open the manila folder of her information, I read through her details as I cracked apart a pair of chopsticks.

She didn’t move. At all. Her long black hair still, her arms and body as stiff as a tree, taking its roots on the ground it stayed in.

“Would you like some?” I offered, as I pushed the food closer to her. “You look like you might be starving.”

Pushing the chopsticks alongside the box as an offering, I placed them in front of her as I flipped through pages and pages of her profile.

Born Eileen Ranch, aged twenty-five, she remained in the city she was born and was a drop out of the Technical College of Computer and Sciences. She had criminal files of when she was arrested due to drug possession and prostitution charges, not to mention loitering and theft.

The food remained, the steam rising from it revealing that it was getting colder and colder.

Seeing that it was pointless, I reached out my arms and started to pull the food back.

That was when she moved.

Her hands fast to grasp at my arms, her head raised as she moved up, her lips cracked and split, her eyes lonely, trying to speak.

Sort of shocked, I let the food go, and retrieved my arms. Almost immediately, her hands moved and she slowly reached for the chopsticks.

It was like watching a hologram, the way she moved, slow and fluid, as if she danced ballet a long time ago.

She quickly ate the meal I offered her, chomping and swallowing as if she had been hungry for millenniums. Watching her eat actually made my own hunger leave, as amazement covered the instinct for whatever made me get the food in the first place.

As soon as she finished, she made a huge gulping sound, one loud enough that I could hear it across the table. It sounded as if she’d just chewed the entire meal and had just now swallowed it, a thought that sounded insane even to myself.

“You feeling better now?” Was all that I could say at the moment, as I took the moment to compose myself, wondering what I would say to her.

She just nodded, as she placed the chopsticks on the box, her hands swiping the leftover sauce from her lips, as if she were a child herself.

“So, tell me,” I started, as I asked the guards behind me for two cups of coffee. “Do you remember what happened?”

She nodded. Once, twice, her hair still not moving despite her own movement.

“Can you describe to me what the killer looks like?”

She shook her head. “No,” she spoke in a timid voice, a word barely escaped from her chapped lips, as her jaws chomped down and shut itself again.

“You didn’t see the killer then?”

She shook her head again.

The coffee arrived, and I pushed a cup to her, who refused and pushed it to the side instead.

“Is there a reason why you can’t describe him even though you saw him?” I asked as I took a sip of coffee, looking at her as her face expression changed, the quietness that masked her before becoming contorted with stress and worry.

It wasn’t before long till she spoke, even though her words made no sense. “It was the devil.” She said between stuttering, the words struggling as it pushed itself out of her mouth. “He was there to take away his soul.”

Once again, it just made no sense.

“Excuse me?” I asked as I sat up. “Could you repeat that again?”

She just shook her head after I asked, her lips twitching, her teeth showing as her body convulsed, jumping and hopping.

It wasn’t long before she just cracked out laughing, a tone that matched the madness of what she had said before. “He exists!” She screamed amongst her laughter, her head snapped back and her chair on the edge of toppling down.

The guards rushed in and tried to get near her, but I raised my hands up to stop them, as I stared at her and tried to get through her;

“Eileen, repeat to me again.” I yelled louder, but still stern, not changing the serious expression I had on my face. “What did the killer looked like?”

“He said I had no body,” she snapped at me as the chair slammed down on the ground, her face lowered and near as close to me as her neck could extend out. “He said I had no soul,” I could feel specks of her spit here and there on the surface of my face. “He said that I wasn’t worth killing, because I would be dead soon, that I wasn’t worth his time at all.”

The guard to my right gave me a look of confusion, but I just nodded as I held my hand in front of him still to yield him. “What did the killer look like, Eileen. Tell me what the killer looked like.”

“He’s here to kill us all.” She screamed as she convulsed backwards, her hands flashing towards her face, the chair now tipped more and more. “You! You! And you, you you!!!”

And as the edge of the chair’s legs gave out, she fell along it, stiff like a statue, as the loud bang on the ground announced the heavy fall she had taken.

We rushed to her, but it was already too late.

She had gauged her own eyes out, squeezed them with her hands so much that they had just popped, the white gauzed liquid inside spread along the blood, everywhere.

She was still screaming as the guards tried to pull her eyes out, as we called the paramedics, as we called for help.

Rob told me later that she never did recover from it, that she would not eat or drink or speak, all the way till her body exhausted and just gave up.

The devil had already left his mark on the world.

Paranoid Android

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 03:34:10 GMT

In every college campus or so, there’s always a Chinese food restaurant that’s open late at night to cater to the drunk and hungry crowd who just got kicked out from their bar’s last call.

Well, that, or they just got kicked out of the bed of their one night stands, but we won’t get to that.

It’s at these places, that me and Rob used to frequent when we were both working late at night on some weird case that made no sense, and since we were both stuck on one that made no sense at all, and it was way, way late into the night, we decided to revisit that Chinese restaurant again, hunger striking when we expected least.

The restaurant’s sign’s light barely worked, the old lights struggling as it flickered on and off in irregular rhythm, tempting and confusing moths here and there as they smacked themselves on and off the old green plastic material the sign case was made of.

The sign may say “Number One Chinese Food Restaurant”, but what they offer is pretty much the opposite of what is advertised. The food, while edible, was far from authentic, stir-fried up by some illegal Mexican cook spitting on your food at the back.

At least, that’s how I always imagined it, as I flinched with every first bite, only easing down after the thoughts had flown away and settled down into my stomach.

Makes sense that we keep coming back for more? Not really, but it’s not exactly like we had the luxury of choices there.

Ordering the usual home-style tofu with fried rice (Which were always yellow, making even less sense than the fact that the fried rice came out of a rice cooker) while Rob ordered his honey chicken with broccoli, we sat down on the cheap, hard wooden benches that made the booths in the place, the mirrors covering the walls making the place infinitely larger than what it really was. The real size of the place was probably about a large hallway, one that was originally used as the lobby hallway for the buildings surrounding it.

Once again, just speculation, you usually don’t judge places well when the only times you visit them are when you’re either drunk or really, really late at night.

Pouring the free hot tea from the ten gallon metal drum on the side, Rob looked as if he was thinking hard as he raised his disposable plastic cup and sipped on the watery tea, the steam rising from it accentuating how hot it still was.

My legs still smarting from the walk, I rubbed them as I lay the metal stick to the side, sighing in complaint as the pain rose more from the massage.

“They didn’t even let you rest before they dumped you back out, huh?” Rob said sympathetically as he watched me struggle with my legs.

“Well, you know I’d probably just get bored and commit a serial suicide if I didn’t do anything, right?” I chuckled at it, although I’m sure it wasn’t as funny as I made it out to be.

“You’re crazy, man.” He replied, as he poured me a cup of tea from the drum. “If I was you, I would have stayed back in bed and enjoyed the days until I could stand up by myself again.”

“Like that’d ever happen to you.” I smiled as I gave up and just let my legs limp themselves on the air. “You would probably just make them both biomechanical and be back on your feet in a day or so.”

He chuckled at that. “It’s funny how you know about it, but still refuse to do so.”

“It’s just who I am, man.”

“Right.” He nodded as the order came out, and the owner lady yelled out our orders in a butchered heavy accented English.

As Rob rushed out to get the order, I thought about the case a bit more, and wondered if I was missing something. Was it really connected to Echo in any way or form? It didn’t feel like it. The post-disappearance death cases were nothing at all similar to what Echo was doing back when she was around.

And just like that, Rob came back with our order ready to go, in Styrofoam boxes and a plastic bag to carry it all.

“You’re not queasy about eating amongst dead bodies still, are you?” He asked as he helped me up from the bench, almost dashing out as soon as I got up to my feet.

“I don’t know,” I replied as I tried catching up to him in my gimpy, cramped pace. “This is actually the first meal I’m going to have after I got out of the hospital.”

“Well, nothing better than get you back through baby steps.”

“How’s rushing me face on to eat in a crime scene considered baby steps?”

“I don’t know, I’m not your psychologist.” He shrugged as he opened the door for me, shoving me and the food on the passenger seat with great hurry.

“What’s up?” I asked, as I repositioned the packaged hot meal on my laps, the warmth permeating through the layers surrounding it.

“Another murder by our serial buddy just happened,” Rob replied as he jammed his thumb on the fingerprint reader, starting the car in as brute as a way as the future will allow him. “And he happen to have left an eyewitness behind.”

“Really?” I liked breaks like that, moved cases that were stuck in the rut. “Was she hiding somewhere or something?”

“No, that’s the strange thing.” Rob said as he rushed out onto the traffic, switching the built-in siren lights on. “He just sort of killed the victim and left the eyewitness there, even though she was just right next to the victim.”

“Hmm.” I said, questioning about the oddity of a serial murderer just leaving somebody who might lead him to his own capture alive. “Want to drop me at the police station where the eyewitness is being held?”

“What, and let you miss eating amongst a corpse and blood-stained walls?”

“Well, you did say baby steps.” I smiled at this, for some unknown reason. “I’m just going to slowly go up the ranks, from first eating with a person who was with the corpse, and then graduate to eating in full glory with the blood and guts and all.”

“Hmm, sounds like a pretty weak program.” He said as he looked besides him and made a full U-turn in full fifty mph without slowing down. “But since you are a puss now, I guess there’s no helping it that you have to take it slow and easy.”

“Geez, thanks for the encouragement.” I said sourly as we approached the police station, already lit with the little excitement that the night had brought on.

Paranoid Android

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 18:00:07 GMT

“How did you end up here?” Was the first thing Rob told me as I entered the scene of crime, spotting me with my little metal walking stick, whose top felt like it was actually puncturing painfully through my palm, yet I couldn’t take my hand off of it unless I wanted to fall flat onto the floor after a couple of seconds of walking. “Aren’t you supposed to be in the hospital still?”

He got up from what he was doing and brushed the dirt off of his knees. Laying on the wall as I rubbed some pain off of my hand, I noticed that there weren’t really that many people in the small studio apartment. On the side, was the token photo guy with the camera lights flashing here and there, trying to record and draw a portrait of the scene as much as he could. On the opposite side, was the regular fingerprint brush guy, his glasses and mustache reflecting the green light that emitted from the laser machine used to find and record any prints left behind. On the floor, crouched down next to the evidence, were two regular cops, probably pulled from the traffic division, from the look of their brightly neon orange vests, setting up signs and letters next to the evidence in an orderly manner, before the camera flashes and captures the scene once again.

Asides from them, there was just Rob, making them five.

Five is not a number that is used for a murder scene, or even a suspected serial scene.

Five is the number you get to clear out a rowdy party at some fraternity down at some small college.

Looking around the scene, trying to figure out why the FIBA man dropped me off here, I answered “The hospital let me out, so that means I’m alright to leave it.”

“Really now?” Rob cocked his eyebrows as if he had just caught his own son lying to him. “And do you have a doctor’s note for that?”

“Do I really look that famished?”

“Well, you are pale and thin and gimping around with a walking cane.” He smiled at his own comment. “If I was a doctor, I’d probably keep you in the hospital on a wheelchair for a couple more days and charge the government a few thousand bucks more for it.”

“Well now, if there’s no nurses naked sponge bathing me with it, then there is no point staying there at all.” I smiled with my own reply.

Rob laughed at that, chuckled then, as he looked around, realizing the curious looks from the people behind him.

“That’s right, you better look professional in front of your underlings.” I chuckled at his reaction.

“Whatever.” Rob replied as he picked up the walking cane, which was just lying by my knees, and looked at it as he turned it around in his hands. “They’re all just dumped with me for one case, so there’s not really going to be a long-going relationship here.” He looked back at them as I looked around some more, checking the place out as he continued. “Fresh out of the academy, they’re just here for some experience before moving on to something else.” He chuckled as he said this. “If lucky, they might eventually end up here, but I think most of them would probably just quit after a few months or so, after they see how ungrateful our pay and return is from all the hard work and time we put in.”

“So why the five of you here?” I said, as I checked out the apartment. It was a small studio apartment, the bed one of those inflatable ones that fills itself up with just one push of button. On the side, there were tables and chairs that were folded into their respective boxes, and a regular sized closet on the side, with mirrored sliding doors. There were no restrooms or kitchen in the studio, so there must have been a public one somewhere in the building. “In fact, why are you here? Aren’t you supposed to be working on the serial suicide case?”

“This IS a serial suicide case.” Rob replied.

“How? Poisoning?”

Rob shook his head at this. “Have you been catching up with the news lately?”

I smiled at this. “You know how I am with painkillers and news, I tend to keep them as separate as they come.”

“Well then, just to catch you up to the present, there have been a lot of deaths around the city.”

“Not really surprising, at all.” I replied at this.

“People have been found dead inside their apartments, not murdered, not suicides, but just plain dead. Their corpses would be found in the same position they were in when they died.” He chuckled as he said this, as if he had just remembered something hilarious. “We actually found some dead people who were actually still standing, their eyes open and their face expressionless, looking exactly like a marionette on a mall on display.”

“How do you know they weren’t murdered or suicide?”

“The autopsy showed no foul play in any of those corpses at all.” He replied, as he returned me the metal walking cane. “Nice cane, by the way, did this come with the hospital discharge?”

“Let’s just say that it was a small bonus for signing up with FIBA again.”

He looked surprised. “Frequent workers program?” He smiled at his own remark. “Can you trade those points in for a flight out of here?”

“Why? You planning to retire?”

“No, but I figured you would be the one who needs the retiring.”

I shrugged at it. “No point yet, I’m still not shriveled and old.”

“And you’re saying I am?”

“Just implying.” I smiled at it.

“Damn you and your youthful arrogance.” He smiled at it as he lead me towards the corpse.

“So the corpses showed no foul play at all, you say?” I followed him slowly, still struggling as I tried getting accustomed to my own handicap.

“No, not at all, they all died naturally.” He said. “They were all from different ages, gender and race too. Nothing common tying them up at all. According to autopsy, they were all healthy and normal citizens, some of them maybe with a common cold and some with an ulcer, but nothing that would kill you completely.”

“So they all just decided to die like that?”

“Well,” Rob crouched down near the corpse as he looked around the area above him. “Basically, they were all going about with their lives and then, suddenly, their bodies decided to die, without them probably even realizing it, at all.”

“Hmm, interesting.”

“Yeah, definitely.” He replied. “The only connection we sort of have is to another case, which is actually of a real serial killer going around.”

“Hmm, really?”

“Yeah, one that the press has dubbed the ‘flower killer’.” He chuckled at that as he shook his head once more. “Can you believe this shit? Who in their right mind would dub a serial killer ‘flower killer’? If I was the serial killer, I would be so enraged by my name, that I would go around killing some more.”

“And that’s what’s going on now?”

“You bet.”

The studio didn’t even have a window, with just a small vent acting as the flow of air through the apartment.

“So I’m guessing the killer uses flower in some sort with his kills?”

“Yep,” Rob replied. “He usually leaves behind an orchid with his kills.”

“And how many kills has it been so far?”

“About five.”

“I see.” I said, looking around. “And he didn’t start killing till after Echo disappeared too?”

Rob stopped whatever he was doing, and looked around at me. “How did you know? I thought you didn’t watch no news when you were in painkillers.”

“I do get briefed on cases before I start any of them.”

“Right, right.” Rob nodded as he went back to his work again. “But yeah, his kills started a day or so after Echo’s building was attacked and she disappeared.”

“And what’s the connection between his kills and the sudden death cases?”

“Well, so far?” Rob replied, as he looked up at me. “The only link we got on it so far, is that for every time the guy kills somebody, a couple of sudden death cases would be found around the city.”

“I see, so are you guys expecting to find a murdered body somewhere in the city today because of this corpse here?” I said as I pointed at the dead male on the floor.

“Pretty much.” He smiled as he went back to his inspections again.

“And the door was locked, I presume, and there is no point of entry found in this studio at all?”

“You got it.”

Sighing, a smile sort of crept back onto my face, as I remembered a story I read before. “This is kind of nostalgic in a way.”

“What, getting back on the groove of detective work?” Rob replied as he got up once again, looking around some more from that angle.

“Yeah, pretty much.” I said, as I gimped my way to the corpse. “The hospital was stuffing me to death.” I chuckled at it. “It was probably what kept me from getting better.”

“Well, they did need to fish out more money from you before letting you leave.”

“Right, right.” I said as I struggled to crouch down, to check on the corpse as he stared up at the ceiling, his mouth open, as if he was about to say something, as if a whisper would escape from his lips now.

After a few minutes of looking at it, and then looking around from his point of view, I said to Rob “You know what this reminds me of?”

“What?”

“Remember that story by Poe? That story that was considered the first mystery-murder story in English literature?”

Rob cocked his head to the side, as he tried to remember it. “No, not really.” He replied in defeat after a minute or so.

“Well, it was something similar to this, a room locked by the victim, no point of entry, and a chimney that was way too small for anybody but a little kid to get in, but it would have been too steep for the kid to survive if he were to get in.”

“I see.” Rob replied, as he helped me up to a standing position. “How did that end? Who was the killer?”

“A chimpanzee.” I smiled at Rob and nodded him thanks as I got up on my walking stick again. “The victim was killed by a chimpanzee who had escaped from a circus nearby, and had climbed down the chimney looking for refuge, only to find the unlucky guy, who it killed out of fear.”

Rob laughed at that. “And how’s that a classic? That’s a horrible ending. Did people ask for their refund?”

“No idea.” I smiled at that, as we both started exiting the studio.

“So you think a chimpanzee killed all those sudden deaths.” Rob asked with a chuckle.

“Let’s hope not.” I replied with a smile. “I’m awfully allergic of wild killer chimpanzees.”

Paranoid Android

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 05:25:57 GMT

He was there, smiling with his yellow teeth, his grin wide enough to display all of the teeth leftover in his mouth, his blue biomechanical eye looking, staring as I came struggling out of my hospital room.

“I’ve been waiting.” Was the first thing that came out of his mouth.

“For what?” I asked.

“You decision.”

“Huh?”

Maybe I should have remembered something, but at the moment, his words seemed pretty pointless to me.

He grinned again, his lips thinning as the smile widened.

“Your early retirement application.” He said simply, as he looked at me, the confused one with the squinted eyes, hoping to make more sense of it all.

We stayed like that for a bit, both of us staring at each other in our own quirky, weird ways.

“You said,” he continued, his face expression non-changing, the smile wider and wider. “And let me quote on this, ‘expect my early retirement application once I’m done with this deal’.”

I’m sure it wasn’t that long ago, but it felt like a long time ago to me at the moment.

“Oh, that.” I said, not sounding surprised, even though I was that he even remembered.

“Yes, that.” He nodded, and nodded again.

I shrugged at it. It didn’t matter if I was without a job or not, because my pension from my time at the military and government jobs should cover my living enough for me to live till I was old and crummy, the mind barely functioning enough to be considered human.

“I guess I could if you wanted me to.” I replied, unsure what the creepy old man wanted me to say.

“Oh, but you shouldn’t.” He said in the same low-toned voice. “Because you haven’t accomplished your assignment yet.” He paused, as if his lungs could barely get enough air for the words he spoke. “We still haven’t gotten her memory bank yet, and we still do verily need the secrets that are hidden in her knowledge.”

“And you need me for this?” I asked him in disbelief, since this seemed like a bad idea considering how horribly I handled the situation myself.

The old man shrugged, his bald head reflecting the bland white light from the hospital hallway. “We could do it either with or without you, although I doubt your exclusion will help the deal any at all.”

“So, you do need me?”

“We’re not opposed if you decide to not quit quite yet.”

Looking at him smiling at me, I just shrugged at it. With her done, and me in a still-not-fully-normal-yet state, no decision seemed to matter at the time.

“Good, because the next case has already started without you.” He said, as he motioned me to follow him.

“Well, cases do and don’t, I’m sure you guys are a rather busy place.” I said, as I struggled to follow the old man. My wounds hadn’t completely healed yet, and I couldn’t walk yet on my own, relying on an ancient wooden walking stick to aid me in my attempts at being a gimp.

Looking back at me, who was already out of breath after attempting to catch up with him for only three steps, the old man said. “You know, if you only replaced them with biomechanical legs…”

And I tuned him out before he even said anything else.

He lead me to his black limousine, driven by a man who looked like he was dressed in a bellman uniform from some five star hotel around the city. His face was stern, the chin chiseled to perfection, and he looked more like a statue carved out of marble than a living being, an impression that made him more, well, impressive than he probably really was.

“Take us to the suicide site.” The old man said as the chauffeur opened the door for us, the back door waxed enough that it was able to reflect brightly back the dim sunlight through the clouds. The uniformed man nodded in a single, firm nod, his silence louder than any word he could have spoken to respond.

The interior of the car looked bigger than what the outside showed it could fit, feeling more like a family room or a condo than a limousine.

Shocked by it, I could barely figure out where, or how, I should sit in the setting the seats were placed inside the car.

The old man went directly to the seat on the back, as if that had always been the seat that he had sat on, and maybe it had, for he fit comfortably onto it, the color and shape of his face changing as he laid back, relaxed, the sun shining through the slit lines through the back tinted window.

“Please, sit down.” He said as he closed his eyes to feel the warmth of the sun, sunbathing like a lizard might to warm up its blood. “The car is about to start, and I wouldn’t want you stumbling and hurting yourself more than what you are now.”

Nodding, embarrassed for some reason, I picked the seat nearest to me and sat down, the legs already sore from the small walk.

Picking out a folder from a drawer that was hidden at the side of the car, he handed it to me and said in a voice that didn’t sound like his own, as if he was possessed by a devil of some sort. “Read it.” He spoke, and handed it to me.

The folder was new, like something that he, or one of his hired goons, had picked up the morning of. There were a lot of pictures inside with police files and autopsy reports, all of them scattered, as if whoever purchased the folder had forgotten to pick up some clips to keep them all ordered together.

The old man looked at me, or stared, for better phrasing, as I flipped through the papers and photos, looking at each of them and trying to piece the visuals with the words that were written on a paper somewhere in the mess.

The ride was smooth, for I felt nothing as I glimpsed through it all.

Well, it was either smooth, or I was too concentrated to notice any bumps or turns that the chauffeur did.

Either way, the old man asked as soon as he saw me turn the folder’s end to close it, as if he had been waiting for it, anticipating, even. “What do you think about the case?”

“What about it?” I looked at him. “They all seemed unrelated in a way, except for the fact that they all killed themselves in a suicide.”

He smiled at this. “Yes, I know.” He nodded, and tapped at the folder, reaching slowly across the space between us. “But I also know that you were working on a case similar to this one when you transferred to FIBA, am I correct?”

“Well, yeah.”

“And I believe that, according to the files turned in by your old partner, Rob, the cases were related to Echo in a way, am I correct?”

Staring at him, a bit angry at the way FIBA snooped around other departments secrets, I remembered the reason why I transferred to be a cop in the first place.

“Are you saying that these cases might be related to those ones?”

He shrugged, grinning once again with his yellow teeth. “I don’t see why not.”

Looking out the window, thinking, I asked “have you guys tried checking their computers to see if they’ve been to any social networks in the last few days before their death?”

“We have.” He nodded. “But we didn’t find anything at all.” He paused as he took the folder away from me, flipping through the photos and words himself. “None of the victims frequented social networks at all, some of them actually computer illiterate enough that they still used the old Windows Operating System instead of the Halograph Operation System.”

“Windows can barely run the net now, so they probably barely got on, huh?”

“Pretty much,” the old man smiled at this. “From the data we pulled out of their computers, some of them didn’t even use their computers for anything else besides typing word documents and spreadsheet data for their work.”

“So, not really related to Echo’s case at all then?” I asked, coming to the most common sense solution I had at the moment.

“Maybe, maybe not.” The old man shrugged. “But the alleged first cases did start up at around the same time Echo disappeared, when her protection building was attacked and bombed. So, with her still missing and back into the society again, anything is possible at this moment.”

Rubbing my chin, wondering about the outside weather, I asked “This sounds more like a case for the normal police than a higher rank security organization like FIBA.”

The old man smiled at my remark. “Yes, that is true.” He replied, looking at me. “But remember, we are also still trying to retrieve the memory bank that is implanted inside the brain of Echo. So anything that might have an inkling leading to her, will involve us in the end.”

“So what do you want me to do then? Just go in there and act like a cop?”

He smiled at this, again, his yellow teeth showing with a wide presence. “With the condition you’re in, it wouldn’t hurt to be stuck as a cop.”

Paranoid Android

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 02:16:00 GMT

The last time I heard from her, was when I was about to get out of the hospital.

While I was off the drugs and painkillers, wires and tabs were still attached to me to monitor my state, the crooning beep of the monitors keeping me company through the silence of the night.

And it was in one of those nights, as I rested and dreamed of a time in where I didn’t used to dream, that I heard her voice.

Whispering.

“Hey.”

A simple start.

I didn’t wake up at first, pretty much believing in my half-asleep state that this voice was nothing more than another dream about to start, the prelude of bizarre images about to come to accompany it.

But no dreams did start, as the whisper crooned me to wake, and gently pushed my subconscious out of my mindset.

And with the jazzy rhythm of the monitor beeps, the soft lullaby that lures me to sleep, the voice came again.

My name echoing in her voice.

“Hei.”

Slowly rising, my eyelids still tired, my iris refocused and allowed the dim light in the room to reflect the sight back to me.

And in the room, the emptiness remained.

The dark cover that keeps us all alone.

Sighing, slightly confused, slightly disappointed, my mind set itself to sleep again.

But that was when the voice arrived again.

Louder.

“Hei.”

Slowly waking up, this time trying to clear my mind some more, I looked around.

The room was still empty.

And before I knew it, something lit up in the room.

A glow that felt barely warm, icy blue that was barely there.

And with a bit of fear and caution, I turned towards the source of light, nightmares and imageries of possible horrible outcomes glanced through my mind.

Yet when I saw it, it all disappeared.

She was glowing in the middle of the holograph image, her smile warm, unlike the glow that her imagery made.

“Sorry for it all.” She said simply, as if it was the bookend to everything that has already happed to us all.

It took me a while to answer, to even make the answer form itself in my head.

The lips trembled, and it did so for a bit, yet when it finished, all that would come out of it was “For?”

She chuckled at it, as if I had said something funny, an inside joke that I just didn’t get.

“For everything.” She said simply. “For trying to protect me, for being shot and flipped in the car, for almost killing yourself just for my safety.

“For allowing me a chance to talk to you again.”

Looking at her, I didn’t know what else to say, except to wonder if this was all still a dream, if it’ll all end without an answer as dreams usually end.

Yet she smiled again and remained there.

“You’re welcome.” Was all that I could say.

Her lips curved more from my words.

A tender moment fictionalized by the glow surrounding us both.

“I have to go again.” She said after we both had our chances to dip into our individual random thoughts. “I think you already know why, so there’s really no point for me to waste words on it at all.”

“But why?” I asked before she even finished her words. “You should come back to FIBA, we could protect you better from the killer.”

She laughed at that. She knew as much as I did that what I just said was a lie. She had a much better chance not being associated by any government agencies at all, because that was the best way to get yourself targeted, the best way to get yourself found.

But I didn’t care, I just wanted her back, and I was pretty sure she knew that as much as I did.

“I’m sorry, I can’t.” She replied simply. “And I’m sure you know the reasons as much as I do, so I’ll just save those words for now as well.”

“So what are you going to do?”

She looked away, as if looking at some other foreign object just off the screen. “Don’t know,” she smiled at this, as if it was a perfectly normal situation to be stuck in. “But to tell you good-bye.”

“Is this all that this whole stunt was for?”

“Well, that, and I needed to keep my hacking skills polished if I wish to survive out there.”

“Right.” Now was my chance to smile as if this was all just a normal thing to happen.

“What else can I say, really?”

“You could say that this was all a trap,” I smiled at it. “That I should really hate you for this, I should really despise you for all that you did.”

She smiled at this, even though I was looking away in a dazed state, even though I wanted this departure to be less bittersweet than what it was already turning into.

“Your heart is already crushed.” She replied in a whisper.

“Why did you come back? If you were to leave again?”

Looking off again, looking off away, she gave out a little sigh. “Would you believe me if I said that it was to see you again?”

She knew that I wouldn’t.

“Let’s just say that you were the only one I still knew in this world that I had know before,” she continued. “The only real link between the past and the present, the only thing that still exists between these two eras of my life.

“The lifesaver floating in the middle of a wafting sea.

“And if it makes you feel any better, you are the only one I trust, the only one I still want to save in this screwed up world of ours.”

“But I’m already too late to save.” I responded as soon as she ended, not even looking directly at her.

“You are never too late to save.” She said back, as her image started to flick, and the rooms were bombarded with intermittence of complete dark. “And you still have a choice, for how you want to live.

“Remember what I said.”

“What did you say?” I asked.

Yet no answer ever came.

The communication interrupted, the holograph disappeared.

The black blanket covering everything up again.

In the midst of it all, I was able to go back to sleep.

And in the dream of that night, I was encased in a capsule, my body stiff, tired and sore, unable to move.

And beyond that glass window that covered the front of my jail, I saw the wasted barren land on the horizon, as a blazing sun appeared beyond that little slit that was at the end of my world, and showed me the little details that I could barely make out with the blurry vision of my half-open eyes.

Capsules sticking out here and there, humans asleep in each of them, everyone wafting in their own sleep.

And searching for her, I couldn’t find her even though I tried, even though I wanted to.

And I slept, once again, in the dream, just to wake up here.

On my bed, alone again.

The sun still not up at the horizon of this world.

I’m trying to get some rest from all the unborn chicken voices in my head.

Paranoid Android

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 15:09:58 GMT

When they said she was gone, I couldn’t believe it.

The doctor said to not get out of the bed.

Coughing myself as my body protested my movements, I got myself up and struggled my way to the door, leaning on the wall and dragging myself across the room, dragging myself past the worried nurses and yelling doctors, the beeping of the life alarm triggered as I ripped the monitor dots off from my chest and arms.

My insides screamed, my eyesight blurred, and my body barely held itself up.

Yet, I still wanted to go.

I wanted to confirm everything by myself.

Because hearing it from others just sounded so fake.

Struggling out of the door, myself in so much pain that even breathing hurt, I felt my legs give up and my body fall, thud, hard, crashing on the floor.

The tiles felt warm as I lay on it. Helpless.

I felt so alone.

They told me that the building she was in was bombed, and that everyone in there protecting her had been shot. They weren’t sure if she died in the attack, and they wouldn’t be sure either until they’ve cleared out all the debris and checked out all the charred bodies that were in the area.

Rob was pretty sure she wasn’t, he said that it would be sort of retarded to just destroy all that data they had within her.

I wasn’t awake enough to hear the rest.

After the attempted escape from the hospital, the doctors kept me sedated day and night, the blue-uniformed nurse coming in once in a while to push the little syringe needle into the dripper, watching the clear liquid mix in and flow down towards my blood vessels, my life stream.

Something felt missing already.

I can’t remember how long it’s been since I was sedated, the only checkpoints in time being the visits I barely remember from Rob, as I lay there, feeling lifeless, feeling worthless.

“How long has it been since last visit?” I’d slur my words out, drunk, eyes barely opening their lids.

“Two weeks?” Rob would think about it for a while before he replied, rubbing his growing beard as he did so.

And all I could do was nod.

Watching him stare at me, I would ask “Did you find her?”

And he would just shake his head, slowly.

And then I’d sleep.

Muddled in dreams that made no sense.

This had become the sad reality I was stuck in.

That is, until one night.

When he came.

When I saw him there.

Standing by the window sill, the moonlight hiding his silhouette, the soft breeze greeting his entrance, he stared at me with his eyes unseen.

And all I could think of was that this was another dream of mine.

Yet it wasn’t.

He walked slowly, stiff, firm and sure that there was nothing of threat around here.

And he was right, of course. The guards had all gone away a few days after Echo’s building had been attacked and bombed, the nurses were maybe doing their night patrols somewhere in another ward, and who the hell knows what the doctors were doing this late at night.

That pretty much left me alone with my surprise visitor.

Walking slowly around the bed, staring at me intently, he slowly approached me.

And me, barely trying to keep myself awake, because it was just ‘oh, so hard’ with all the drugs and sedatives they’ve been pumping into me.

And maybe he knew this, I don’t know, but a smile did start to rise from his lips as soon as he saw how out of it I was.

Barely able to talk, my lips numb and unwilling to move, I struggled out a “Wha…” before the voice box just collapsed completely.

Smiling at that lame attempt at talking, the visitor came closer still, leaning towards my face as if to examine it, the way doctors do with their minty-smoky breaths.

“I’m sorry you have to be in such a state.” The man said, his voice low, deep, and mixed with some kind of echo I couldn’t quite catch.

He paused as if awaiting a reply, but he should have known better than that, because I just couldn’t do no reply.

After a few long seconds or so, he continued. “I’m sure you know who I am, don’t you?”

Seriously, I didn’t, but I could have given it a guess.

Smiling at my reaction, or lack thereof, he asked “Where is your little girlfriend at?”

He said “It’ll save us both a lot of time if you would just tell me about it.”

Trying to speak, but unable to, all I could do was just moan a confused reply, a surprised ‘uh?’ at him.

Staring intently at my expressions, as if reading me, he just shrugged “Alright, later then.” He said simply as he started to turn around, and move away.

I wanted to do something to stop him, I wanted to ensure that Echo did get away, that he didn’t kill him and that she was still out there somewhere.

But I couldn’t. All I could do was struggle to try to raise my hand up to stop him, and fight to keep my eyes still open for a few seconds more.

The last thing I remembered from the conversation was him turning around, when he was near the window and ready to climb out of it. He sort of just looked at me with an amused smile and, with his low deep echoing voice, said “Nice shot, by the way, for someone without any biomechanical enhancements for shooting.” He pointed at his temple, right between his eyes, and said “You hit me right there, from that far away.” He chuckled, shook his head, and said “If it wasn’t for the fact that my skull was also biomechanical, I would have died right away.

“If it wasn’t for the fact that I’m fully biomechanical, I would have lost the fight there.”

And like that he was gone.

I wished that I was gone.

Paranoid Android

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 04:19:30 GMT

Waking up in the hospital, my hands resting near the coldness of the plastic bars, I didn’t find her there.

The assassin didn’t show up at the farm house, but his body wasn’t found by where we crashed our cars either. They came to pick me up, and they took Echo to a protective custody place somewhere, anywhere, but where I lay.

The doctor was surprised when I asked to keep everything as organic as possible, even if it might not heal properly.

Or at all.

Waking up lonely, I sighed and closed my eyes again.

They did try to salvage as much as they could from my wounds, but it was still impossible to stop most of the bleeding unless they replaced some parts with biomechanical ones.

I felt less human for some reason.

“You alright there, buddy?” I heard a familiar voice accompanying the sound of the door opening.

“I think so, I think so.” I repeated to myself.

Opening up my eyes, the light and the color of it all made me squint a little.

Me, the night creature who still shivered at the light.

Rob smiled at my reaction, and sat down on the guest chair near the bed. “It seems like you took quite a beating there, man, but I heard you handled it like a pro.” He sounded impressed, even though I’m sure he wasn’t.

Nothing ever impressed a veteran from several wars.

“Yeah, but I felt like I just wasted time and got nothing accomplished at all.” I replied as I struggled to get myself up to a sitting position.

Rob shrugged at this. “You did probably more than you should have at your state at the time. You could probably have salvaged some organic parts if you arrived at the hospital as soon as you got shot.”

I smiled at that. “And what would have been the fun in that now, right?”

I said so even though I already knew that the parts that were unsalvageable, were already unsalvageable no matter what. The wounds didn’t worsen, we kept it as stable as we could.

Rob knew this too, but that didn’t stop him from rubbing the fact that I’ve become even more biomechanical in my face.

“So, where’s our little serial suicide suspect now?” He asked as he took out a cigarette from his pocket.

“They took her into protective custody, since I couldn’t really protect her at the state they found me in.”

“Smart move on FIBA’s part.” Rob said in an over-exaggerated sarcastic tone.

“Did you find anything else on her while I was out?”

Rob shook at the question. “The only thing I could find was that our little suspect has more classified information locked up by the government, than anyone else I’ve found on the government server so far.” He said as he balanced the cigarette in his lips, not lighting up, but just holding it as if he could still suck the smoke and nicotine out of it. “How did you know her anyway?”

“We worked together before.” I replied, before looking at Rob with a puzzled look. “Didn’t I tell you that already?”

“Yeah, but I guess I didn’t care enough to remember that.” He smiled at that as if he was just playing with me.

“Were you expecting me to say that I found her as a hooker in some seedy alleyway or something?”

“Only on lonely nights.” Rob chuckled at that, before he started to get up. “The doctor says that you should be up and running again in a few weeks or so.” He scuffed as he finished saying that. “You would have been up and running in a day or so if you would just stop being so stubborn about having biomechanical parts placed in you.”

“It just makes me feel less human having them in me, you know?”

“Right.” Rob scuffed at that too. “I think I’ve heard that answer before too, but just didn’t care enough to remember it.”

“Seems to be a new trend you’re starting there.” I smiled at that.

“Right.” He smiled back, and started to turn around towards the door, before stopping again and turning around to me. “I’ve been meaning to ask you this, but didn’t get to since you went into surgery and all.”

“About?” His sincerity peaked my attention.

He turned around, and slowly sat down on the chair again, his cigarette bouncing up and down nervously between his lips. “Has Echo been talking to you?”

“Why?”

“Come on, just be straight with me for once here.” He seemed annoyed. “Did she speak to you after you guys left my place, or not?”

“She did.” I replied, simply, waiting for his reaction. “Why do you ask?”

“Did she say anything weird to you while she was talking to you?”

And here I thought he would be mad that she didn’t say anything while we were interrogating her.

“A bit, why?”

Looking at me, Rob had the most serious look in anybody’s face that I’ve ever seen in my life. He slowly took the cigarette off his lips, still bouncing it up and down nervously in his fingers, his eyes staring and burning harshly at me. He was silent for a while, looking at me, before he said, in a low voice, in a serious tone, asking “What did she say?”

“Does it really matter?” I replied, getting nervous from just looking at him. “What’s it to you?”

“Just tell me.” He said simply. “And I need to you to think as hard as you can, and try to tell me in detail all the things that she’s been telling you.”

“Look, man, why does it matter?”

“Because I think she may want to add you on as her latest serial suicide victim.”

I didn’t believe my ears when I heard that. My face must have looked as shocked as if I had just seen a ghost. “Come again?”

“Think about it, Hei.” Rob asked. “How long has it been since she last contacted you? How long has it been since you talked to her?”

I was seeing where Rob was getting at, but it still sounded too strange to be true. “Come on now, Rob,” I replied with a nervous laugh. “You know me, man, you know that I would never, in a million years, think of something as absurd as committing suicide.”

“I know, I know.” He said, but his face expressions and tone didn’t change still. “But all the profiles and interviews regarding the suicide victims confirmed that they didn’t have any suicide thoughts about it either.

“That is, until they met her.”

“But that’s the difference between them and me though.” I replied. “I’ve already met Echo before. This is not the first time I’ve talked to her.”

“Right, but who knows if they’ve spoken to her before or not.” He continued. “Remember that her data doesn’t show up on any virtual recording anywhere on the net, and the reason we found it on the servers was because she left it there, and just in letters that would have only made sense to someone who knew her.”

I didn’t know what to respond, but I could see more and more where he was getting to.

“The data that we pulled out with those letters left behind by her didn’t really show up except recently.” He said again, leaning closer as he did so. “For someone who is so skilled at hacking the social networks without being shown or recorded by any of it, it sounds like an absurd mistake to just leave their names behind to be tracked down and found guilty for being the connection to a series of suicides around the city.”

That’s what I thought too, but Echo didn’t really answer my question then when I presented it to her.

“But if you’re right, wouldn’t it have been easier for her to hack into the network and just find my phone number and address to find me and talk to me?” I replied simply.

“I know, I know.” Rob placed the cigarette back into his lips again, bouncing it and bouncing it, his eyebrows frowning currents on his face as he thought about it. “That’s the part that I’m sort of missing in the formula here.” He paused, as he looked down, and then up to me again. “But that’s the piece of the puzzle that you’re withholding there now.

“Right, Hei?”

Looking at him, I knew what he meant, yet played foolish as if to avoid the question completely. “I don’t know what you’re talking about?” I replied. “It sounds like you got all the pieces that you need right there.”

“But I don’t now, do I?” He smiled. He read me already, the sneaky sly fox, and was pretty much already placing all his cards on the table. “Tell me, Hei, when was the last time you guys spoke. Why did you stop communicating all of a sudden? What kind of relationship did you have? What was the cause of the break-up?

“Did you sleep with her?”

All the questions I wanted to avoid.

“Aren’t those kind of personal now?” I asked.

He smiled at it again. “You know as much as I do that personal questions and investigative questions are all the same to a cop’s ears.”

“Would it be enough to say that we parted on bad terms and were never going to talk to each other ever again?”

He smiled at my response. “Then you do agree that my theory works now, right?”

It was hard not to. “She got me to get her because it was the only way I would talk to her.”

“Therefore the reason why just getting your address and number wouldn’t be enough, since you wouldn’t have talked to her if she had just gotten to you straight.” Rob smiled happily now, his eyes winking with the same old mood again, his serious stage gone completely from his person.

I sighed at it, and didn’t know what to say.

“Is she the kind of person who would kill now?” He asked simply, just to recheck, just to make sure he was right.

Just to make sure that I knew he was right.

I just nodded. I think we’d already proven enough without bringing her past kills into this.

Her past kills with me, specially.

“Alright then.” Rob smiled at this, as he took out his notebook and flipped around, scrawling notes on it here and there as he hummed a happy tune of some old song that I’ve never heard before. “I think we do have enough to peg the serial suicides on her.”

“Isn’t it enough that she’s already being convicted by FIBA for assassination and conspiracy to steal government data?”

Rob shrugged at it. “I’d feel much better knowing that we closed the case and brought the right people to justice to pay for what they did.”

I was going to say ‘But she already is’, but kept my mouth shut to not drag this longer than it already has.

“So case closed?” I asked him, as I leaned back on my bed again.

“Yep, yep.” Rob nodded at this as he put his notebook away, before turning around to look at me again. “By the way, you thinking of coming back to the force once you’re done with your little FIBA business?”

I smiled at this. “Only if I don’t end up killing myself as a victim of a serial suicide.”

He chuckled a bit at my response. “Well, if you do kill yourself, don’t forget to give me all your stuff on your will, okay?”

Paranoid Android

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:11:36 GMT

“Since when did you become Hei?” She asked as I breathed heavily on the wooden floor, the farm house empty yet still presided, the memories and objects and photos all still placed on the same spot their owners left them when they left, everything in the same way it was when somebody else was still here.

The house dark, the moonlight barely there, we hid on the corner of the smallest room, the one that had a yellow baby’s crib as the centerpiece, the walls plastered with sky blue and clouds presided with yellow and purple bears, fuzzy and happy in their own little captured state.

She asked me. “Why the name ‘Hei’?”

Coughing up still, unable to control myself, I lay limp on the wall and rested my head up, hopefully allowing the air to enter my lungs in an easier state.

I had already called FIBA the first moment I had with the landline phone, the first moment I had when I saw the ancient plastic turn-dial phone, one of those that got popular during my childhood when everyone wanted to go back to the ‘golden age’, the ‘better days’ of yesteryear.

Nostalgia has their way of controlling our feelings and ways of life.

Everyone wants to go back to when they felt young and safe.

“Just stay there and we’ll send someone right away.” Was the answer we got from the operator, as something booped and beeped in the background, the sounds of her typing and choosing on the holograph keyboard.

“Tell them to just stay put on the parameters and arrest anybody who approaches the farm house.” I said as Echo looked around the house for something that could patch me up, any herbs and medicine and bandage. “I think the suspect may be fully biomechanical, so there is a possibility that he is still alive and chasing after us. I want them to assert plan 3499 and use about a mile for the farm house parameters.”

Plan 3499 was basically surrounding the parameter and hiding so that nobody can see you, and then stealth capture any suspect that approaches the center base, which, in this case, is the farm house.

“Are you going to be alright?” The operator asked. “From the wounds that you described to me, it sounds like it may be fatal if we don’t treat it soon.”

Looking down at the blood and calculating the pain that my nerves shot up and down my body, I said “I should be fine for a couple of hours if I can find something to stop the blood and patch myself up a bit, but just in case, stand-by for a possible change in plans.”

“Affirmative.” The operator replied, before I hung up the phone and started the operation.

I could still barely feel my right arm.

Limping up the stairs, Echo returned with a first aid kit and some leaves she picked up from the garden on the back.

“Here, chew this.” She said as she handed me the leaves and pulled me up the stairs.

It tasted bitter and poisonous, but I chewed it anyway.

“Just get the juices and don’t swallow the leaves.” She said firmly as she checked what she had in the first aid kit, pulling things here and there before just dumping the rest of the box down the stairs.

“Are they going to do anything?” I asked as we moved through the darkness.

“They should slow down your blood flow enough so that your heart can sustain enough blood to keep pumping for a while.”

She looked around and took me towards the smaller room on the right, the one with the plastic carousel of purple elephants and orange monkeys hanging on top of a wooden crib.

I tried feeling the wound to see how far the damage had gone.

“Here.” She said as she lay me down on a corner, one that was lit enough thanks to the silver moonlight pouring from the window.

It was the longest second I ever had as I tried to lay myself down.

Crouching down to check on me, the bandages and medicine and such all bundled up in her hands, she asked me then “Since when did you become Hei?”

“Why the name ‘Hei’?”

I would have chuckled at her question if I wasn’t in such pain, if I wasn’t struggling to just breathe.

“Why the weird question at such an awkward time?” I asked as I looked out the window, trying to absorb the moonlight that slipped through the dirty panes of glass.

“Trying to keep you talking so that you could keep your mind off of this.”

Trying to look down, I asked “Is it bad?”

“It is not good, that’s for sure.” She replied as she poked around, her fingers searching and feelings through the blood and skin covering me. “The best news I have is that none of the bullets stayed inside you. It feels like a clean shot, with no shrapnel or anything stuck inside of you.”

“And the bad news?”

“It may be a while before I update the bad news.” She said as she took out a sewing needle pack from her pockets, and looked up at me as if to show me what she meant to do with them. “You know what this means, right?” She said as she held the pack of needles high enough for both of us to see.

As if I couldn’t see them the moment she pulled them out.

“Surgery possibility?” I winced at the only logical response I could have from the needles.

She just nodded at it, before saying “Keep talking.”

“We’ve gone through this before.”

Sighing, I wondered if her skills had rusted, if she still remembered all the training we had since the war.

It’s been a long, long time ago.

Or, at least, it felt like it.

Looking down again, pulling a few needles out already from the pack, she asked. “So why the name ‘Hei’?”

She said “Why not choose something else that would not stand out in this time and place?”

We were both born with just numbers and scan codes for a name when we were kids, because rejects that were not supposed to exist did not get names, because our parents did not care enough to give us names before they gave us away to their own government, and because the government did not care enough to give us all an individual name that actually meant something. So for the longest time, we only knew each other as numbers, scan code bars that separated us from the next, that made us all unique in a way that only products could get.

My name was 06251980, and hers was 09111987.

We only referred to each other as ‘him’ or ‘her’.

“When did you decide that your name would be ‘Hei’?” She asked again as she pulled out a lighter and looked around for something in the dark, dark room.

Taking in another struggled breath, I asked “Remember that time when we were sent out to destroy that Southern village by the providence of Hunan in China?”

Looking aside as if thinking, she shook her head after a while. “We’ve been to China so many times, that they are all starting to blend in together.”

“Well, I think it was when we were like fourteen or so.” I replied. “When we were setting up explosive charges on the bridges and some of the buildings that night, I spotted a little boy coming out of one of the houses and stumbling through the night with his right hand laying on the wall for support.

“The kid was still sleepy, but I was already ready in case he saw me and screamed out in alarm.

“Yawning, the boy just sort of stumbled to the edge of the building, before pulling down his pajama pants and letting out a stream of steaming piss.”

“That sounds normal.” She replied as she kept her eyes down close to the wound, her breath still warm enough to be felt through the wound.

“Right, so I sort of relaxed down a bit as I stared at him finish it off and pull his pants up.

“But when he turned around, he sort of just stumbled a bit and turned to look at the spot I was in, and after a while, as if squinting his eyes, he sort of slowly stopped and looked at me, at the spot in the shadow I was in.”

“You should have killed him.” She said in a matter-of-fact tone.

“I know,” I replied. “And I was ready to, but then, a voice came out of the house, I think calling the boy’s name, and before long, you could see an older woman with graying hair, sticking her head out of the crack of the house’s door and sort of just loud whisper the boy’s name.

“The kid kept staring at me, even after the woman spotted him and waved at him to come towards her, to head back inside where it’s warm, in that loud, husky whisper of hers.

“The boy sort of looked back at her, and then looked up at me, and then, his finger slowly lifting, pointed me out in the shadow.”

“And you still didn’t kill him?” Echo asked as she kept on with what she was doing.

“Well, I didn’t think he could see me anyway, so I was just waiting for the woman’s response.” I replied. “I actually had my gun already sighted at the woman before the boy pointed me out for her, so I was actually prepared for it just in case she saw me in the dark, just in case her face expressions changed after she turned around and looked towards my spot.”

“And?” She replied simply.

“And she didn’t.” I replied back in as simple an answer as hers. “She sort of just turned around and looked at where the boy pointed, squinting her eyes as she struggled to make a form out of anything, and turned back to the boy again to scold him for not listening to her.

“The kid kept pointing at me, now more awake than he was before, and saying ‘Hei, Hei’.

“The woman sort of lost patience and came out of the building herself, and dragged the kid back inside the house without another word.

“The kid kept looking at me, and his eyes never left my spot until the door was shut away for him, until the door blocked his sight from me.”

“You know ‘hei’ just means ‘black’ in Mandarin, right?”

Looking at the moonlight, I really didn’t care anymore. “Yeah, I do.” I replied.

“So the kid, in his kid talk, probably just meant for the mom to keep looking at the dark spot, or actually, even maybe tell her that you were hiding in the black spot.”

I smiled at this, almost chuckled if I could. “And it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

She nodded at this. “And if I’m right, the kid is probably dead now anyway, right?” She looked up at me after she said this. “I don’t remember leaving any villagers alive when we were in China during our tour.”

And such was the truth that still stuck to us.

Paranoid Android

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:11:08 GMT

She used to always sleep with the TV on.

I used to think that she did so because she was so accustomed to the noise of the war, to sleep with the explosions and the gunshots on the field, that she couldn’t sleep no more without any sort of noise to keep her company.

But when I asked her about it, she told me that that wasn’t it.

That wasn’t nearly it.

She said that she was afraid to sleep without any noise, because she was Echo, and like a real echo itself, she couldn’t sleep without any other sources of sound, that the silence would engulf her and erase her away from this Earth, from our minds.

She existed only because she was an echo of everyone else.

And looking at her scream, it was kind of hard to believe that.

“No!” She yelled at the top of her lungs, as tears slid down upside down from her tears, our hairs pulled down straight by the gravity that held us down. “I don’t want to die!”

My eyes barely open, the blood from some cut wound having already streamed down and dried up over my eyelids, she struggled as she screamed and pulled at her seat belt, trying to force the buckle open but unable to budge it at all.

My head still swimming, my vision blurred and unfocused, I slowly moved my head around to see if anyone was coming at all.

The wounds torn by the bullets still screamed for attention with spurt shock pains here and there, reminding me that just because we were upside down on a crashed car, it didn’t mean that they were any less important to me.

“God, no!” She kept on screaming, yelling, making the noises that made sure that she was still present in the car. “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to disappear!”

Coughing and coughing, I wondered if my lungs were filled with any internal organ liquids yet, if my biomechanical heart will still keep pumping even when it starts running out of blood to push and pull.

“Calm down, Echo, we’ve been here before,” I struggled as I got the words out of my mouth, my hands slowly searching around my hips for the seat belt buckle. “This is not the first time we’ve been shot at and thrown upside down on a car.”

Even that didn’t calm her down, and her struggles of panic were starting to stress me out.

Try as I could, I couldn’t smell anything through my nose, my senses still drugged and pained by all that has happened in the last few minutes or so.

But in the distance, you could see someone running down the road towards us, his hand stiffed up as he held something in them, his run uniform with the perfect sprint form to get to us as soon as he can.

I wished that it was actually someone rushing over to help us out, but I’m sure we all know that wasn’t true.

You could see the fear in Echo’s eyes.

I’ve never seen fear in Echo’s eyes before.

“He’s here.” She said as soon as she spotted him as I did, the lowest toned voice she’s uttered since we crashed on the side of the road. “Oh, God, we gotta hurry up, we gotta get out of here.”

Just ‘cause she said so didn’t mean that we could.

Closing my eyes and hope that my brain will wake up from the hormones injected by my own body, I reached my hand under the seat, and felt for the duct tape that was glued down there.

The black duct tape that hid my gun under my seat, just for when I needed it the most.

Her, maybe knowing it, maybe not, still continued to struggle with her belt buckle.

Looking at the man approaching as I felt for the gun, I calculated the distance and knew I had to at least stall for some time if we were to get out of the car before he got here.

And that was when my fingers felt the rough, plastic feel of the duct tape.

With no time wasted, I ripped at it and pulled the gun out.

My fingers hurt from even such an easy task.

Without a hesitation, maybe because we did it so much when we were young that it felt like second nature, I pointed the gun at the man and quick pointed, quick adjusted, to his silhouette before I squeezed the trigger, pulled it to feel the recoil.

Bang.

The loud shot resonated through the car, as the man running towards us jerked his head backwards, and in the same instance as he did so, his feet came down and seemed to trip on the ground, falling face first with his body limp and his arms flailing behind.

The gun made a small dust cloud as it fell, followed by the encore of the man’s dust cloud on the ground.

She saw this, yet continued to struggle with her seat belt.

“He’s not organic, you know.” She yelled as she pulled and ripped. “He’s probably a fully biomechanical assassin.”

“I know.” I said, even though I wasn’t fully sure anyway, as I pointed the gun at her belt buckle.

The spark from the shot allowed us both to see each other, to observe how bad off we were both at.

She fell to the roof of the car as I unbuckled my own seat belt, falling shoulder first and crashing down, unable to stop myself as my right arm was basically useless.

The man was still on the ground, his shadow melted with the darkness of the dust.

Pulling the roads from my memory, as we both struggled out of the back window of the car, I handed the gun to her so that I could at least use my left hand to support myself.

“There should be a farm right down the road.” I said as I pulled myself up, grunting and struggling as my insides screamed with pain. “We can get help there, or at least stall some time for the killer if it’s empty.”

“Are you alright?” She asked as I tried to wipe the blood from my eyes. “Are you going to make it?”

“I’ve been worse.”

Literally.

Looking behind still, the guy was still lying face down on the ground.

“You think he can hear us from this distance?” I asked as she reached over and let me use her as a resting shoulder.

She gave the gun back to me, placing it right on my palms. “You shoot.” She said. “You were always the better shot.”

“Yeah, but I used to do it with my right hand.”

“But you’ll also get the first shot because you’ll probably spot him before I do.”

Looking back again at the still body on the ground, I just nodded as we started moving along again.

Everything screamed.

My body was trying as hard as it could to stay organic.

paranoid android

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 17:59:38 GMT

“They all wanted to die on their own.” She said as we drove down the street in my black car, blending and dashing through the darkness, the dim headlights being the only things that told anybody that we were still there.

“Oh, so now you talk.” I sounded sarcastic, even though I was more shocked than anything else.

We had left Rob’s place, since his wife and kids were about to come back home from a biomechanical organ check-up down at the federal hospital, and were driving around looking for a roach motel we could hole into and hide till they called for her.

Looking at her looking at me, the mirror reflected the hatred that I had for her.

She went back into silent mode, staring at her own reflection at the side of the car, the ghostly image that only appeared briefly if we happened to be spotted by a street light lamp.

Setting my own vendetta aside, my own frustration and stress, I talked to her in the nicest way I could sound, the nicest tone I could fake. “So why did you keep silent till now, Echo?”

She still didn’t say anything, the darkness engulfing us both as we whizzed by the buildings at a probably illegal speed.

“I thought that you were fully a memory bank, that the storage unit inside your brain pretty much occupied everything that made you a human.”

Nothing.

Slipping back into silence myself, we drove and drove around searching for the darkest spot we could find in this already dingy-looking town.

“Did you miss me?” She asked after a while, her face still facing the darkness, her lips faced away from me.

I didn’t say anything. There was really nothing else to say.

She already knows how I feel.

She was the one who made me feel the way I feel.

With the streets almost empty because of the cold, the city sleeps in a slumber with some grumbles here and then.

She asked “Did you ever think about me ever since?”

I pouted and pretended I didn’t hear her, that the lanes and streets and darkness and buildings took over anything I ever had for an attention span, that all I could ever do was to be trapped by their details and the chore that I was in.

She looked at me look at her in the reflection of the dark.

She said “Are you still mad at me?”

“You still haven’t forgiven me?”

“You’re still living in the past?”

It didn’t matter now, probably. Nothing ever did.

“Why didn’t you speak till now?” I asked back just to interrupt the rhythm of her speak.

“Would it have mattered if I did earlier?”

“FIBA and Rob might have treated you nicer if you did.”

“I wouldn’t have cared if they had treated me nicer or not.”

“Then what do you care?”

“Having a real body besides this virtual shell.”

Looking at her in question, I asked. “You’re fully biomechanical now?”

She laughed at this, as if it was an inside joke we both had, as if I understood why it sounded so funny to her.

“Would it matter?”

The x-rays from FIBA showed that only her arms and legs and eyes were biomechanical besides the storage unit occupying her brain, and that she still kept vital organs and parts organic, despite those usually being the main reason anybody went biomechanical.

Replacing cancerous parts was much easier, and cheaper, than to find a real cure.

“Organic and biomechanical is all the same.” She said as she looked ahead at the road in front of us. “We are all still trapped in a virtual shell that unable us to feel truly human, to truly live.”

“Then how do you truly live?”

“By waking up.” She smiled, the first time I’ve seen her lips curl since she took my heart.

“Is that what you did to those suicide victims?” I asked. “You ‘woke’ them up?”

“Not really.” She replied. “Only you yourself can wake yourself up, because only you can make the decision for the future of your own life.

“All I did was provide them the information and sources, like a good teacher does to her students, because all that I can do is to teach them and let them decide what they want to do with the life that they live.”

“That’s what motivational speakers and car salesmen say.” I chuckled at this. “But in the end, they are still the ones persuading you to do the things that they want, by cornering and leading you with questions and answers that will eventually only lead you towards the same ending that they want.”

She smiled at this, and looked at me with her green, green eyes.

“Do you think I persuaded them to kill themselves?”

Not unsure what I wanted to say, I moved away from the subject. “Why did you leave your name on the data after you hacked it?” I smiled at this, as if to ensure her that this was the direction I wanted to go. “That seems a bit sloppy for someone of your caliber.”

“I wanted to be remembered.” She said, as she looked away again, the reflection of the light on her green eyes fading through the darkness.

“And leaving your name on hacked data will help you do that, and not get caught for it when they find out instead?”

She smiled at this. “If I got caught up, it would still mean that people knew who I was, and remembered me and my name for it, even if it was for the wrong reasons.”

“So all that you did. Hacking into a social network server, talking to all those serial suicide victims, letting all those suicides occur and then getting caught by FIBA was all part of your master plan to be remembered?”

She smiled at that and said nothing, the rumble of the engines and the whirr of the wind filling up the silence that separated us both.

“I knew FIBA would lead me to you, I knew that FIBA would help me get to you.”

I laughed at that. “So you did all this and got caught just so that you could get to me?” I shook my head in disbelief. “Why? So you could confirm that I still hated you all these years? That all that I’ve ever thought about was to choke that little neck of yours and watch as your eyes roll up and the white fills the space between your eyelashes? Is that what you wanted to confirm?

“So you ‘persuaded’ all those innocent people to kill themselves and end their lives just for that? So that you know that you’re not wanted? So that you know that I still hated you for trying to kill me and ripping my heart out?”

She said nothing, and looked away in the same position she did before.

“What is it that you expected from me?” I yelled louder, even though the echo resonating through the car would have been enough for her to hear me clear. “That I would welcome back with my arms wide open? That all that you’d ever done to me would be forgiven and that the past would not matter? That everything would just slip back into normal again because you decided to ‘come back to me’, and that it is all forgiven because you said ‘sorry’?

“Because you said ‘I am so sorry’?”

The car rumbled a bit as the speed continued to gain, my feet pressing the gas pedal all the way to the bottom, forgotten as anger occupied the curiosity in my mind, the melancholy in my heart.

In the midst of the silence, my voice became dimmer, and an empty void occupied my mind.

“You could have easily just contacted me through phone or email, and I’m sure your hacking skills would have led you to my information and profile on the police department.”

We were almost outside city limits, the street light intervals becoming longer and longer, feeling as if it were miles and miles away from one lamp post to the next.

And in all this darkness, and in all this rage and silence, she said “I didn’t think you would forgive me, and if you did, you would not have been the same Hei I fell in love with before.”

Absorbing the rumble of the steering wheel as I gripped it tighter and tighter, my bare knuckles probably white from all the stress placed on them, I asked, softly, silently “Then why did you return?” I said. “Then why did you come back to my life?”

“Because you were the only person I knew.” She replied, a whisper drifting between the space separating us both.

The void that we still could not attempt to fill.

And in this moment of silence, she said “I no longer have a real body, like you.” Her tone was low and barely audible. “All I am are the memories of a system now old, all I have is this moment here, this life that I’ve been given.

“I have nothing beyond the present that I have here.”

Making no sense, I didn’t even attempt to humor her. “So now what?” I asked. “Are you just going to keep silent and not say anything till they extract the memory bank from your skull?”

“I can’t.” She replied. “If they do that to me, I’d die.”

“Everyone has a soul that will go somewhere afterwards.”

She smiled at this. “This is my soul in the afterlife.”

Once again, she made no sense.

“Everyone else is dead up there.”

And before I could give a reply, before I could say anything else, I felt some loud noise rip through the air.

A sharp whizzing noise as I felt it rip through my skin.

The feeling on my right arm was gone, my shoulder bones maybe shattered from the metal cap blasting through my skin and muscle and nerves.

And before I knew it, a hole ripped through my shoulder, the blood spilling as the bullet ripped through the skin on the other side.

Echo tried to say something, her lips open and her lungs poised to utter a single word, one that would be ripped and cut off by another whizzing bullet towards us, as it targeted my intestines this time.

The high-speed bullet crashing through my back window and ripping right through the flimsy seat.

The bile and digested food pouring and mixing in with the cavity that was between the organs.

Losing absolute control, my mind still in shock and surprise to know what to do, the car drove through the side of the road into a bump, at a speed that still resonated through the air from the result of my feet still plastering the gas pedal to the ground, and jumped and flipped as the tires bounced the rough terrain and threw us both first headlight first towards the ground, crashing as glass shattered everywhere, before gravity brought the rest of the car upside down, dust clouds and metal fragments everywhere, a breath that I could barely reach.

In the loud crash and resulted from my inability to drive, I could barely hear the screams that Echo made as the car tumbled into a rest.

Either my organic ear drums were getting older, or we were just getting farther apart.

I used to always hear her no matter how loud the noise was.

I used to always be with her no matter how far she was.

Paranoid Android

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 16:04:07 GMT

Staring at me staring at her, she says nothing, I say nothing, the world is encased in silence.

This pisses Rob off.

Circling her as she sat in his old shaking wooden chair, the white paint barely clinging to the surface to give it some color besides the rotting brown, Rob rubs his jaws in a forceful way as if it was the lamp of a genie, three wishes and nothing more if the spirit comes out of his jaw.

And me to the side of the wall, lying on it, staring at them both, the interaction that’s becoming more and more one-way as the minutes tick by.

She wasn’t even looking at him, nor moving her head, nor anything at all.

The perfect still sitting porcelain doll.

Frustrated, Rob pulls out a cigarette and lights in right besides her.

Besides Echo.

She told me that they called her Echo, that she calls herself Echo now, because she seemed to echo the moods and feelings around her, copy what the atmosphere deems and act accordingly to what she observed or sensed from the others.

Because she had no real feelings anymore. Because she never learned how to feel when she was little.

The little side effects that us ‘pod kids’ have due to an abnormal environment, due to our homogenization to the military, our complete brainwashing to follow whatever it is that our orders asks us to do, orders us to do.

We are the little children that the world didn’t want anyway.

Looking at me, Rob took a long draw of his cigarette, and puffed it all out of his nose, the smoke clouds first swirling before it slowly thins itself out, rising up to mix itself invisibly in the air.

Looking at me, Rob motions with his head for me to follow him.

We couldn’t use the police station for this interrogation, because I wasn’t supposed to be here, I wasn’t supposed to even be around anywhere except a closed-down building in where we’d hide and wait till our orders were changed.

Just like what we did before we were allowed to join the society as real humans again.

Following Rob into his tiny kitchen, so small that it barely fit us both, he lowered his head next to mine and whispered “What the fuck is wrong with her?!”

It was a whisper yell, so spit was coming out of his lips a bit from it.

“She’s been implanted with a memory bank, like I said before.” Looking back as I spoke, as if afraid that someone else was listening in on our conversation, I continued. “It may have changed her way of acting or speaking because of a program in it. I’m not quite sure, but she hasn’t been speaking or even moving since she was assigned to me.”

“So what, she’s basically just a storage unit now?”

I shrugged at the question. “Maybe.”

“So what would be the point of transferring you all the way to FIBA then, huh? If all they were going to do was just have you do ‘warehouse security’ for the rest of your shifts there.”

‘Warehouse security’ was what we referred to when the job only required you to sit there and waste time, instead of actually doing real work.

“That would be a pointless and costly transfer for FIBA itself, so I doubt they just did all those complicated paperwork so you could sit there and read newspapers while you guard an immobile person.”

“Maybe they were just looking for a way to waste some more money.” I chuckled as I say so.

Looking in the direction of Echo, Rob drew another sift from his cigarette, his eyes squinting as if he was thinking of something.

“How did you know her anyway?” He asked, his words mixed with puffs of white smoke.

“Business acquaintance.” I replied.

Looking at me with one raised eyebrow, Rob chuckled at it as he started to get out of the kitchen. “Really?” He said as he started to leave.

“What does that mean?” I asked as I followed him back into the room.

“Just what it sounds like.” He smiled at it.

And when we returned, she was in the same spot, not even a finger moved or different from before.

“I doubt she’s going to speak,” Rob said as he placed the cigarette back on his lips again. “Or even do anything at all tonight.”

“So what are you going to do?”

Rob stared at her a bit more as he finished his cigarette, before he just shrugged and squashed his cigarette on the wall to smother it out. “Go over the files, I guess, and also go over the data that was sent over from the online servers that have any kind of social network attached to it.”

“For?”

“The hope to stop a victim before he or she commits a suicide.” He said as he sat down on his desktop computer desk, and turned the holograph on. “And who knows, maybe after we stop them and they calm down, they can tell us how your little friend here is getting people to kill themselves, or the reason for it and all.”

“Any lead for the case, huh?”

“Pretty much.” Rob smiles as he sat half backwards, half forwards on his chair. “I mean, what else is a clueless police man suppose to do when his supposedly star witness slash suspect is a storage bank?”

I smiled at that myself. “I don’t know, get some sleep, maybe?”

“Sleep is for the weak, and you know it.”

Smiling at that, I started to miss working for the police force again, everything seemed more personal than what I used to do at FIBA, so you cared more because it meant something to you or someone else.

“If you do find a victim, would you be able to stop him or her though?” I asked as I headed over to Echo.

“I’ll try.” He replied as he turned his back to me and started checking the words and letters that were starting to float up on his holograph screen. “I know that it’s their freedom to do what they want with their lives, but it seems like a complete waste to just end their lives like that when they can do so much more, you know?”

“It is their choice though.”

“I know, and I’ll act accordingly so.” He smiled at it. “In the end, the only way you can stop a suicide is to let them decide it for themselves, and coach them towards a better end with your own words. And, hey, who knows, maybe we’ll get a good friend out of it if we do our jobs well.”

“You’re too organic thinking for someone who’s basically a biomechanical man.”

Rob chuckled at my response. “Well, they still haven’t got my heart yet, and that’s where the soul comes from.”

Somehow, that made me reach for my chest, for the heart that I had lost so long ago.

And as I did that, I saw her eyes move to look at me, to stare at my fingers sadly searching for the beat they had know so well before.

“I’ll give you a call if I find anything again,” Rob said as I stared at her stare at me gently rubbing at the empty spot in my chest. “I mean, she might eventually snap out of her state too, so give me a call if that happens too, alright?”

I nodded in response, even though he couldn’t see it with his back turned to me.

Her green eyes stared and did nothing to sooth the pain that I felt inside.

Paranoid Android

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 03:32:48 GMT

When Rob called, he sounded cheery, as if nothing was wrong with the world at all and everything was cheerily perfect, sparkling clean enough for you to eat off the floor.

“Hey!” He said, almost yelling, almost shouting with laughter through the videophone. “How’s the new job treating you?”

With her on my side, staring out at the windows, looking at the blurry neon lights flash past us, I answered “Peachy green” to his question.

“That sour, huh?” He replied, his tone still the same, his face expression remaining unchanged. “So what’s the new job about?”

“Top secret.”

It wasn’t really top secret, but that was easier to use for an explanation than the entire story I have behind it.

“Already, huh?” He said with a smile. “I knew there was a reason they pulled you out of the force so fast.”

“If you would only know.” I replied as I held in a sour sigh from escaping my lips.

“Well, hopefully your situation will improve as time goes along.” He smiled sympathetically. “I have something that might make your day better though.”

“Considering that the night is almost gone, I doubt it’ll make that much of a difference, man.”

“I guess,” he chuckled at that. “But anything that makes your mood go up has got to be better than sleeping depressed and sad, right?”

“Spit it out then.” I looked at her as I said so, whose pose and look has not changed since I last glimpsed at her.

The neon lights going past us back and forth seemed like giant fireflies flying through the darkness of the night, red, blue, orange and green, all of them carefree and unworried about tomorrow and the things that it may bring with the future.

“I think I’ve found a link to the serial suicides.”

That peaked my interest, as I replied “A break in the case?”

He nodded, sure about what he had just said. “We’ve been checking around with their friends and relatives, asking around who they’ve been meeting and what they’ve been doing when they left home, but we sort of forgot something along the way.”

“Like?”

“The net.” He smiled widely, as if he’d been waiting to tell me that this entire time.

“Instant messaging and such?”

More nod and nod. “They’ve all been chatting along in a social network that included holograph avatars that imitated your motions with motion capture suits.”

“Yeah, but isn’t that kind of normal?” I asked Rob. Motion capture suits had been popular ever since they were introduced almost two decades ago, when I was still in elementary school, and internet chatting had been around probably even before Rob had enlisted in the Iraq and Iran wars. “People go to social networks all the time.”

“Right, but the only common thing these serial suicides had was that all the victims, a few weeks or months before they committed their suicides, talked to an individual whose holograph avatar could not be digitally seen or traced except by those who it contacted, who all ended up death after they’ve had a few sessions with the mysterious avatar.”

“What do you mean it couldn’t be digitally traced or seen?” I asked as we stopped at a red light, trucks and rows of people crossing each other in front of our small, trapped space of a car.

“None of the recordings from either the victim’s computers or the social network servers showed anybody talking to their avatars, but the victims were clearly having a great conversation with somebody, except that that somebody was just an empty space in any of the recordings.”

“So maybe they all had a sort of mob hallucination or something?”

When the car moved again, the pull of the movement pushed both of us back towards the back of the seat.

The only thing close that we had done this whole night.

“That’s what I thought too.” Rob replied, unaware of the little revelation I just had a second ago. “But according to the traffic data printed from the server’s hard drive, the victims were not alone and there was an anonymous avatar from an anonymous source sharing the social network spots with them, and this same avatar and source was recorded in all of the servers that the victims visited, in every single one of them that they weren’t sharing with a known avatar or source.”

“So a hacker?” Was the first thing that went through my mind.

“Possibly.” Rob replied, looking off at something as his thoughts invade his mind. “But we do have a small lead to start with though, even though nothing else is sure.”

“What is it?”

“Well, all the servers that had the anonymous avatar visit seemed to have a cluster of just unusable data scattered around the hard drive’s memory.”

“That sounds like a hacker’s job alright.”

“Right, except that the signature wasn’t really that long, and consisted of only four words in all of them.”

“Which four words?” I asked as I stopped at another red light again.

“E, C, H, O. Echo. All consecutively, all the time.”

Looking at her looking at the reflections spotting my side window, I replied to Rob “I think I’ve found our culprit already.”

“What?” He sounded surprised at this, since I think he was expecting to be the only ones with a lead at this point. “How is that possible?”

“Because she’s sitting right here besides me.”

Paranoid Android

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 04:50:26 GMT

Her clothes never wore the same next day.

Even though the armors were body molded after her own, even though the shapes were sculpted the same, she would never be able to fit into her armor after a shower the next morning, with the steam and mist covering up everything on her details, her silhouette gleaming in the clear, distorted glass that we call a shower door.

“Don’t peek.” She’d say as she’s coming out of the shower, her wet hands searching for a towel nearby.

Except there isn’t any, because I’ve already hidden them all away.

She knows this, yet she still plays along with the game.

“Don’t look at me.” She says as the steam rises off her skin, the droplets of water holding onto her skin as long as I wanted to hold on to her.

She says “Don’t stare at me.”

Although I’ve already seen every curve of her body, every turn of her legs, she still teases me so.

Every morning, she would struggle to put her suit armor on, her body sticking to the wrong parts and to the wrong fabrics, nothing matching the way it’s supposed to.

I smile and enjoy every bit of it, I laugh and tease her about how clumsy she was.

In some ways, she still has my heart in her hands.

And although I thought of so many things I wanted to tell her if I ever saw her again, I turned cliché and forgot the words at heart.

She looking at me looking at her stopped my empty, biomechanical heart.

In the white metal room, the seams already glued with hard shells of cement, she stared at me with the same green eyes as she did before.

I said nothing because I couldn’t.

I said nothing because I wouldn’t.

The new commissioner of FIBA, a balding, cheek-sagging, old man with a biomechanical blue eye, looked at me as if studying me for his next experiment, the guinea pig ready for dissection and classification.

The two-way mirror at the side of the room, our reflections the only echoes that resonate in the empty space.

Listening intently, you could hear my heart beat.

One beat per second.

Enough to get me going for another beat.

“Why is she here?” The words escaped my mouth, before I could attempt to catch it with my hands.

“Ah, so you do know her?” The FIBA man said, as smile spreading so wide across his face, that his cheeks had to stretch in order to fit his cartoon grin. “We were starting to believe that we transferred the wrong guy over here.”

His yellow teeth reflected black dark on the shoddy two-way mirror.

She didn’t say anything, just the same expression on her face, her hands and feet all tied and chained together into a single metal bow.

“Where did you capture her?”

With my eyes still unable to take themselves off of her, I asked the FIBA commissioner these emotionless words.

“Why me?”

Shrugging, the commissioner just turned to look at the two-way mirror, as he picked something out of his teeth with his chubby index finger, his short nails struggling to dig anything out of his mouth. “You knew her, right?” He mumbled as coherently as he could as he continued to dig his teeth.

Looking at her looking at me, I turned to the obese man. “And?” Was all that I could utter out as I approached the man.

Turning back towards me, he smiled and made a t’ching sound with his teeth. “This is your new assignment, Hei, the reason why we transferred you back here.”

“I did not agree to this.”

The FIBA commissioner giggled a bit with his old, low voice. “But it doesn’t matter now, does it?” He said as he circled the desk that was connected to her chair, connected to her chains.

“Where was she found?” I asked, looking at him circling around us slowly, painfully slowly.

“At the ocean.” He replied, I listened, while she continued looking at me. “She was just lying there on the sand one sunrise, in the middle of a privately-owned property.”

He chuckled, the higher sound tune reaching across all the corners of the empty room. “Maybe she finally broke.” He continued. “Her brain finally went cuckoo from all those assassinations and all those innocent killings.

“The guilt probably crushed whatever she had left of a human heart.”

“And what do you want me to do about her?” I asked as he made a full circle back to where he was before, in front of the goddamn mirror.

“We just need you to protect her until we can dissemble her memory bank and recover all the data that’s probably under password inside.”

“And then?”

The commissioner shrugged, as if it was of no concern to him.

“I guess we can always try to take her to court and sentence her to a life sentence or death penalty.” He shrugged again as if to reassure me of his knowledge. “But then again, after we recover her memory bank, I wonder how much of her brain will still remain.”

Looking at him looking at me looking at her through the two-way mirror, I still tried to figure out why I was summoned to take care of this job in the first place.

In fact, due to our relationship, I would probably be the worst person to be paired up with her right now.

“How much of her head is biomechanical?” I asked finally, after we doused ourselves in our silence for a minute or so.

The same shrug, the same uncaring look in his eyes. “From our first x-ray look at her, they’re guesstimating that it’s almost her entire skull. Her eyes and nose have already been replaced with enhanced tracking systems, and her memory bank and CPU controlling her systems are basically occupying where her brain should be.

“After we remove her memory bank from her head, she will pretty much be barely human.

“Or should I say, she’s barely human now.”

“So no point at a trial anyway.” I basically said what was in everyone’s mind, and all he could do was just smile that same disgusting smile and nod his obese head till his cheeks wobble its entire fat up and down.

Looking at her looking at me, I asked “So she has no human brain tissues remaining at all?”

Shrug. All he could seem to do. “From our first look, yes.” He replied. “If we dig around in there, we may find some hidden around her memory bank, but I doubt it would have been much to even control her basic functions to live.”

My heart still malfunctioning, the blood still flowing as minimum as it could to keep me alive, I asked “How long?”

“Excuse me?” Now it was his turn to be taken by surprise.

“How long do I have to be in this assignment?”

He smiled, pleased I guess, by my acceptance of his proposal.

“Only two weeks.” He simply replied.

Staring at him in anger, I firmly sputtered out “Expect my early retirement application once I’m done with this deal.”

And with the same smile, as if he was an old man offering some dirty candy to some kid, he replied.

“I’ll be expecting it with full honors.”

Paranoid Android

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 03:46:36 GMT

The first time I met her, she wasn’t sure.

All she could do to be sure was to stare at the mirror for hours and hours on end, checking every detail of herself, every pore and every curve and every strand of hair, obsessively, until she just nodded and say:

“Yes, I think I’m truly human.”

Although she said that at the moment, although she nodded as if she was absolutely sure and convinced of what she was saying, she would be worried about it after a second, looking at me or at anyone else, asking us “hey, do you think I have any biomechanical parts hidden in me?”, or “I do look as if I’m made out of 100% organic, right?”, or even:

“You do believe I’m human, correct?”

Although we said “yes” and nodded as if we knew and were experts on this field, we would be wondering if what we agreed was really real a second after our encounter with her.

No, she looked human, she looked as organic as any of us.

But because of the questions that she gave us, that little doubt that she inserted in, our own certainty would be questioned by ourselves later on, because at the end, nobody was ever sure of anything.

All we could do was guess.

When I first met her, we were both only eight, already dressed and trained and ready to do what we needed to do. We hadn’t graduated to bigger rifles and bazookas yet due to our physical strength being lower than the one necessary to even lift the weapons themselves, but we did get through being the first ones on the field, the little camouflage before the enemies realized they were being invaded.

We were the first ones to plant any bombs in a war.

Nobody likes shooting at kids unless they have to, and the truth is, if you fake it well enough, nobody will suspect you of having bombs and handguns since you were six, even if you were Asian or white or Indian in an area that consisted of nothing else but black Africans.

Because nobody suspects innocence to be tainted so early on.

Because nobody believes that blood thirst could be settled in such a young one.

But this was all that we’ve ever known, this was all that we’ve ever been taught since we could first remember.

This was our game of hide n’ seek and hopscotch, playing marbles and jumping ropes.

This was our video game of points and medals.

When we were in the field, we were happy though.

Playing in such a freedom was incredible compared to the small cramped bunk pods we were usually accustomed to. Sleeping in tents and sleeping bags were a treat compared to the generic soft materials that covered the bottom of our pods to make their so called ‘beds’.

We were just doing what we were left living to do.

But when I first met her, you wouldn’t have known that we were the killing machines that started and help end wars far in Africa, Europe and Asia. In fact, you wouldn’t have known that we were the terrorists that started the collapse of federal buildings and embassies and hospitals, the ones who gassed sleek subways in England and Japan and posted the blame on Islam or Sahra.

We were the innocent children who were caught up in the sins that we had committed ourselves.

Seeing her picture on the holograph screen on the commissioner’s desk, I was reminded of the past that I was trying to escape.

And here I thought the loss of my heart would have been enough to repent myself from my old sins.

Leading me past the metal detectors and biomechanical identification x-rays, I was taken to a small cramped office once I’ve arrived at FIBA’s headquarters.

Everybody looked miserable and nobody looked organic at all.

Sitting down on the harsh plastic chair, the ones that seemed to have been posted here for decades before, I tried to make myself comfortable as I looked around the small space around me, the dirty chairs and tables, the old magazines and waiting people who went along with it.

This was the waiting room to our own demise.

Looking at me through her thick, heavy rimmed glasses, the secretary lifted a finger to wave at me and nodded at me when I made eye contact with her, asking me to come along.

When I arrived at her front, almost sticking myself to her desk, she asked me “Can you make it last, forever you?”

Looking at her unsure, she just smiled in her wrinkled way, her lips the start of the curved lines that went on tour around her rosy cheeks. “You’ve been here before, haven’t you, Hei?”

Practically staring at her, I tried to remember who she was, but nothing was popping through my mind, empty in the search that I had in those three or four seconds of silence.

Although I didn’t say anything, her smile remained. Warm, and familiar.

“Just head back there, Hei,” she said in her old, unstable voice. “I’m sure you still remember where everything is. Nothing has changed at all.”

I thanked her and walked past her desk, the dark dimly-lit hallway leading me towards an unsure exit.

As unsure as my future will be.

Paranoid Android

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 03:30:10 GMT

The first thing that I remember, was being implanted with a tiny chip that would identify who I was.

My barcode stamped under the skin.

My fingerprint in case I didn’t have a fingerprint.

The second thing that I remember as a child, was to be given a one-piece uniform to wear and cover my all, as the barber started to shear any hair I had on me. My hair, my eyebrows, my armpits.

Anything that could leave behind DNA trails for people to identify us.

Anything that would identify us besides the tiny chip.

We were meant to be biomechanical from the start.

We were meant to lose our organic origins from the start.

We were lead to our bunk pods, each assigned with a number plastered on the door of our pods, the pods so small it resembled a porta-potty. If only porta-potties were smaller and had some kind of cheap, soft padding to resemble a bed, a dog house to call home.

At the back of every semi truck, there were at least fifty bunk pods resting on top of flatbed trailers, all of them identical to the other, even down to the mud that stuck between the cracks of each walls.

Baggage already before we even knew what was going on.

This may not reflect the childhood of everyone, but it reflected well the one I had.

We were the leftovers from the normal kids who went to school and lived a civilized life.

We were the abortions that parents didn’t want, we were the extra child that the population law did not allow.

We were already a burden before a word even escaped our lips.

I don’t know if the commissioner knew this, but I bet he didn’t care.

All they care about were the things that we were told to do.

Nobody pays attention to the little details that makes up your life.

It’s all about the big checkpoints that makes up a quarter of your time.

So, staring at him staring at me, I waited for the next words to come out of his mouth, his answer to what I need to do next, his choices of what routes I need to take.

“Tell me, Hei,” he started, his eyes still staring at the same spots he did before. “Why did you leave your previous position?

“Why did you become a cop?”

For someone who’s trying to supply his force with enough people crazy enough to put their lives in line, he sure sounds like he’s trying hard enough to have one less person in his team.

“Because I wanted to contribute to the community, sir.” I responded as if I really meant what I said.

“Is there any other reasons for that, Hei?”

“I guess the pay and the benefits aren’t that bad to speak of either.”

Clearing his throat, another sound coming out of his mouth that sounded like a deep bear growl, he gave me a serious look before his hand reached over to the manila folder, and with an effort, pulled back the thick weight that comprised a chunk of my life.

“I’m sure you know what’s in here, Hei.” He said again as he pulled the folder towards him and opened up the cover, the pages more than happy to pop out and spill out all over the desk.

One more reason why holograph notes are much easier to handle than real, physical paper ones.

Through the corner of my eyes, I could glimpse through papers and photos, printouts in as old fashioned a way as the commissioner’s organic frame, letters and images to spell out a fuller picture of the puzzle that was a stranger’s life.

My life.

“When I received your transfer forms and interviewed you for your current job,” the commissioner said, the flips of the pages between his hands interrupting his words and pauses here and there. “You informed me that the transfer was due to your heart.

“Or rather, the loss of your heart.”

I would have sworn that I’ve lost it a longer time than that, but then again, I was never too sure.

“You said that the doctor had recommended you to take a simpler job, one that would lessen down the stress that you were putting in your heart.” The commissioner continued in his growling voice, the booming echo shuffling here and there with the pages he flipped between his hands. “You said that you just had a heart transplant and replaced your old heart with a biomechanical one, and that you were looking to take it easy in order to avoid overworking your body, up to a point that would make it reject the biomechanical heart that the doctors’ had just implanted.”

If he already knew all about it, why was he asking me?

Sighing as he closed the cover on the folder, his eyes closed as his fingers rubbed them hard, massaged them to their own content. When he opened them and looked up again, the eyes were bloodshot red, dry and drying up with the warm air.

“I’m sure you had your own reasons to move here, didn’t you?” He asked as he pushed the folder aside, gently, as if it was alive on its own.

I didn’t answer at all.

Looking at me looking at him, his hand moved to the side and activated the holograph screen, the bright screen lighting the shadows that had covered the room.

And although I couldn’t believe it, there she was.

The climax to what all this conversation had been building up towards.

The flood gate that the commissioner had just been waiting for to open up.

And looking at her not looking at me, I wondered what this was all about.

I wondered why she was brought up at all.

And through it all, the commissioner stood up again to take up the sun, the shadows now lit bright blue by the blinking sheen that the holograph screen was displaying out.

“Hei,” he said, his voice low and echoing from the wall in front of him, the surround sound booming at me from every angle and tone. “From this moment on, I’m transferring your assignment to the hands of the Federal International Bureau Association.”

He took a long pause, as he sighed and took a long deep breath in, as if refilling his lungs more for another boom across the room. “You’ll be assigned a new partner by FIBA and will report at the headquarter building on 7839 Hopkins Drive at 0700 hours tomorrow morning, where your new assignment case will be given and our authority over you transferred to the heads that occupy that branch.”

I wanted to complain, I wanted to use my excuse of not working my fake, fake heart, of avoiding stress so that my body would not reject my biomechanical fake.

But I knew it wouldn’t work. What he had said was already done for me. Settled and stamped and approved for transfer, days before I even knew anything was going on.

I was already defeated before we even knew there was a war.

And the picture on the holograph screen? Just staring in blank as all profile pictures tend to do.

The woman who ripped my own heart out.

“Not going to tell me still, huh?” The commissioner cracked a smile as he said so, the sun settling whether he’ll block it or not.

The day was already done.

Paranoid Android

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:19:59 GMT

When the commissioner grunts, he sounds like a bear.

One who’s either pissed off or just waking up from winter hibernation.

Either way, it’s a grunt to be intimidated by, as it goes deep enough to rumble the tables and any walls around him.

Deep enough to rumble the fear out of your heart.

The commissioner used to be one of those war veterans who couldn’t get enough of the war, so he went back for consecutive tours one after another, each more dangerous than the other, each more adrenaline pumping than the next, until he was so addicted to it, that he couldn’t really find any more thrill from killing people and avoiding bombs and death in the fields of Iran.

I think that war was after the Iraq one? I’m not really sure, but I’m sure I can find the answer somewhere on the net, but what I’m sure of is that the commissioner is younger than Rob by a few years, so that must have meant that he wasn’t able to enlist till later on.

When the commissioner stands up, he rises above the clouds.

Or at least, he appears that tall.

His dress shirt barely able to contain the flexing muscles under it, his body blocks the entire window behind him when he gets up, as if eclipsing the sun itself, surrounding and covering the whole room in darkness, his bulging eyes the only thing that’s visible under the silhouette of the mass that covers his body.

Would you believe that he was one-hundred percent organic? Can you imagine how long it must have taken him to build his body into something like this?

As awed as I should be by this realization, I was incredibly intimidated by him.

It is whispered in the vine that he could destroy any biomechanical parts with just the wink of his eyes.

“Hei.” He grunted in his deep voice, the grunt so low that it could shatter a glass just by the sheer force behind it. “How long have you been in the force?”

I want to just shrug at his question, but I can’t, because it just wouldn’t be professional enough to answer in that manner.

“About three years, I believe, sir.”

He just nods at my answer, as if pondering about the deepness of it, even though there were none.

Maybe he can sense that I’m not even sure that the answer was correct?

“How long have you worked with Rob, Hei?” The boss answers with another question.

Trying to count the months in my head, I answer with the unsure response of “A year, maybe?”

Nodding, once again, he starts to sit down, as the sun peeks above his balding head, as if just rising from the horizon for the first time in the entire day.

“What did you do before you entered the force, Hei?”

I didn’t say anything as I looked at him, unsure of what he was getting at.

As if sensing what I was thinking, he pulled a folder, one of those old manila envelope folders that no one uses anymore, and slapped it on the desk.

A standstill between both of us.

The folder was brimming full of paper, its covers barely able to hold its shape from the amount of paper stuffed in there.

And on the front cover, written with a black thick-tipped marker, was my full name, in the commissioner’s curvy but firm handwriting.

‘Hei-Liang Huang’

And above it all, our eyes locking on each other’s stares, studying, trying to see through the irises and lenses and optic disks into what the other was thinking, the fog that was inside our minds.

I didn’t speak, our silence spread through the room, threatened only by the loud breathing as the air came out of the commissioner’s hairy nose.

“And?” I wanted to say, the word almost out of my lips.

But it never came.

“I know everything.” He said, in his curvy but firm way, his voice booming and sure of the words it spoke.

It was a lie, but it was close enough.

Nobody can ever have their lives summarized in only words and files.

But you can always cliff note it in that way without a care.

Paranoid Android

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:18:39 GMT

On my days off, I surf the net as I look for new things to buy, new products to fill up my heart, or rather, that space that used to be my heart, a space that is already replaced with a purchased product itself.

“You should replace your eyes with biomechanical ones,” Rob said casually as he saw me squint at the flat hologram displaying its low resolution on my desk. “I think your co-pay for that is only like fifty dollars with our insurance.”

“I’m okay with glasses.” I replied as I pushed the sliding rims back up to the top of the nose.

“Suit yourself.” He shrugged as he sipped at his coffee, his image transparent, yet distorted, through the blue sheen of the hologram.

Rob was almost ninety-nine percent biomechanical, starting his replacement cycle when biomechanical parts started coming out in TV commercials and hologram ads on the net. His knees were basically broken back then, from a wound he suffered back when the United States were still fighting Iraq, when he foolishly signed the petition to go to war at the tender age of fourteen.

He told me that the whole ‘fourteen-year old soldiers’ was a law they passed out at the latter parts of the war, when most of the older members have either been killed or rebelling to pull out of the war. He said that there just weren’t enough soldiers to fuel the war, and that the army would collapse and lose at an alarming rate if they didn’t get enough replacements the month after. And so, the government let them do what they wanted, passed a law that lowered the recruiting age to fourteen, passed a law that allowed barely-men to fight on the battlefield of the sands, the places we didn’t belong.

Being born in an era where the kids can be recruited at any age the nation needs them to, it was hard to believe his old fogey war stories, and not wonder if he made up this whole thing and was just exaggerating the effects that this Iraq war had in the nation, or the economy, at that.

Wasn’t wall street already falling before anything began?

Back when biomechanical parts started becoming commercial, they gave out affordable plans of payment and huge discounts to show people what the future could be. “Evolution past what we were limited for” was its slogan, and the slogan was true in so many ways.

We did get past what God had given us. We had taken his lemons and made lemonade.

“You’re acting like an old man.” Rob says to me now, ironic as it may be. “All conservative and afraid of what you can become. Times change, and if you don’t change with it, you’ll sink like a still shark.”

“I’m not completely organic, you know?” I responded with an annoyed grunt, as I pointed at the chest that contained a beating machine regulating my blood.

“A biomechanical heart was just something they placed in you.” He replied. “You didn’t willingly put it there. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that you were dying and passed out, you probably would have complained and died instead.”

He did have a point there, even though it was a very slight one.

“Evolve or die, that’s the way the world goes, buddy.” Rob said as he looked up on the BIOCO website for their new catalogue, their new models.

Their new upgrades of life.

Ever since biomechanical parts became popular, our fear for the grim reaper seemed to have gone down, as his visit can be dismissed as long as our insurance is willing to co-pay fifty percent for the parts and surgery.

The limits for what you can have is only limited by what’s in your bank.

We have become the consumer whores that our consumer society have taught us to be.

We have become what they wanted us to become.

Yet, through it all, it all seemed for the best.

No more sick children.

No more fear of germs and viruses.

It’s a new utopia for the rich.

And before I could even sigh for it, the message window on my holograph rings, blinking red and blue, urging me to just touch it and open it up.

And when I do, the face of the commissioner is up.

As cliché as it sounds, he does have receding hair, his large mustache covering his lips as if it was an overgrown bush, his thick eyebrows already lowered, frowned in either anger or stress.

Because, seriously, that’s all the feelings I’ve ever seen him have.

“Hei,” he shouted in his low, growling voice from deep inside his throat. “I need to see you in the office. Now.”

Looking at me with a shrug, Rob cocks his head to the side with a puppy look of confusion.

“What did you screw up this time?” Rob smiled as he said so, as if he was expecting an answer from me.

I was the one who cocked my head to the side with a puppy look of confusion this time.

“I’m sure I’ll figure it out once it’s too late.” I said as I logged myself of the system and headed upstairs for the commissioner’s office.

“Yeah,” Rob chuckled as he replied. “When he’s chewing your head off with a grunt.”

Paranoid Android

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 09:17:27 GMT

To not sound cliché, I’ll say that the night was not rainy and cold and musky or anything like that, yet it was getting cooler, as the winter slowly advanced on us, and every breath that came out of our mouths started to materialize into a visible form, a cloud, if you must, reflecting the dim lights of the blinking bulbs of the street lamp, the only source of visibility that we had, even if it was unreliable.

Although we weren’t supposed to taint the evidence at all, Rob pulled out a cigarette and lit it up as the lamp bulb started to give out in the darkness of the night.

“Those things will kill you.” I said. Cliché, I know, even though I already said that I was avoiding any clichés.

“How will it?” He snickered at me, as he took a long sip of smoke from it.

It was a normal scene really, nothing that really stood out as extraordinary or rarely seen.

Well, as normal as a corpse with her brain splattered out all over the sidewalk could be.

Staring at it, looking intently for all the broken bones and torn flesh, I asked him if they could fix her up. You know, replace her up with biomechanical parts or even, if her insurance was rich enough, fix her up with genetically cloned parts that will fit up into her as if she was born from it.

And all that he could do was laugh.

“Let the dead rest dead, man.” Was his only reply.

His ashes falling all over the pool of blood, the sticky gooey texture of it grabbing up every little bit of gray dust, as if it needed it to survive, as if it needed it to live.

And me, telling him what he already knows.

“Your ashes are falling all over the evidence.” I said, he heard, a smile as the lights went out and all we could hear were the sirens of the streets, the whimpers of those still awake at these early hours.

The glimmer from his cigarette was the only star that shined tonight.

“What are we doing here, Hei?” He mumbled as his footsteps scraped on the pavement, rasping away as he lead his cigarette firefly away from the scene. “We’re not suicide prevention units, we don’t just sit in some cubicle hearing some losers sob story about how he can’t live anymore.”

Despite the harsh tone of his voice, Rob was actually a very nice guy.

Pulling out a flashlight, Rob shone its bright beams onto me and the made up corpse, wearing a nice white bridal dress and a see-through veil etched with roses and pearls on her hair.

For some reason, it reminded me of her.

With her face mashed onto the ground, I couldn’t tell if she had make-up on or not.

“What are you kneeling there for still?” Rob mumbled through his now chewed up cigarette. “You proposing to the dead or something?”

Under the spotlight of the flashlight, I felt that I had a connection to the corpse, I felt that I could feel what she was going through.

I could understand if she tried to communicate to me.

And I’m sure I would have looked the part of the tragic lover, in fact, anybody passing by would have probably thought that I was the lover of this made up corpse bride, kneeling besides it, the warm blood soaking through my cheap black dress pants, my eyes looking at her sympathetically.

Yeah, I could have been her corpse groom.

With the light still on me, Rob called for an ambulance and told me to hurry up or he’d leave me behind.

“Unless you’re going to propose to that dead girl, get your butt back here.”

He was kind enough not to use the ‘a-word’.

As I stumbled through the darkness to bump onto the car, the pain stinging me enough to make me draw a sharp breath out of pain, I asked Rob if he knew about the ancient custom of marrying living women to dead men, so that they’re not lonely in the afterlife.

He told me that it sounded made up.

“Now who’s naïve?” I said as I turned the key in the ignition, and the roar of the engine brought us out of the silent night.

Paranoid Android

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 02:27:15 GMT

0

She has my heart in her hands.

Literally.

The organ somehow still pumping air as the last drops of blood drips away, a slow gooey river down the side of her ceramic white gloves.

She whispers kindly, her voice low as words were spoken by her lips.

“This is all a trap,” she says to me, in the nicest tone I’ve ever heard. “You should really hate me for this, you should really despise me for all that I did.”

And in the end, the heart felt as ripped literally as it was metaphorically.

And I could still not bring myself to hate.

In her high heel boots, the ones with the big metal zippers showing on the side, she made the klick-klickity sounds as she walked on the white tile floors, ones stained and painted to look like a high class marble cut, the ones that reflected your disappointments and sorrows if you just shined and waxed it right.

And in the echo of the empty spaces between us, she spoke once again in her whisper tone. “I’ve never loved you. You should never come after me again.

“Your heart is already crushed.”

Yet, as she says it, the heart tried to pump some more, tried to keep its rhythm going before it realized that there was no more blood to fill it, no more reasons to keep going anymore.

Before it realized how empty its body have become.

And me on the floor, my mouth hung open, my breaths attempting to become a voice, a word, a phrase to tell her how much I still loved her, how much I couldn’t change the feelings inside my heart.

How much I couldn’t change the tears in her eyes.

And with the heart in her hands, as it slowly reaches to a stop, as it starts realizing it’s own futility in life, she walked past me, the klickity klacks as her heels hit the tiles over and over again.

And me with my eyes dilating, the blood spilling out into a mess, a pool flooding and expanding, my lips tried to speak, tried to form the thoughts that were still in my head.

Except it wasn’t in my head anymore.

She had my heart in her hands.

The Lost

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 02:50:05 GMT

I.
My mother died in the early mornings of my twenty-seventh birthday.
My dad called me, early in the day, as I was barely awake and my eyes still squinting with the desires to fall back under the spells of the sand man once again.
I had been awake till nearly an hour before the call with my friends and my girlfriend, celebrating in bars nearby as we hopped from one to the next, celebrating my existence and the hours in which I arrived to this world in the first place.
And in those hours, I never thought about celebrating the one who brought me out here in the first place.
“Your mom is dead.” Was the simple greeting he gave me when I first answered the phone, mumbling and grumpy at having been awoken so close after passing out with sleep.
I wasn’t surprised when he said that, but just sort of stood by in silence, awaiting his following words.
Mom had always been kind of crazy, chemical imbalance driving her to feel crazy weird things.
“They found her this morning in a hotel room. She had shot herself.” Dad said, his voice sort of wavering as he tried to squeeze his voice through.
I was still quiet, awaiting the following words.
But they never came.
When people hear about their mothers dying, they usually respond by either being depressingly sad, or being angrily in rage. I did neither. I just sort of waited as if I was awaiting an order at a restaurant, sort of anxious but not really in a hurry, detached to the moment after a few minutes or so.
The funeral would be held next Sunday, and I would still feel the same.
That little ball of sadness held somewhere waiting to explode.
My earliest memories of my mother was that of her writing in her little black notebook, writing down her little sorrows and pains in little sentences and phrases that she called poems.
They were the lyrics to her early demise.
My dad would keep ignoring her signs of depression, as if by doing so it would go away. He would go to work and come back and pretend that everything was alright.
She would keep her little notebook at the night stand next to their bed, on dad’s side, out in plain sight. I don’t know if dad ever read any of her poems or talked to her about it, but the notebook always remained in the same spot whenever I saw it, awaiting for attention, awaiting for a response.
Everything was normal till one morning, when mom finally decided to stick her head inside the oven, with the gas turned on high and unlit.
They say that mental illness was genetic, they say that depression is related to the things you ate.
They say things without ever having to experience them at all.
Everything is just a theory until you felt it happen to yourself, until you were exposed to it first hand.
At the hospital, dad said that he didn’t know, that he didn’t realize what was going on.
And in my heart, I believe that he still felt like that to this day.
At the hospital, me and mom did little paintings with crayons together.
Yellow suns mixed with blue skies and neon green grass.
The smiles that weren’t there in real life.
* * * * *
I drove back the same morning my dad called me about her death, and rode a bit with the windows down, despite the winter cold rushing and lowering the temperature inside the car.
Even with my breath now visible from the cold, I could not feel it. Everything felt a bit numb and unfeeling, as if my senses had been lost for a bit.
Dad told me that the funeral was set that weekend, just a few days from today. I told him that I would be back to help him with the preparations and he replied in his same low tone, soft voice. “Thanks, I’d appreciate it.”
Even though I’ve been his son for twenty-seven years now, he still spoke to me as if I was a guest in his hotel, with the same professional courtesy as any stranger he saw on the streets.
I wondered if it was this same courtesy that drove my mom insane.
“Are you okay, dad?” I had asked for some reason, I didn’t remember why.
“Yes, I am, thank you.” He had replied, in his monotonous tone. “But don’t worry about me, how are you feeling?”
I told him that I was fine, even though I was unsure of it myself.
“Good, good, just take care of yourself, alright? And if you need anything at all, just let me know, okay? I’m always here to help you.”
It felt as if he’d memorized the courtesy at his job and transferred it to fill in what he lacked as a feeling human being.
All I could do was let go, there was nothing else I could do, really.
After my mom’s first suicide attempt, the doctor had prescribed doses and doses of white and pink pills to keep her calm, blue and yellow ones to match the feelings of the day, the half-filled pill bottles piling up and up in the restroom cabinet.
It always took me a few minutes to find aspirin through those seas of bottles, searching each one of them for a label that did not contain my mom’s name.
My mom was born in Taiwan, and brought back here to the United States when she married my dad overseas, who was a navy seals at the time stationed in the US base in Japan. She was a betel nut seller at the time, selling cigarettes and betel nuts on the street, encased in her little glass cage for all to see, attracting the loneliness of the others in the hopes to sell them a bit of comfort in the world.
Dad first saw her when he went to Taiwan for a little weekend vacation, since the island was so near the Japanese base he was stationed at.
She must have looked like a pretty caged bird looking for a savior to rescue her out of her encasement.
Dad came back more and more just to talk to her, to be with her, to know her more than what her surface showed.
And through it all, they were married as he was returning to the United States.
And through it all, I was conceived.
I’ve never truly heard anything about their meeting from my mom’s side, whose prose and lyrics showed more of her mind than anything else she ever said.
Her poems were her puzzles to her heart.

Chapter 3

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:23:22 GMT

I think everyone has a mid-life crisis of some sort throughout their lives.
Well, almost everybody.
Back in the day, people only lived to their mid-30’s and died, so I assumed they had their mid-life crisis far faster than modern procrastinating man. In fact, they did everything faster, married when they were fourteen, had kids when they were probably sixteen or seventeen, held a family and lived a prosperous life when they died at thirty-five.
Most of us were probably just starting to masterbate at the age of fourteen.
Those were the people who had no time for anything else. Those were the people whose life literally blurred by.
Yet they did find time to do other stuff, to tell tales to their kids and leave a memento behind to remind the world and history that they existed, that they were here and fulfilled their purpose before they deceased and decomposed away.
I always wondered if they had time in their busy lives to think “Man, am I doing everything in my life well?”, “Should I turn to a religion or a god to fulfill this emptiness in my soul?”, “Do I really want to spend the rest of my life with this money-sucking cow that calls herself my wife?”
Maybe we do have too much time in our hands now, that we have time to think of the most stupid insipid stuff in life.
And as I’m writing about it, I realize that I do too.
When you have time to reminisce about your past, you realize that you just have too much time in your present.
If I knew I was about to die in my mid-thirties, would I have taken more chances and actually lived better? Would I have had a family and lived a prosperous life by now?
Being twenty-six and single probably isn’t a failure in the present day, in fact, the numbers for those who are similar to me are increasing, but if I was living back in the day, would it have been okay? Would the village people around me go “He’s a failure, he hasn’t had a kid yet, and he’s only got a few years to go”.
I imagine I would have been the equivalent of a cat lady in the past.
The biggest thing I hated about these weird waves of depression and self-wondering is that they always popped out at the worst times possible. At the shower. At your work. At your High School reunion.
I remember it once popping out when I was seeing some old friends again.
This was when I was like twenty-two, fresh out of college and not being able to find a job with my degree.
It was different for all of my friends though, they were now working in medicine labs and health care industries or even managers in businesses whose names you see on billboards.
The equivalent of having a family and a prosperous life in the modern times.
Drinking amongst them, I felt like a poser and a loser.
No matter what you do, you’re always losing to somebody, so I don’t know why we even bother comparing ourselves to anybody else anymore.
I guess it’s just human nature.
While listening to my friends talk about grad school and the dick teachers they’re dealing with on law school, or about their importance at their jobs and the moolah that’s coming in to their pockets, I felt like I wasted my life.
I felt like I was a cat lady.
You could feel uncomfortable and ashamed crawl over my shoulders, looking at my face and laughing at it. You could see the shine in my eyes go out as I retreated inside my own skull, swimming in my own depression and demise.
“So what are you doing right now, Ethan?” They would ask. Of course they would.
“Still working at the hotel.” I would reply.
“Ah, nice.” Simple reply, and they would stop at that, while going back to discuss and compare each other’s achievements and successes in life.
The truth is, there really wasn’t anything to talk about when I was in Ohio, there wasn’t anything worth talking about in my past.
Life didn’t start getting glamorous till I moved to L.A.
And I’m sure that’s the part everyone is actually interested on.
Even before college, you realized that the world was separated in more than just two groups. People liked to classify the groups as just nerds and jocks, but we all know there’s more than that.
I, since I lacked my own self identity, somehow belonged and disassociated with either groups. I was friends with all the groups, the jocks, nerds, bullies, and handicapped, yet I wasn’t really friends with them all.
Let me explain.
When you connect with someone and starts hanging out with them, you have this need to want to keep seeing this person over and over again, because you guys knew what each other liked, and you guys could easily just play each other off and have a good time no matter what because you guys were both so similar, that it was like being with the good part of yourself.
I could connect with other people, and I could hang out with them, but it never gets to that point in where they needed to see me, as if addicted to me or something.
Maybe they could feel like something was wrong with me.
Maybe they could feel that I really wasn’t one of them.
I had a lot of friends, yet I didn’t at the same time.
I don’t know if it makes sense.
The thing about it was that I was a chameleon, I reflected and blended in with whatever atmosphere and mood people had.
If you’re happy, I’m happy. If you liked something, I would be in there still.
I guess imitation was the right word for it.
Scientists say that human behaviors were learned when they were kids, imitating like Splinter did in the Ninja Turtles to learn the behaviors of our masters, in our case, parents. Whatever you act as now, are just reflections of those you grew up with, and as time went by and you started to combine those into an unique flavor that is your own, you obtain your own self identity, your own quirky ways of acting on your own.
I believe I still haven’t reached that limit yet.
I am still imitating other people’s behaviors and ways to act in other to somehow blend in an unique me that I can call Ethan Ride, an unique brand that is distinguishable from any other brand.
I’m hoping this is all sort of making sense now. Am I going too fast for you?
Due to my own lack of self identity, I was able to connect and disconnect with all groups, because I really haven’t declared myself to be anything else but human, but a chameleon of their own moods.
I am just the guy you get along with great, not one of your own.
A foreigner living and working in your own land of whatever.
I guess you can say I’m just like a domestic dog, I never grow up mentally and remain a child.
I wonder if that’s why my relationships don’t last.
Even with Cee, I’m not sure what is it that we have.
We are best friends, I guess, in a sense that she calls it, but at the same time, we seem to be so distant after all.
It’s like I can tune into her station, yet static would arise and the songs can never clearly blast through the radio.
Yet somehow, we seem to keep seeking each other.
I don’t know why.
I don’t know how.
We would just somehow find little events in our life that calls for our need to see each other again, even if we had departed from our last meeting with the worst after taste ever, even if we hated each other’s guts for some stupid thing we’ve either said or done in the past.
For some reason, that’s the only consistency that we have in our friendship. We will seek always seek each other again. Sometimes it’s me. Sometimes it’s her.
That’s all that we have for each other.
I think.

Chapter 2

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 04:33:34 GMT

When I was a child, I was pretty shy, now that I think about it. I would be the quietest freak in the wallflower corner of the room till I was able to figure out where I was, or how I was supposed to act like.
My family moved around a lot, not because I was an army brat and my dad and/or mom got moved around everywhere, but because the economy was bad, and my parents had to move around to where the money was in order to keep my brother and me fed and growing up in a sort of stable and normal environment. The constant changes and the different behaviors in people let me to be afraid to say or do anything till I figured out the rules of the people, because what enlighten some people would infuriate some others, and what is considered a delightful behavior in one society became a blasphemy in others.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I felt like I needed to confide somebody about who I was.
That, and I’m bored of just staring into the highway road and its flashing yellow lines, with the occasional car or truck light illuminating the empty night.
Driving back towards ‘home’, something that I haven’t called that state in a long, long time, I started to wonder what made me who I am in this day and age, and what little changes and events in my life led to this disastrous mess that encompassed my body.
Ralph led everything back to Cee, the only friend that I still know since Junior High school. Ralph got this crappy idea from a really sort of retarded equation he came up with.
“Is there a reason why every one of your main female characters’ names start with a ‘C’?” He asked me one rainy afternoon as I stared up at the different lamps in his study and wondered how many watts of light did they use, and if he had a closet full of different bulbs with different wattages for each lamp that were stationed around the tiny little room.
“I don’t believe I do, do I?”
“Christina, Cecilia, Chloe, Catherine, Cici, Celia, Claire, Cilia.” He paused as he looked up at me, taking off his glasses as if that would make him look smarter or wiser than the buffoon that he really was. “Do I really need to go on with this list any longer?” He asked, snottily, without sugar on top.
“Probably not, since I’m actually paying for every minute you spend wasting it.” I smiled at it.
“Okay.” He replied, and sat back on his tall black leather chair, his hands crossed in a mock prayer position and his glasses back on the middle bridge of his nose.
The leather couch I was in would have been comfortable has it not been for the location it was in, right in the center middle of the room.
It’s hard to kick down and just chill out when you’re at the center of all attentions here.
After a few seconds of silence and waiting, Ralph spoke again.
“Well?” He asked.
“Well what?” I replied.
He sighed, me wondering why he hasn’t given up yet and just tossed me to another ‘associate’ of his. Maybe he really needed the money.
“The answer I was asking for.” He continued.
“I didn’t think you were even asking a question there.”
“I did, Ethan.”
“Oh, then I must have missed it then.”
I hated coming to the shrink, it felt like going into the principal’s office, you always felt like you were guilty of something, that the only reason they even have to see you is because you did something wrong, very wrong.
To get back to the conversation, all I said was “I don’t know, maybe all their names start with ‘C’ because of a coincidence.”
“You know that’s not true, Ethan.” He took off his glasses again. “You’ve written over ten novels and all of them have this same trait for the main female character.”
“Well, I didn’t even notice that till you said it.”
“Or you do, but you’re just refusing to admit it.”
Looking at him, looking back at me, looking back at him.
“Ethan,” Ralph said slowly. “Who is Cee?”
“I already told you, she’s a friend I’ve known since I was a kid.”
“Just a friend?”
“I told you I’ve never had a girlfriend before, Ralph.”
“Right, but you also told me that you didn’t consider anyone a girlfriend until you’ve actually dated them for more than six months.”
“Well, you’ve got to have some standards, right?”
“Then what do you call those who’ve had intimate relations with you?”
“Uh…” I paused. “Potential partners?”
“You know most people would call those who date them and go to bed with them as their actual boyfriends or girlfriends, Ethan.”
This lecture could go on and on forever.
“Is Cee a ‘potential partner’ for you too, Ethan?” He went on.
“No, she’s one of my best friends.”
“But you’ve had relations with her too, didn’t you?”
“Man, did I tell you that already?”
My first memory of Cee was at a friend’s party when we were both around seventeen, drinking along illegally in parties here and there. My first memory of her was holding her hair up as she puked into the toilet. How or what lead to that, I really don’t remember.
My second memory of Cee was also holding her hair up as she puked into the toilet again later on in the night.
My third memory of Cee was waking up in a pile of coats, naked, assortments of coats with different colors and sizes and fashion covering up parts of my body.
She was already at the door, buttoning her jeans up, the slit of light sneaking through the room shining right behind her, highlighting only her lips and her fragile little fingers moving quickly along her blue jeans.
Her silhouette dimly moving as the light reached my eyes, half open as I tried to see who she was, or trying to remember how I got here.
With a smile on her face, her lip gloss waxing and diffracting the little light in the room, she looked back at me, the sound of her zippers closing up accompanying the dull music booming from the walls outside the room.
“You weren’t that bad, tiger.”
Looking at her, I wasn’t even sure if that’s even what she said.
The smile still on her face, she turned and quickly walked out of the room, a glimpse of her red lock of hair blurring through the motions.
And just like that, she left.
And just like that, I left.
According to most of the people, that would be love at first sight.
According to me, I was just drunk.
All that went through my mind was trying to figure out how and when did I get here, what happened when I completely blacked out, and who that person was.
The night was a blur, and nothing really seemed to matter anymore at the time.
All I had was a pounding in my brain, screeching and screeching to be stopped.
I wanted it to be stopped.
Thinking about her, I had an urge to give her a call. I wanted to ask her if she was the reason why I was who I was today, and if she could explain to me why am I doing anything that I’m doing right now.
Nothing is solved with me just thinking about it.
But it is about four thirty in the night, so I doubt anybody would be thankful for a call at this moment.
I need to sleep, but I also want to drive.
My mind is so fragmented right now.
Just then, the phone rang, the loud beeping demanding attention, the buzzing shaking the phone as it went back and forth on the coin holder making an annoying whizzing sound.
“Hello?” I answered.
And to my surprise, it was Cee.
“Hey, I didn’t wake you up, did I?” She asked, as if she didn’t already know that I barely sleep.
“No, not at all.” I almost smiled, yet the creases never formed. “What’s up?”
She remained quiet for a while, so silent that I thought my cell phone might have either ran out of battery or just plain lost its signal. But after a moment or so, she came back on again. “Nick cheated on me.”
I thought it was funny that she sounded so serious about it, considering that she had cheated on the guy multiple times, but laughing about it would probably not put her at ease. “Really?” I replied. “How did you find out?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“That bad?”
“Yeah, that bad.”
Nick was this guy she’s been dating for a while, maybe a year or so. They both met at college, hit along because they were both studying for MCAT, and, well, started going from there.
The thing about it is, as much as Cee liked Nick, he just wasn’t that great of a performer in bed, or that good to start with at all in anything else. Nick was a clean shaven guy with a great Christian family and a wonderful future as a brain surgeon, basically the modern time equivalent of a blond haired prince in a shining armor riding on top of a white horse, but just couldn’t keep a wild girl like Cee entertained.
Cee’s description of him was “a subject without a core”.
Whatever that means.
“Please don’t tell me that he cheated on you with one of your friends.”
Which sadly, I’ve actually ‘intimately’ met all of them, since they were all pretty much rich spoiled girls looking for a good time with wild sex and lots of drugs. You know, the Hollywood stuff that you thought were fake and only existed on movies and television.
Well, guess what, some rich people thought it was smart enough to emulate that lifestyle, and they’re fucking the brains out of everyone you know.
“No, it wasn’t.” She replied, then pause, that silence once again. “It was with of the interns that he was working with.”
“Ah, new meat.”
“New meat is right.” She scoffed. “Did I mention that the intern was a guy?”
Wait, clean shaven guy, great Christian family, wonderful future as a brain surgeon. I guess some things ARE too good to be true.
And the things just got too out of hand for me to NOT laugh about it.
Like I guessed, she wasn’t too pleased about the laughter.
“It is not funny!” She yelled at me. “It’s not funny at all!”
“Oh, maybe not to you, but it is to me.” I couldn’t stop, which is bad, since I was driving in a dimly lit highway at over eighty-five miles an hour. “This is the hilarity that keeps my heart light.”
“God, can you ever be serious for one second?”
“But I am serious. This is some good comedy stuff.”
And before you can say ‘apple’, she hang up the call and all I got was a blinking sign showing me how many minutes we spoke in that brief conversation.
Talking to her reminded me of why I left Los Angeles.
Sighing, I got off an exit and looked for the nearest motel.

The life and death of Ethan Ride

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 18:23:56 GMT

"Hello, my name is Ethan Ride, and I'm an alcoholic."
"Hello, Ethan." The reply from the group was scattered, not as unanimous as the Hollywood movies and TV shows makes them sound, the sounds and voices overlapping one another until it really doesn't sound as anything else but senseless babble.
“I’m not from around here, but I hope that doesn’t really change your opinion from me, I’m not a tourist checking around for the most fun thing to do in town just so that I can blow away wads of cash that I hardly make.” I continued, as you can see. “I am just passing through, on my way to the other side of the country, and I just happen to find information for this meeting by accident.”
The mixed group of all races and ages, from as young as nineteen to as old as sixty-five, looked at each other or would just doze off as I went on, I don’t think anybody cared, and if they did, they sure didn’t seem to mind that I was talking my head off on nothing and everything at the same time. I didn’t like my voice at all, sometimes too whiny and sometimes too rough, and the amplification of it through the loudspeakers of the small gym didn’t help at all either.
“I started drinking when I was five,” the feedback from the loudspeakers made me cringe a bit as my shoulders lifted themselves up involuntarily to try to block the sound out of my eardrums. “Well, I should say I had my first taste when I was five.
“For you see, my grandpa, my dad’s dad, was a farmer who would drink from sunrise to sunset. He even had this little drink carrier made out of a fruit back in Taiwan.”
Oh, yeah, did I forget to mention I’m an Asian? Yes, I know, the name Nathan Ride doesn’t exactly scream Chinese. But I am. So are my little brother and family. Our parents just named us different from their own family names.
When I was born, my parents were on their way to America, their applications for a green card already in and almost ready to go. They didn’t want a name that would stick out as Oriental when they went, or so, that’s what they told me. They could have just been lying and decided to name us with the last name of ‘Ride’ instead of ‘Huang’ for the sake of screwing our heritage and racial identity up. Because, you know, some parents are cocks like that.
“I have to say that, maybe I’m just a social drinker.” I continued my supposedly short introduction. “But then again, because I’m always socially out, I tend to drink more than I really want to.
“You know those mornings in where you wake up with a horrible hangover, your stomach heavy and dense, your brain screaming for air in the loudest pain ever? And then you try to swear off drinking forever, because everything felt so bad, so horrible, that it doesn’t seem like any fun and party is really worth all that hurt? Yeah, that’s me every morning, but like everyone else, that whole philosophical goal goes away once you feel normal again, and you go out and commit the same mistake, over and over again.”
I don’t even know where I’m going with this. And I’m sure somebody in the group must have realized this by now. Someone needs to cut me off.
But like every group, you have people who sympathize with you, maybe because they did it themselves, or maybe because they just feel sorry for you. And those people were shouting in agreement now, going “Hell, yeah” and “Oh, fucking yeah”, or, well, you get the idea.
Standing in the front of the group behind the podium, I felt totally exposed to the rest of them, and maybe that’s why I’m telling them all these weird thoughts that should have never seen the light of the day, because I don’t know any other way to distract them from the ugly nakedness that I am. Let them think of something else, distract them with a shiny penny, anything from letting them see who you really are.
I think that’s how stand-up comedians started back in the day. When? I don’t really know exactly.
But even I get bored of just coming up with one thing after another, entertaining the crowd with witty or just plain strange tales of myself, so with a simple “I look forward to working with you all”, I excuse myself, and lower myself into the mush pit of green metal folding chairs and mingle with the rest of the freaks who are just as fucked as myself.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been to an AAA meeting before. I accompanied a friend of mine to one a few months ago. We were all at this party, thrown by another faceless and nameless host that shall remain lost to my memory, and went out with our friend, whose name should just remain as “Charles” in this little petite memoir, to grab more beer and supplies at the local supermarket since we were running out of it.
The car ended up being hit by a bus, as they sped up and tried to run through an intersection with stop signs. Charles died in the accident, since the bus hit on his side. My friend ended up in jail for driving under influence and involuntary manslaughter (Since Charles’ family was furious at this).
In the end, who knows whose fault it was, but he took the butt of it all.
In my own guilt, I went with him to the AAA, in another state, even though it was still as depressing as this one.
If being drunk was as depressing as these meetings, being sober and clean of drugs would be the hippest thing in the world.
My shrink said that alcohol and caffeine and all those drugs screws up your sleep schedule and brain cycles, or something like that, and that all those screwed up things, poison, he calls it, are what’s driving me through insomnia.
I always thought it was because I had too many thoughts in my mind, but what do I know? I don’t have a PhD in bullshit.
When I went back to the road again and started driving, I started thinking about Ralph, my psychiatrist, who was the reason why I went on this aimless drive in the first place.
Picking up my cell phone, I gave him a call.
“Hello?” He sounded sleepy, since it was two in the morning.
“Hey, Ralph, don’t tell me you’re asleep already?”
He groaned, sounding like a dog clearing his throat after choking too much water down its nose. “Hi, Ethan.”
“Hey, dude, I just went to an AAA meeting to check out the scenery of the town.”
“Ethan, is it possible for you to call me in a normal hour?”
“Not really, I’m usually too busy in a normal hour. Plus, you got work too? How you going to answer the phone when you’re listening to another psycho babble out their insanities to you?”
“Ethan, I’m really tired, I need to sleep. Not all of us can just sleep three hours a day like you do and keep themselves awake like you do.”
“Hey, did you get that DVD I sent ya?”
“Yeah, I did, very funny.”
“No, I’m serious about it, I’m really firing you and am actually now hundreds of miles away from Los Angeles.”
Sigh, and more sigh. “Why are you calling me, Ethan?”
“Don’t know, just thought I’d give you a call and thank you for screwing me up so much that I had to drive away from the city just to give myself a sane mind.”
“I doubt I had anything to do with it. You would have done something like that anyway.”
“Oh, maybe.” I scratched the back of my head, the road as black and empty as the night itself. “But you are definitely the catalyst of it.”
“Ethan, you need to grip yourself with reality here. You can’t run away forever.”
“Oh, but I’m not running away at all.”
Silence, although I can imagine him just rubbing himself in the eyes and shaking his head in disbelief. “Okay,” pause. “Then what are you doing now, driving hundreds of miles away from your home, Ethan.”
“Oh, but Los Angeles isn’t my home, Ralph, you should know this by now.” I smiled. “I’m heading back to my real home, the permanent one that I can always go back to.”
Well, that wasn’t my intention at first, but now that I said it, it sounded more and more enticing with every passing second.
“Really? And where’s that?” He asked, although I’m sure he already knows the answer.
“I’m heading back to Ohio, Ralph.” I replied. “I’m heading back and away from you.”

Chapter 0

Mon, 02 Oct 2006 02:30:32 GMT

"This is a video to my psychiatrist, my shrink, my supposedly calm and logical side to my life in this world. Yes, this is a video made just for you.
"I just wanted you to know that, as of right now, around twenty-two and twenty-five hours in the day, you're fired, and out of my life.
"I just figured that I'll send you a video on DVD just to be different, because too many people just use the phone.
"I want to be original.
"I want to stop being a hack.
"As of right now, I'm not returning to your cramped little office, not only because it smells of your stale farts, but also because I'm sick of your explanations about why I'm sick mentally and need to pay you a hundred and fifty dollars an hour just to lie down on the couch and tell you a vivid story of myself, of why I'm like this, of why I've become this little failure in the big picture of a failed world.
"I may be a failure, but at least I match the palette colors of this failed world.
"I may be a failure, but at least I'm not you.
"All in all, no matter what I tell you, I'm sure I'll never be as perfect to you as yourself.
"You may tell me that I'm getting better, but I'm sure that's just my check not bouncing talking, because I'm sure that if I don't get out now, I'll just end up having to pay you that hysterical fee for the rest of my life, tied up to your clownish lies about how I grew up like this, and that every little emotion I have is tied up to some dysfunction in my brain, some drug I should be taking, some change in my life that I need to do.
"Well, you know what? I am changing something in my life, and I'm going to use that saved money to go out and check out the world while I'm young.
"This is a video to my psychiatrist, because he's a total cock.
"This is a video for you."
And with my middle finger raised, I approached the camera, and with one last disgusted look at the camera, the face of the young fucker muddling up my mind, I gave him my last speech.
"Fuck you."