Cure for Sanity - Chapter Five

Cure for Sanity - Chapter Five - Murder Most Foul



Prail left a bot in her place, and rejoined her conversation with Janique.



"Tell me again why I shouldn't kill them. Convince me."



"It's not a matter of should or shouldn't," Prail said. "It's a matter of can't."



"I can try."



"Don't fuck with singularities. You've been warned."



Prail blinked and left. She needed to relax. She was getting an idea for a zombie game. There would be lots of blood and shooting.



Hidden forces were pulling Janique this way and that. She could feel them tugging on her, but she wasn't sure of who, what or why. She was able to resist whatever it was. Prail and Chris had each in their own ways made her incredibly strong, both mentally and physically.



Then she sneezed.



In the quarter-second it took for that to happen, she was defenseless. Suddenly, she found herself on a construction site.



"Someone godded you," a guy in a green hard hat was telling her, indicating her own head gear.



She smiled and walked off, feeling somehow slightly taller. Janique found a portable bathroom, thinking that Prail had for some reason put her in the Renee Hollander game Construction Master. But when she looked in the mirror, she was horrified to see that she had a beard and moustache. The front of her hardhat said "Jason Christie". Above that, written in red Sharpie, was the word 'God'.



Janique fainted. When she woke up, she was back with Chris.




###


God was playing Fuck Shit Up, he favorite Prail game. It wasn't one Prail had designed, but still hers. Theirs.



He wandered through her database, scrambling and deleting data, changing variables. He crashed subroutines. He's switch flags, turning people's interior personae around. White people became black inside. Men and women exchanged genders. He toyed with her raytrace features to create logical paradoxes, lighting the moon in unnatural ways. No one noticed except Prail, who always set things back to right.



God constantly had to find new ways to keep from being bored. At the same time, he didn't like to do anything physical, the ramifications of his actions were so great. Which was why he had built the little prison for himself. It was empty and sterile, and he hadn't set foot outside of it in aeons.



The last time he had, he'd heard the screams of a billion dying worlds with each step. Which didn't bother him as such. But he liked peace and quiet.



A fly had found its way inside several millennia earlier, and he'd killed it without thinking. Throughout the multiverse, the future evolved descendents of flies were wiped out, never to return.



"Oops," he had said at the time.



Forgetting who he was had been part of the problem. Eventually, other living things learned to stay far away from him. Sometimes, he actually felt guilty at creating the whole stinking system in the first place. At other times, because of all the bad things he allowed to happen. When he felt like that, he seriously rethought his role as a hands-off creator.



He loved the worlds, but didn't really belong there. He had built a tiny house on an asteroid and kept it in the furthest reaches of space, at the center, where he was as far away from everything else as he could get. Immortality sucked. Omnipotence sort of did, as well.



Sort of.



To assuage his on-again, off-again feelings of guilt, he allowed Janique to seek him out and actually find him. Her let her dominate him and punish him, and that made him feel better, on occasion.



She thought she did it all on her own, and never realized that when she did it, she was actually everyone else in the multiverse who was angry with him. Everyone who had bad luck, or fell on hard times, or lost a loved one.



Consequently, she abused him with a vehemence that was nearly frightening. That was a good feeling to him, being scared. It took a lot to scare him, of course.



His biggest fear was that she would lose interest and not come back.




###




Janique decided to make her first attempt at killing Jason Christie.




She found him in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Airline Highway. His first wife, Suzanne, was driving them somewhere in a black Lincoln Towncar. Janique appeared in a double-axle truck pulling a horse trailer. They were making a U-turn, and she mashed down on the gas pedal, reaching nearly fifty miles an hour when she hit them squarely on the passenger side door.




Just before she struck, she popped back out, leaving the truck driver to his fate. There was no way either he or Jason could have survived. 




She appeared back at Prail's game design lab.




"Got him," she said.




"Oh, really?" Prail said, not looking up.




"Fuck yes. Car wreck. He shouldn't have made me."




"Janique, you don't understand. All he's really doing is receiving visions of your life and writing them down. Things don't work the way you think they do. You're only making him more powerful."




"Powerful? He's dead."




"Oh, really? It takes more than death to stop him. Look."




Suddenly, Prail and Janique were in an emergency room, and Jason was awake, with a doctor poking his feet with a needle.




"What the fuck are you doing?" he said.




"There's blood in your urine. We're checking for spinal damage."




"You shoved a tube up my peehole! Of course there's blood!"




The scene switched, and he was in a hospital room. Suzanne, another woman, and two guys were standing around the bed. 




He woke up.




"Where am I?"




"We were in a wreck," Suzanne said. "Broken ribs, collapsed lung."




"Who are these guys?" Janique whispered.




"They can't hear or see us," Prail said. "That's Gortician. High-C's band."




"But-"




Prail took Janique back to her lab.




"See?" Prail said.




"But I killed him!"




"I know. He just keeps coming back."




"But why? How?"




"Love. Unfinished business. He has to find Johnnie. He has books to write."




"Fuck," Janique said. "And Gortician? That's a planet, not a band. High-C's a dealer, not a musician."




"Down there, they're a band. In another part of the multiverse, they're the biggest band of all time. Bigger than Disaster Area."




"Really?"




"Sure. There's even a parody of them, Metalocalypse. He's not allowed to know."




"Why not?"




Prail shrugged. 




"Prime directive?"




###




Pex took a peek at Prail's database and poked around. He checked the security settings first. She was listed as security level zero, Supergod status. Very funny, he thought. He made a new entry at negative zero, Above Supergod status. It was actually a clone of her settings, but he knew the label would bother her.




He only hoped she appreciated the joke. But she played games with people's lives, and needed to be taught a lesson. She wrote the games, at least. He noticed that once a game could be considered finished, she lost interest, relying on bug reports from testers and users.




He admired her dedication to her art. But Pex had learned something that felt important to him. As he spent time among them, he began to feel that the non-carbon-based life forms deserved as much freewill as their creators. 




2D people were people, too. It hardly seemed fair that they could be switched on and off, or be unknowingly manipulated for the duration of their lives. He suspected, no, he knew that Prail wouldn't agree. He paused everything and went to her lab.




"Hey, 'Wolverine'," she said. "How goes the takeover?"




"Not too good. I quit."




"I heard you were fired."




"Same thing."




"You don't want to work for them anyway. Bad for the environment."




"Fuck the environment."




"What?"




"You heard me," Pex said. "Concrete and steel are just as valid as dirt and trees."




"Dirt and trees are natural."




"Everything's natural."




"They're man-made!"




"In a synthetic environment?"




"They're prettier."




"That's debatable. A matter of taste, at least."




"Go play, Pex. I'm working."




"Your sim sucks," he said.




"What?"




"It's too realistic."




"How can a simulation be too realistic?"




"It just is. It's too limiting. Anything is possible, and you have them digging ditches and changing diapers."




"They're non-player characters."




"Another problem I have with it. They're slaves, essentially."




"They don't know that."




"What if I tell them?"




"They won't believe you. They don't have the capacity." 




"Ergo, your simulation is flawed."




"No, it isn't. Anyway, it's mine. Go write your own. By the way, thank you for the empty rooms."




"You're welcome," he said. "Ungrateful brat. Maybe you're misinterpreting the data."




"Seems pretty straightforward to me."




"I gave you a wealth of useful information. Use it however you wish."




"Yeah, in a huge blast. Thanks for overwhelming me. You made everything unstable, for a time."




"You handled it okay."




"But I should have been warned."




"They shouldn't have to work," he said, continuing his argument.




"They have a choice."




"Sure. Arbeit macht frei. Free to work."




"They can organize politically. Work together."




"The fact that they don't indicates that they can't."




"They can, trust me. Want to view the source?"




"Ugh, no. Your code is too workaday. Instead of code like building blocks, you should craft something closer to poetry."




"You code your way, and I'll code my way. I don't tell you how to be a bum, do I?"




"I'm going to make things more interesting."




"How?"




"You'll see," Pex said, and left her to wonder and worry.




###




Pex gently probed Prail's mind while he had her distracted, and found out about Janique's machinations. She struck his as vaguely psychotic. The first thing he did was try and subtly warn people by sending her the porn actress Crazy, prompting the movie title, "Janique is Fucking Crazy."




He was amused.




Then he did a quick examination of the popular culture available to him on Earth, changing song lyrics and movie dialogue to suit his aims.




Pex planned on writing a single game that dwarfed Prail's entire portfolio, with the fate of the entire Earth at stake. He was ready to teach her true game design. All he had to do was stay one step ahead of, and behind, her and Janique.




One of the many advantages he had was that he knew what Ultimate Hustle really was, and it was a crucial bit of information Prail wouldn't share with the ego-maniacal Janique. She had sent him to Earth with it encoded in his being. 




He was to infiltrate, assimilate and overthrow the entire planet, gaining mastery of it. And he had. But he was so good at it, Prail hadn't noticed. Which left him stuck in the game.




To Pex, secrecy was paramount to ruling. Plus, he found it entirely unfashionable to go around flaunting your power like that. Tacky. He was too subtle for her. Brilliant. That gave him plenty of time to play, and it would be that much more fun when she did figure it out.




He had one little change that he wanted to make to her sim immediately. He did a global search, and in the disease section, deleted 'Cancer' and all related subfolders. It was miserable enough down there without incurable plagues.




That was enough, for now. He erased his tracks and went to ponder the intractable problem of dealing with his sister.




 








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