Cure for Sanity - Chapter Six
Cure for Sanity - Chapter Six - Swamped Things
Prail had had it with Pex. No more helping him.
He could pick on her all he wanted, but insulting the stimulation she was developing really hurt her feelings. She wished she knew how to make his life more terrible, but he was pretty much bottomed out and seemed to enjoy it there.
His random actions and lack of proper motivation put all of her test results in jeopardy. If others played the game like Pex, her simulation would be worthless. Plus she had her hands full with Janique, who was tampering with timelines and realities that were better left alone. It was scary how obsessive she had become so quickly.
###
On the way back to the shelter, Pex found a twenty-five pence piece on the sidewalk. He looked up after retrieving it, and he was in front of a McDonald's. His stomach rumbled. Given the late hour, her knew Prail wasn't there.
Instead, he went to Cairo, an Egyptian-themed casino mixed in among the pubs on the south end. Pex walked up to the roulette wheel and placed the coin on double zero. The croupier noticed and immediately gave it back.
"Ya need chips, mate. And it's a two-pound minimum bet."
Saddened, Pex walked toward the door, passing the slot machines on the way out. He considered playing one of them and trying to push the machine, but figured Prail would just find a way to thwart him, so he didn't bother.
Outside on the sidewalk, he stopped the first person he encountered, an elderly blue-haired woman, and said, "Excuse me, young lady. May I please have one pound seventy-five?"
She stopped and looked at Pex, who looked like a skinny lumberjack who'd been lost in a helicopter accident, and had just wandered into town, having spent four days in the wilderness. She pulled a two-pound note from her purse.
"You're not going to get a drink with this, are you?" she asked before handing it over.
"No, ma'am. I'm going to gamble it," Pex told her.
"Well, I never," she said with a mix of compassion and scorn, and walked off.
Pex stopped the next person, a middle-aged, working class man in the bib overall of a tradesman.
"'Scuse me, sir. Lemme a fiva?"
The man stopped.
"Lend you? A fiver? You just asked her for one pound seventy-five."
"You look like a working man," Pex said, losing his accent. "Money in your pocket. Knows the value of a money and a man's word. I'll pay you back tomorrow."
"Tomorrow, eh?" the man laughed, reaching for his wallet.
"Same time, same place," Pex agreed.
He didn't believe him, of course, but he did like his audacity. He handed Pex a five pound note.
"Sure you will. Have on, then."
"See you tomorrow," Pex said, walking off.
He returned to the casino and bet double zero on the roulette wheel again.
Only he was unsurprised when he won. Grumbling slightly, as if he had been cheated, the croupier paid out his winnings, a thirty-eight-to-one long shot. Pex tipped him a fiver, which soothed his injured ego. Then he went to McDonald's Prail was not there. Another unhappy meal.
###
Prail was instead keeping an eye on Janique full-time. The real problem, she observed, was that Janique thought that things were simple. And no matter how many times Prail tried to show her the hidden complexity, her beliefs persisted.
She was beginning to suspect that Janique wanted to kill them just for the challenge it presented. When she watched her kill their dogs, she very nearly grew angry. Her madness was so compelling, Prail began to view her actions from within Janique. There was an enormous amount of backstory and complexity to be found there.
Prail watched horrific scenarios of rape and torture, ending with the bodies of both Jason and Johnnie bound in chicken wire, weighted with cinder blocks, and dumped into the swamp.
But she also saw the parts Janique did not.
She saw the offer being made to Jason, which he accepted, to die in the place of his future wife. He went through the ordeal not once, but twice. In the last instant before the bound bodies hit the water, Prail saw their faces turn into Pex's.
Not only had he beaten her out of what she was trying to achieve, he left her with the memory of succeeding. To further complicate things, Janique's naive attempts were having far-reaching implications that even Prail hadn't anticipated. She was essentially making it harder on herself, and by extension, for her as well.
This time, when Janique reappeared in the lab, she didn't boast, "Got 'em!" or anything of that nature. But Prail could feel her belief that she had achieved her goal.
"You need to stop," Prail told her. "You're Florida State University. That means you're fucking shit up."
"What?"
"Where have you been?"
"Oh, nowhere, really. Checked on Chris. Why?"
"You're turning into a monster. He's in 1984 now, look."
"Is that an important year?"
"So important they wrote a book about it," Prail said.
"But..." Janique started to say.
She was whisked away to an apartment in Las Vegas. Jason sat at a huge desk with a gallon bottle of pink heart tablets that she instantly recognized as speed. She looked over his shoulder and read what she could. It was a song, and there were gaps in it, but Janique got the gist of it:
"Turning my attention to the Nazarene
His eyes plead for mercy, it seems
...
Without proof of their faith
The priests' faith now ends
Darkness covers the world
As a deadly new Satanic age begins"
She wondered why Prail elected to bring her to this particular point, as she would rather have read the entire song, but it didn't matter. Prail needed to check her premise. A few scenes later, and Jason and friend Terry conduct an impromptu sacrifice. They burned a roach to death with matches, and left a tiny upside-down cross next to the body.
"Aww," Janique said. "That's cute. It's actually sort of sweet."
"You have no idea," Prail said. "Then they killed some kid in the desert. Tim something. They don't know they did it."
"So?" Janique said.
"It's your interfering with their lives that's making him do these things. Every time you try and kill them, he'll retaliate sevenfold."
They were back at the labs. Janique was disappointed because she had wanted to see the boy in Vegas die.
"Well, if I can't kill them, I'll make their lives so miserable, they'll kill themselves."
"That might work, I suppse," Prail said, tiring of the conversation.
Let Janique believe what she wants. Pex would handle it. At least she hoped he would.
###
Pex had to laugh. If he didn't, he'd go insane. Like them. He'd done his homework and predicted correctly. Now he needed Prail's attention, and she was of course missing in action. He had to admire her tenacity. It was mildly infuriating. But the things she had shown Janique had set events in motion that required action on his part. The showboating to Prail would have to wait.
That presented a problem. Pex had set up the changes he wanted to enact, but hadn't actually made any of them. It was going to be his grand reveal. He'd be working without a net, unless he could relinquish his need to one-up his sister.
He decided to try and get her attention. He went to her McDonald's at the evening shift change. Darcy of the blonde pigtails was walking to her Fiat.
"'Scuse me, uh, Darcy. Is Prail working?"
"Who?"
Pex thought about it.
"Black hair? Square glasses? Petunia?"
"Patricia," Darcy said.
"Oh, right."
"Is she your girlfriend, then?"
"No, my sister."
"You can't remember your sister's name?"
"It's a long story," Pex said. "Want to take in a movie?"
"What, tonight? Now?"
She was flattered, and the emotion shone on her face.
"Yes. Tonight. Now."
"I've only just met you., erm-"
"Pex."
"Pex, is it?"
"Yes."
"What movie?"
"Star Wars, of course."
"Star Wars? What's that?"
"You'll see," Pex said. "Can we take your car?"
"Get in," she said with a smile.
Prail didn't show up until they had parked and walked to the theater. It was suddenly 1977.
"Hello, Pex," she said. "Darcy."
"Two, please," he said. "Go on ahead, Darce."
She looked at them both somewhat warily, as if she possibly wasn't buying the sister thing, and then Prail said, "Good seeing you again."
Unable to counter this kindness, Darcy smiled and walked inside, ahead of a line that stretched around the block. This wasn't going to Pex's liking.
For one thing, when he'd planned it, it was going to be daylight. Leave it to her to thwart the very fundamentals of what he was attempting. He followed the script anyway. She began her assault by saying nothing.
He had, at a minimum, a hundred well thought-out responses, none of which made any sense with a proper lead-in taunt, which Prail was now thoughtlessly withholding. Pex limped along, his simple scenario in tatters.
"See that sun over there? Wait."
He began again.
"Oh, yeah? See that sun over there?"
Prail supernovaed it on the other side of the planet.
"That's not a moon," she said. "That's a space station."
"Wrote it," Pex said, and exploded into billions of particles. Each went and performed a single function.
"What took you so long?" Prail asked, doing her best to remain unimpressed.
At the same time, she wanted to show off on her own. She briefly considered explaining her complexity theory to him, and decided against it. She could feel a certain bleakness at his core, however, and it was unnerving. It was very unlike her brother as she knew him.
She decided to indulge him.
Prail waited for him to blink, which took seemingly forever. When he finally did, the afternoon sun was over his shoulder."
"Try again," she said. "Pex, the reason that the sim is so complex-"
"Oh, yeah? See that sun over there?"
He gestured with his thumb.
"It's not a sun. It's a partially exploded atomic warhead."
"Okay..." Prail said.
"A bomb."
"And?"
Pex detonated it. Everything was back to normal in an instant, with only he and Prail the wiser.
"Feel better now?" she asked.
"Not really, no."
"It was very impressive, Pex," she said consolingly.
"Really?"
"Oh, yes. Real supergod stuff."
He studied her face, but if she was referring to his hack, it wasn't revealed there.
"I have to go," he said. "Your friend is making real trouble."
"Said the guy who took some poor girl on a date two years in the future, and then exploded the sun..."
Pex scrawled something on a piece of paper.
"You're not interpreting all of the data. Think 'little endian'."
He haded her the decode equation and turned to leave.
"Wait! What about your date?"
"What?"
"The girl. Darcy."
"You handle her for me, would you. I'm no good at these things. I just needed her to get your attention."
"She's two years in the future!"
"Give her some good memories? And a suitable bank account?"
"Pex, you're a total bastard!"
"If so," he said, "you made me one."
And then he walked off.
Prail wasted no time getting back to her workstation. She wrote a new routine to decode Pex's transmissions, inverting the byte order and processing it via the equation he had given her.
She was again assailed with mountains of data. Prail noticed it was an array of arrays, XYZ points of sub-decimal numbers. This, she could work with. She picked a random point in the stream, and directed the output of the routine to her shader/renderer.
The first two attempts yielded bizarre shapes that she could not discern. On her third shuffle, she got it right. Pex had made her work for it, but it was worth it.
The lower torso of a female began to fill the display. Startled at what she recognized, Prail stepped backward through the dataset a bit and restarted the process. What she got in exchange was a very accurate nude model of herself. She was bald, and otherwise hairless, but it was definitely her body.
She laughed at his temerity and cheek.
Bastard, indeed. While she was decoding the rooms he sent her, he'd been compiling data on the human form. Without really trying, he'd done three-quarters of her sim for her. The easy parts, to be sure. But it was sweet.
[image error]
Prail had had it with Pex. No more helping him.
He could pick on her all he wanted, but insulting the stimulation she was developing really hurt her feelings. She wished she knew how to make his life more terrible, but he was pretty much bottomed out and seemed to enjoy it there.
His random actions and lack of proper motivation put all of her test results in jeopardy. If others played the game like Pex, her simulation would be worthless. Plus she had her hands full with Janique, who was tampering with timelines and realities that were better left alone. It was scary how obsessive she had become so quickly.
###
On the way back to the shelter, Pex found a twenty-five pence piece on the sidewalk. He looked up after retrieving it, and he was in front of a McDonald's. His stomach rumbled. Given the late hour, her knew Prail wasn't there.
Instead, he went to Cairo, an Egyptian-themed casino mixed in among the pubs on the south end. Pex walked up to the roulette wheel and placed the coin on double zero. The croupier noticed and immediately gave it back.
"Ya need chips, mate. And it's a two-pound minimum bet."
Saddened, Pex walked toward the door, passing the slot machines on the way out. He considered playing one of them and trying to push the machine, but figured Prail would just find a way to thwart him, so he didn't bother.
Outside on the sidewalk, he stopped the first person he encountered, an elderly blue-haired woman, and said, "Excuse me, young lady. May I please have one pound seventy-five?"
She stopped and looked at Pex, who looked like a skinny lumberjack who'd been lost in a helicopter accident, and had just wandered into town, having spent four days in the wilderness. She pulled a two-pound note from her purse.
"You're not going to get a drink with this, are you?" she asked before handing it over.
"No, ma'am. I'm going to gamble it," Pex told her.
"Well, I never," she said with a mix of compassion and scorn, and walked off.
Pex stopped the next person, a middle-aged, working class man in the bib overall of a tradesman.
"'Scuse me, sir. Lemme a fiva?"
The man stopped.
"Lend you? A fiver? You just asked her for one pound seventy-five."
"You look like a working man," Pex said, losing his accent. "Money in your pocket. Knows the value of a money and a man's word. I'll pay you back tomorrow."
"Tomorrow, eh?" the man laughed, reaching for his wallet.
"Same time, same place," Pex agreed.
He didn't believe him, of course, but he did like his audacity. He handed Pex a five pound note.
"Sure you will. Have on, then."
"See you tomorrow," Pex said, walking off.
He returned to the casino and bet double zero on the roulette wheel again.
Only he was unsurprised when he won. Grumbling slightly, as if he had been cheated, the croupier paid out his winnings, a thirty-eight-to-one long shot. Pex tipped him a fiver, which soothed his injured ego. Then he went to McDonald's Prail was not there. Another unhappy meal.
###
Prail was instead keeping an eye on Janique full-time. The real problem, she observed, was that Janique thought that things were simple. And no matter how many times Prail tried to show her the hidden complexity, her beliefs persisted.
She was beginning to suspect that Janique wanted to kill them just for the challenge it presented. When she watched her kill their dogs, she very nearly grew angry. Her madness was so compelling, Prail began to view her actions from within Janique. There was an enormous amount of backstory and complexity to be found there.
Prail watched horrific scenarios of rape and torture, ending with the bodies of both Jason and Johnnie bound in chicken wire, weighted with cinder blocks, and dumped into the swamp.
But she also saw the parts Janique did not.
She saw the offer being made to Jason, which he accepted, to die in the place of his future wife. He went through the ordeal not once, but twice. In the last instant before the bound bodies hit the water, Prail saw their faces turn into Pex's.
Not only had he beaten her out of what she was trying to achieve, he left her with the memory of succeeding. To further complicate things, Janique's naive attempts were having far-reaching implications that even Prail hadn't anticipated. She was essentially making it harder on herself, and by extension, for her as well.
This time, when Janique reappeared in the lab, she didn't boast, "Got 'em!" or anything of that nature. But Prail could feel her belief that she had achieved her goal.
"You need to stop," Prail told her. "You're Florida State University. That means you're fucking shit up."
"What?"
"Where have you been?"
"Oh, nowhere, really. Checked on Chris. Why?"
"You're turning into a monster. He's in 1984 now, look."
"Is that an important year?"
"So important they wrote a book about it," Prail said.
"But..." Janique started to say.
She was whisked away to an apartment in Las Vegas. Jason sat at a huge desk with a gallon bottle of pink heart tablets that she instantly recognized as speed. She looked over his shoulder and read what she could. It was a song, and there were gaps in it, but Janique got the gist of it:
"Turning my attention to the Nazarene
His eyes plead for mercy, it seems
...
Without proof of their faith
The priests' faith now ends
Darkness covers the world
As a deadly new Satanic age begins"
She wondered why Prail elected to bring her to this particular point, as she would rather have read the entire song, but it didn't matter. Prail needed to check her premise. A few scenes later, and Jason and friend Terry conduct an impromptu sacrifice. They burned a roach to death with matches, and left a tiny upside-down cross next to the body.
"Aww," Janique said. "That's cute. It's actually sort of sweet."
"You have no idea," Prail said. "Then they killed some kid in the desert. Tim something. They don't know they did it."
"So?" Janique said.
"It's your interfering with their lives that's making him do these things. Every time you try and kill them, he'll retaliate sevenfold."
They were back at the labs. Janique was disappointed because she had wanted to see the boy in Vegas die.
"Well, if I can't kill them, I'll make their lives so miserable, they'll kill themselves."
"That might work, I suppse," Prail said, tiring of the conversation.
Let Janique believe what she wants. Pex would handle it. At least she hoped he would.
###
Pex had to laugh. If he didn't, he'd go insane. Like them. He'd done his homework and predicted correctly. Now he needed Prail's attention, and she was of course missing in action. He had to admire her tenacity. It was mildly infuriating. But the things she had shown Janique had set events in motion that required action on his part. The showboating to Prail would have to wait.
That presented a problem. Pex had set up the changes he wanted to enact, but hadn't actually made any of them. It was going to be his grand reveal. He'd be working without a net, unless he could relinquish his need to one-up his sister.
He decided to try and get her attention. He went to her McDonald's at the evening shift change. Darcy of the blonde pigtails was walking to her Fiat.
"'Scuse me, uh, Darcy. Is Prail working?"
"Who?"
Pex thought about it.
"Black hair? Square glasses? Petunia?"
"Patricia," Darcy said.
"Oh, right."
"Is she your girlfriend, then?"
"No, my sister."
"You can't remember your sister's name?"
"It's a long story," Pex said. "Want to take in a movie?"
"What, tonight? Now?"
She was flattered, and the emotion shone on her face.
"Yes. Tonight. Now."
"I've only just met you., erm-"
"Pex."
"Pex, is it?"
"Yes."
"What movie?"
"Star Wars, of course."
"Star Wars? What's that?"
"You'll see," Pex said. "Can we take your car?"
"Get in," she said with a smile.
Prail didn't show up until they had parked and walked to the theater. It was suddenly 1977.
"Hello, Pex," she said. "Darcy."
"Two, please," he said. "Go on ahead, Darce."
She looked at them both somewhat warily, as if she possibly wasn't buying the sister thing, and then Prail said, "Good seeing you again."
Unable to counter this kindness, Darcy smiled and walked inside, ahead of a line that stretched around the block. This wasn't going to Pex's liking.
For one thing, when he'd planned it, it was going to be daylight. Leave it to her to thwart the very fundamentals of what he was attempting. He followed the script anyway. She began her assault by saying nothing.
He had, at a minimum, a hundred well thought-out responses, none of which made any sense with a proper lead-in taunt, which Prail was now thoughtlessly withholding. Pex limped along, his simple scenario in tatters.
"See that sun over there? Wait."
He began again.
"Oh, yeah? See that sun over there?"
Prail supernovaed it on the other side of the planet.
"That's not a moon," she said. "That's a space station."
"Wrote it," Pex said, and exploded into billions of particles. Each went and performed a single function.
"What took you so long?" Prail asked, doing her best to remain unimpressed.
At the same time, she wanted to show off on her own. She briefly considered explaining her complexity theory to him, and decided against it. She could feel a certain bleakness at his core, however, and it was unnerving. It was very unlike her brother as she knew him.
She decided to indulge him.
Prail waited for him to blink, which took seemingly forever. When he finally did, the afternoon sun was over his shoulder."
"Try again," she said. "Pex, the reason that the sim is so complex-"
"Oh, yeah? See that sun over there?"
He gestured with his thumb.
"It's not a sun. It's a partially exploded atomic warhead."
"Okay..." Prail said.
"A bomb."
"And?"
Pex detonated it. Everything was back to normal in an instant, with only he and Prail the wiser.
"Feel better now?" she asked.
"Not really, no."
"It was very impressive, Pex," she said consolingly.
"Really?"
"Oh, yes. Real supergod stuff."
He studied her face, but if she was referring to his hack, it wasn't revealed there.
"I have to go," he said. "Your friend is making real trouble."
"Said the guy who took some poor girl on a date two years in the future, and then exploded the sun..."
Pex scrawled something on a piece of paper.
"You're not interpreting all of the data. Think 'little endian'."
He haded her the decode equation and turned to leave.
"Wait! What about your date?"
"What?"
"The girl. Darcy."
"You handle her for me, would you. I'm no good at these things. I just needed her to get your attention."
"She's two years in the future!"
"Give her some good memories? And a suitable bank account?"
"Pex, you're a total bastard!"
"If so," he said, "you made me one."
And then he walked off.
Prail wasted no time getting back to her workstation. She wrote a new routine to decode Pex's transmissions, inverting the byte order and processing it via the equation he had given her.
She was again assailed with mountains of data. Prail noticed it was an array of arrays, XYZ points of sub-decimal numbers. This, she could work with. She picked a random point in the stream, and directed the output of the routine to her shader/renderer.
The first two attempts yielded bizarre shapes that she could not discern. On her third shuffle, she got it right. Pex had made her work for it, but it was worth it.
The lower torso of a female began to fill the display. Startled at what she recognized, Prail stepped backward through the dataset a bit and restarted the process. What she got in exchange was a very accurate nude model of herself. She was bald, and otherwise hairless, but it was definitely her body.
She laughed at his temerity and cheek.
Bastard, indeed. While she was decoding the rooms he sent her, he'd been compiling data on the human form. Without really trying, he'd done three-quarters of her sim for her. The easy parts, to be sure. But it was sweet.
[image error]
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