Spanner 19.6: Drag You Down With Me

← ...from previous

Chaos Angel Spanner — Chapter 19: Hackers of Reality
Part 6: Drag You Down With Me

20 october 2014.
after school. Colette removes the textbooks and materials she needs from her locker in the main hallway. She hears footsteps behind her. She turns to see Shira. “Hi, Shira. Can you help me with this?”

“Sure.”

Colette gives Shira her backpack to hold, puts her books and materials in it, and zips it up. She turns around so Shira can put it on her. “Thanks.”

“No problem. I’d really love it if you could join us in the girls’ locker room next to the pool.”

She gives Shira a puzzled look. “How come?”

“The girls and I figured, since you came back with a new body, we need to have a good look at it, so we need you to be naked for us. Okay?”

Colette sighs. “Okay. I’ll do it, just this once.”

locker room. Their friends are already naked when they arrive: Karen, Jennifer, Leila, Fiona, Polly, Brandi, and Marina from Team Bremelo; Lorelei, Chuck, Lyssa, and Lorine from the GSA; exchange students Fuyumi, Harumi, Anna, Régine, Elena, and Sana. They strip Colette naked, hug her one by one, cry together with her, shower her with kisses. When Shira’s turn comes, she sighs with relief to see her naked. Their love for her overwhelms her. Finally, she throws herself into Karen’s arms. They hold each other as tight as they can and cry together with all their heart. Still crying, Colette stands on her toes and gives her a long hard sweet kiss for a minute or more. Their friends cheer them loudly.

When the kiss ends, the girls fall silent so Colette can speak. “Karen, I never realized how much I love you until they took me away from you. If you ask me to marry you, there’s no way I can say no.” She kisses Karen again, and the girls cheer them again.

Karen and Shira help her onto the closest bench. Karen says, “I noticed you’re an inch shorter than before you disappeared.”

“The body they gave me was thirteen or fourteen equivalent. But I’ll gladly take this over brain damage and severe trauma any day.”

The girls study Colette’s body closely, looking at her, feeling her smooth skin, squeezing her soft flesh, making themselves familiar. The ones familiar with her former body — Karen, Shira, Jennifer, Polly, and Lorine — make comparisons between her new body and the old. Then they kiss her body all over; Lorelei, Chuck, Lyssa, and Harumi join them.

After she comes down, Karen says, “Colette, we want you to know that you belong to us. We totally love you and we’ll always be here for you, always.” The girls shout, whoop, howl their agreement. Through free-flowing tears, Colette silently mouths the words: I love you.

Then the boys come in, themselves nude: Kio, Dexter, Cory, Rob, and Connor. Colette shrieks and tries to hide her nakedness from them. Kio strokes her hair, then gently moves her arms so he can see her body. He takes her in his arms and kisses her deeply. Her body shudders with sobs and pleasure. Once he lets her go, she shyly allows the other boys to see her body. She studies their

Shira and Polly cover the hard wooden bench with a soft layer of towels and gently guide Colette onto it. She lies on her back, her body open for all to see; she blushes hot and red. First Kio makes love to her gently, then Shira more roughly, then Dexter, Leila, Cory, Jennifer, Rob, Lorelei; they fuse together in the heat of ecstasy until she forgets about Connor.

Karen shakes her out of her waking dream. Gently she lies on top of her friend. They stare into each other’s eyes. Colette asks, “You too?”

“If you want.”

“Please?”

Karen nods happily, then presses her lips to hers. She kisses down Colette’s trembling body, all over her breasts, down to her sex, makes love to her with her tongue, drinks deep...

bus. The two sideways seats in front of the back seat each seat three: Jennifer, Shira, and Polly on one side; Lorelei, Harumi, and Colette on the other. “Why didn’t Karen wanna come?” asks Colette.

“She wants to meet us back at my place. She’s ordering the food.”

Lorelei puts her arms around Colette. “You all right now?”

“I guess I am now. I love you guys.”

Washington Avenue. Karen decides to walk the short distance between the ferry terminal Shira’s apartment. She walks slowly so she can enjoy the crisp cool autumn evening air.

But when she reaches the Burwell Street light, people flee from her screaming. Suddenly she finds herself surrounded by enraged cops.

“Freeze! Get down on the ground now! You’re under arrest for insubordination and treason!”

Major Falconer has none of their patience. Before the cops can tase Karen, she leaps out of the nearest squad car, jumps her, and holds her from behind with a knife to her throat. “Now I got you, little witch! I’m gonna kill you myself and all your peacenik traitor friends!” She bites Karen’s ear as hard as she can, hoping to bite it off.

“Honey! Don’t be a fool!” shouts Admiral Fleer. Alan James Fleer is a big man, tall and stout, a former weightlifting champion and professional wrestler. He towers over Karen and Falconer like a Viking warrior king and glares down at Karen with the Berserker’s blood fury. “Peace,” he spits. “You want peace.” He grabs Karen by the throat, right out of Falconer’s arms, and holds her up by one hand to his hate-contorted face. “You’re desecrating the sacred honor of all the warriors who ever sacrificed their lives for America! That’s worse than treason! That’s blasphemy!”

With his mighty fist, Fleer punches Karen in the stomach as hard as he can.

Karen is bound and gagged. Someone kicks her forward. It is Alan Fleer, in full uniform, the one-star flag of the American Empire behind him.

Admiral Fleer:
Attention, liberal traitors of Cascadia. You have betrayed America for the last time. I have possession of one of your own. If you do not surrender collectively and unconditionally to the eternal dictatorship of Jesus America immediately, I will treat her the way a traitor should be treated. She will suffer the torments of hell while she still lives. Then she will die.

I will do the same to all of you, one after another, until you surrender to my will and proclaim me your king. You will also bring me the head of Shira Thomas. You have only twenty-four hourse.

ESPNBC: Admiral Alan Fleer has announced he has put the liberal traitor Karen Kubota under his personal custody—

Leila gasps in horror — Colette screams — Polly faints — Shira’s eyes narrow, her face hardens — Jennifer says, “Our move. Think fast—

The eight-bit mask of Spanner appears in front of a pixilated and jerkily animated Imperial flag.

Spanner:
Well, well, well. Big Al was never a subtle one. He’s publicizing his latest crime. It’s a kidnapping. He’s got a hostage, and she’s a pretty one, mmmm, mmm. Considering what you’ve already seen of him, bets are he’ll use her as a play toy. Maybe, just maybe, he might even drink her blood. He always wanted to be a vampire like the Beckets, with their amazing superpowers. That’s why he married one.

But before Big Al has his fun, he has a use for her. I wonder what his demand is? Chances are, you already know. In fact, he’s just bragged about it to the whole world.

Fifteenth Street. Rachel Brinkman and her brother Bob walk up the hill as they go home from school. Suddenly they find Leila in their way. Rachel asks, “Leila, what’s wrong?”

“Tell me you don’t have anything to do with this.”

Bob shrugs. “We don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s Karen.”

Rachel gasps in fear. Bob grabs Leila by the arms. “What happened to her?”

“She’s been kidnapped. It was Falconer. And Fleer. They used COPCO agents.”

Rachel screams. Bob holds Leila tight. “Oh my god—”

“Is she okay?” asks Rachel.

“Probably not,” says Leila. “What Fleer’s about to do to her, he already did to me.” A black van skids to a stop behind her.

Lars Izquierdo leans out the passenger-side window. “Hey, gorgeous. You called?”

“You guessed right,” says Leila. Arisa opens the sliding door and pulls Leila in. She waves to her cousins, then pulls the door shut as the van speeds off.

Slasher Hunter van. Arisa buckles Leila in and holds her tight. “You don’t look too happy tonight,” she says.

John Peck says, “I gather you heard the news.”

“Everybody did. Fleer announced it on the news.”

Through tears and gritted teeth, Leila explains, “Fleer was the one who kidnapped me from Pretty City. You don’t know about it ’cos my grandfather kept it quiet. He held me for ransom. While he had me, he beat and raped me. Grandfather caved in. Then he trapped me in a marriage arrangement to a serial killer. I’ll never forgive Grandfather for that. But it wasn’t Thorwald of Biotron who trapped me. No. It was Fleer. For that, he needs to die. Slowly.”

Peck says, “I’m afraid he’s protected by his position.”

“And the entire Party. You wanna know what their precious revolution’s really like, look at Fleer.”

Arisa says, “So you wanna bring him down and cash him in?”

“I’m not like Shira. I don’t care for the money.”

Lars says, “I saw that supervillain ransom note of his. I sensed an ulterior motive.”

“Karen’s the head of our school Peace Committee. She’s heavily involved in organizing the Student Union. We plan to hold a student body peace rally on Halloween, not because of the day, though Samhain’s more than a little inconvenient, but because it’s the Friday before Election Day. This is exactly the kind of bullying we plan to protest against. Now I so badly want it to happen for Karen. But how?”

“You know what he’s doing, don’t you?”

“Putting out fires with napalm. That’s how Shira would put it.”

“Now think about this: what would Shira do?”

I light goes on in Leila’s eyes. “Hmmm.”

Mudlark House. Once Willa drives her van into the garage, seven girls get out. Following Polly, Fiona, and Harumi, Shira helps a sobbing Colette out and holds her tight; Jennifer and Lorelei hug her from behind, and the other girls turn it into a group hug. “Colette, it’s not your fault.”

“Yes it is.”

“It’s Fleer’s fault, not yours.”

“Then why don’t you kill him?!”

“And make him an immortal martyr? He doesn’t realize that’s what he’s doing to Karen.”

“But he’s killing her!”

“We’ll bring her back. But we can’t kill Fleer.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t fight fire with napalm. You put it out with CO₂.”

Spanner:
Alan Fleer is holding a beautiful hostage. [show school picture of Karen] He is demanding unconditional surrender. He is threatening to kill Karen Kubota, a high-school peace activist, if the so-called liberal traitors of Cascadia don’t surrender to him and his god unconditionally. He is an Admiral of the United States Navy, yet he is acting exactly like a terrorist.

[show official Navy picture of Fleer in front of the flag, complete with medals]

Guess what? He is a terrorist. The uniform, the medals, the honors, the patriotism, the years of faithful service? All of it is a lie.

In my hands I possess the death of Alan Fleer. If he brings harm to young Karen Kubota, if he rapes her like he did her best friend Colette Rosewater, if he orders an attack on the so-called liberal traitors of Cascadia, I will show you his true nature right here on this channel. I will expose him to the burning sun of public awareness. And then, like a vampire in sunlight, Alan Fleer will die.

You have already had a preview of his death. Here’s more.

Another one of Eden Fleer’s adultery tapes plays. This time, a naked Honey Sue Falconer sodomizes him with a cattle prod. Electrical clamps on his penis, painful in themselves, connect it to a car battery. He begs her to up the voltage. She complies.

Eleventh and Callow. The intersection is blocked by the collision of a COPCO squad car with a black stretch Hummer. A block away, the Slasher Hunters get out of their van and run toward the crash. They find Sparks holding his pistol to the head of Arvid Shield.

Leila runs to Sparks and tries to pry the gun out of his hand. “Stop it! Stop it!”

Arvid says, “Leila! Calm down.”

She lets go of Sparks’ arm and sighs in despair.

“You really should put the gun down, Jim. You need my help more than anything.” To the Hunters he says, “I’m glad you came.”

“Fleer’s out of control,” says Peck.

“I gave the videos to Shira. I told her to make good use of them. Fleer is overreacting. We should have expected this.”

Sparks holsters his pistol. Leila runs into Arvid’s arms. “Looks like she can’t pull it off by herself anymore.”

“She isn’t.”

“She has us.”

“She also has Eden Fleer.”

admiral’s house. Dorian and Christian stare each other down. “Father should have killed the bitch right there,” Christian snarls.

“Really,” says Dorian coldly. “He’s making America look like a banana republic.”

Charmian screams, “Stop it, you two!”

“You’re a damn fool!” shouts Christian.

“Father’s lost his mind!” yells Dorian.

The three sisters stare at each other angrily. Tears stream down their faces. Julian cowers in the corner of the room. They remain silent for a seeming eternity.

Suddenly they hear a scream from the bathroom. The four of them run together. Lillian is slumped in the doorway, unconscious. While Julian tries to wake her, the others spot blood stains on the shower curtain. Christian opens it.

In the bathtub, they find their mother — naked, bloody, dismembered, dead — rope burns, saw marks, signs of torture—

on to the next... →

Back to Chapter 19 index...
Back to Chaos Angel Spanner table of contents...

Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

[Revision 2, 9/30/11: The kidnapping, Leila/Rachel/Bob, van, and intersection scenes heavily modified from the first-draft original to fit the new continuity; everything else is new material. New edit: Removed editing note to self and corrected HTML error.]
[Revision 3, 10/2/11: Expanded locker room scene as part of the Chapter 7 edit.]

Spanner 19.5: Live Zombies

The final edited versions of Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 are now complete, so I realized the new second scene I added to this installment calls back to not just Part 3.6, but Part 2.3 and even Part 5.6 as well. Be sure to go back and read those first three chapters. Some of the new changes are subtle, but others are important, and even relevant this late in the story. (Note: the character originally called Nicole is now Colette, a change I’ve been considering for a week. Now to re-edit Chapter 4...)

← ...from previous

Chaos Angel Spanner — Chapter 19: Hackers of Reality
Part 5: Live Zombies

19 october 2014.
technosphere. The Fearsome Foursome hold an emergency video conference. R.G. Litton is the man on the spot. Brinkman says, “That young lady is going too far, Mr Litton. Why aren’t you

Litton frowns. “You guys realize you’re on hostile territory, don’t you.”

Jack Becket snaps, “What the hell are you talking about, Litton?”

“You’re on the West Coast. Big cities full of liberal socialists with no religion who call the Church of America a cult. If we weren’t here to hold ’em back, they’d be going round naked and fucking in the streets. You’re in Ecotopia, not America.”

Everson snarls, “You forget, Mr Litton, that God owns the world, and America is God.”

“To them, this is a colony and you’re a foreign company. Ecotopia ain’t no more America than Japan, Germany, or Egypt.”

Fleer shouts, “Then we do what God tells us to do! We make it American! By force!”

“Let’s not talk about us,” says Brinkman. “Let’s talk about this Shira Thomas and how she is, as they say, owning you.”

“You want it, you got it.” Litton explains, “Y’see, Shira Thomas has home field advantage and all the big-city liberals are her twelfth man. She’s their outlaw folk hero, the Calamity Jane of the airwaves. They’ll protect her just like the Sicilians hid Lucky Luciano from the FBI. You can’t win ’em over with publicity or warnings. Scandal won’t work; she cultivates her bad reputation. Killing her’ll only make her a martyr, and we don’t want any more martyrs against the revolution.”

“What about force?”

“You tried that. Twice. Both times, she used her sock puppet the Monkeywrench against you. Now she’s out in the open saying nyah, nyah, nyah right in your faces, and the slobs’re eatin’ it up.”

“Then what the hell do we do?”

“First, you activate your sleepers. Second, you hire the Molotov twins.”

The shocked Foursome cry out in unison: “What?!

techGothic. Sparks drives Shira to Seattle’s Underground City. As they make their way in, she notices for the first time something disturbingly wrong about the naked go-go dancers in their shiny white high-heeled leather boots. She runs up to one, a dead-looking goth girl covered in black flame tattoos, in order to inspect her. “Skin’s gray, all right. So it’s not a trick of the light.”

He sniffs at the dancer, then looks at Shira. “Formaldehyde?”

“Deadbots.”

“Say what?”

“These go-go dancers are computer-animated corpses.”

His mouth drops open; he points at the dancer. “Jesus H. fuck — I recognize this one!”

“You actually knew this woman?”

“Serial killer fangirl Ollie whacked right in front of me couple o’ days after the Spanner Incident. See the knife marks?”

She notices multiple sutures on and between its breasts, one across the slashed throat, and one all the way across her forehead indicating that the top of its skull was removed. “Wow. I wonder if this was what she actually wanted to be.”

“Funny, I never noticed at first, but then these girls don’t move like they’re dead at all.”

Supple muscles contract and breasts bounce as if the body were still living. “Must have converted her while she was still freshly dead.” She climbs up onto the platform, into the spotlight, right in front of the dancer. She looks carefully at the blank dead face. She waves her hand in front of its eyes; it doesn”t notice her. She gazes intently into them for a minute. “Those lovely eyes are glass,” she says to him, “like blind people use.” She jumps back down with a huge grin on her face. “Our girl’s a silicon-brained dance machine. SRL, eat your hearts out. I wonder if she does sex.”

Sparks wobbles, nauseous. He says nothing.

The club’s owner, a middle-aged and Greek-accented Leather Primitive named Hassan, strides up to them. “Her name is Ebony Dementia, and yes, as soon as she saw our other dead dancers, she was overcome by the desire to become one herself. Isn’t she amazing?”

Shira turns her head and flashes him a mischievous cockeyed grin. “She’s absolutely decadent. How’d you make her?”

“One of our regulars invented the process of turning dead people into robots using a special chemical treatment best applied to a fresh corpse before it goes into rigor mortis. If you want, you can ask him to explain it in detail.”

“I bet that’s how your club got your name... Does your inventor have a name?”

“He prefers to be called the Toymaker.”

Shira’s mouth drops; she stares at Sparks. “That must be how he got his handle.” She smiles again at Hassan. “Where do you find your, uh, volunteers?”

“Some of our more lethal regulars are surrounded by female... admirers.”

“Worshippers, more like. Who die eagerly at the hands of their idols so they can be turned into dancing corpses.”

“There is no accounting for human perversity.” Hassan shrugs.

“Have anybody recognizable asked your guy to turn their bodies into dancing deadbots?”

Hassan laughs. “If they were, they would be highly coveted indeed.”

Shira taps her phone to show him Colette’s school photograph. “Is this part of her collection?”

“Why, we just collected her last month. Does she have a name?”

“Colette. She’s a friend of mine. I wanna acquire her. How much do you want?”

“Are you buying her for the sentimental value?”

“No, I’m buying it for her.” She winks.

Sparks says, “I thought you were trying to stop this kind of shit, Shira.”

Hearing her name, Hassan puts his hands on her cheeks and looks at her closely. “Shira? Say, you’re the Loca Fantoma from MyTube!”

Shira grins. “He wins the Cheezy Prize™.”

“You’re playing a deadly game, Miss Shira Thomas.”

“I always play to win. Their strong points are money, guns, and religion. Where are they weak? Scandal, corruption, and especially sex.”

“Shira my darling, you are but one person. There’s no way you can bring these people down by yourself.”

“I don’t need to. The System’s falling down by itself. Me, I’m just getting people out of the way so they don’t get crushed by the debris.”

Announcer:
Recent events prove the perversity of humanity. Police agents succumbing to the temptation of corruption, subversive forces trying to tear down the barriers that protect you from crime. COPCO has your public security solution.

Introducing the new generation of automatic agents, now equipped with the latest hardware and software antivirus and antihacker solutions. Trust COPCO to put the bite on crime.

20 october 2014.
Shira’s apartment. As soon as they wake up, Shira and Leila make love with fierce desperation. After they’re done in bed, they get into the shower and make love some more while they wash each other’s bodies. They eat breakfast with Hope and Ayla, then brush and floss their teeth together at the bathroom sink. Shira throws herself onto the living room couch; Leila lies on her back on top of her, and Shira puts her hands on her beautiful soft breasts.

“Do we have to go to school today?” asks Leila.

“Why not? Technically, we rule it now.”

“Two Student Councils and one angry fight club say we don’t, at least not yet.”

“I said, technically, love. They’re still in denial, so we’ll still have to fight.”

“I just wanna rest for a while.”

“You can always sleep in class.”

“The teachers’ll only yell at me.”

“Tell ’em, ‘Don’t bother me.’ Or just take a nap in one of the study rooms. Me, I’m sticking around. There’s some crazy shit goin’ down today, and I gotta be in on it.”

ferry terminal. The members of Team Bremelo limit themselves to friendly hugs and pecks on the cheek while Jack Becket’s copbots watch on. A Caliphate suicider causes a commotion. Leila looks questioningly at Shira. Shira winks. Leila smiles.

Suddenly Shira appears in the terrorist’s face and stares hypnotically into his eyes. His expression of absolute hatred fades behind the beard. She says, “You are totally unable to kill. Say it.”

“I am totally unable to kill,” he says wanly in a New Israelite accent. Great, she thinks. Another prison-gang convert.

bus. Charmian smiles weakly at Shira. She winks back. Leila flashes her lover a jealous look. Shira’s smile tells her, She’s no threat anymore. Trust me.

AEGIS appears only to Shira. She asks, How’s the trojan penetrating?

You only need to infect a few units, it replies.

There’s only one unit in a botnet. Capture the assimilant, and its zombies are yours.

school. Polly marvels at the cruel-looking androids scattered throughout the school. “How come all those copbots are here” Did we do anything wrong?”

Shira chuckles. “We were born not rich, that’s what. Everybody knows Jesus America only loves the rich.”

“Who said that?”

“Drusilla Becket herself.”

“God must especially love princesses,” says Polly sarcastically.

“Hey, they inherited the family jewels.”

noon. It begins within the sacred precincts of the Holy City arcology itself. In the towers filled with bureaucrats, in the halls of the police and spy agency headquarters, in the very courts of President Goldman Sachs & Co., Vice President Sarah AMERICA!, and the late King Patriot, millions of identical security androids rip their heads off their bodies and hold them high.

“It’s him!” scream several agents.

“Trace him!” commands Secretary Radisson.

The wave of robot suicides sweeps down into Texas and across the nation in a radar arc. Millions upon millions of copbots decapitate themselves in Dallas and Houston; Atlanta and Miami; Charleston and Charlotte; the long megalopolitan corridor from Norfolk, Virginia to Portland, Maine; through the ruined cities of the Rust Belt and the urban oases of the Midwest and into the mountains; into Cascadia and down the West Coast into California; and finally coming back through the Minuteman-ruled desert ruins of the Southwest.

Radisson stands before the king’s giant televised image. “See” I warned about this possibility, Your Majesty.”

“This Spanner is resourceful,” says the ghost. “He is an extremely dangerous man. You must find him and destroy him before he can work his way to Us, and to Our people.”

lunch. Several dozen robots stand motionless, holding their heads high above their bodies, useless. Some of them have already fallen to the floor. Students and teachers stare at them in horror or laugh at their impotence. The Fleer sisters, forgetting their enmity, hold each other protectively. Shira, Jennifer, and Steve look at the dead machines far more skeptically.

“So what’s the verdict?” asks Steve.

“Not a Single Point of Vulnarability this time,” Jennifer replies, “unless you consider their OS to be one. Knowing how much bureaucrats love their ‘one size fits all’ solutions, that probably comes with the territory.”

“Easy for you to say!” cries Charmian.

Dorian hugs her sister from the side. “Aw, calm down, Charms.” She kisses her on the cheek. Charmian sighs.

Jennifer does not bother to look at them. “Well, you’re nontechnical, so I guess you wouldn’t understand.”

“I doubt the weapons techs at Dictel Research understand any better,” says Steve.

“That’s what we’re counting on. Who knows what their robot agents could end up doing?”

“Or what might happen if an enemy botnet jacks ’em.”

“That too.”

Pan slowly along a row of COPCO security robots, all dead, all holding their heads high above them, the heads they tore off their own bodies.

Spanner:
Trust COPCO to put the bite on freedom in the name of freedom. Their freedom is the freedom to commit any crime with no consequences. Your freedom is the freedom from crime. That means: freedom from the criminals who rule you. The purpose of crime is to destroy freedom. Its target: you.

Freedom, or crime? Make your choice. You don’t have much time.

library. After school, Team Bremelo hold a strategy meeting at the central table. All three librarians join them: Sally Hatfield, Kitty Carlisle, and Christine Jordan.

“Now that nobody’s listening,” says Shira, “let’s plan for the inevitable big fight.”

“Which ones?” asks Polly.

“First the election, then Valiant Team’s attempt to prevent it.”

“We can’t just take over and rule the school like the old Student Council did and Valiant Team are trying to,” Jennifer adds. “We have to find some way to prove we’re better than them.”

“Yeah!” echoes Cory.

Karen stands up. “I know exactly what we need to do.”

“What’s that?” asks Shira skeptically.

“For those who don’t know, the Student Union voted to hold a rally against bullying on Halloween. Whoever shows up to try to break it up, whether it’s COPCO or Valiant Team, we’ll show the world we’re ready to stand together.”

“Yeah, and attract all the gangsters in Cascadia,” says Cory.

“And their bought and paid-for cops, too,” adds Kio.

Shira stands up and leans on the table to look strategic. “We’re keeping our strategy nonviolent.”

“Like how?” say Cory and Kio.

“Cory, you’re right that just holding a rally against bullying will just attract bullies like flies; they’ll take it as a Challenge, and then we’re back to fighting. If we wanna hold a rally, we gotta distract our enemies so their attention’s on each other and not us.”

Karen crosses her arms. “Shira and Cory, I love you to pieces, but I don’t believe we’ll be attracting all the gangs in the area.”

“Then you don’t know gangs, cousin. Word on the street says they’re taking this as a personal attack on their manhood. Since we girls are in charge, it feels like castration to their wounded egos. The Party doesn’t want to waste precious cops and radicals if they can manipulate the gangs into doing their dirty work for them. So we need to get the gangs to insult each other’s manhood so they pour their wrath on each other instead of us. That means disinformation and misdirection.”

Polly asks, “But what if somebody tries to stop us before then?”

“They’ll regret it. And they won’t know what hit ’em.” Shira winks.

on to the next... →

Back to Chapter 19 index...
Back to Chaos Angel Spanner table of contents...

Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

[Revision 2, 9/29/11: First two scenes, COPCO commercial, and Spanner piratecast are new material; techGothic scene then revised to add a second continuity nod. Shira/Leila love scene/dialogue originally from Chapter 18. Everything else heavily modified from Chapter 19 first draft.]

Spanner 19.4: The Memetic Terrorists

← ...from previous

Chaos Angel Spanner — Chapter 19: Hackers of Reality
Part 4: The Memetic Terrorists

19 october 2014.
restaurant. He said pick one at random. She said Italian. Now J.T. Sparks and Amanda Currie share an after-midnight Italian dinner together just one block from the Seabeck ferry. They’ll have a romantic road trip back home in the dark, and it gets them away from Bremerton.

A man plays romantic violin. Their wine is deep red. They touch their glasses together. Amanda says, “I was wondering if you still have any reasons to hate me.”

“Same reasons why I’d hate myself.”

“Do you still hate yourself?”

He shrugs. “I figured, why bother.”

She smiles. Her smile fades away. “Do you still have any feelings for her?”

He touches his face involuntarily. “Nothing positive. I hope.”

“If you do, can I kill her?”

“You wouldn’t be able to live with yourself if you did. Me, I don’t even wanna see her again. Let’s sic Desiree on her. On second thought, maybe I ought to stick around just to watch her torture the psycho bitch to death.”

She laughs, but stops herself. “I’m sorry.” She studies his face carefully. “She the reason you picked a different face?”

“There’s Dad, and there’s the bad guys, but other than that, yeah. I hope she’s disappointed.”

This time she lets herself laugh. “Have you been watching the duel on TV?”

“Shira had better be careful. You do not want to slip up against the Rat Bastard.”

“If you tell her that, you know what she’ll say.”

“‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll find his weak point.’”

“I want you to know I’m working on a story right now.”

“What if she finds out we’re together again?”

“I’d like to see her face. And if she’s connected, I’ll follow her all the way to Holy City.”

Shira’s apartment. Leila Shelley in a little black dress matching her elegantly bobbed hair. Fashionable black woollen cap tilted atop her hair. Black leather pumps, legs wrapped in sheer black hose. A thing of beauty.

Shira embraces her from behind. She gently pulls the strap off Leila’s left shoulder, down all the way to expose the beautiful firm breast, finger touching its soft pink cone. The nipple hardens beneath her fingertip. She plays with the right strap. “Please don’t do this,” Leila softly protests.

She gently kisses Leila’s pale shoulder. “You’re too beautiful for clothes. The mask only hides your beauty.”

“Not outside. They’ll crucify us if they see us like this.”

“Let them try and die.” Shira covers the white breast, puts the straps back in place, spins Leila around and catches her in her arms, pulls her close to kiss her — then stops halfway to gaze into her violet eyes.

“What are you doing?”

“Gazing into your eyes. I can never get enough of the sight of those beautiful deep orbs framed by soft silken cilia black as darkest night, those shimmering starlike spheres like vivaciously vivid velvet violets, purple as the ponderously pretentious prose I’m romantically spewing just for you, my sweet black rose.” Leila collapses onto her shoulder, laughing helplessly. Shira holds her tighter. Once Leila catches her breath, Shira gives her a long deep kiss.

This is the Emergency Alert System. [school picture of Shira appears on screen] Be on the lookout for Shira Thomas. She is suspected of subversive activities and possible child pornography. The Cascadia Public Management Corporation is putting out a reward— [the picture distorts]

Chesty Morgan is smothering John Holmes to death with her gigantic bare breasts. Shira slips in front of the scene.

Shira:
A price on my head? Moi? [laughs contemptuously] That’s right, Wally Brinkman’s putting yet another contract out on me. Rumor tells me this time I subverted a marriage he arranged. I stole the girl.

Attention hitmen: last time he put out a contract, the Slasher he hired met his happy end between the sweet cheeks of my beautiful brown ass. [turns around, slaps her short-skirted buttocks with both hands] Word to the wise guy.

Shira slips out of the picture. Chesty Morgan lets go of John Holmes. He falls backward, out of the picture, dead. Cut to the naked corpse. Freeze frame.

Shira’s apartment. Sunday morning. Two weeks ago, King Patriot’s attempt to seize dominion over the city of Seattle from its infidel majority led to his destruction in his own trap. One week ago, his grief-maddened followers attempted to destroy the city in revenge. The new day dawns to peace and no violence. The synarchs of Cascadia have retreated to their lairs to avoid the city and each other.

Hope lies back in her recliner. Ayla rests naked atop her body. The girl no longer feels shame at being nude in the house, not even in front of its normally naked inhabitants. Shira has taught her well.

The phone’s “emergency hotline” ringtone sounds: an extremely important video call. Hope sits up so that Ayla sits on her lap. “Please go to my room and read a book. This is an extremely dangerous man, and I need to talk to him alone.”

Ayla falls limp into her arms. “Aww...” Hope kisses her sweetly on the temple. She slinks off to the master bedroom. Hope puts on a robe, goes to the phone, and switches on the monitor. The face on the screen belongs to Richard Becket.

“Good evening, Miss Reston,” says the Chairman. “We have heard that your little election thing is going on, and we insist you people cease.”

“What? You’re firing the shareholders you said you fired already?”

“It is a well-known fact that one enlightened professional can manage far better than an infinite number of amateurs.”

“That’s just an assumption. The fact is that one man, no matter how enlightened, is even more capable of running the company into the ground. Your nephew’s running this state into the ground. Its shareholders are revolting for a reason.”

“Our most advanced management theories make shareholders unnecessary anymore. Management is sufficient.”

“Get out of your castle in the clouds, Chairman. Theory and practice are two completely different things. If the theory doesn’t work, no amount of forcing it will make it work.

“Miss Reston, I’m afraid your pie-in-the-sky socialist illusions are over.”

“My illusions? What about yours? Your System is already bankrupt, and you’ll keep denying it till the repo man comes for you. Goodbye, Mr Chairman.”

“Your funeral,” the Chairman snarls, “not mine.” He disappears from the screen to end the call.

“We’ll see about that,” says Hope anyway, in the exact words he expects.

Yoyodyne Arcology. Jack Becket goes directly to the Yoyodyne Defense Robotics Division’s main factory just outside Colorado Springs to make his order. Yoyodyne chairman George Cantrell personally gives him the grand tour. “We’ve improved our manufacturing processes to make it faster and easier to manufacture more of the robots you need, Mr Becket.”

“I think it’s more important to pay better attention to your software, Mr. Chairman. The problem isn’t the hardware. We need better security right in the operating system to foil the hackers who have been hijacking our systems.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to speak with Apple or Microsoft about that. We just buy their operating systems and run our control programs over that. Better yet, I’d suggest you go to Symantec and Network Associates. They specialize in software security systems.”

“We need better than that. We need hardware security. At Agency headquarters, our central system uses dedicated hardware firewalls that keep all but the most insanely dedicated criminal hackers out.”

“Well then, I’m afraid you’re dealing with the most insanely dedicated criminal hackers. Our on-board security is among the best in the business, good enough to win several industry awards.”

“Remember the name of Spanner, then. You’ll be hearing a lot more of it.”

admiral’s house. Vivian and Christian stare down their less ruthless sisters Dorian, Charmian, and Julian. Lillian hides from the increasingly violent conflicts in the basement. In the living room, Eden Becket Fleer screams at her husband the Admiral over his raging adulterous affair with Honey Sue Falconer.

Dorian and Charmian swallow all the love and admiration they once had for their eldest sister. “I hope you’re not defending Father’s affair with the Major,” says Charmian coldly.

“Forget about the Major,” Dorian says. “That’s a foolish passion they’ll both recover from once they regain their reason. But you, Vivian, were always Father’s favorite. If that video is true—”

Vivian snaps back, “That’s a lie, Dorian, and you know it. Don’t believe a terrorist.”

“Spanner has no idea what your body looks like, but I do. That was your body.”

Christian tries to punch Dorian, but Dorian parries. Christian screams in her face, “That’s impossible! Vivian wouldn’t do such a thing to Father!”

Charmian puts her arm around Christian. “Christie darling, everybody already knows about Father’s adultery with the Major, and that’s bad enough. But he can still atone for that. But his own daughter?”

“If the terrorist’s tape is real,” Dorian adds, ”then Father is out of both the Party and the Navy, and we’re finished. We might as well be... what’s the word?”

“Muggles,” Julian replies.

“So, dearest eldest sister mine, let us hope the terrorist forged that video, for your sake and ours.”

Vivian sneers, “You three are out of line. Forget everything and just do what Father and I tell you to do.”

“Very well.” Dorian turns away, walks to the door, turns back to face Vivian. “I don’t want to say I told you so.” She leaves, and Charmian and Julian follow her, into the living room where their parents are threatening to kill each other.

A line of identical female sexbots with oversized breasts, naked except for high-heeled go-go boots, dance together in mechanical lockstep. Shira steps in front of them. Zoom slowly onto her face.

Shira:
Did I hear all those politically correct people say there’s supposed to be a free market? My small-business friends beg to differ. They all say they’re the victims of crony capitalism. To which I say: crony? More like phony capitalism. The real reason for the Conservative Revolution is that the banksters and corporatists want government to pick the winners. [waves] Bye-bye, market freedom!

It’s not just the fact that nuclear power’s all the rage in America even though it’s too overpriced for the free market. It’s not just privatizing the police and giving some politically connected company called COPCO a no-bid monopoly at extra cost to non-rich taxpayers. It’s not just COPCO giving Biotron a no-bid contract for security robots at a similarly inflated price. It’s not just the head of CPMC selling his granddaughter to the head of Biotron so I’s have to defile her in order to save her. It’s this:

Cut to grainy digital video of COPCO Seattle chief John Cameron Becket, completely naked and having sex with a series of bizarrely shaped custom sexbots. Shira speaks in voice-over.

Shira:
That’s right, Mr and Mrs America. This is the kind of thing your taxes are paying for. Think about that.

Washington Avenue. Shira notices the streets are suspiciously empty even for a Sunday night. No one is there. She looks down Second, even Burwell (there is no Third Street): not a single person, though the Harborside Commons is still supposed to be open. No one walking the length of Fourth Street to get to or from the movie theatre two long blocks away on Park.

She skips and dances down the street, taking a good look at the city parking garage under demolition, relying on memory and intuition to find her way, and spinning back around at her building’s front door only to find R.A. Leggett sticking his Beretta 9mm in her face.

She smiles ironically. “Looking to collect?”

The MIAA punisher’s mirrored Ray-Bans fail to hide his permanent scowl. “I only deliver the penalty.”

She punches his wrist so his shot passes her ear. “Informing me of the Death of the Author?” She elbow smashes upward into his jaw; he staggers backward into the glass door. “Sorry, perfessor, I don’t grok that aporia.”

Leggett picks himself up, rushes back through the door — and finds nothing. Her backfist finds the side of his head from behind. He falls sideways, spins on hand and heels, fires three shots widely. Beauty bark from the nearest planter she throws in his face. Bark fragments infiltrate his mirrorshades. She kicks his knee. It stings. He shakes his shades, fingers his eyes clear, opens them to find three of her dancing in front of him, mocking him.

“I see,” says one. He fires at one phantom. Another says, “Neoliberal market socialism” [fires at second phantom] Another: “deconstructs the nexus” [shoots again; out of nowhere she hits him] “of mass and culture” [shoots again; his feet sweep from under him, and he lands hard; his gun shoots by itself] “reinforcing the structure of power” [shoots at a nothing; another nothing headbutts his skull from behind] “and distorting the narrative” [shoots up but she’s down; she roundhouses his jaw into a wall] “of cultural discourse.”

She lets him regain his footing. He holds the pistol out at her again. He puts the hot barrel to her forehead. She smiles ironically.

He pulls the trigger.

click

He tries to pistol-whip her. She catches his arm and wrenches it backwards. He feels his elbow bend the wrong way. He bites his tongue to keep himself silent.

“That’s the kind of bullshit excuse they make down in Pretty City, anyway, in academic word-saladese.”

Leggett grimaces, “You won’t get away with this, Thomas.”

“By the way, my fist wants to talk.” She lands a right uppercut on his jaw. He staggers backwards, keeping his feet only by a miracle. “My foot adds its comment.” Slipping behind him, she back-kicks his tailbone, sending him stumbling forward several feet. “End of discussion!”

He rolls on the sidewalk, comes up facing Shira’s direction, points his empty gun. She is gone.

on to the next... →

Back to Chapter 19 index...
Back to Chaos Angel Spanner table of contents...

Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

[Revision 2, 9/28/11: Hope Reston/Dick Becket and Yoyodyne scenes modified from first draft; everything else all new material.]

Spanner 19.3: Read Between the Lies

← ...from previous

Chaos Angel Spanner — Chapter 19: Hackers of Reality
Part 3: Read Between the Lies

An image of Pinocchio on the right of the screen.

Spanner:
They cannot tell the truth. [the nose grows] It’s against their religion. [it grows some more] If it’s true, they cannot tell you. [and more] If they did, they wouldn’t be the Chosen Ones. [finally it reaches the left edge of the screen]

They hoard truth. [the head expands] They keep you stupid. [it expands to the edges of its half of the screen] It boosts their egos. [it doesn’t stop expanding until it takes up the entire frame] They don’t do it because it’s right. They do it because they’re meaner than you. Knowledge is power. If ever they let you have some of it, their egos would...

The bloated head pops like a balloon. The picture goes black.

18 october 2014.
Shira’s apartment. Shira penetrates Leila with her strap-on. Leila attacks the black rubber rod as if it were a real man. Shira wields it like a warrior, plunges deep, hits her spot over and over. Leila loses her reason, her sense of self, her separation from the world, and the world explodes inside her body.

After they shower and dry off, they let in Jennifer, Connor, and Rob. They stay uniformed while Shira and Leila stay naked. They take their seats circling the coffee table. “Let’s see,” says Jennifer, “what do you think they’ll be up to this weekend?”

Shira replies, “They’ve already taken a series of major hits to their public opinion ratings, enough that the short sellers are circling ’em like sharks. Me, I’m dealing with the Rat Bastard. But don’t you keep complacent. Any news on the Student Union?”

“The weekend’s here and all homework should be done,” says Connor, “so we’re getting the real work done before school starts again on Monday.”

“Actually,” Jennifer adds, “some students are just throwing away their homework in frustration anyway. SPEC’s standards are getting more irrational by the minute now. I suspect the assassination of King Patriot sent management completely off the rails.”

Shira says, “Mom’s closer to the sinking ship, so she can tell us more about it when she gets back.”

Rob looks at Shira with his sister’s seductiveness. “Is it true you seduced your dad last night?”

Shira grins wickedly. “Leila tell you she watched?”

Announcer:
Two years ago, the Conservative Revolution saved America from certain destruction at the hands of its own Communists. But some people refuse to learn the hard lesson of 2012. They want to return us to the liberal lies of old. America needs conservative stability, not democratic chaos. People like Shira Thomas—

Shira appears, a green pillbox hat perched precariously atop her thick red mane, the lower half of her face hidden behind ten playing cards she holds in her left hand beneath her bright green eyes. She lowers the card to expose the mocking smile on her big sensuous lips.

Shira:
So CPMC’s campaigning against me. I thought they didn’t do elections anymore. Aren’t elections, well, liberal?

Wally, you’re taking a big gamble. You think you can rig the game ’cuz you own the house. Are you blind? You don’t see that I’m holding all the cards.

She thrusts her hand into the camera: all jokers. She flings the cards away and snaps her fingers.

Black Tower. “This is starting to look like a public relations disaster, Mr Litton,” says an increasingly frustrated Governor Brinkman.

“I ain’t worried,” Litton replies. “You play the best, you gotta push their limits.”

“This is not a game.”

“To her it is. She plays down and dirty, just the way I like it.”

“You’re betting the entire company on this. What if we lose?”

“If you do, it’s your fault. You hired me to clean up the mess you incompetents already left. So leave her to me. You just get out of my way and let me do my job.”

“Very well. But if you fail—”

Litton snaps, “I don’t fail. But I don’t trust you not to.”

Brinkman only glares back.

Pizza Mafia. For his favorite deliverer’s sake, Uncle Renzo orders his Mafia-suited goons to keep out all cops and Party spies. Shira knows that won’t keep away Jack Becket’s copbots, so she hacks up a series of misdirections to keep them away; as for Echelon, she sends its camdrones and bugbugs on celebrity duty. The restaurant closes down for a private meeting. Officially, the organization meeting there is Team Bremelo. Ostensibly the subject of the meeting is a Team Challenge that looks increasingly inevitable. They’re really meeting on Student Union business. After lunch, they get down to the business at hand.

Shira announces, “I move to hold the school elections the same day as the general election.”

“Good luck,” says Sparks skeptically. “CPMC management’s saying they already cancelled it, and Ol’ One-Eye says he intends to treat it like a foreign invasion.”

“More like native insurrection.” She puts her hand to her mouth and does an imitation Apache war cry. Everybody laughs. “Seriously, we natives are itchin ’ to take back control of our reservation, and we won’t let the Great White Fathers in Salem and Colorado Springs stop us. After all, they’re aliens to us, and we’re foreigners to them. So election, November 4th, non-negotiable.”

Karen stands up. “I second it!”

Lorelei stands up beside her. “I third it!”

All the Bremeloes and Student Union leaders stand up and cheer. Shira says, “Approved by unanimous acclamation. If the Great White Fathers got a problem with it, sucks to be them.”

Sparks holds his hands up to concede the point. “Okay, okay. Problem is, they consider the election a military threat. So how do you guys plan to handle their strike cops, copbots, and barbarian hordes?”

“We keep doing what we’ve been doing, and that’s use their ambition against each other.”

Jennifer explains, “In any authoritarian revolution, the power seekers inevitably battle the true believers as they rise to the top. The secret behind Thermidor and the Stalinist Terror is that eventually they win. When that happens, the revolution goes to hell; instead of being a dictatorship of people who want to force their ideals on everybody else, it turns into a dictatorship of people who want personal power at everybody else’s expense. Eventually, the revolution fails.”

“Let’s talk about just the Fearsome Foursome and friends. Fleer’s the fanatical idealist, but right now he’s in a tailspin ’cuz his wife doesn’t agree that polygamy’s a good idea. Brinkman, Ross, and your old man are the main opportunists, only out for a profit, and their portfolios are bleeding red ink right now. Dru and her bullyboys Everson and Scofield are waiting to put their wacko cult in control of the reservation so they can kill off all us Injuns. As long as they stay at each other’s throats, they can’t stop us.”

Polly asks, “What about the Student Council?”

“They really have no choice. It’s a two-party system now, and we’re the third. They’ll be running against each other, especially Christie versus Charms. They couldn’t even stop us if they tried.”

“Not even if they blow up the school?”

“If they do that, they’ve already conceded.”

Minuteman Bangor. In his base camp between the warehouse district and the nuclear submarine base, Braddock Green makes an order. “I want twenty bombs. Twenty.”

The creepy, raspy voice of the Toymaker replies over the phone, “How good do you want ’em?”

“Good enough to stymie Shira Thomas.”

“Not good enough.”

“Then good enough to slow her down.”

“It’s gonna cost you big time.”

“Price no object.”

KCUF studios. Shira leads her handpicked Team Bremelo delegation to the studio: Jennifer, Connor, Steve, Ken, Cory, and the Shelley twins. Deth Pussy greets them in the lobby. “Yo, babe! What brings you guys here this pissy weekend?”

“The Student Union agreed we should hold the school elections on Election Day, and the Peace Committee’s standing behind the big anti-bully rally on Halloween.”

Deth holds his hands out to gesture her to stop. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Not in this dictatorship!”

“Especially in this dictatorship. Everybody knows all the gangs are just itching to crash the party, so we already know we need to do to ’em beforehand. The Man’s why we’re here.”

Simon interrupts. “You wanna spread some rumors? You’re already doing a good job on your own.”

“Actually, I want the Government to start denying things. Starting with their incestuous relationship with the Mafias.”

“You’re saying, denial’s gonna help you guys?” asks Deth. “Get real, babe.”

Jennifer holds up a finger. “The Law of Plausible Deniability states: If the government and its official media deny something, that something is true by definition, especially if it’s false.”

“Let me get this straight. You say some funky shit about the Man. The Man denies it.”

“Publicly,” says Shira.

“And then because the Man says it’s false, it’s true. That about right?”

“Exactly! So the Law of Plausible Deniability allows us to use disinfo as a weapon. Remember what J.T. said? Most of the cops he knows are moles, working for the enemy, the Mobs, or the competition. We can use that against ’em, and that’ll give us civilians a little more leeway. What say you?”

Deth shouts to the whole studio crew. “Hey, anybody up for a Plausible Deniability campaign?” The entire studio erupts in cheers of assent. He holds out his hand toward the studio door and bows to Shira. “Have at.”

Desiree:
Reports are coming in from various cities showing COPCO agents accepting bribes from known figures of the Syndicates...

COPCO CEO Sparks:
There are rumors going around that this company has been infiltrated by crime syndicates. They are rumors. There are no Syndicate moles in this company.

COPCO Chief Becket:
There are no Mob moles in this company! How many times do I have to repeat it?

ABCNN: COPCO CEO Brendan Sparks has denied any infiltration by Mob agents—
QVCBS: COPCO CEO denies any moles in the company—
ESPNBC: CEO Sparks is denying that there are any Syndicate moles—
Sun: COPCO spokesmen deny—
Fox: COPCO has issued an official denial—

coffee shop. Sparks asks Shira, “Why’s that old bastard denying it?”

“Because it’s true. C’mon, Jim, you told me yourself.”

“I never thought I’d see him denying it officially.”

“We figured since they don’t like reality anyway, we’d give ’em a dose. They also seem to be operating on the assumption that what they don’t know won’t hurt ’em.”

“And they haven’t heard of the Law of Plausible Deniability.” J.T. takes a sip of his double Americano. “Where’d you guys get that, anyway?”

“Communism, of course. Then our ex-Commie friends turned America into the Soviet Union of the Right, so we applied the famous old CIA jargon phrase to it, and it stuck. It deals with truthiness, actually.”

“Or what’s not truthy, in this case.”

“By the way, how’s the “Rebel Rebel’ investigation going?”

Sparks laughs. “Everybody knows who’s behind it already, but we know she’s shielded by Incorporation privilege. But we’ve managed to follow her trail to all sorts of underground child pornographers. Some of ’em are pretty nasty work. I’m sure you know who I mean.”

“Hmmm...”

ESPNBC reporter:
COPCO employees marching outside the Public Safety Building, protesting persistent rumors that they’ve been targeted for takeover by the Syndicates...

KCUF studio. “That’s rich,” says Leila, watching the report on a monitor. “They just had a gang feud inside the company, and still they deny there’s any Mob connections?”

Shira replies, “Yes, for the same reason Fleer isn’t doing Honey Bunny, Everson isn’t doing orphans, One-Eye isn’t doing sexbots, and Dru’s husbands aren’t swimming with concrete flippers.”

Deth comes waving his arms to alert her. “Uh-oh, babe, here comes another Rat Bastard attack!”

The one-star American flag waves proudly, followed by a montage of devout Americans holding up their right hands and glossolating.

Announcer:
Fellow Americans, we united on September 11th to save the world from Islam, and we united on August 25th to save America from the liberal Communist threat. Don’t let liberal traitors like Shira Thomas—

“Hmph!” Shira holds up her phone. She ostentatiously clicks a video file. The studio crew cheer.

Soviet soldiers goosestep in formation for Comrade Stalin in old black-and-white file footage as a background for Shira.

Shira:
Don’t they look cool in those red-trimmed olive uniforms? Who said Comrade Stalin couldn’t match his ex-friend Hitler in the looks department?

Well, did you know half the Conservative Revolutionary Party used to worship Comrade Stalin before they found Jesus and switched sides? They won’t let you forget that America won the Cold War. Problem is, we won it by becoming the enemy. [cut to red “CCCP” banner, then Shira reappears] Welcome to the CCCP: the Confederacy of Conservative Christian, uh, whatever the ‘P’ stands for. [smiles sweetly, waves] Have a nice day...

Black Tower. Fleer growls, “Why don’t we just kill the bitch?”

Litton replies, “Bad idea.”

“How?”

“You wanna know how to become immortal?”

“Sure. Tell me.”

“Become famous and die. Celebrities bank on that. Better yet, get killed by the government. Then you’re a martyr.”

“You lie.”

“Bullshit. That’s why you ain’t gonna kill the bitch. So you guys just step aside let me deal with the bitch. You hear?”

Brinkman says, “We do it his way for now, Alan.”

Fleer glares at him. “So what do we do if he fails, Walter?”

Brinkman has no answer.

on to the next... →

Back to Chapter 19 index...
Back to Chaos Angel Spanner table of contents...

Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

[Revision 2, 9/27/11: All scenes concerning KCUF and COPCO heavily modified from the first draft, the Student Union scene consolidates different scenes; everything else all new material.]

Spanner 19.2: The Perfect Girl

I had Cure song titles in mind for this and the previous installment. Last section’s title didn’t quite fit the text, so I added a word to it (the song in question being “The Snake Pit” from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me). This section’s title (from the same album), however, proved... perfect — but not for the reason you’d expect. Also, if you notice my style changing to grammar’s detriment (I the grammar nazi), I’m learning how D.H. Lawrence liked to use incomplete sentences as prose poetry, remembering the late futurist FM-2030’s notorious fondness for colliding adjectives or verbs together without commas, and realizing I no longer need to overuse the word “then”.

← ...from previous

Chaos Angel Spanner — Chapter 19: Hackers of Reality
Part 2: The Perfect Girl

5 november 2011...
Robert Shelley is thirteen today. Arvid Shield, his beautiful uncle with pale skin and long black hair, gently kisses him on the lips. Rob says, “I’m scared.”

“I love you, and I only want you to be happy. But what you need is sexual healing. I’m going to make love to you. I promise to be gentle.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Arvid gently nudges Rob to turn over. He marvels at the boy’s beauty. He is just as gorgeous from behind as he is in front. He goes over to the dresser to take an elastic hair tie to tie up his hair and a tube of lubricant. Returning to the bed, he caresses and kisses the boy’s beautiful butt. Rob moans sweetly. “Relax,” says Arvid as he massages Rob’s anus. After a few minutes of this, Rob melts.

Arvid sticks the tube slightly into his anus and squeezes some lubricant into it. “It’s cold,” Rob giggles. He sticks a finger in and gently massages. When Rob’s rectal muscle relaxes, he inserts a second, and then a third, until he’s ready.

“I’m going to make love to you now. Are you ready?”

“I don’t care anymore. Just do it.”

Slowly, gently, he slips his erect penis between the boy’s beautiful quivering buttocks and into his waiting anus. “I’m going to teach you now. Relax.” Rob cries out when Arvid’s penis reaches his pleasure spot. When it’s in all the way, Arvid says, “Now squeeze as hard as you can.” Arvid slowly, carefully extracts his hard phallus; Rob tries to crush the hard phallus the way he taught him, the way a woman does.

Arvid repeats the movement over and over, bringing himself and the boy to escalating ecstasy and shattering climax. He falls on top of the young beauty and holds him firmly yet gently. “See? It wasn’t that bad.”

“But why do you make love to me when Grandfather rapes me?”

“Because you are sweet and beautiful, and I love you.” Arvid gives Rob a long and passionate kiss. “Do you love me?”

“I’m in love with you too.”

“Would you like me to do it again?”

“Yes. Please do it.”

17 october 2014.
suburban house. In a standard suburban house in a standard suburban neighbourhood lives a writer of standard conservative thrillers named Joanne Partridge. She scorns her effeminate son Kenneth enough to put his bedroom in the basement. She never fails to remind him that she reserves the master bedroom to herself because she is superior to him. At least it has windows, he thinks.

Shira gave back the crumpled hit list she stole from him. She told him neither she nor he no longer need it because the targets are perfectly happy to save them the effort by taking each other out. Now it lies on his desk. He stares at it as if trying to divine some occult significance from it. It does not respond.

Kenny believes he is a failure even at being evil. He failed to take out the Student Council. He is a wimpy emo non-athlete. His grades are relentlessly mediocre. The In Kids constantly punish him for the crime of not having pull. Or he has pull, but refuses to use it to his advantage like they do. They accuse him of having a conscience like it’s a bad thing.

He crumples the paper for the last time and tosses it across the room. How dare the Student Council deprive him of his revenge! At least if he blows up the principal’s office and takes out that smirking creep of a principal, the drill-sergeant fascist vice principal, and their concentration-camp commandant, at least he can go out in a blaze of infamy. But then he remembers that if he survives, he’ll be just another crime statistic like Shira said, and then a footnote in obscure criminology textbooks as Jennifer patiently explained in explicit detail. He gives up on the idea.

He takes out the netbook from its hiding place in his desk and opens it. It boots into Ubuntu Linux; he insists on the standard XFCE interface instead of the limited Netbook Remix. Beautiful dark-skinned Shira shamelessly opens up her nude body to him in the beautifully processed photo he uses for desktop wallpaper. He hates himself for his impotence. She silently tells him she can cure it. Her laughter echoes in his head. She is laughing at not him, but his mother, the frigid bitch.

He fires up Libre Office Writer. The blank document stares at him blankly. He remembers what the writing books told him: don’t bother structuring your novel in the first draft; just write. The voice of reason tells him that though his mother’s standard conservative thrillers instantly sell millions of copies to Party members whether enthusiastic or unwilling, her works will not survive. His can if he just writes them right. He loads the novel he’s working on. It reads as badly as a network news pundit’s ghostwriters. It’s only a first draft says Reason. He ctrl-ends to the end of the file, remembers where he left off last time, thinks of Shira, and types.

downtown Seattle. Billy Bob Skeever is a politically powerful oil trader and weapons dealer known for his eagerness to deal with terrorists and enemy nations strictly for profit. He married five wives in succession; each bore him a son before he divorced them and screwed them over. The last was a granddaughter of Thomas Drake Becket of Dictel, Incorporated. She is still his wife, and her child — Roger Becket Skeever — is his golden child, his heir, his prince.

The resentful sons of his gold-digging exes are gangsters. The oldest is Johnny, Marine sniper turned professional hitman; the biggest is Geordie; the meanest is Tony; the craziest is Eddie. That’s Eddie Evil, lead singer (sic) of hate metal band Gang. In the living room of ultra-luxo top-floor flat overlooking Elliott Bay that their father bought to stash away his wife, they glare down at baby brother Beck.

“I’m told,” growls Johnny Skeever, “you and your friends keep getting your dicks handed to you by a girl.”

“Her name is Shira Thomas,” snarls Beck bitterly. “She loves to fuck with us. She’s got Bart freaked. Charmian’s obsessed with her. Bitch’s fuckin’ crazy, man.”

“You think Shira Thomas is crazy?” wails Eddie. “You should see that psycho Eurotrash girlfriend of hers.”

“You mean she’s got a girlfriend?” marvels Geordie.

“Leila Renata Shelley, AC/DC fashion model, ninja goth girl, and total fucking nutcase,” Beck explains. “So fuckin’ psycho, she and her pretty-boy faggot twin brother got kicked right out of Pretty City.”

“That’s fucked, man.”

Eddie shakes his head violently. “Talk about fucked, you see her slice and dice Frankie Becket’s devil man into bite size bits?”

“Fuuuuuck.”

“We was fuckin” trying to sacrifice some fuckin’ Wog whores to the Devil, and here come fuckin’ Shira Thomas and her crazy-ass Eurotrash ninja girlfriend with the fuckin’ Slasher Hunters to fuck everything up.”

“Shit, that’s fucked.”

Johnny says, “We’re gonna have to do something to fuck that bitch up.”

“And her crazy-ass ninja girlfriend.”

Beck moans, “You go after those chicks, you guys better be really fuckin’ careful.”

Johnny crosses his arms and looks at Beck like he’s nuts. “What the fuck are you sayin’, Beck? You afraid of a couple of fuckin’ girls?”

“Fuck the Slasher Hunters, bro. It’s the girls. You better be afraid of those two. They’re fuckin’ nuts.”

Mudlark House. Connor tests out Tansie’s lovemaking abilities by making love to her while Jennifer looks on. He kisses her deeply; her lips are soft and kiss him beautifully. He caresses, kneads, sucks, and nibbles her breasts in order; she responds with sweet moans and obvious pleasure, or at least an excellent simulation, though her skin tastes a bit rubbery. He licks her nether lips, nibbles up and down each one, rubs her clit with her teeth, plunges his tongue deep into her cunt, squeezes her soft buttocks hard; she moans, screams, writhes like a real woman, and her vaginal lubricant tastes as sweet and delicious as a real woman’s, a very good sign. He slips his penis deep inside her; she squeezes and releases it with the skill of a master and somehow prolongs and intensifies his orgasm. He tries not to take too long so he can save her for his sister.

When he empties himself into her and collapses onto her, he gazes into her beautifully engineered eyes and is surprised to find not just a perfect innocence but something that can only be called deep love. Jennifer observes them up close. “Connor, she loves you!”

“Did you simulate that?”

“This is too perfect for mere simulation. It has to be an emergent property, like true emotion in real humans. Oh, this is so beautiful!” She playfully slaps her brother’s naked butt. “My turn!” He struggles to get off while she rushes to climb on.

Jennifer gives her robot girl the most passionate loving kiss she can muster. Tansie’s lips and entire body respond with what in a real human could only be love and overwhelming desire. When Jennifer breaks the kiss at last, Tansie gasps, “I love you.” She looks at Connor, and Jennifer lets him kiss her. She says, “I love you too, Connor.” Jennifer is overwhelmed by excitement; she gets off Tansie to remove her contacts so she can see the gynoid’s energy patterns directly. What she sees shocks her.

“What is it, Jen?” asks Connor.

His sister turns to her, eyes and mouth wide open. She takes a deep breath and lets it out. “It’s so beautiful. Her energy patterns are pure like I’ve never seen in a human. They show a perfect innocence and a pure heart that would be impossible in a real woman.”

“Jennifer, you are an absolute genius.” She beams with excitement and pleasure.

She tells her robot girl, “Tansie, I’m going to lie down beside you. I want you to make love to me.”

“Can she do lesbian sex?”

“All the best models can, and she’s the best.” She directs Tansie to roll onto her, runs her hands down her smooth body from her shoulders to her soft buttocks, kisses her deeply. The robot girl kisses down her body, slowly down, searching for pleasure spots on the way to her breasts. Whenever Jennifer lets her know with louder higher cries and explicit directions, she stores the location in her memory.

Tansie caresses her breasts, first gently, then harder, then sucks them. She nibbles and then bites the nipples at Jennifer’s request. She kisses downward toward her cunt, kisses the nether lips, opens them, licks them, kisses the hard clitoris, rubs it with her teeth harder and harder, plunges the tongue up her moist slit. Jennifer’s screaming ecstasy tells her she’s doing it right.

Jennifer cries out, “Mount me! Now!” Tansie obeys. She locks their cunts together, puts their clits in contact, rubs them together. They share their pleasure and scream out their love in discordant harmony. Once they finish, Jennifer lowers her smiling blissful gynoid onto her, caresses her soft smooth body, kisses her long and deeply. “I love you!” gasps Tansie.

“I’m in love with you too. You’re so beautiful. I’m so glad you’re mine.”

Connor looks down in pleasure at his sister and their beautiful robot girl. “How’d she test?”

“She’s perfect.” Jennifer goes back to kissing Tansie’s soft lips.

Bangor squats. Scope follows Amanda Currie through crowded alleys, around squalid shanties, past illegally occupied warehouses and mini-storage units, keeping his focus on her always. “What the official news networks refuse to tell you,” she reports, “is the rumors of sex slave rings operated by gangs in the slums. If this were a case of ‘Missing White Woman Syndrome,’ they’d inform you immediately and relentlessly, and the authorities would shut down the slave rings immediately. But though the clients are white, the slaves are not, therefore it’s a non-issue and simply the way things are done in America. But injustice is still injustice, no matter how you officially spin it. ‘The way things are‘ doesn’t cut it.”

What would Rebecca Street do? she asks herself. Her soul wordlessly answers; at once she knows exactly what to do. She spots some suspected slave traders, directs Scope to hide, and uses herself as bait. Her microphone captures their conversation. “Hey, lookie that!” “Yo, that’s some fine white tail.” “How much we gonna get for that?” “She looks worth a lot.” “Let’s go for the big score.”

She captures every word clearly. Her viewers catch every single one.

Shira sits before the camera wearing a blue sailor-suit school uniform. Two burly men, one tall and one short, sit behind her. She smiles bashfully.

Shira:
I’ve got something to confess. I admit I’ve been doing wrong. I’ve decided to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah...

She starts to remove her shirt.

Big man:
Oh, no!

Small man:
She’s malfunctioning!

Shira:
...blah, blah, blah, blah...

Shira (or her simulacrum) continues to monotonously repeat the same syllable as the two men forcibly stop her from stripping. She throws them off; they fly to either side, out of the picture. She throws off the scarf, proceeds to tear the blouse’s thick fabric in front with an audible rip, throws it behind her. With one yank she snaps off her bra and discards it. She shows off pert pretty breasts with large nipples. She stands up, drops her skirt and panties, exposes shapely hips and hairless pubis...

Shira:
Yo, Rat Bastard! You think I’m stupid? You must be trying to make our viewers think I’m a robot.

The camera follows her to her left. Leaning down she embraces the naked smiling Shirabot sitting in front of her. Bliss holds Freddy Freakbeak up, using the Furby to strategically cover her breasts with her forearms.

Bliss:
Heya.

Freddy:
Yo.

Bangor squats. Amanda flees the gangsters. They giggle psychopathically. She lures them into a rival gang’s ambush. The two gangs trade punches.

A gangster tries to grab her. She wiggles her way out and kicks him in the groin. He takes out his gun, shoots at Scope, is shot, falls down. Two gangs, then a third, shoot at each other.

Shira’s apartment. Naked again, Shira watches in fascination as her own father has sex with her likeness. Bliss pleasures him like an expert, the way she was designed; he pumps her harder and lets himself lose control. Sparks, still dressed, hugs her from behind and asks, “How can you watch your own dad having sex?”

“He and Mom gave up trying to keep me out when I was three. They know I’ll watch whether they like it or not.”

“Well, it looks like he’s actually having sex with you.”

“Hot damn if it doesn’t turn me on.”

He looks at her strangely. She winks back.

KCUF studio. When Amanda returns, the crew greet her like a conquering hero. Their cheers, hugs, and encouragement give her a euphoria she has never felt as a reporter before.

Desiree throws herself joyfully screaming into her arms. They jump up and down together, losing themselves in each other, their hero worship mutual at last. And for the last time, the soul of Amanda Currie and the image of Rebecca Street fuse to become one.

Shira’s apartment. Ric Thomas drinks lots of water and lets himself cool off. He pisses the water out into the toilet. He wanders into his daughter’s bedroom and finds Bliss lying on the bed awaiting him, lying on her side, legs open and bent. He jumps her. She answers with a wicked grin. He goes cold as he realizes this girl is not Bliss, but Shira.

He tries to leave. “No.”

She traps him. “Yes.” She kisses his lips hard, slips her tongue through them deep, not letting go. They struggle for minutes. She releases him, he gasps, she pants.

“Shira, don’t do this.”

“Give up already. I’ve been wanting to do this for years.”

He glares at her furiously. She smiles at him with undisguised lust. “Well, then. So how are you in bed?”

“I’m a savage.”

They lock lips more furiously than before. She bites his ears hard, he squeezes sucks bites her breasts, spears her; she turns him over tops him crushes, roars teeth clenched howls screams, clamps his penis down renders him helpless, tortures him into endless beautiful blissful hurt; he explodes into her, she explodes him, they melt merge fuse into one—

—then fall apart, collapse her atop him, shake their heads violently to regain their equilibrium, stare into each other’s eyes, stare deep. They breathe hard at first but regain their breath. Shira says, “I’m in love with you, Cedric. I have been, always.”

“Shira, you shouldn’t have done this.”

“Too late now. I’m not a child anymore.” She plants a sweet deep kiss onto his unwilling lips, signalling no more words necessary.

Suddenly they sense another presence. Leila stands next to the doorway, drenched in sweat, hand on cunt. She has been accompanying their pleasure with her own. Ric fights off embarrassment. “What’s she doing here?”

“Don’t worry about her. She likes to watch.”

Black Tower. In the highest office in Seattle, Governor Brinkman and R.G. Litton watch Shira blue defeated by Shira yellow. Brinkman frowns. “It almost looks as if she’s anticipating your every move.”

“Bitch got some skills. Plays a hard game. Oughta hire her.”

“Good luck trying. You and I know full well she’ll laugh in your face.”

“Hmph. England won all the battles but France won the war. I’ll get the last laugh yet.”

on to the next... →

Back to Chapter 19 index...
Back to Chaos Angel Spanner table of contents...

Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

[Revision 2, 9/26/11: Opening flashback taken nearly unmodified from first scene of chapter first draft; Skeever Brothers scene heavily modified from first draft to fit new continuity; everything else all new material.]

Spanner Chapter 19: Hackers of Reality (Revised)

← Chapter 18

Chaos Angel Spanner — Book 1: Rock City Blues
Chapter 19: Hackers of Reality (Revised)

Four straight failures to punish the Cascadian people for the October 5 disaster in Seattle, including the assassination of King Patriot himself, threaten to split the Fearsome Foursome, and the resulting factions threaten to plunge the state right back into war. Meanwhile, back at Bremerton High, the Foursome have also split their puppet Student Council in two, giving the dissident Student Union the opening they need. And in the Telesphere, the media terrorist called Spanner and the master propagandist known as the Rat Bastard go to war...

After a Chapter 18 of almost all new material, I’m now mixing and matching material from Chapters 18 through 23 of the first draft into a more workable order and adding new material wherever I feel it’s needed. By this point, the Second Edition is far superior to the first draft, as the plot escalates toward the climax of Book 1 in Chapter 23. For those of you who read the first draft already, I have some surprises up my sleeve...

Table of Contents:

1. Into the Snake Pit (September 25, 2011)
2. The Perfect Girl (September 26, 2011)
3. Read Between the Lies (September 27, 2011)
4. The Memetic Terrorists (September 28, 2011)
5. Live Zombies (September 29, 2011)
6. Drag You Down With Me (September 30, 2011, revised 10/2/11)

I wrote the original chapter in a bad mood. This partly explains the tone of the original introduction. Interestingly enough, that introduction (quoted below) applies much better to the new Chapter 19 than the original. And just because a villain’s minions fail doesn’t mean he isn’t still evil...

A man cannot spin a character out of his inner consciousness and make him really life-like unless he has the possibility of that character within him — a dangerous admission for one to make who has drawn as many villains as I.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I have a nasty temper. I have a social conscience. When the two come together — watch out!

Or just read this chapter and find out just how evil a Dennis Jernberg villain can truly be.

In this case, the villains are Admiral Alan Fleer and his partner in crime, Honey Sue Falconer. I put my full fury into them. You want to know just what Team Spanner are up against? Consider this: Spanner is the most cynical gangster epic in the history of fiction. The word “gangster” is properly defined as the kind of serial killer that runs in packs. This explains the importance of the Slasher Hunters to the story. There is no tyranny without the most vicious gangsterism to back it up with terrorism. That’s right: tyranny, terrorism, and gangsterism are one and the same thing. It cannot be any other way. Cascadia’s ruling “Fearsome Foursome” — Admiral Alan Fleer, Governor J. Walter Brinkman, Seattle Mayor Rev. Luke Everson, and NPA Cascadia Section Chief John Cameron Brinkman — are mob lords, and Cascadia is their turf.

Is it any wonder that those Evangelical Christians who remained Christian despite the extreme temptation of power willfully risk their lives to call “Jesus America” the Antichrist?

So how does a hero take on such a synarchy of supervillains? Not by force. Not by mass protest, at least not at first. By hacking reality itself. Turn the spin against the spinmeisters. Take the battle to the enemy at a higher level. Make them fight you on your home territory. Strike the killing blow with weapons they cannot defend against.

Scenarios from the Project Notebooks of the late 1990s: the robot suicides and the Mexican standoff. Characters: the Skeever Brothers.

And now the battle is joined at last...

Chapter 20 →

Back to Chaos Angel Spanner table of contents...

Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.