Chaos Angel Spanner — Chapter 19: Hackers of Reality
Part 3: Read Between the Lies
Part 3: Read Between the Lies
An image of Pinocchio on the right of the screen.18 october 2014.
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.
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:Black Tower. “This is starting to look like a public relations disaster, Mr Litton,” says an increasingly frustrated Governor Brinkman.
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.
“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:coffee shop. Sparks asks Shira, “Why’s that old bastard denying it?”
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—
“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: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?”
COPCO employees marching outside the Public Safety Building, protesting persistent rumors that they’ve been targeted for takeover by the Syndicates...
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.“Hmph!” Shira holds up her phone. She ostentatiously clicks a video file. The studio crew cheer.
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—
Soviet soldiers goosestep in formation for Comrade Stalin in old black-and-white file footage as a background for Shira.Black Tower. Fleer growls, “Why don’t we just kill the bitch?”
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...
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...
[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.]
No comments:
Post a Comment