"Wake up... An eye is upon you."

-- Introduction, 'Powerman 5000: Tonight the Stars Revolt'

He had all the trappings of a nerd, as the stereotypical image goes. A half-finished bottle of cheap cola sat on the desk alongside his keyboard, no glass to be seen, after all, why bother pointlessly getting a glass dirty when all you'd have to do is wash it, when the bottle is perfectly good to drink out of? A cheese sandwich that had spent two minutes in a microwave graced a plate to his left. He *had* to dirty a plate, because those 'toasted' sandwiches got far too hot for his hands to keep from dropping on the carpet and making a dirty great big mess which he would be held accountable for, incurring the wrath of his mother. And that, he did not want to happen, because then he'd be cast from his familiar spot in front of the computer and forced to do something constructive or useful, and that was again, something he considered most unpleasant. A pair of headphones were wrapped around his head that he had 'low-keyed' from the school he once went to, which he did not much like either, and they were playing music to him at levels which would send small woodland animals into a coma, but were simply destroying his sense of hearing as far as he was concerned. He didn't care, really, all that mattered was that Metallica was playing, and playing loud. He maintained the ideal that music only sounded right when you couldn' hear properly for an hour afterward.

Humming along with 'Holier Than Thou' he put his thin fingers (often called piano fingers for some reason, which he thought was ridiculous because he didn't play) to his keyboard again, tapping out line after line of conversation to people he had never met, but enjoyed talking with anyway. Left to one side for the moment was a near complete re-write of the Half-Life game mechanics, which had racked his brain for far too long for him to think about. He scratched behind his left ear irately, the other hand trying to itch at a nasty spot on his head. His hair was brown like mud, and because he didn't like it's colour he also didn't care for how it looked, which meant that mostly it stuck out in all directions like a frightened plate of spaghetti. His eyes were brown, also, but there was very little care involved in eyes, so each morning all he had to do was put on his silver, oval spectacles because he was short-sighted and hated having to walk around squinting at things only to find out they weren't worth trying to squint at. He was tall for his age, tall by most standards, even, and had a build that could only be described as lanky. His arms and legs always seemed to be all over the place, especially when he was trying to play sports or run somewhere.

Without warning, his screen went blank, windows opened to people and places around the world replaced with straight black. "Aw, frap." He was most understandably not in the mood to be interrupted by such ridiculous errors. He poked at the escape key half-heartedly to see if he hadn't hit another key that he shouldn't have, but the dark screen stayed put, staring blankly back at his irked face. Then, as unexpected as his screen turning blank, letters began to form across it, typed out slowly so he could read them as they popped up, green and interesting against the black. It read, quite simply: The Matrix has you... Matrix? What? The young man tried Alt- C, and that too failed to disperse the text, until what replaced it was another line as incoherent and vaguely sinister as the first. 'They are watching you...' "What in the hell?" He looked over each shoulder, trying to see anybody who might be watching him, and without suprise, his cursory inspection turned up nothing but a potplant he had not seen in the office before, and that his bottle of cola was empty. 'Noone expects the Spanish Inquisition.' Great. Now his computer had some strange Monty Python virus, making him silently vow to never again download an .MP3 onto the PC which he didn't own.

One final time, the screen changed it's mind on what it wanted to tell the young man sitting before it. 'Knock, knock, Spike.' His eyes narrowed suspiciously at the monitor, until the sound of knuckles banging against the front door made him feel as if his heart had leapt into his throat, pounding his tonsils for an escape route. "H-Hello? Coming, yeah, gimme a sec..." Pushing back the chair in which he sat, Spike took one last look at the screen. It was blank. "Going nuts," he mumbled under his breath, rubbing at his long face with one hand. Through his tasteful home in suburban Palmerston North, New Zealand, he walked, strangely hesitant towards opening the door, lest it be another portent of doom his computer had been giving him. In front of it, he stood with his hands at his sides, struggling to find strength enough to lift one hand so that he could perfrom so small a task as open the door. The door shook violently again as the knuckles found it a second time, loudly signalling somebody outside didn't much like it out there and thought being in might be much better. Spike put his hand on the knob, and snatched open the door.

"Hello deary!" A typical 'little old lady' stood in the doorway, clutching a conspicuous amount of paper pamphlets in one hand, and her trundlebag in the other, it's wheels resting on the pathway up to the front door of Spike's house. "Is your mother in, wee man?"

Spike sighed inwardly, though something kept him from voicing several of the nasty things that came to him to tell the crazy old bat. "No, Mrs Hall, she's out getting groceries at the moment. You want me to take a message for her?"

Mrs Hall shook her head, the floppy brim of her oversized red panama wobbling in the breeze. "No thankyou, sweetheart. Though you could help me, couldn't you? A nice strong boy like you could help out with putting up some nice big decorations, couldn't you?" She handed him a pamphlet, covered in enthusiastic platitudes for the local community group, who were having some kind of social gathering which would be called a party, but seeing as how the only people who would be going were cantankerous old men and little ladies that yelled at you for looking at their bingo cards, Spike wanted as little to do with it as possible.

"Aw, Mrs Hall... I'm kind of busy at the moment. His eyes drifted to the sheet again, which diligently informed him that the social - he was already calling it the 'cemetary' in his mind - would be in a few short hours. "Can't it wait?"

True to form, Mrs Hall shook her head and put on her infamous smile, which was enough to melt the hearts of even the most staunch teenager, the way her cheeks all crinkled up and made her look so much like the friendly old lady on the 'Aunt Betty's Pudding' packet that you couldn't help but smile along with her and agree with whatever she said. "Oh, well... I guess I'll have to find somebody else to help, then, sweety." She half-turned, placing her pamphlets back into the trundlebag, until that knowing glint flicked on in the corner of crafty eyes. "Would you mind helping me get this bag full of cakes into my car, then?"

"Cakes?" Spike repeated, hardly daring believe she had said that magical word. "You... Do you have any of your custard squares?"

She smiled brightly, knowing full well the leash to which all teens are inseperably bound: Their stomach. "Oh, yes, but I suppose they wouldn't be of any interest to you, seeing as how you're not going to be at the community hall tonight and all.."

He was very quickly reconsidering that fact, being as how Mrs Hall had thrown together some of her infamous baking. "O...Kay. I'll come around and help out."

"Good boy." She reached into the trundlebag and pulled out a set of flowing red robes which she tossed to Spike, who in turn caught them, running the smooth material across his fingers. "The night's theme is Spain, Troy. Put that on if you like, you can be an Inquisitor!" She thought it might be frightfully more exciting if he werer able to play as one of the 'bad guys'. Little did she know that he considered fancy dress being for little kids.

He certainly spent longer staring at the cloak than necessary. "Spanish Inquisition, huh? Yeah... I'll be there." Spike turned inside, custard squares and marshmallow delights forgotten with the growing weight of the robes in his hands. The messages on his computer had told him that nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, and here he was, holding a set of robes that would make him look just like one of them for a social that he, until a few minutes ago, had no idea about.

He wasn't expecting that.

***

Surge grimaced. He was not the sort of man that made a habit of grimacing, not because he was afraid of the lines it might put on his face but because of the fact that it wasn't often something so terrible came along that it was enough to make him grimace. He did grimace then, though, because the old woman to his right that had just vocally bashed him for trying to steal something from her armada of bingo cards had requested 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon' from the equally decrepit little man who had decided to be one of those newfangled disc jockeys for the night. Surge didn't want bingo cards, old music, or even to be at that ridiculous social. Surrounded on all sides by that musty scent of old, wheelchairs, zimmer frames and so many crutches he had to remind himself he wasn't in a hospital, Surge quietly hummed 'Sad but True' to himself, lest the bingo woman hear him, and take to him with the nearest mobility aid.

Sitting to his left, Volt picked up on the tune and joined in softly, surrounded on all sides by a sea of elderly which would quickly turn violent if they heard the two unusual men humming such outlandish music. The hall was wooden, and plain just like the people who were holding the social in it, who may as well have been wooden for all the moving they did. Not even Buddy Holly's greatest hits had managed to move them, but it had managed to make Surge feel physically ill. He leaned to Volt, speaking in a hushed whisper so as not to disrupt the rapt attention that Bingo Woman was paying to Joule, who had been snared by a number of cute little partygoers into calling the bingo numbers on the stage at the front of the hall. "I'm going for a cake from the stall at the side of the room. You want anything?"

Volt nodded quickly. "Out?" He was mildly disheartened by Surge quickly shaking his head, jerking it towards the doorway as a reminder that they still had a certain someone to wait for. "Oh, alright then. Um... Could you get me one of those chocolate biscuits with the marshmallow on top?" His smile flashed anew when Surge at least nodded to that, and carefully pushed back his chair to escape his position alongside the little old lady who was even then fixing Volt with an evil glare - trenchcoats were not the sort of things the elderly appreciated when the night had a 'theme' to the contrary, and from what Volt could tell, it was something to do with Spain. Somebody had attempted burritos, even though they were Mexican, which were laying forgotten on a table just under the stage because none of those who had turned up really liked spicy foods which might upset their 'picky' digestions.

Surge was halfway to the cake stall when Spike finally made his entrance, dressed in the robes that Mrs Hall had provided and looking as though he were about to be sick, which he actually was, as he had walked an awful distance dressed as one of the Spanish Inquisitors and was feeling rather silly after passing cars had tooted at him, small children had stared, and the elderly had mumbled about how cute he looked. He *hated* when the elderly said nice things about him. Little did he remember that the gathering which he had dressed up for was an entire horde of the elderly, who had all turned around in their seats to get a look at him after Mrs Hall, who was just handing Surge a marshmallow delight and a jam tart, began to wave enthusiastically and in turn, dropped the jam tart. Stammering apologies to Surge, she bent down and helped him to clean up the mess as the elderly converged on Spike. From the seats they came, from the dancefloor, from the bingo tables and from the cake stall, they came to him like sheep to something that sheep like to mill towards, all with wide smiles and lots of wonderful things to say about Spike. 'Oh, he's so cute!' was used more times than Spike would care to consider, grannies by the dozen pinching at his cheeks, poking at his chest and otherwise tossing him about like a piece of meat.

From her vantage point Joule could make out a flash of the red robes that they had contrived to have Spike arrive in, so they couldn't possibly miss which person they were looking for. She hastily called out a few numbers off the top of her head until the lady nearest to Volt jumped out of her seat screeching 'BINGO!' at the top of her lungs, sending her cards all akimbo and conscripting the young man in the trench to help her pick them all up so she could collect her winnings. Joule carefully picked her way through the crowd which was returning to their seats, only a few dedicated old biddies remaining to bother Spike, whose speech had by then been reduced to 'Hullo,' and 'Yes, Mum's fine.' She tactfully reminded the two old ladies of the Slave Auction that would be starting in a few minutes, and that they had better get to their seats or else they could miss out on that handsome man in black who was helping Mrs Hall scrape the last remnants of strawberry jam off the wooden floor with a sheet of paper. "Thanks," mumbled Spike, scratching behind his left ear. "But I think that guy's gonna be more than a little pissed that you volunteered him to spend the night with one of the mob here."

She laughed politely, which turned into a full giggle when she could make out the pair she had dislodged from Spike pointing and whispering to each other, sizing up Surge, who was still none the wiser of his recruitment. "He'll get over it, he's Surge, after all. You know him?"

Spike looked between Joule and Surge, his mouth hanging half-open in disbelief. "*The* Surge? That altered the pay accounts of the entire Waiouru Army base?"

"The one and only," she replied, cooly. "I'm a friend of his, Joule. It's a pleasure to meeet you, Spike."

What had been only mild discomfiture quickly developed into full-blown paranoia when he heard his alias used without an introduction, Spike's head tilting carefully to the left as it always did while he thought something was either confusing, or required additional thought. And the woman in leather talking to him deserved both. "How'd you know that name?"

She slipped an arm over his shoulder, sending his pulse somewhere into the stratosphere and gently guiding him towards Surge. "Come on... We have a lot to talk about."

Before they arrived alongside him, one of the elderly ladies had whispered something into Surge's ear, his eyes turning wide behind his black shades in horror. "I'm doing... *What?*"