Disclaimer: Prototype is the Property of Activision Blizzard.
Bare feet against the thick carpet approaching where he sat on the floor. He was too heavy, too much biomass to trust the cheap-looking couch in Dana's latest safehouse. So he sat on the floor, drawing his feet in close to avoid tripping her as she approached.
She handed him the bowl of popcorn she had microwave. Intermixed with the pervasive scents of gasoline, grease, the tobacco smoke from a previous tenant clinging desperately to this place, and human, he picked up the artificial butter flavor and a slightly burnt smell. Dana walked over to the television and hit the buttons on it get it to channel three. Static screen after static screen—a few safehouses back they'd had luck getting a signal on an over-the-air antenna, assuming he held it at the right angle out the window and the weather was right. Albeit all that got them was reasonably useless local news.
Hadn't even bothered to try this safehouse. Still, Dana asked him to make sure they could fit plug in the television and a battered old VCR to the the generator by a length of extension cords.
Finding the right channel, she shoved a tape into the VCR. The whirring of mechanisms accepting the VHS and the tape spooling… to a blue screen. Dana sighed and went behind the TV, playing with some of cables.
"What are we watching?" He asked.
In a lot of ways, tonight was an extravagance. There was only a limited supply of gasoline he could get, and usually they kept the generators off unless she needed to charge a computer battery or they needed to power some stolen communications gear.
But while 'making herself at home' by ransacking the place and finding anything worth keeping, Dana found a bookshelf full of VHS bootlegs. And she suggested that, since Halloween was approaching, they should do a horror movie marathon. He didn't particularly care, but she did. Something 'normal' to do in the midst of all the chaos. It made no difference to him—all he knew for himself, that he hadn't stolen from someone else, was Manhattan in chaos, and he thrived in it. 'Normalcy' didn't suit or matter to him, except that she needed some of it. And that made all the difference.
She'd curated a selection of movies. She'd spent most of the afternoon on it, muttering plots in her head. Zombie movies definitely weren't going to be done. Wait—was this the one with the fight between the zombie and the shark and the topless scuba lady? Still no. Okay, they were definitely not watching The Thing… or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Well, The Thing with the Space Carrot might be okay.
All in all she put a ton of thought behind her choices.
"Hm… start off with Death Machine?" Dana asked. "This guy's tastes weren't exactly Rosemary's Baby or the Exorcist."
Hm. That was a fairly obscure one, he thought, as he plumbed the depths of stolen memories. Movie trivia didn't particularly interest him. Stolen data filed away as useless. Although there were enough horror aficionados at Gentek and in Blackwatch that he had a few impressions. "It's like with… a robot… bear?"
She grinned and nodded. He stared at her, prompting her to explain. Death Machine was like the bastard lovechild of Die Hard and Alien and Robocop. With a fraction of the budget. Brad Dourif was the villain.
Alex scowled slightly—that struck enough chords to draw up sharper images. Two competing thoughts ran through his head, connections forming from very different memories. Brad Dourif was either the creepy murder doll or the creepy advisor of Theodin. Common ground was that he was creepy.
"We don't have to watch it if you don't want." Dana said, noticing an annoyed look on his face. She looked a little crestfallen.
That made him pitch forward, hand on his temples. A vague impression of a girl with Dana's features, younger. Not grown into them, with longer hair in a messy ponytail. Bruises from childhood misadventures—or something else—on her shoulders.
She was too young to be watching movies like that, Alex Mercer had said. She responded that mom didn't care, let her watch whatever. Whatever, he had better things to do.
She looked a little crestfallen.
She might start to whine, and that would get mom's attention. Fine, she could watch along with him, as long as she was quiet.
"Are you… okay?" Dana said, crouching in front of him. His gaze left the carpet, festooned with popcorn he'd spilled when the old memory hit, up to her. He could see the indecision on her face, the tensing of muscles as she tried to decide to reach out to the thing pretending to be her brother, while instinctively she wanted to back away. "It's that thing with your memories right?"
He'd sketched a partly-true outline. Sometimes he'd remember bits and pieces of "his" past. And it would hurt.
"Hn… I'm fine. It's nothing." He said, as the headache subsided. He took a deep breath. He took a deep breath. It was likely that if they went through this marathon, she'd get nostalgic, talk of the good old days. It might trigger a few more headaches. But… pain wasn't something he was unaccustomed to. He forced himself to relax, looked back to the floor. "Sorry about the popcorn."
She retrieved the bowl from his hand, still containing maybe two-thirds of the starting amount of popcorn. "It's okay. This'll be my half—you can get the stuff you spilled."
She actually actually stuck her tongue out at him with that.
Then she added. "If you're not feeling this, we don't have to…"
"Turn the movie on." He said, forcing a grin.
She turned and pressed play on the VCR, then walked back and sat on the couch, next to him.
The movie was mostly uninteresting. Cyberpunk corporate sci-fi horror. A few characters names writhed in his head until he realized they were all supposed to be references to characters. Brad Dourif played the villain, a mad engineer for the sinister corporation who developed an obsessive crush on the female lead. There was illegal weapons testing and a super soldier program—Dana stated she forgot about that, might've hit too close to home.
Honestly, none of it bothered him. He ended up paying more attention to tracking errors on the tape than the actual plot. Down the hall the generator was making a noise—he'd have to look it over when they were done, it might need repairs or he could loot another one. He inhaled, pretty sure there was no extra carbon monoxide in the air- shoving the windows out of their frame and putting some more holes in the exterior wall of their generator room did provide adequate ventilation, apparently.
He knew that the hammy performance Brad Dourif was giving was supposed to be entertaining, but it didn't do anything for him. The man overacting man on the screen was uninteresting—an image projected by a cathode ray tube, masked by scanlines and tracking errors. Instead of a heartbeat, Alex heard the whir of the VCR and a low humming noise from the television set. No scent. The television was warmer than the surroundings, but the screen was uniformly warm. IN the end, he was getting sidetracked remembering other roles he had played.
Something was bothering him. A random thought ran through his head. A bit of backstage trivia. Dourif apparently was a method actor. Kept in character so long as he was on set. Method acting. Playing a character and trying to cling onto it.
He half turned to Dana, who shifted her attention from the screen to him. "Dourif's a method actor, right?"
"Apparently. Some people on the Lord of the Rings set apparently were confused why he started talking in a weird fake American accent once he finished filming his scenes—he never actually talked in his normal voice to any of them until he didn't need to play Wormtongue anymore."
And that was what bothered him. "How does that work when he plays a killer doll?"
She looked confused. Alex grinned a little, and she grinned back, let out a tiny exhalation that could've been a laugh. It was an honest question, but it was also a ridiculous one that worked as a joke. She leaned back in the couch and wondered. "I dunno. I remember one… like him and Ernie Hudson were like playing mission control while some low-budget Jean Claude Van Damme-type guy fought a bad CG alien…"
"Interceptor Force." Alex said after cross referencing that bit. Somewhere, he recalled a Marine vehemently ranting about how stupid it was opening with an F-117 firing an air-to-air nuclear missile at a U.F.O. He was also aware that the alien was also a shapeshifter, likely so that they didn't have to rely on dodgy CGI to portray it when they already had low-budget actors in front of the camera.
"Yeah, that's it!" Dana said. "I think it was like, made for the Sci-Fi channel. Man, I wonder if the two of them hung out at the craft services table and reminisced about when they were in actual movies."
"Like Death Machine." Alex said. A joke. Something you did when watching bad movies. Method acting. He was gratified that the Dana laughed—it wasn't normal for them. He still startled her inadvertently too often, her wrapped up in work and awake by virtue of caffeine and obsession, him unable to shake the drive to approach silently.
Acting the part of her brother was something he still needed to practice. In some ways, this was something he'd done since he first became aware. Pretending. Playing a role. Although regimented jargon, rigid hierarchies—there were proper things to do when pretending to be a Marine or Blackwatch soldier. Both the doctrine as written, and as actually practiced. What was the right answer in a social situation? Not something he worried about normally. Not something that had clearly delineated answers in a DOD field manual. "Made for TV movies are always awful, huh?"
"Not always." Dana said. "Duel. Dark Night of the Scarecrow. Trilogy of Terror."
Duel was the one that resonated the most. Early, early Spielberg—that train of thought led to a dozen others. Indiana Jones and melting faces, Jaws and a series of disappointing sequels, E.T. Duel itself was based on a Richard Matheson story written for Playboy—one older Gentek scientist actually had the issue from 1971.
"That was based on Matheson, right?" Alex asked, already knowing the answer. "Same one as I am Legend…"
He recognized the mistake the moment he said it. I Am Legend. Vincent Price and Charlton Heston and Will Smith. A story about the last man on Earth, barricaded against the undead animated by a world-ending plague. She hadn't wanted to watch any zombie flicks.
"I… think so?" Dana said, apparently not noticing or caring that about his choice in trivia. Was it a mistake to bring it up? Second guessing himself. "I'd have to check... shit, there's a man… on the wing of the plan!"
Alex looked at her strangely, making the connection a few minutes later. Matheson wrote the short story Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Somehow he had that trivia, although nobody he consumed had read that story. A lot of them had seen the Twilight Zone adaptation of it. Oftentimes, you could see it on on the Sci-Fi Channel, where you could also see Death Machine and Interceptor Force, albeit at different times and dates.
They were engaging in movie trivia and enjoying a low-budget horror movie.
Method acting.
He was more interested in her reactions than the film itself—television never really interested him. Monitors could be a valuable source of information if there weren't… other more convenient sources, but watching flat people with no heartbeat or scent or heat to them just didn't hold any fascination.
Dana wasn't scared. He knew when people were. Heartrate, respiration elevated, muscles tensed. This was a "horror" movie, but she wasn't scared. It was funny? Fun? Quick cuts to hyper close ups of an utterly impractical killer robot that was closer to being a blender than an actual war machine. She seemed to be enjoying it. Or maybe just being around him. Doing something fully normal as a break from all of the chaos.
Even if none of this felt normal to him.
They made idle conversation, and he watched as the heroine finally trapped Brad Dourif in a vault with the death machine. As soon as the credits began, Dana hopped off of the couch. The VCR whirred and whined and spat out the tape, and she quickly ran back to the shelf.
Dana suddenly began barraging him with questions. Did he like cats, or would he be upset at… well no, nothing bad happened to an actual cat…
Apparently the movie she decided to play was The Uninvited. She knew it only by reputation, and apologized when it opened at a random office and parking garage that was supposed to be some sort of top secret laboratory conducting unethical experiments. She thought it struck to close to home.
He really didn't mind.
He already knew what the movie was when she said the title—this one left an impression on the viewers. Not a good one, but an impression nonetheless. The killer mutant cat movie was incredibly convoluted—they had an actual cat on set to show the cat walking, and it would be replaced by a cheap rubber prop cat that would vomit up another, mutant cat that would kill people.
"This makes no sense." Alex said, holding back the rest of the joke intended on making. "And I am a shapeshifting monstrosity" went unsaid, because he wasn't sure if Dana would take it.
The cat—not the bad puppet cats, but the actual one—was an orange longhaired cat. A smile crossed his lips when he recalled a memory he—not one of his victims—had, something of his own. He had startled Dana, not something he was usually happy about, while she had been taking a break from one of her innumerable trawls through open source information on the situation with cat videos. She apparently had to put up a front and tried to block the screen from him.
That had been fun.
The movie, on the other hand, wasn't. Like Death Machine, he got nothing from it. Unlike Death Machine, they overdubbed every frame in which the real cat was on screen with the same looped, frantic cry, while the cat itself looked perfectly calm and didn't even have its mouth open. That was annoying.
Dana herself was enjoying it, her worries about it hitting too close to home fading as the cat almost immediately escaped the "top secret facility", was in a car crash that looped both the cat sound and the same metal grind noise, was adopted by a group of teenagers played by adults, and somehow ended up on a boat with a trio of mobsters, who in their trip to do crime decided to bring along teenagers they just met. If nothing else, watching people wrestle the cat puppet was amusing to her.
When it ended, Dana got up and began perusing the VHS tapes again.
"Hm… Proteus?" Dana said, quizzically.
"I wouldn't." Alex said. "It's The Thing, but if it was also a shark and addicted to heroin."
Nothing about that sentence bothered him, but he figured the concept of a shapeshifter had been enough to make her swear off The Thing, she might wish to avoid a knockoff. She muttered "heroine addicted shark" under her breath in a tone that made him wonder if she was going to watch it to make sure he wasn't bullshitting her.
She let the tape fall to the floor and looked at the next in the stack.
"Prophecy." She called out. Alex nodded.
Hm. Angels and demons. Nothing he was particularly interested in, but the movie had Christopher Walken in it, he was fairly well liked for his unusual performances. And… the devil was played by Viggo Mortensen. Circling back to The Lord of the Rings.
Method acting.
Except he and Dana were thinking of The Prophecy. The movie that was actually on the tape was Prophecy. His brain flickered to a random Manhattanite who had made the same mistake—expecting angels and demons, only to get Armand Assante pretending to be a Native American and a mutant bear caused by a paper mill?
"Huh. Thought it was a different movie." Was about all Dana could muster at the opening scene, of a search party being killed by the bear. She wasn't particularly invested in this one at first, but began to lean in as things got absurd. Talia Shire got attacked by an insane raccoon puppet. Armand Asante getting into a fight with a man with a chainsaw. And Kevin Peter Hall in a terrible looking mutant bear costume.
For his part, Alex did not mention the fact that the manager of the paper mill poisoning the nature was Richard Dysart, who had his arms eaten off in The Thing's defibrillator scene. Might spoil the mood, especially as she seemed to have turned her opinion around by the time the mutant bear flipped a truck.
"Can you believe this film came out a month after Alien?" Alex said. A bit of trivia, comparing it to a much more well known 1979 monster movie.
"Really, no shit." Dana said as the credits rolled. "And wait, John Frankenheimer?"
Alex looked at the director's name. The Manchurian Candidate. Ronin. "At least this was better than Reindeer Games."
That got a laugh out of her.
Method acting.
Her laughter faded and she blinked, looked at the tapes, then at him. "You've… never seen Reindeer Games."
He hadn't. And given that there wasn't even a glimmer of a headache when he thought about it, the real Alex Mercer had not seen it, either. He could give her a full rundown of the plot. He could give her trivia on the careers of the actors involved—Ben Affleck, Gary Sinise, Charlize Theron. He could explain a Blackwatch officer's annoyance at how having the final shootout involve a team of robbers in Santa suits made it impossible to know if Danny Trejo or Donal Logue had been shot, and those were two pretty distinctive people.
But he'd never seen it. Until tonight, he'd never seen any movie all the way through. All that trivia was just that, trivial bits of information he'd torn out of the heads of victims, things he'd filed away as useless until he found a use for it.
Method acting.
"No, no I haven't." He said, letting his 'character' drop. He might've overplayed his hand, broke the illusion. "Sorry."
"No, it's…" She paused. "…I shouldn't have brought it up, yeah? We're having fun."
Had she been acting this whole time? Forcing a little bit of normalcy, pretending her 'big brother' was just that—her brother. Someone to watch movies with and laugh at the poor quality, rather than something closer to the Thing or a heroin addicted shark? All the time aware that every bit of banter, every reference he threw her way, all of his attempts to fake being normal were just that, a facade of normality he'd made from memories he had gotten secondhand from corpses?
He didn't think so. He'd been gauging her reaction. She'd been staring with attention on the television, not on him, laughing in a way that obviously wasn't forced, making observations all the way. If it was an act, a one-woman play, she at least believed in her character.
She might've been method acting, too.
The VCR complained as the credits ended and the tap ran out, giving them the perfect distraction. Dana got up and perused the tapes again. "Hm… Chopping Mall sound okay?"
That was… surprisingly that was a blank space. He knew it had involvement from Roger Corman, and that led to all sorts of thoughts. Jack Nicholson's first onscreen roles. Boris Karloff reciting An Appointment at Samarra. "Feed me Seymour". A lot of 1980s sword and sorcery movies with topless women. A lot of movies with topless women, period. But somehow, all he had was the VHS cover—a rotting hand holding a shopping bag full of body parts. "It's a slasher film, right?"
Dana only grinned as she pushed the tape in. "We have such sights to show you."
Was it related to Hellraiser, or was she just making a joke?
If they were both acting, at least this was a play they could enjoy. Even if only one of them actually enjoyed the movies.
