Circle of Fate and Pain
by Elliot Bowers
"Epitaph"
lyrics and music by King Crimson
Chapter 12—Madness from Machinery
1.
In an entire neighborhood of people, in this neighborhood, no one could help him—no one but himself. That was because his problem was inside himself and absorbed within. And there was no getting out of himself what was inside. From the flesh of his toes to the top of his brain and throughout all his organs, throughout his blood, the man was contaminated. Worse still was how there was no name for the contamination inside himself.
Worse still was how the contamination made it almost impossible to talk. It was messing up the soft matter of his brain and made it very difficult for his mind to work. First, he was feeling pain and aches inside and throughout himself. Now he was feeling numbness mixed in with that pain. It was as if Jack Bent was trapped inside his own private little version of Hell.
So lost in a sickening and agonizing world of his own pain that Jack Bent had the vague notion of maybe stopping and lying down. Yeah, he'd just lie down on this hard city sidewalk all around. And there he would lie, not getting up ever again. Just let the contamination do its dark thing to kill him. He was dying inside.
Still, the curly haired man in tee shirt and slacks did his best to keep walking along. A strain of effort let him put his numb left foot weakly forward. The numb right foot then touched down... Not that Jack Bent could feel it as he staggered along. It was because there was a distant feeling of pressure somewhere around his ankles. The pain and sickness, it had already taken over both hands and feet. The pain was eventually going to crawl through the numbness of arms and hands, eventually getting up to his head. Swish…
Who-o-o, whoops! He nearly fell over that time. Thank goodness the sidewalks were wider nowadays--to accommodate the larger cyborgs.
Now it was accommodating an especially tall and painfully lost fleshie male, lost in his own pain. Somebody help me out... He instead mumbled something because speaking properly wasn't possible at the moment. Walking along this wide sidewalk only made for the more expensively dressed cyborg-men just walking past him. It was getting to be late afternoon, when all the big rich Motorball executives dealt with the big rich Factory cyborgs. He couldn't ask them for help. His head was just so full of pain...
It therefore made things easier for the cyborgs in business-clothes--those who were able to go right past him. They didn't want to deal with common street-trash like him, be the trash with a body of flesh or metal. The fact that the curly haired man was swaying and staggering meant that he must be a drug-junkie chunk of street-trash. It could have been beer…or that cheap and slightly toxic swill of leftover liquid that counted for "beer" among the dirt-poor masses of Scrap Iron City. Not that the curly haired man could hear them through the rumbling pain in his head, but some of those Motorball businessmen passing by also gave him brutally insulting words in passing.
And he kept walking in one direction because of the vague idea that there was some kind of help at one far end of this street. His steps barely carried him onward. Now, the awful, sickening nightmarish pain in his midsection only hurt worse. A cough, and there were dark spatters mixed with the sprayed flecks of saliva from his mouth. His mind wandered and wondered about—a his mind was so dizzied and incoherent with pain and suffering that it put him in an altered state of consciousness. He was delirious, and…all sorts of odd thoughts and imaginings were drifting through his head. They weren't even in words, just jumbled images of places and things. Things…sort of went here and there, places made of ideas--and there was singing or something...
Most of the lights were turned down or shut off completely, leaving most of the many patrons sitting in the darkness. This was one of those places where people went to hear some original and important music. And if lucky, maybe an especially old song would be performed--songs from ancient times. The musicians on the raised stage looked ready for that sort of thing. It was actually a band made entirely up of fleshies: not a single cyborg among them. One bearded man was sitting behind a drum-set and beating out a slow drum-beat, occasionally hitting the cymbal at the right points to make for a clash-h-h sound. A tall, blonde-haired woman in summer dress and leather boots stood with guitar and was strumming out a back-melody. There was even someone at a battered analog device--something known as a "piano." As the drummer played out the slow and funeral-like drum-beat, the tall blonde female guitarist playing the back-melody, along with the piano going.
Then came the male vocalist. He took to the microphone and began to croon sing.. It was the voice of a dark and troubled man in work-clothes and a wild head of hair. Some of the lyrics seemed far too troubling and close to some kind of truth.
The wa-a-a-all on which the prophets wrote,
...is crack-ing...at the seams.
U-u-upon the instruments of death,
...the sunlight, widely gleams.
When every ma-a-an...is torn apart,
...with nightmares...and with dreams
Will no one lay the laurel wreath
...as silence
drowns the scre-e-eams!
Confusion…will be my epitaph
If we make it, we can sit back and laugh...
...But I fear, tomorrow I'll be crying.
...But I fear, tomorrow I'll be...cry-y-ying...!
"I don't know too much about karma myself. At least, I know that karma is a force in this world that keeps too many things from going wrong," said Mr. Okotonz, speaking to the customer standing on the other side of the counter. This was happening here in his shop, and this big bodied cyborg with swarthy face was sitting atop his reinforced alloyed stool. "Maybe my problem is how my interests are all over the place instead of concentrating on one thing at a time. An ancient saying goes, 'Jack of all trades, master of none.'"
"Still, that idea of some kind of force keeping things at least a little bit decent is a nice and comfortable idea. You've probably heard as much history about this world as I have. The world was a better place almost a thousand years ago, maybe because the world was ruled from the ground, maybe because there were a heck of a lot more jobs and people paid to keep everyone safe and healthy. You know... There used to be people called the 'police' to keep criminals from doing wrong--at least one member of the police for every sixty people. Now it's just some bounty hunters.
"And get this. There were other kinds of people paid to keep fleshies healthy. Tell me if you've heard about 'rescue workers.' Rescue workers… You know? Those people in Ancient times who were paid to save injured fleshies and put water on fires? Would you believe the rich people back then paid groups of people to sit around and wait until there were fires to put out? I read that it cost a lot of credits to do that.
"Hey, don't give me that sort of look. I don't make this stuff up! You're laughing now... But that's the way they did things in those old days. Back then, there was no big floating city in the sky, everybody lived on the ground, and the rich people had to do something for the people. This land was covered with great big green fields and places full of trees with only some deserts. Now what do we have? Hmmph..."
At this point, he looked past the current customer--looking to the left to stare out the big barred picture-window that gave a view of the city street out there. "Killer bounty hunters and those goofy Deck-men, that's all we get from Zalem for working so hard all the time. That's all that keeps things barely decent--along with karma."
He then stopped looking outside, returned his eye-focus to the customer. "Here's a little something to talk about. Ever get the idea that there's something else to go with karma? So there's this invisible quantity that sort of keeps things barely decent in the universe. But... Who--or what--enforces karma? I don't care how mystical and powerful a force is. There has to be someone or something to make sure that even mystical forces are kept in check in this broken-down rotten world of ours.
"I don't know... Maybe they're invisible, those people or creatures that maintain karma. They must be hard workers or something. Who knows? What if they were invisible and only certain people could see them? Or it could be that we sometimes do see them--though our subconscious blocks them out. Or maybe... Maybe seeing them is a sign of something going wrong. It's like those ancient cities I just told you about, with the 'police' and those firefighter-people paid to keep things neat. You only really saw firefighters and the police when something was wrong.
"So what about those new kinds of mutants people are talking about? People are starting to see them pop up from the ground. Maybe they're from the same place that karma really comes from or something. Yeah buddy, something else has to be out there and keeping us from becoming too self-destructive—because those Deckmen are just robotic idiots with chunks of human brain-matter to help them talk. I'm guessing it wouldn't be long when some Deckmen start being blown up at random.
"But...! Here are some question marks for you—great big questions. Where the hell did those little bastards really come from? No, wait… Here's a good one: Why are they here? It could mean that something must really be going wrong, them being here. Almost nobody saw them before. And anybody who did was just called crazy. I saw a pack of those short guys running around too. Hey, don't give me that look... Hmmph! I see you have that sort of I-don't-believe-a-thing-you're-saying look to your face. Karma is all in the books, I tell ya! It's like you think that the stuff in the books is just some made-up mess made up by some guys high on some new kinds of drugs or something. You also have the sort of look of someone who doesn't believe anything unless it's as real as the credit chips in your wallet.
"Well, let me tell you... There was this scientist who got out of Zalem, see. Rumor has it that he sort of left on his own before something especially rotten happened to him. You know Zalem, always ready to take somebody's brain for no good reason. Anyway, that scientist-guy was starting to fool around with karma. By now, anybody who can read knows something about nanotechnology...which, by the way, was another part of his research. The guy liked fooling around with the stuff of reality by using that nanotechnology stuff. So if that guy who pretty much reinvented an ancient technology is fooling around with karma..."
At this point in his own monologue, Mr. Okotonz shook his head. It was too terrible to talk about, let alone consider. "I don't want to know what's going to happen—if it didn't happen already! It'll just happen again, too—something bad."
"Hey buddy... You okay there?" asked a big broad cyborg-man in blue work-clothes. He was likely a cyborg Factory worker down at some kind of warehouse. "You're looking a little bit on the lost side. Know what I mean? Hey-hey! Can you hear me at all, buddy?"
The buddy in question right now was Jack Bent. Or it was the thing that was once Jack Bent. He was standing there and swaying slightly side-to-side. The look on his face was a slightly angry one even though his eyes were generally glazed over. That big broad cyborg-man standing nearby was barely even heard. No... It was as if the figure of Jack Bent was seeing and hearing into another world.
"Listen, buddy... If it's drugs you've been messin' around with, I know it ain't my business. Still... I'm looking at your arms. You're still a fleshie--no metal parts, right? I'll tell ya what's wrong with that. Some of those drugs out there will mess up your insides early. Then you'd really have to become a cyborg before your time. I know 'cause I used to fool around with all kinds of junk. And then there's all that chemical junk in the air and water... Health clinic people told me all about it. They know what they're talking about, too. Both kidneys were messed up, and my liver was all full of lumpy cancers. Nasty, nasty... If I didn't become a cyborg, my brain would've been full of that cancer-stuff. Is your brainokay?"
Nope, Jack Bent was not home right now! He was not there at all. There was just the figure of a curly haired man in slacks and tee shirt. Something seemed wrong with his abdomen, too... Was that a blood stain? This was a cause for concern, this blood from an unknown injry
"What the Hell? You been stabbed or something, guy?" The cyborg-man tried waving his arms... "Hello! Hello? Ah, forget it," he finally said. Then the cyborg-man put his metal hands in his pockets and began to walk away. One more look back was all that he gave Jack Bent before moving on. A person could only worry so much. Well, anyway... A man couldn't save the world. He had to look out for his family and friends--as best he could.
Help me! And Jack Bent remained standing there, swaying there. Or it was what was left of Jack Bent after they got him. Them, those muscular midgets in the gold-colored coveralls, they had gotten him and left him this way. No more worries, no more pain, no more fear...or strength or hope, either. There was just that shell of a person.
If one stared, one saw that the thing once known as Jack Bent was now with a peculiar facial expression that indicated a person was looking slack-jawed because he or she was...looking and listening to something else. Whatever it was that was seen through those eyes and into that other place, those passing by did not know. (Help me, please!)
"Hello there. What's gotten into you?" asked one especially large-headed male cyborg. There was an air of intelligence that shone through his eyes. He could see that something was most certainly wrong. "So really, what has gotten into you?"
"Aharg...a-a-at..." came the mumbled response from the thing that was once Jack BentThat, or something, was as much of a response as anyone was going to get out of the shell of a person. That was because the thing inside made hi m something else--had changed his mind. Elkric... Then the Jack Bent-thing walked away.
"Fine by me, guy!" said the large-headed cyborg. "Just asking, that's all. A fellow citizen of Scrap Iron City, and you can't even give enough kindness to answer a few questions. It doesn't cost anything, you know... Whatever, guy! See you around."
"Elkr-r-r-r..." answered the thing that was once Jack Bent. The destination was actually not too far from here. Just stagger-walk on... While still going, he looked to his right—looked beyond this world and into another. Then it kept going.
…
2.
That big low-colored sun cast everything in glowing tones—the light glowing between the jagged blocky shapes of buildings to soften the edges of everything. As the dying light of the city day continued passing into night, winds blew across and howled. It could have been the buildings that made for most of the local landscape being shadowy. Except, something was wrong. Some of those shadows were a great deal darker than they should have been--especially the alleyways. One particular alley looked like an opening into the darkest night ever, a darkness that was darker than the universe. No one passed by along the sidewalk.
That was because there was no one around this part of Tire-Wire Alley. At least there was no one alive--not cyborg, not fleshie, and no mutants at all. For a part of a border-town neighborhood that was supposed to have an awful lot of bustling activity so close to night-time, there was little to none now. It was just so quiet along these sidewalks and buildings. There had been a lot of people around here recently: trash blowing along on howling sunset winds, along with recently parked trucks. Whamp-p-p...came the distant echo of a sound.
Someone was coming right now. After the sound of a building's front door being blasted open, there was the sight of two girls running. They were wearing denim outfits more befitting bikers out of centuries ago: both wearing tight-fitting jeans and elastic tops that were barely shirts at all, the tops leaving their vaguely muscular abdomens bare, synth-leather jackets worn over their shoulders and backs. Their midget-sized boots thudded out their rapid-fire pace. One of them was carrying something that trailed long white silkiness.
It was a third girl that they were carrying--Kyrie. Though moving at an incredibly fast pace, the sleeping girl seemed not to mind at all. Whatever caused her to become unconscious must have been especially severe. A closer look would reveal that her face had taken on a sort of blushing complexion--a contrast to her moonlight-pale hair.
They kept running onward without paying much attention to the sudden lack of people walking along these sidewalks. What mattered to them was running, moving fast. Anything that could pop out suddenly and make for a crash, they did not care. There was a robotic r-r-roar from way back there. So they kept running.
Then something did pop out at them. Blocks ahead, part of a sidewalk flipped upwards like the lid of a box. One fleshie arm reached up to slap one hand atop the sidewalk. Then the other hand took hold. Something or someone was climbing up from below.
The figure of a man sort of flopped the rest of itself onto the top of the sidewalk. A blink of less than a second, and the flipped-open section of sidewalk disappeared, and it was as if the sidewalk never opened up at all--except for there being the thing that climbed up out of the
The thing that was once Jack Bent knew that they were coming. It was because the thing had the ability to see and hear into another place. That figure was also seeing things that were there...yet also not really there, listening to the collective whispers and glimpses of knowledge coming into the head. That knowledge meant things…
Then came the gynoids, those robotic girls who could pass for human. One of them was an unconscious Kyrie.
Both of them stopped on seeing a swaying figure standing at the mouth of.--of course--an alleyway. One of the figure's arm grotesquely jerked up in a vague form of greeting. Only after that arm made a "get-over-here" gesture did the twins understand.
They both saw it as a safe place to go. After all, where else was there to go--besides running and going onward? Any being with a living brain would have felt that something was wrong with an alleyway that looked darker than the universe. Since the gynoids' brains were actually computer chips, and they were just robots designed to look and act like human girls, they did not have that sense of something going wrong. To their eyes, it just looked like a typically shadowy alley. Except, when they tried to run past, the darkness swallowed them up. Whamp-p-p! The disappearance was followed by the sound of a large metal door or gate being shut.
And that was it. There was no longer the sound of twin artificial girls running and carrying Kyrie. Matching it was a sudden-passing sort of breeze. Then came a sort of strange and muffling sort of quiet stop . The breeze stopped. All little bits of blown trash or torn cloth just sort of fluttered to a stop. It was as if the world was waiting. The...flash of white light glared out everything. Everything was suddenly wiped out with glaring white. Of course there was not enough time to scream.
The sound of a roaring rumble above awoke her from her stunned sleepiness. For just a moment, she had stopped thinking. It was as if she was dead for that time. But if she was not dead, then what was this?
Please help me, somebody! I can't move... Everything hurts... It hurts all over! Everything feels so wrong with me, all over. Someone please...
She heard everything--though her hearing felt oddly muffled. More importantly, she was doing her exhausted best to keep herself alive. Everything just felt so weak and far away... The girl was aware of being carried somewhere. Yet that was almost not an important fact at all--because she was still trying to stay alive and thinking.
It was becoming hard to...stay alive and thinking. It could have been because--for just a moment--the girl dropped her concentration. And for that moment, there was a minute idea of simply surrendering her life. It would not at all be difficult. All that the girl had to do was relax and give in. Just give in to the numbness that had already conquered the rest of herself. This was her trapped in her own head, very nearly deaf and barely alive. Inside her head... She was barely able to keep herself thinking.
And for moments...things stopped. Her life—if she had one—was a weak flutter that...every so often...stopped... Then it tried to keep beating. It was a serious effort and took almost all of her severely reduced strength to pull air into her lungs. It was an intense effort to breathe.
Though her eyes were closed, she was very conscious of everything. It actually was a very terrible for Kyrie at the time because of that: being conscious, yet her entire body being as if she was unconscious...and dying. It took a conscious effort to keep herself from dropping off into death.
Swish...whoomph! The girl felt herself falling. Though she could not see anything, the girl could hear wind rushing in her half-deafened ears and feel her hair fluttering as she fell. Something struck her left cheek… It felt like a floor. And there she laid—because she could not move.
There was the sound of a door opening nearby, and it now felt as if someone dropped her. Then came the sound of what could have been the sound of her own self, herslf falling to a hard surface. Was it the sound of herself?
Like, I'm not dead! So somebody help me out! That person who carried me...! Someone carried me. Listen, please. I... I'm still here. I just can't move or talk, that's all! So don't treat me like a corpse! I'm still a person. Please...
Then it was as if someone could hear her thoughts. Something grabbed her by the hair first. Then big rough hands caressed her cheeks, and she felt herself being lifted upwards--being carried. Yes, someone had picked her up! Now, feeling was returning to her cheeks and face. Yet her body still felt numb.
"So there you are!" said a man's voice. "I just knew that flan-eating psycho wouldn't take you out of the equations just yet. Well, I saw your jaw moving. Why are you bothering to try talking? How in tarnation could you talk if you don't have a throat right now or a decent power supply? Ah, just screw it... Since your brain's not real, you wouldn't need blood going through the noggin. Hey… You still listening in there?"
Suddenly, the girl felt and saw that her right eyelid was open--the eyelid of her good eye. The other eye was damaged. Now she could see things. This was true even if everything did look dark.
The girl had the idea of there being a low ceiling that was primarily made up of wires—like parts of a grand machine. Some of those wires had parts that glowed like stars in a sky. Then the man holding her turned her around. There were some strands of her own hair in her eyes... "Sorry about that, cutie-pie," he said, some of his fingers brushing aside lengths and strands.
About the man, he was someone with a tanned complexion, looking vaguely athletic, a wild head of dark curly hair. She also saw that his shoulders were clad in sky-blue--a sky-blue sort of tee-shirt. His head and shoulders were also framed with a light shining down on him. Except... There was no spotlight visible above. Also odd was how he was able to move her around so easily. Then the girl remembered being hurt very badly. Something hurt her neck…
Like... Oh my gosh! Suddenly, her mouth began moving--even though no words were coming out. I don't want to die! You've gotta help me! Take me back! She's... She's all alone! And I'm dead!
"Hey, toots!" exclaimed the man in sky-blue clothing, watching her mouth move and seeing a worried look on her face. "Don't you worry your pretty head about this... Heh, heh... Get it? Was my comment over your head? Sorry about that one too! Anyway, did you hear that rumbling? We'll get back to business pretty soon. Hmmph... Well, first thing we have to do is wait for the alleged radiation levels to go down above-ground. Well, it's both sooner and later at the same time. Time? The inversion already happened, and I made sure that it didn't get to go around again. It can't--not without all the bowls in neat rows.
"But guess the heck what? I'm taking you out of the equation and using for my own dang-on pawn. I'll use anyone else I can, too. Do you know how annoying it is to have your stomach being used for the sack of a device for cosmic obliteration? Well, they should've looked in the fridge before taking me away! Feh, they're trying to take me off the shelf. They've got some nerve!" He turned around the head and tucked it underneath his right arm. "Yeah, and we'll screw up and around with old boy Nova's plans pretty darned twistily--until they're more twisted than a pretzel in a blender, in a house trapped in a tornado on a spinning planet. Cheap joker didn't even bother to build an entire planet, either... We'll show 'em what for!" Then he walked in one direction in this darkened place—going towards a strange machine to be used to help the girl.