Item 8100201437060: "Hannigan."
Class: Safe
Security Level: 1
Containment: Minimal.
Description: Bulky 1980's television set with wheeled stand and top loading Betamax player. Requires electricity to operate. Betamax tape winds and plays by itself, as if controlled by some otherworldly entity. Attempts to replace the Betamax with a DVD or BluRay player, VCR or electronic gaming equipment have resulted in technicians contracting Egyptian plagues, which go away the moment Betamax is returned to the machine.
Displays one program, Hannigan, a plodding formulaic TV movie series which ran from 1968-2006. Hannigan only has 21 episodes in total, but the anomalous television, according to most recent tabulation, has generated more than 367 variations on those 21 episodes, including several in which the detective is brutally murdered, loses his badge, or makes no appearance in the program whatsoever.
The effect of watching the program appears to be harmless. Programming continues to play, regardless of whether anyone watches it or not. The device seems to be merely a self contained universe of fictional characters embued with life through unexplained otherworldly energies.
[0000]
Someone must have lived, because the feedings continued.
An entire week with that blocky old thirty four inch Panasonic plugged in. Twenty four hours a day.
Thanks to Casper Darling and his instructional materials, I could also understand what the television said. More so because it kept on going.
No remote. Trapped within my cell, I had no way to shut the TV off, unplug it, or change the channel.
I had a security door on the side of my cell. It resists acid and any physical attack I threw at it. I made several attempts during the course of this program.
I kept wishing the red things would knock the TV over, but I told you how helpful they are.
For the fifth time, I watched a mustached detective in a trenchcoat suck on a lollipop as he pried a gun out of a dead victim's fingers.
Last time the gun had a pearl handle.
The corpse lay facedown on a drafting table with a small black hole in his temple. Sketches on the wall should have been splattered with gore, but they'd sanitized it for TV. "Ma'am, wasn't your husband right handed?"
A blonde stood in a doorway, clad in a skimpy little green outfit with bell sleeves. She dabbed at her eyes. "Yes, but sometimes he sketched with his left." The woman slumped on a banquette couch, fishing a cigarette case from her purse.
The woman said no last time. Also, unlike the other version, she didn't touch the decanter of brandy.
"He ordinarily does everything with his right, am I correct? If he's hammering a nail, it's with his right?"
Slight change in wording.
I have watched enough television to know what a thirty minute to hour long episode of any program is supposed to be the same every time you watch it. Gilligan's Island Season 3, Episode 29 will always be about a monkey throwing around exploding dishes. Outside some sort of computerized trickery, the characters will always react and say the same exact things forever.
Hannigan episodes, however...
Although Episode 16, `A Rat Betrayed' is always about a successful cartoonist getting murdered by his greedy, alcoholic brother, sometimes the victim gets bludgeoned to death with a brass rodent. Or has his poisoned body dropped off the side of a yacht.
Sometimes it's staged as a kidnapping in order to get ransom money, or he hires a hitman to kill the brother so he can collect the inheritance.
Sometimes he has to pretend the cartoonist is still alive to continue receiving salary, or kills the cartoonist for cheating on his wife.
Everything else in the episode changes too. The detective goes to a different dentist, he twists his leg ice skating, has a tumor removed from his dog, goes to the gun range to get re-certified, visits his wife's grave, fixes a flat tire...
Detective Hannigan only catches the criminal once every ten versions. A lot of times the murderer walks out of the police station and the credits roll.
I have seen a total of five episodes.
Although the constant miscarriage of justice annoyed and frustrated me, Hannigan did provide an intellectual complexity that the thing in the neighboring cell desperately lacked, so I only struck the window during the first few days, more or less when I desired sleep, and had not yet learned selective listening. Later I'd lay the bear face down on the floor so I wouldn't have visions of police officers and 1970's San Francisco in my brain.
On day eight, the sounds of screeching and loud gunfire drew my attention away from the television.
Flying red things exploded, bloody pieces dropping from the air.
Afterwards, things quieted somewhat, if you could call my surroundings quiet.
A woman's voice echoed through the cell block. It sounded distant, like she spoke from the floor below. "Are you sure it's safe to let that thing out?"
A radio answered her. Although staticcey, I recognized the voice as Langston's. "I'm going to put the Panopticon on lockdown for awhile. I know you're tired of coming in here and fighting those Hiss monsters all the time. It doesn't help that the elevator to that floor is now broken. I'd like a break myself, and our meat supply is running out. I figure if we send this thing out to hunt, it'll eat whatever keeps popping in and opening the cells."
"What if the Hiss gets to it and it lets more of those objects out?"
"The creature has been exposed to Hiss radiation longer than anyone else, and I haven't noticed any unusual behavior. I'm thinking it's due to the creature's highly developed brain. But if anything happens, you're welcome to shoot it. As I said, we're running low on supplies."
So that's what he thinks of me, I thought with a growl. I should let them out just to spite him.
"I'm coming back down. I sure hope you know what you're doing, Langston."
"So do I."
Ten minutes after this conversation, alarm klaxons blared and the reinforced security door on the side of my cell slid open.
The mustached man on TV winked at me.
Not knowing what to expect, I tossed the bear through the doorway like a grenade.
It flopped sideways, giving me a skewed view of a balcony overlooking the watch tower. No red things so far.
Would they actually be dangerous? Or, like the bear, only dangerous to humans? The idea both thrilled me and inspired caution.
Thick concrete walls hemmed in the alcove for my cell. Parabolic reflectors stood on tripods nearby, looking like robotic scarecrows. Across a hall lay another door, presumably the loud simpleton that so often disturbed my peace.
Until I saw the hallway, I had no concept of how deafening the thing had truly been. I bared my fangs, thinking of what I would do to...whatever it was.
Relying on my other senses, and my shadow in the bear's field of vision, I crept outside, then, holding the stuffed toy like a lantern, edged further out.
Another musical number issued from the cell opposite. I snarled and rammed my exoskeleton full force against its security door.
A lockbox gave me a polite `access denied' beeping sound in response. I growled and scratched at the door.
"Duh hey!" a voice cried from within.
"Shut up!" I shrieked.
Sudden evil laughter prompted me to close my trap.
I pressed my body against a concrete wall, stilling myself like furniture, the prey pose of a spider.
Also like a spider, I tapped unlimited reserves of patience, allowing the passage of time to hopefully blind would-be prey into thinking me furniture.
The laughter faded. I posed like a lawn jockey holding out a ring, once again using the bear.
Clear. I slipped out onto the balcony.
Off to my left lay the the Panasonic, with its endless marathon of Hannigan.
Setting the bear down, I grabbed that rotten box, and with one mighty shove, dunked it through the railing.
"One more thing..." the detective's gravelly voice cried before the plug came out of the wall.
The TV whistled through the air...and fell silent.
I held the bear over the edge and sucked in my breath.
The floors read Five, Four, Three, Two, One, and then you had a (presumably) bottomless pit, where no light escaped, and you had no indication of what lay beneath.
Red light flashed beside me.
Something with inhuman strength knocked me sideways. The bear flew out of my claws.
I experienced the visual of falling five stories and threw up.
The thing that struck me bashed my head with its fist. The concrete beneath me cracked and I saw stars.
Turns out I didn't need a bear to see that!