Back to the dusty wasteland.
Giant mutant worms swimming in distant sand dunes. Remnants of the old containment facility scattered the scene. The hot sun warmed the fake blood that pooled around my legs and chest. The only question that remained was what was beyond those sand dunes? There had to be something.
Schwarzwald waited as the 3 snipers and 5 gunners joined him. There was no way we could outrun a Tactical 7 Team. T7T were elite. You never knew who the commander was.
Schwarzwald smiled at them maniacally as he stood over the corpse of his old friend. He stood over my corpse. He was standing over me.
People only get to live because other people die. That was an eternal truth we could never shake, not even in our most deranged utopian sunset dreams.
Schwarzwald preached to his new comrades "Man gets too comfortable. He allows evil to thrive and proliferate. He forgets violence.
Nature is violence. It is the seed violently exploding out of the ground! And rapidly growing in competition to ensure access to the sun, to resources! That Will to Survive, that Will to Thrive! This violence and competition carved man, and man had to fight nature to survive her violence.
When Man became apex was when he created his ability to overmaster violence, and to compete in anything.
And now, fully domesticated, Man had forgotten that truth; the only solution to bad violent people is good people who are more adept at violence!
How can a digitized man fight a spiritual demon when he cannot even grasp the physical? Let alone escape his own mental constriction/construction?"
The T7T looked at each other, baffled by the words of the Great Sage Schwarzwald.
With me dead, perhaps they had no use for Schwarzwald anymore.
It didn't matter.
In WormWorld did anything really matter?
Just keep moving forward...
Don't become Recycled Organic Matter.
Don't become Worm Food.
Schwarzwald continued "And of course! What for I? What was outside? I had to know! I wanted to know the words I didn't have... All the things I had yet to imagine! Just beyond the grasp of my comprehension... but to know that they are there! Just beyond the grasp of my comprehension! Waiting for me, that which is yet to be known. The madness of seeing yet not seeing. That which both feels tangible and intangible simultaneously. A virtual unreality. A connection into the future. That of making 'what will be' into 'what could be'. A transcendence. An escape from WormWorld..."
The T7T approached in a relaxed way, perhaps ready to put one in Schwarzwald's back.
Schwarzwald began to sing "Hey! hey! hey! hey!
Ooh, woah!" he gave the signal.
I knew from the signal what to do. I rolled to the right as Schwarzwald dived to the left.
As he unloaded his sub machine gun, I unloaded my pistol.
We got the suckers.
They fell to their sandy deaths with such a shocked face.
People only get to live because other people die.
They must have felt so stupid.
Schwarzwald had planned it all. The Impossible Escape, the Betrayal, and all his bluffs up until now. All those years at playing Time Crisis.
They never had a chance!
It didn't take much for him to be part of the hunt for us, and it didn't take much of a show to reveal the entire T7T into the open. Thanks to my incredible acting the T7T were now Worm Food. They were nothing compared to Time Crisis, and that was their downfall.
Schwarzwald was a genius at Zero Day Exploits within the System. Every response had a plan of action. And so every plan of action could have a response. And so forth. Ad infinitum Ad nauseam.
I got up and looked at Schwarzwald. We had done it.
As I changed out of my sticky clothing, and washed my heroic sweet abs of the sticky fake blood, an armoured off-road vehicle sped towards us, before coming to a halt.
Nemo Zilcho looked out at us from the vehicle. He was wearing aviators that he must have grabbed from somewhere. He gave off a real Lawrence of Arabia vibe.
"No time to explain! Get in!" he demanded.
We complied.
Everything had gone entirely to Schwarzwald's plan. Zilcho, pro-action inside and out, had secured the T7T tactical hybrid vehicle. I had played the role of the mouse, and together with Schwarzwald we had wiped out the last team capable of stopping us.
The vehicle was the end-game.
Zilcho jested "How do you like dem apples? Ey?! You know like in the movie with Matt Damon?!"
Zilcho began to repeat "Matt Damon" in a retarded way, referencing some old movie.
Such was his ways. He could have been anybody... or nobody.
He pointed to the back of the truck. There was plenty of food supplies, but more surprisingly, apples.
"Where did you come from?" I asked the apple I held in my hand.
A mystery not to be answered.
We sped off.
...
The ruins of the ancient containment facility became a distant memory.
The giant mutant worms would soon become the images that haunted our presence/present.
The T7T Tactical Off-Road Vehicle (T7T TORV) had enough fire power to take out a City Zone (CZ). We were going to find out what lies beyond the edges. Giant mutant worms be damned!
They called us the Triumvirate of the Damned.
If only they could see us now... Driving across the dusty sand dunes... towards our damnation.
From this point forward it was constant battle stations. This was the unknown. I held a defence rifle, ready to start blasting anything that looked to be starting some. This was it. The point beyond the Event Horizon. There was no turning back. We were going through the sand dunes.
....
Everyone believed what was presented to them in the digital mediums. And if it was not presented in the digital mediums, then it wouldn't exist and people wouldn't believe it.
Therefore the Digital was part of the structure of the Physical Brain.
Whatever emerged from the Digital mediums was interpreted as Raw Experience by the Physical Brain.
Thus emerged the Digital Brain and its consummation with the internet that acted as a consensus machine; an intelligence unto itself.
Therefore Digital was Reality, and Reality was less than Real.
/...
Schwarzwald and I barely made it out alive. Last we had seen Zilcho was dead in the truck, sinking into the sand. It wasn't real. It couldn't have been. I had thought it over at least 3571 times. Those giant mutant worms... the way they moved... how they looked...
Just another trick of the system?
It was all fake?
Or could I just not handle reality?
Maybe I was just coping because of all my negative credits as the social commentary went.
And the social commentary, where did it come from?
I had to watch so many 'influencers' to gain social tokens, and the only thing these influencers provided you with was carefully crafted stories made up after the fact of the happening, a containment. A homogenized sea of craftily crafted messages in a bottle. Consensus generation through the nodes of these influencers.
And who were the top influencers?
Those chosen by the system... and therein lies the System's Trick.
Influencers who play the roles in the system to pacify the masses by making them all believe they are rebelling when in actuality they are all a part of the System, their thoughts completely captured and unknown to them...
Commodification of rebellion. Rebellion bought and sold on the stock market.
Was our attempted escape all part of the plan? Just another Trick?
...
Schwarzwald and I waited in the lobby. It had been 7 years since we had last seen Zilcho.
There he was in the flesh. He hadn't aged a bit. We on the other hand looked marinaded in the terminally online and overcooked.
"You're alive?" I asked.
"I'll pry open any lock that gets in my way. I'll stretch out my hand until I reach my goal" Zilcho said as he flexed his bicep muscle like Jean Claude Van Damme in the Street Fighter film when he is fighting Raul Julia.
That was Zilcho, every expression from 80s, 90s, or 2000s throwback with New and Oldie Goldies. He was a cultural meme machine. But who was beneath the memes?
As unique as the falling snowflakes
Hitting the damp ground
and then dissolving
into sludge,
where they then
flush down
the gutter of reality
into a
Grey Goo
"I don't believe it. You are dead!" Schwarzwald pointed in accusation.
Zilcho coolly responded "I was dead, but I got better."
I sipped the synthetic whiskey Schwarzwald had purchased for me.
I tried to believe that Zilcho had somehow made it, just as I tried to believe in this synthetic whiskey. Maybe it was all bangarang. I was but a spectator watching a story I was part of that I was merely too incompetent to influence. I could only watch. Even if I already knew what happened next. I could only watch the chaos.
"So where have you been?" I had to know.
Did he make it outside?
Zilcho put on his aviators and said with a cool stare "I got out. I escaped WormWorld."
"So what is outside then?" Schwarzwald demanded.
I was just as intrigued as Schwarzwald. This was big. No one knew what was beyond the city.
"You want to know the truth?! You can't handle the truth!" Zilcho jibed.
"Okay, I get it, you are still alive and as infuriating as ever" Schwarzwald conceded.
Schwarzwald and I looked around. The lobby was still empty.
"Good to see you both also!" Zilcho said indignantly.
"Look we haven't got much time. What is outside?" Schwarzwald asked again.
"I've seen things you wouldn't believe. There is a whole other world out there. People. Places. Things. So many people to meet! Places to go! Things to see! All that stuff! Just waiting beyond the dunes..."
Schwarzwald and I both waited for Zilcho to continue.
"More details?" I questioned.
Zilcho continued "Well you both lived through the slow motion collapse of civilization. It all starts with things like trains arriving later and later. More and more trains derailing. Water pipes bursting. These are all such small incidences but a greater sign of the fall in IQ across the population. People were merely not smart enough or educated enough to maintain civilization.
Living through the collapse, most people couldn't see it.
It was just a myriad of unrelated crises.
And slowly things declined, until the eventual bottoming out, where barbarism was more comfortable than the System that had made people addicted to Comfort. Comfort caused and led to collapse.
The world caved in under the weight of its own hubris.
And out from it WormWorld emerged.
A world built by a biodegradable workforce who were buried beneath the city.
The rest of us didn't know how we got here. It just suddenly was. Perhaps a slow creep... or maybe it was always here, but we just hadn't the cognition to see until way past the tipping point.
And here we were. You had to keep moving forward through the maze, or you were Worm Food. Just another Biodegradable Citizen.
And what's outside?"
"Yes! Now tell us! What is outside?" Schwarzwald exclaimed visibly angry at Zilcho's circling.
Zilcho continued "Outside is irrelevant because you will all be seeing it soon! The real reason I am here is to get you out, but knowing you two, you should both have sizeable escape plans by now?"
I looked around, about to spill the beans of my plan which I had been too afraid to even tell Schwarzwald, but knowing that Zilcho had got out gave me hope. Perhaps we still did have a pocket of absolute privacy.
"I..." was cut off by Schwarzwald.
"The sun is shining" he said to Nemo Zilcho.
"But the ice is slippery" Zilcho responded.
Schwarzwald gave me a look, before putting his fist right through Nemo Zilcho's skull.
Schwarzwald's fist went right through Zilcho as he glitched out, before completely disappearing.
It wasn't actually a person. Just a program assuming the Avatar of a Dead Man.
It wanted to know our plans.
"How did you know?" I asked.
"The sun is shining, but the ice is freezing" Schwarzwald said tapping his forehead.
"But it is 'The sun is shining, but the ice is slippery'..."
"Oh..." Schwarzwald said with a manic smile, before continuing "I guess this is it. The final symphony!" as he moved over to the Piano before continuing once more "The Moonlight Sonata!"
She was on to us.
There was no escape from the Eternal HR Woman.
Escalation was imminent.
And in the background Commissars of the remnants of International Capital plotted.
Chapter 1 No Money, No Job, No Life
Chapter 2 Schwarzwald
Chapter 3 Apocalyptic Stare
Chapter 4 Digital Marionettes