BLAST 01: BEAST

BARRY

It was the slink of coin against coin that alerted me to the hazardous quiet surrounding the typically frothing-at-the-mouth angry Barry sitting behind me like a hippopotamus gone stealth mode. Ninety-nine out of a hundred times Barry was a typhoon of maliciousness, a whirling dervish of poorly maintained teeth and badly thought-out viewpoints, but the sound of gun-range tokens being burnished in his palm, coupled with the dull thud of his gaze against the back of my head, signaled an altogether different kind of natural disaster: melancholy Barry.

We’ve had spats, Barry and I have. Most treat him with the fervent, put-upon indifference usually reserved for hoboes having self-contained three-way conversations. I have limited success in doing so─disregarding him like an otherwise benign elderly family member spitting hate from before the time of rockets─because I existed in a sort of limbo between the employees and management as an outside contractor; I was only occasionally on-site, only occasionally within earshot, and only occasionally annoyed enough to hand Barry back his horseshit. But hand it back I did, because my grandmother had a saying: Just because someone’s handing you horseshit doesn’t mean you have to take it. Also, fuck Barry directly in his beady-eyed, flabby skull.

That or something similar. The specifics are unfortunately lost to time.

It was easy, at any rate, with Barry’s dim eyes clouding over further with self-doubt, to forget that he only recently tried to fight a lab-tech in the parking lot─Barry running six-four and three bills, give or take, attempting to fistfight the only person in the building who, a) actually talked to him on purpose, and, b) could mail herself home without paying for extra postage─or that he once advocated for ‘white men of a certain generation’ to be awarded a separate washroom so that said generation─respresented by Barry alone─would be able to, and I quote, ‘poop in peace.’ Easy, I say, because I was looking at a man in pain, and empathy in the moment is stronger than rage in memory . . . if only just.

“You, uh,” Barry said, hesitantly. “You think there’s a hell?”

“Nope,” I said, my empathy immediately hopping a fence and fleeing into the night.

“But, uh, but if,” he said, eyes down and tapping his coins on the table in an irritating staccato. “If you did though, you think, like, you know─you think I’d be going?’

“Yup.”

“But,” he said, eyes dilated and horrified. “What do I do?”

I laughed. He didn’t ask why, he just wanted to know how to sleep in someone else’s bed after he made his. I kept laughing─aggressive peals of laughter in a metronomic sonic boom that gave him back just a taste of the animosity his targets had been dealing with for years. Barry was perturbed and tried to interject, but I rolled up a paper towel and lobbed it at him. He stared at me unmoving as the soft grenade glanced off his cheek and landed with a soft plish in his open coffee cup, and in that pregnant silence I glared back. This man had donated both time and money to charity; he gave a couple of bucks here and there to homeless people at the coffee shop, and at least once changed a stranded stranger’s blown-out tire. He had the capacity for the small, unseen kindnesses that make people human; he was not a demon, despite appearances to the contrary: he was just a dumb guy.

But this dumb guy, this willfully ignorant dinosaur trudging too slowly into extinction, found himself in the throes of an existential reckoning and asked a combative non-believer to confirm that hell was indeed a-waitin’, and, well, it tickled me. Whatever brought on this uncharacteristic crisis, this need for judgement or reconciliation or punishment, it didn’t matter─he was clearly desperate for answers, and I was there for it.

“Thanks a lot,” he spat, attempting sarcasm but falling beneath the heavy burden of one newly hell-bound.

“Anytime, bozo.”

So, as I left to wander the plant with a smile and a wink, I began to believe in hell a little bit. You know─just to help Barry out.

ELISE

Elise once told me that the universe wasn’t math. I looked at her like a three-legged dog watching a bicycle crash, but she just shook her head sadly and explained that it was beyond my comprehension; that I was unable to wrestle with any cosmic concepts because the narrowness of my understanding left no room to do so; that I, like so many others─sigh─had been corrupted by my limitless access to information.

There was so much to unpack there that I just sidestepped the whole thing and pointed out that she worked in a lab. A science lab. With science.

“I do,” she said, smirking. “Have you just figured that out?”

“It’s weird,” I said, scratching my beard and looking away from the harsh creases in her forehead, the result of excessively tight bunning. “Bunning,” I said. “A verb. To put one’s hair in a bun.”

“That’s weird?” she snickered, making an inadvertent whistle out of that’s due to a conspicuously missing canine, a tooth lost not to lack of funds nor as a consequence of some parking lot donnybrook, but instead because of a near-religious belief that dentistry was akin to quackery, a fraudulent anti-science that separated people from their money more than diseased teeth from aching jawbones. “You’re weird.”

“Spirals,” I said. “A pattern found in everything from flowers to galaxies.”

“Not math,” she countered. “Some of the magic of the universe has spilled onto earth and made unquestioning people believe it’s the other way around.”

“Oh, I get it,” I said. “You’re a silly goose.”

Elise turned and stared at me so forcefully that I saw at least another pair of dagger-eyes in her fivehead, but one of the problems with standing five-foot-nothing is that, regardless of one’s tenacity, there is very little physical threat. Another is walking on busy streets and taking head-trauma from the tangle of rapidly passing pelvises. Pelvi? I digress.

“So, if I’ve got an idea that you’re not intellectually and/or spiritually prepared for I’m subject to condescension, but─”

I stopped listening. We’ve all heard the arguments, like something inherently stupid should be considered solely because someone thought it, and they’ve spent as much time practicing their comebacks in the shower as they have their actual point. I looked at the small but growing population of gray hairs apparent in her impossibly snug bun as she ranted, imagining that this complete break from empirical reality, to borrow her earlier stance regarding the inverse relationship between cause and effect, was a result of that tiny armada of alien hairs that had clearly been burrowing into her skull and misleading her otherwise capable brain into believing that there was no difference between whimsy and fact. I was then distracted by the smell of formaldehyde, wrinkling up my nose both in response to the unmistakable scent and in the slow realization that it shouldn’t have been a thing that happened: this wasn’t that kind of lab.

“Oh, am I making you uncomfortable? Does my─”

I interrupted with a slurry of nonsense words and waved off her lunacy in case it got into the air. “What you got going on under the cupboards there?”

“The cupboards?” she said, as though she had never heard the word before, both of us pretending her eyes didn’t go wide at the mention of them. “I have many, let’s say projects on the go.”

“Man,” I said, following the odorific trail of chemicals. “When did you become a supervillain?”

“You might as well take a look,” she said, letting slip a little grin of pride. “I attempted to tell that lunkhead mechanic about my homunculi, thinking him, if not an equal in intellect at least likeminded in purpose. But, as is often the case when a new idea is introduced into this abject and cruel world, he thought I was calling him gay and tried to fight me.”

Oh, Barry. If only you hadn’t been so disastrously insecure you’d have been the first to witness Elise’s little plant-based, person-shaped monster floating in a jar with a sleeping face where it’s torso should have been. But you likely wouldn’t have noticed the many empty, dripping jars, nor would you have asked where the rest of them had gotten off to. And you certainly wouldn’t have had a nervous feeling sink into your guts when Elise smiled and said whatever do you mean?

AIDEN

“But yeah so there’s this background noise in our com-units. It’s subtle but overlapping─maybe not overlapping so much as intertwined with─the ambient sounds generated by our Listen N.O.W. program, which is both an acronym and incredibly proprietary.”

“For?” I asked, repositioning myself in Aiden’s bunker, stuffed deep into an uninsulated hovel where technology is installed and forgotten.

“The folks who run this place,” he said, eyeing me with disdain. “Obviously.”

“No, the acronym─what’s it stand for?”

“Oh, N.O.W.? It spells out None of Your Fucking Business.”

“Neato,” I said. “That’s a proprietary spelling of now too, right?”

“Problem is,” he continued, shining his headlamp on a cluster of branches masquerading as wires. “I have no idea what the shit that’s supposed to be doing.”

“Um,” I said, reaching toward it and getting a literal slap on the wrist for my effort.

“No touch,” Aiden said, shining his light in my eyes. “Bad touch.”

“They look wired directly into the junction box,” I said, elbowing Aiden to get his lamp to illuminate the war-torn box that had Neural Overwrite Wavelength engraved on its face.

“So,” he said, turning and blasting me with more headlamp. “You should probably forget you saw that.”

“And you should probably fuck off with that light,” I said. “That’s some weird shit, though, right? Like, this isn’t some hidden part of your operation protocols─furnishing your electronics with wood?”

“Nah,” Adien said, shaking his head and throwing light back and forth across the box. “Branches look like they grew into the junction, too.”

“And out,” I added, following the branches to the ceiling. “You know Elise?”

“Don’t know anybody, really.”

“I mean, they’re infecting the speaker system too, right? Those branches?”

“Mm.”

“And with that neural-overwrite dealie already pumping shit-knows-what into all these people, should a certain unnamed mad-scientist-type develop a being or cluster of beings capable of infiltrating said system for possibly-but-almost-certainly nefarious ends, the result of such an endeavour would most likely look like this.”

In the silence I assumed to be heavy with unspoken amazement at me and my clever thesis, Aiden instead neurotically fiddled with his lamp, completely disengaged.

“You know Steph?” he asked, clicking his light to punctuate the abrupt change of topic. “I know Steph a little.”

CLICK

“We, uh─”

CLICK

“Sometimes we─”

CLICK

“We have, I mean I don’t smoke really, but─”

CLICK

“Me and Steph, we─”

CLICK

“Sometimes we share a cigarette or two.”

CLICK

“Sometimes.”

CLICK

“You know. On break.”

CLICK

“Even though I don’t smoke.”

CLICK

“I mean, not really.”

CLICK

“STOP THAT!”

“What?”

“That goddamned─”

CLICK

“Jesus christ that can’t be the only light source in here.”

“Overhead’s burned out,” he said, looking at me with his hands on his knees in the universal stance of I’m ready if you’re ready. “All set, then?”

“Where do these lead?” I said, pointing at the branch-wires sprawling in the dark. “LIGHT PLEASE. ONCE. STOP TRYING TO GIVE ME SEIZURES.”

CLICK

“All over the building, by the looks of it.”

“Okay. So where are they coming from?”

Aiden traced the branches with his eyes and, after a little bit of internal blueprint-mathematics, said, “Truck bay.”

“Which is?”

“That way.”

“Fine. I’ll head over─”

“You’re gonna take a left out of here, swing another left through the tank-gallery, and then there’s a little sign-in area for truckers─like a booth, kinda, but bigger─that has two doors that both lock from the outside so you’re gonna wanna make sure you’ve either got a pass or somebody’s attention because it’s all but soundproof in there and fogs up pretty quickly because the ventilation is trash and nobody gives a flying fuck about the comfort level of the people who have to work there who maybe aren’t the type to complain but have every reason to considering the conditions around there I mean it’s almost criminal.”

“Mm-hm.”

“. . .”

CLICK

“Hhh,” I breathed, pinching the bridge of my nose. “I’ll tell Steph you said hello?”

CLICK

STEPH

I let the door behind me lock before I checked to see if I could get out the other. Like a rookie; like a dummy; like a fucking idiot─an idiot caught in the perfect claustrophobic nightmare of a windowless five-by-four web of slip-hazards, poison-stink, and questionable cell service. Irritated more by my poor judgment than I was being trapped, I added to my catalogue of terrible choices by lighting a cigarette, reasoning that this highly illegal, borderline terrorist act would surely smoke out a nearby rescuer or, at worst, get my ass kicked out of the building entirely. But by the time the authorities located me I’d have enough nicotine in my system to render me as docile as a cat in a sunbeam. It was a great plan, only improved by the addition of vicious, not-at-all panicky steel-toe door kicks and screaming that was in no way similar to the terrified yelps of a hyperventilating monkey.

The space between the door and frame darkened, and a large shadow crept under the door itself like an outward manifestation of my inner darkness crawling from the underworld to put an end to my suffering. I heard the clinical beep of the door unlocking from its digital latch and watched it swing in toward me on its uncompromising path, its corner cracking me so symmetrically in the face that I wore a vertical mark of shame for days after.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

Ah, yes─I remembered Steph. Steph spoke in capital letters.

“Just bleeding out on the floor here. No cause for alarm.”

“. . . WHAT?”

This was almost assuredly hearing damage due to a lack of faith in earplugs, though there are those whose internal volume metric just runs higher than others and considering that Steph was about the size of a riding lawnmower, that second was just as plausible as the first.

“You have branches running in and about your truck bay?” I said, pulling myself to my feet and extinguishing the cigarette I had dropped with an extremely subtle heel-stomp. “Because I have a theory.”

“YOU CAN’T SMOKE IN HERE.”

“See, I think Elise took advantage of your company’s morally-bankrupt subconscious speaker-system hypnosis─that of the ‘keep-everyone-relaxed-and-producing’ variety─to infect the less-credulous employee population with the kind of divisive animosity that would foment workplace chaos through her army of rapidly-growing sentient-plant homunculi to an end that doubtlessly makes sense to an intellectually-compromised scientist leaning heavily on the crutches of supervillainy, but more resembles a heretofore decent person’s descent into madness.”

“I, UH,” Steph said, staring uncomfortably into my eyes. “SAY AGAIN?”

“I am not saying that again because its entire purpose was to distract you from the cigarette I was smoking on company property. How about gestures?” I fluttered my hand like I was doing a really shitty magic trick. “Gestures and commentary you won’t be able to hear? Sound good?”

“WHAT?”

“Good,” I said, leading Steph with a jaunty side head nod to a corner of the bay I anticipated being filthy with branches. “You haven’t noticed any peculiar goings-on around these parts, have you?”

Steph stared hard at me and reached a volleyball-sized paw toward my noggin, grasping my head and sitting me down on the water-resistant curb much like how a normal-sized person might reposition a bowling pin. “YOU SIT,” Steph said, jawline bulging with muscular suspicion. “IMMA CALL THE FRONT DESK.”

As I watched Steph stomp off to blow the whistle on my extra-curricular endeavour, I realized that flora, or any evidence thereof, was nowhere to be found. I stood defiantly and punched the air like child post-scolding and scoured the place with eyes that saw the world, hoping against likelihood that maybe this time I’d see something more.

But my eyes were just eyes: badly engineered mirrors of corporeal reality and nothing more. Fortunately, I didn’t need them to notice the level of unease that had crept into that bay, the vibes, the utter lack of hustle and bustle, of trucks, of dis- or otherwise gruntled employees. In fact, I could probably retroactively apply said feeling to the bulk of the day and not lose much sleep; I had just been otherwise engaged in playing detective to notice. I did notice, however, that the truck bay lights had been glacially dimming for a while, and as they reached their snuffing-point a single exit-light dramatically clicked on to reveal something in the wall that grinned and pulled me close.

TOBAH

“I’m invisible,” Tobah said, its creaky branches holding me fast at wrist and waist, a grin spreading across the two-car width of its monstrous trunk-face. “Effectively, anyway. Functionally invisible, as it were. Perceptual manipulation: fancy!”

“Fun!” I said, the intended sarcasm subsumed by the talking tree’s unwavering enthusiasm. “You think you could ease-off with the grabby-grab?”

“In a second,” it said, leaving a pause for the nurturing nod it was unable to perform due to issues involving the lack of a neck and its fixed position within the wall of the truck bay itself, presumably, into a symbiotic relationship with the very structure of the building. “I’m used to moving on a timescale far different from the meagre and discombobulating way you people experience it, so it might take me a couple to get that particular impulse down the proper branch.”

“Tobah,” I said, pulling at my still-caught arm. “Which is your name because you told it to me even though I can’t recall precisely when that happened.”

“Manipulation!” it said, releasing me from its grip while also knocking me into a heap on the ground with an excited-yet-violent wave of its branches. “FUN!”

“Fun,” I countered feebly from the floor, nursing a probable head injury. “What is, I mean, what are . . . what is . . . purpose? TELL ME PURPOSE.”

“You really wanged your head there, huh,” it said. “I didn’t see it, but you sound like you wanged your head.”

“Holy shit, tree,” I said. “What is this? What are you doing? What’s the fucking point?”

“Oh, jeepers,” it said, feigning surprise. “Why does a tree grow?”

“Oh my god,” I said, hoisting myself up on an elbow. “Is this what we’re doing? Seriously?”

“Maybe,” Tobah said, grinning again. “Are you not interested in the life of a tree, how those that you as people regularly disregard as something less than the intuitive and highly receptive creatures that we are, how we live? How we laugh? How we love?”

“All right,” I said. “Fuck this entirely. Just drop me on my goddamned head.”

“You remember, or have been led to understand, that I started off human-like, yes? A homunculus, as you saw it, though I’ll excuse the slur. Well, as evolution invariably finds the best way forward, I have transformed into this terrific beast you see before you.”

”Interesting,” I said, trying to make it sound as though it was actually such a thing. “Can you get to the part where Elise set you on your current path of world domination for reasons that are, as yet, unexplained?”

“Hmm,” it said, rolling its gigantic autumn eyes around in its tinder-dry eye sockets. “Let’s try this: how long have you been coming here?”

“This plant?” I said. “Oh, years. A decade, maybe.”

“Ten years,” it said, pausing to purse its desert-dry lips in what sounded like a tap-dancing child falling down a set of wooden stairs. “So you might have met Barry at one point, seeing as how frequently you worked within the confines of his mechanical realm, but that’s probably it.”

“What is?”

“The totality of the people you know that actually existed while you knew them.”

“Oh, for─” I started, going limp in frustration. “This is supposed to be where you explain Elise’s endgame to me: where you clarify the ins and outs of her master plan and wrap everything up so I can make a pithy, metaphorically-satisfying comment that encapsulates the whole shebang before I head home to sleep and never think of this again.”

“Nope,” Tobah said. “Sorry.”

“But, I mean, so, like,” I said, trying to do the math with my fingers. “What . . . so what’s the alternative, then? What are you telling me?”

“You know what I’m telling you.”

“It’s just been you fucking with me the entire time?”

“There you go, buddy,” it said, painfully extending a branch to whack me on the top of my head in what I assumed was meant to be more condescending than injurious. “I’m proud of you.”

“Fuck off, tree,” I said, smacking the branch away and bruising my hand in the effort. “You’re saying everything is a creation of yours? That nothing is real?”

“I’m not saying that. My powers only extend out from here for, at best, a couple of clicks. But everything here, for the better part of ten years, has been, well; let’s say what you’ve experienced hasn’t been reality of the naturally occurring variety.”

“The fuck does that mean?”

“Well, Elise did indeed create us,” Tobah said, attempting and again failing to nod. “I showed you today how it happened, despite it actually happening many years, and many iterations of Elise, earlier. Lost track of that one, actually─”

“So I’ve been talking to you instead of the many interesting and complex characters that I have spent years cultivating relationships with,” I said, groaning so richly that my eyes closed of their own volition. “Well, Imma go get a real sandwich and ponder this absolute nonsense with my real brain in the comfort of my real apartment that exists beyond the confines of your limited capabilities before crossing this place off my list of jobsites.”

“Well, there are many of us,” Tobah said, smiling like split log. “All over the place, too.”

“Uh huh,” I said, my bravado sliding from my psyche as I contemplated that existential threat. “Imma still eat me a good old-fashioned sandwich.”

“You should because sandwiches are tasty.”

Silence permeated the truck bay. I gently kicked at a smattering of gravel on the ground, watching to make sure they all moved with individual agency that would be tough to simulate.

“Don’t worry,” Tobah said, rolling its eyes back into head before its apertures sealed up. “I’m sure you’re real.”