serials
kicking, throwing them into one another, twisting necks, but they just keep coming. Joe tells Rash, “Christ, Rash, I hit a security protocol, they’re all over me… everywhere.” Falling to the ground, Joe’s eyes roll into the back of his head and he looks dead, a hair’s breadth from a seizure. “Stay with me, Joe. Stay with me,” Rash scoops him up like a wounded animal and Trip jumps into the hot seat at the terminal. Rash says, “C’mon, kid, I want to hear about those implants, tell me more.” Trip says, “You’re buying this now? You? I’m supposed to be the gullible one.”
“Shut up, will ya?”
“Just saying, hacking with a thought is one thing, but aliens? Seriously?”
Rash says, “Joe, come back. I need you to tell me about the aliens, man. I want the truth.”
“You can’t handle the truth,” Joe says, winking.
Thought Joe swings one of the little gray bastards around by the ankles, crashing its oversized head into the others like a mace. It finally splits open like a slimy green melon and the aliens topple backward. Joe pushes through the hole in the wall, chasing after them. They scatter like insects, letting out shrill cries of pain and fear, a pile of dead or unconscious invaders heaped around Joe’s ankles like a war photo.
He says, “I’m in.”
Joe, in Rash’s arm, echoes the words.
“He’s in,” Rash tells Trip.
“Me too,” Trip says, “The walls just came down, don’t know what I did.”
“Don’t you get it?” Rash says, “You didn’t do it, he did it. Look at him.”
Trip shakes his head as his eyes scan through line after line of decoded text.
The Thought Chip Record screams:
All a lie. Big hoax. Fool for believing. They’re the Christ machine. The Apocalypse Factory. They used us to invent Jesus the way they used us to invent athletes and movie stars. Been a part of it too long. All a part of it. Building our demise with labor forced on us by scare tactics of credit scores, tax men, caste system promise of a better future for yourself and your children – promise of God in dollar bills, promise of dollar bills in God. All one thing. We’re all electrons in the atomic number of America. All part of the machine. Cogs in a clock. Wheels on the bus. Round 105