Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End (16 page)

Dave clutched the cigar impotently between
his teeth as they stared at each other uneasily. Instead of
speaking, he crossed his feet on the desk, which was bare except
for an ashtray and a thick glass with a telltale pale amber puddle
inside – the remnants of Glenlivit on the rocks left out too
long.

This was meant to demonstrate his
superiority in this environment, however Don was too busy thinking
about alcohol. Don was a fan of single malt himself. In his opinion
it was a liquor well suited to back-room meetings.

It wasn’t right for this meeting, however.
Scotch was a drink to be shared between co-conspirators. The plot
he was about to unleash called for a couple shots of tequila, which
was generally a far less Machiavellian liquor. He doubted Dave
would catch his sinister intentions if he asked for Cabo Wabo, a
brand owned by a rock star, which seemed fitting, all things
considered. But, no. This plane would have to be landed sober.

“
You are an
idiot
Don,” Dave said, breaking a measured the silence. “Sometimes
I really wish we didn’t hire any of your kind here, but it seems
that if we want an IT department, there isn’t any choice.
Otherwise, you’d probably be homeless, handing out small-minded
feel-good pamphlets on street corners. But I am a nice guy. You
know that right, Don? So let’s talk a little bit about business,
shall we?” He lit the cigar. Each breath sounded like a death
rattle.

Don pulled a chair up to
the desk and gingerly put his laptop down on the floor. “Sure,
let’s.” He could smell scotch on Dave’s breath from ten feet away.
It cut right through the pungent smoke.
I
warn you not to underestimate my powers
,
Don thought to himself.

“
What is this nonsense with you busting in on a boardroom
about unholy vengeance? You are in the presence of a God, son. If
you are going to  continue working for this company you need
to realize that your first concern must be the growth of Kaltec. He
must be your God. He is a hungry God, Don. A hungry, vengeful God.”
An edge of genuine fear made his voice tremble.

Don froze in horror. All of this was news to
him. He had never heard of Kaltec before. Corporate brochures,
countless awkward and tedious meetings. No Kaltec. Maybe Dave was
trying to bring him in on the ‘inside.’

“
Lord Kaltec watches your every move. Do you follow me? Kaltec
is not a he, Kaltec is an
it
. I want you to go to sleep at
night thinking…how can I keep it fed tomorrow? If you don’t feed
it, it will eat you. You are a cell in Kaltec's body. You are
little…tiny…You are tiny Don, do you understand that?
Tiny
.” Dave was chewing
on the end of his cigar as he spoke. A brown froth lined his
mouth.

The Plan. The
ketchup
. He rummaged
around in the bag for packets, nodding absently. “Yes
sir.”

He had an arsenal of arguments and
complaints he could unleash in a forum like this…finally the
opportunity had presented itself and he had no appetite for it.
There was no point. He may as well argue the ills of eating beef to
a cattle farmer. His counter-argument would need to be much more
visceral, if he  wanted to reach this audience. And anyway, he
was pretty sure Dave was completely insane.

“
Your bleeding hearts are small. How will that please Kaltec?
You must have passion. Real strength, to kill millions to serve and
please your Lord. If one person out of a thousand dies as a result
of our medication, there’s an outrage,” Dave growled. “They don’t
understand true power.”

Don nodded, giving an almost mischievous
smile. If Dave had been paying more attention, that smile might
have made him wonder. He might have wondered why Don was opening
packet after packet of ketchup, without anything to put it on. But
Dave wasn’t wondering much of anything at all. He was so hammered
his face was numb.

Dave continued, “When I was your age kids
were crying up a storm about a couple slants getting blasted in Mai
Lai. Fuck them, we were trying to crush Communism. I killed a bunch
of them over there, just spraying bullets. All the same. We had to
get out of the jungle but we won the war, goddammit. And one day,
Kaltec, he–“ Dave dropped his drink. “Don?!  What in the hell
do you think you are doing?”

While Dave was speaking, Don had dropped his
pants, and proceeded to squirt ketchup all over his genitals,
nodding his head agreeably, conversationally.

Don and Dave regarded each other awkwardly
over the slop-slop-slop sound of his hands doing their work below.
The cigar fell from Dave’s flaccid lips, making a wet splat as it
landed on the desk and stuck there hissing amidst a cloud of ash
and smoke.

But there was no other reaction. Dave was
apparently far more insane than Don had assumed. There was no brain
to shatter. Dave was a simulacra, a shell of a man that existed
merely to serve his imaginary Lord, an Aztec Leviathan, a
feather-plumed tyrant of the dark beyond: Kaltec. Lord of Europharm
AG.

Don kept a wide smile as he proceeded to
masturbate, ketchup splattering all over the expensive rug. The
smile grew, but this was getting awkward. Dave wasn’t moving, only
staring with an increasing look of curiosity on his face. What was
supposed to happen next?  In hindsight, maybe calling it a
“Plan” was getting ahead of himself. Nothing to do at this point
but run.

Finally, Dave reached for the phone to call
security, but Don was already gone.

As he flew down the steps, an uncomfortable
slimy feeling between his legs, Don realized he had been planning
this for months, maybe even years. Not the ketchup stunt, that was
just a sudden flash of genius, but instead the realization that
there was something very, very wrong with this world. The question
was, what was it and what could he do about it? It had been
bouncing around in his head all this time, it had even been the
subject of his dreams – when he wasn’t occupied by three-foot-tall
naked green women. Dave’s drunken rambling about cells in bodies
had given him an idea…a terribly wicked idea. Simple and profound.
 What was that band’s name? Babylon? He’d have to give them
some help. Kaltec was a weakling compared to the Gods he could
invent.

Cancer starts with just a
couple cells, after all. It is the revolt of the few against the
many, when the many are fat and insane.

Maybe the analogy didn’t
hold, exactly. He had more pressing things to worry about anyhow,
like evading the guards.

The autumn months moved towards winter.
Clumps of auburn leaves were replaced by an unsightly gray sludge.
The bustle on Park slope was a perpetual blur, viewed through the
window of Don’s makeshift office in the front room of his
apartment.

Not that he looked out on the outside world
much – his primary contact with the outside was through Xi Ping Bo,
who brought his orders from the corner Chinese store regularly by
bicycle. There were other options in the area, but Xi Ping was his
favorite. Maybe he just found his name amusing.

Don
had been gaming corporations since middle school. Hacking,
playing the market, but he never knew why before. Yet again, he’d
banked against Europharm, fucked them over all across the news,
outed them to the government anonymously, and raked in some back
end off his investment in their competitors. He lived in a modest
apartment and endured the commute, and kept saving. This was no
different than before, except now he had The Plan.

Subversion had been
his
modus operandi
. A means unto itself. Not anymore. He would use the money
and techniques learned through that interaction to fund social
viruses which would spell the end. For the Pharmaceutical industry.
For all industries founded on imperial ownership notes.

Crushing major corporations and causing
civil upheaval took planning and skill. This was why he needed to
recruit the help of some of the most brilliant and eccentric minds
in computer programming, economics, media and social engineering.
Ontological terrorism on this scale was a long con. He had to
settle in.

Implementation of such a plan would require
wide dispersion and a thorough understanding of social patterns and
chaos theory. It could begin with cells and meta-cells of
operatives that didn’t even know each others names. It would take
on a life of it’s own. In the end no one would know where it
originated. When that time came, he would be long gone. He would be
in Thailand, or Switzerland. The image of that flaccid cigar
falling from Dave’s slug-like lips would taint his nightmares until
his dying day. He didn’t want to be Dave 2.0 in twenty years. That
image was reason enough to drag the Western World to its knees.
Blue screen of death. Hit Ctr-Alt-Delete. Pray for the best.

Over the course of months he dabbled with
countless approaches. With the nest egg he’d saved, he had time to
research. He had time to skulk and plot and eat copious amounts of
greasy Chinese food. Pages of notes collected first in vast piles
of napkins, wrinkled and stained with coffee rings. A couple napkin
ideas graduated to a notepad.

Many of these notes later got the red pen,
writ large: not feasible, unnecessary, stop eating Lo Mein after
midnight, magnificent tits!, and so on. He considered just
destroying centralized banking, but after long and tedious research
on the history of the federal reserve, he came to realize that the
system itself was devised to bring about the same kind of
stratification and destabilization which he thought he had to
create. To bring about his desired goals, the most crucial elements
were social rather than financial, so his focus turned towards the
media.

He gathered information on the groups and
individuals he would need to contact, he charted out all their 1st,
2nd, and 3rd tier contacts, and determined at what point their cell
would need to be activated. He barely slept, no one saw him, and
the few friends he used to have were long since convinced he had
gone entirely insane.

When he was done researching, he started
making phone calls.

First on his list was the
Colonel. His guess was that his moniker originated with Colonel
Kurtz, from
Apocalypse
Now
, Coppola’s modern adaptation of Heart
of Darkness. Kurtz had gone beyond the realm of the Military’s
command, had gone beyond the realm of sanity, and found a strangely
pragmatic reality out there, in the tangled roots of the mango
trees. Of course, this Colonel looked more like Klink, from the 60s
television show Hogan’s Heroes, if he was fronting an Industrial
band in the 90s.

Last he heard, the Colonel was making a
killing running the IT department of some medical web start-up, and
blew that killing quite literally in white-hot blasts through the
septum. He did it alone, he did it at great parties that he threw
at his pad, he did it while he worked. Chances are soon he’d do it
subconsciously, while he slept. Don could imagine his hand slinking
around the top of his bedside table like a tarantula, quivering
atop the glass when it sensed its prey was near.

He made a quick call to give the Colonel a
heads up. The real way to sell him on the concept was in person,
over a line or two. Don honestly wasn’t fond of the stuff but he’d
make an exception to close a sale. When the Colonel answered, Don
heard hysterical giggling in the background, loud enough to
overpower crashing electronic drum machines and distorted
vocals.

“
Speak,” he said. He obviously knew who was calling from his
caller I.D. Two years, and that was all he had to say.
Typical.

“
Colonel, it’s Don– ” he started automatically.

“
I can read. OK, go to town girls. Now. Like a vacuum
cleaner…Though you might want to have your number protected. I
could find out where you live…” he hissed.

“
You’ve known where I lived for years. Anyway, I have a
business proposal for you. It’s not just money…it’s…something
bigger than that. Do you remember that ongoing conversation we had
back in school…about taking down the big names in the media
industry? About shifting the geography? Well I have something that
could be bigger.” Don spoke rapidly and loudly, hoping he was being
heard over the music.

The Colonel hummed to himself when Don
finished speaking, and then replied with what sounded like
bemusement, “Great, I was wondering how long it would take you.
Making these porno videos is totally sucking out my soul.”

“
Porno videos?” Well that explained the background
noise.

“
Yeah,” he said, “I’m making one right now. Thank God for DV
cams, and coke whores. Girls these days, they’ll do anything for a
gram. It’s sad. Isn’t it, honey? Anyway, it passes the time but I’d
rather do something more
subversive
.”

He hadn’t said otherwise, but Don knew he
wasn’t actually participating in the films, either. The Colonel was
rather particular about making flesh on flesh contact with anyone,
even in passing. Most of the time he wore tight leather gloves,
layer upon layer of clothes. It was such a straightforward
mechanism that psychoanalysis seemed unnecessary.

He was still talking like a jackhammer,
probably swimming in a deep, invigoratingly cool pool of dopamine.
“So you’re at it again huh. Let me guess, all of the business world
is like…different organs in the same organism. Like, oh my god!”
Hearing the Colonel try to talk like a Valley Girl turned Hippie
was almost more than Don could bear. “And you want to become an
organ and then, like, pull the plug. Or fill the body with confetti
or something. I’d rather an army of monkeys, or a pet elephant. Or
an M-1 tank. But your plan sounds grand, too. Jesus girl, finesse,
c’mon…Though I have to tell you I don’t think humans are fit to
govern themselves. How about tomorrow night, your place? Throw in
the army of monkeys and I’ll love you forever. Me love you long
time. Spit or swallow girls, make up your mind. Oh wait. Tell me
why I give a fuck, again?”