CHAPTER THREE: Not Even The Mince

Listen. There’s something you ought to know. It’s not a comforting thing to know. It’s not a useful thing to know. This knowledge probably won’t help you in any way. Unless you are a ‘person’ like Agent Z it will likely only stress you out. And yet!

It is better to die knowing.

Listen. Perception and conception and reality are not contingent on one another. This is a widely understood concept. That there is a ‘you’, the thing swathed in the dark interior, the thing that you know and the only thing that you can know. There is a ‘real’, somewhere, out past the dark abyss and you will never truly experience it. You will never touch the True Thing. Instead it is all translated through the endless train of perception-objects, the perceptual world’s emanations of the true noumenal existences in the ‘real’ world. Things can only be known through phenomena, which is something that occurs inside ‘you’. And what you perceive and what we can only assume to be real do not always line up. Noumenon and phenomenon do not always line up.

Again, this is a widely known concept. It has long been understood that we are all adrift, little candle-boats in a deep dark sea.

But the whole framework of perception? That perspective we use to understand and exist within the world, to translate objects into perception into concepts? It’s not neutral ground. It doesn’t exist for you. And it is not lifeless. It teems.

All of the world is an ecosystem, friend. Why would this be any different? There are bad ideas and by that I mean bad ideas. There are malicious concepts, hostile modes of communication, false perceptions that hunt like vampires. There are predators of thoughts and of sensation and, of course, of humans. Since we see and think and feel so fucking good.

The perceptual ecosystem is varied, with beings that are made entirely of contagious thoughts, or something that exists only within perception and melts to nothing until it is seen again. There is a thing, out there in the world, that will kill you if you think about it and then nobody will ever think about you again, your conception-object permanently bound within your murderer’s ideatic mass. In contrast, this creature here is not so scary, not so strange. It’s fundamentally still an animal. It’s made of meat and wants to eat meat and has just picked up some strange evolutionary adaptations, including binding its conception-object as a Trojan Horse behind your eyeballs.

This wouldn’t work on anything that isn’t sentient. Which is fine: This eats humans. But compared to some of the beings just mentioned, to whom humans are the equivalent of grazing grass both in their capacity to fight back and their capacity to comprehend the means of their own destruction, this is...It’s just an animal! Just a big fancy dog, maybe.

A scavenger, perhaps. It can’t make you forget it so it only has one chance to strike before a human knows there is something wrong, that there is something that their mind and body refuses to align with. It subsists primarily on abandoned human garbage and abandoned human corpses and, occasionally, on abandoned humans.

Jacob was thinking exactly none of these thoughts as he ran. It would have been strange if he had been. Right now, all he was really focussing on was trying to escape from a day that was for sure one of his Top 5 Worst Days Of All Time. And on that list, which will not be shown today, it was at least third place.

All he was thinking about right now, of course, was getting the hell out of dodge (and he’s not even in Kansas!). He wasn’t even trying to outrun anything in particular, at least not anything he knew about. He was just trying to outpace this wretched day.

It had started innocently enough. He had gotten up, started his usual routine, gone to work-hrm. Maybe not so innocent then. But as innocent as it could be. And then later, on his way home in the evening, he got off the bus and stopped. Looked down. Saw that shitty overpass that he always saw on the ride to and from work every single day. He’d never been down there. Never even really took any notice of it before. But today was different and he had had no idea why. And he figured, he thought to himself, he had plenty of time. Why not go down and have a look? Maybe get some good photos for his blog. Jacob had never been the kind of guy to worry about getting mugged.

Instead of getting mugged he met the person (probably) in the suit, the one that later told him to call it Agent Z. She was pretty tall, around six feet, and had a body type that was all straight lines and right angles, long-limbed in a bad way. Her hair was relatively short and dark and profoundly greasy, tied back in a scruffy ponytail. She was dressed like some sort of spook, with a well-fitted suit and shiny shoes. He had wanted to take her picture, though he didn’t know that it was a ‘her’ at the time. She’d just looked like the kind of weirdo that you saw in the city sometimes, the kind that you could maybe take a viral photo of.

They’d talked for a while and she said that she’d been waiting for someone. She appeared distracted, so much that she seemed to simply ignore his requests for her name. And despite her forbidding him from taking any photographs they’d had a pretty friendly, if bizarre, conversation.

And then-and then-and-then...and thennnn….and then nobody had arrived? The shock of this thought made Jacob stop running. He was up out of the causeway now, on the sidewalk, walking past people and people walking past him. He could almost feel their glances striking him, the gazes of people who were concerned but ultimately apathetic. Distressed-looking bloke wandering down the sidewalk with a camera bag in one hand and a hollow look to his eyes? A lot of people would prefer that he’d just keep on walking on out of their immediate perception and thus, out of their lives.

Jacob didn’t care. He was too busy thinking about nobody. She’d been waiting for someone, for a group of people. And then, as they sat together, no people ever showed up. And then something had happened and it was like thinking about a dream. There had been an event but it was so elided of detail that his brain kept skipping over it. It was a paradox structure, a small complex of memories, thoughts, sensations and ideas whose primary instigators never existed. Agent Z had been involved. She’d been very involved. His head was hurting again. His recollection kept going right over to the second conversation he’d had with her, as if there had been nothing in between, as if there had been no nobody. Which there hadn’t. She’d been weirder then and had acted like he’d never introduced himself the first time.

And-and-and-and something had been stupid about his responses too! He remembered how he’d acted, how he’d felt, the awe of it all and he could not remember why. Why was he suddenly so afraid of her?

Because he had seen what she could do.

Backtrack to the interval where nobody showed up and nothing happened. As far as he could remember, the two of them had just sat there without saying anything for at least five minutes. And this surreal sequence kept slipping from his mind whenever he thought of it directly, whenever he didn’t approach it from a right angle, and instead tried to glue their two conversations together as if they’d been the same. And then there’d been the headache and she’d told him to run and he had, for some reason?

And he had to keep thinking about this. He had to. Because he knew, he just knew that if he stopped for a while, if he slept, this would all just heal over and he wouldn’t think anything of it. He had to get to the bottom of it before then.

He won’t, by the way. Not without outside help. It’s impossible. To Jacob, the simple evening’s experience of:

1) Leave Work

2) See Agent Z

3) Speak to Agent Z

4) The Battle With Seven Dead Men, Wherein A Human Body is Minced.

5) Get life 'saved' from otherwise fatal bullet.

6) Speak to Agent Z again.

7) Be interrupted by an unknown predator.

Has been thoroughly put full of holes. He can't even remember the mince!

A short while later, Jacob rounded the corner into Memorial Square, the intersection upon which his apartment building was located. As he always did, as everyone always did, no matter what, he raised his hand to his head in a simple salute. A salute aimed at the great stone obelisk that stood in the middle of the square, for which it was named. Memorial Square is full of people, going to and fro and they always salute. Everyone does it.

And just like everyone else, Jacob does this without knowing, without awareness. He doesn’t see anyone else salute nor does he even begin to perceive the object to which this instinctual and automatic deference is owed. He has no idea why Memorial Square is named Memorial Square and he has been living here for years. In this, he is not unique.

If you know how to look, and your security clearance is high enough, you can find one of these structures in nearly every major city in the world.

But enough! Enough! Jacob is out of the Square now, he is climbing the stairs of his narrow apartment building, squeezed between two larger, older apartment blocks like an architectural stutter. His mind is in disorder, replaying the contradictory memories over and over again like a broken record. He knows he has to keep it all in his head, else he just might lose it. And besides, what else did he have to think about? At least that awful migraine had faded…

He walks into the apartment without opening the door. This is because the door is already open, hanging ajar due to an intruder, an intruder who is already near and dear to our hearts. Having been interacted upon by a classified being, the door’s state has been rendered ambiguous. You see what you genuinely expect to see. Everyone else wandering the gray halls of this place see a closed door because that is what this place is, an endless procession of closed doors guarding the lives of strangers. But to Jacob he expects to see a closed door that he then opens so he simply strides through the open doorway unimpeded, his brain filling in all the relevant nonsense of inserting keys, twisting keys, pushing the door, etc. Sensory packages full of lies.

He does shut the door behind him though. That absolutely happens.

He slings his pack down and tries to think about the past again and, in a moment of satisfaction and horror, finds it much smoother and easier to explain than it had been before. This is what happened, this is the past that has now slunk into Jacob’s head:

1) Leave Work

2) Walk down past the embankment for some fucking reason.

3) Take a few photographs of nothing.

4) Get an awful headache.

5) Start walking back home.

There! Doesn’t that make much more sense? It certainly doesn’t contradict itself anymore. But there’s just one teensy tiny little absolutely massive problem. Jacob is now sure that didn’t happen. There was something there, wasn’t there? His throat was hoarse from speaking and shouting: why?

There had been somebody there with him. But it was useless. Agent Z had re-entered Secrecy Protocols in order to escape being attacked by memetic maneaters and because of that it had all been fucked. The conception-object of her was off-limits. Thoughts would not form her.

Jacob rubbed his forehead and began to pace his apartment, trying to memorise the antithesis of memory. In the end he gave up and decided that what he really needed, really needed, after a long day of work and sudden existential confusion, was a nice hot shower.

This greatly surprised Agent Z, who was currently naked and in his shower already, washing great globs of monster gore off of herself.

She stood there in the running water for a few seconds, just watching as he stepped over her discarded clothes without seeing them. His gaze went right through her and to the shower-nozzle, which had been rendered ambiguous. Like the door.

She got out of his way.

It is now ten minutes into the future from this moment. Agent Z sat on the only chair in the apartment, straightening her tie. She was as she always looked now, save that she was a little damp. Her hair was greasy enough to be naturally water-resistant, like polyester or nylon, so it dried very quickly. She was also bleeding now, just a little. The bullet had begun to sink into her skin and though it had yet to strike the bone of her sternum, there was a persistent trickle of blood running down her chest beneath her clothes.

She was also surrounded by a gory halo of broken teeth, ragged fur and general red and squishy flesh bits, the result of the now-deceased predator having a go at her and getting postponed. It is never a good idea to exist in two different timeframes at once.

Agent Z had a big problem and a bigger problem and her mind, holed through and never good in the best of times, was having a hard time processing them.

Big Problem: She had killed an animal, a memetic camouflage artist. After it had sealed her sight by coating her face in blood that her eyes refused to look at, killing it had been very easy. If she couldn’t see anything at all, it’s little conceptual saboteur couldn’t foul up her shots! And all it took was one shot from the pistol in her lap. This was not her big problem. The big problem was that it had not been alone. She was hunted. And so, using Jacob’s past like a lifeline, she had made her blind way back to his apartment to set her trap.

But that had lead to…

Bigger Problem: Jacob had now seen her naked. For a given value of ‘seen’, anyway. She had been in his field of vision, even if his brain had been fooled by her Secrecy Protocols. And that was a problem. Because the moment she declassified, the moment she unlocked her presence in the cognitosphere, he would remember her again. And not just the memory of their encounter, oh no! He would remember seeing her just now, as if he had always done so.

Awkward.

Agent Z did not like being seen. She didn’t believe in it. It was unfashionable and gross. Being perceived was outdated and belonged in the past, which was a made-up country. As a member of the Agency, it was not supposed to be an issue for her. But…

But, she thought as she stared down at the classified trails of blood that Jacob had unknowingly left across his apartment, this was her mistake. This was her hole in her head. It didn’t seem correct to vanish forever from Jacob’s world after that. Not while he still bled for her.

+++SECRECY PROTOCOL: Locked+++

+++SECRECY PROTOCOL: Unlocked+++

She could hear Jacob in the shower. This wasn’t new. The shouting was, however.