Thu, 19 May 2005

The game is simple, and has only one rule.
Ask me a question, and I will tell you lies. You will read these lies (also known by the title of “stories”), and then ask another question as to the story. Next week, on Sunday night, I will answer that question with another lie/story, and so on once a week until there are no more questions. I will answer one question a week, and only one question a week, and unanswered questions will be fed to a hole in the earth where devils live. These questions will be answered here. You have one week to ask the initial question.

[Attentive reasers will remember this as an old project. I’ve decided to renew it, and I still have a month’s worth of questions from the first go-around, but it never hurts to have more, and plus I had to update the email address. Next installment coming this Sunday.]
(12:05.05.19.2005) [/akasa] #

akasa: question one
why do the little people follow me?

Gretchen stared at the small black cellphone as if it were a bomb, or a dead body. It had been a week since the two men gave it to her, and gave her instructions for its use, and disappeared onto the highway, and it was only just now, while drunk on cheap wine she stole from work, that she decided to give it a try. She had her first conversation with the Council, the answer to her first question, and was certain she had helped kill a man.

The two men sat at the back of the diner, where the light was dim, and ate enough pancakes to kill a bowling league. The taller one called Gretchen by her first name, which was something everyone does in Tamrack, the truckers and salesmen happy for an excuse to stare at the nametag on her chest, the locals all aware of everone’s name as if it were a genetic gift, or what Gretchen would consider the small-town hive-mind. When the man asked her to sit with them, she brushed it off without thinking, staying bemused so as to avoid trouble without necessarily forsaking a tip. The smaller man, the quiet one, looked her in the eyes and said “We found your cellphone. On the bridge.”

Gretchen hadn’t seen her cellphone since it fell out of her purse when she was out with her friends two weeks ago, since that drunk snowball fight where Sarah broke her glasses and refused to talk to anyone for two days. She figured it was gone forever, and kept reminding herself to get up early and run to the mall to replace it, but the only time she had off was during Thanksgiving, and there was no way she was going anywhere near a mall until well into December.

“It was kinda messed up, but we fixed it,” the shorter one said.

“We’re technicians. We fix things.”

Gretchen picked up the phone and looked at the keypad, which had been broken away to fit in a larger pad, which held thirty-two buttons.

“What did you do to my phone?”

“That’s the Bozeman keypad,” the chatty one said. “You can use it to dial satellite, second-grid and private numbers. We also sim0clock’d it, so you’re never going to have to pay for minutes ever again. HAve you cancelled your account yet?”

“No.”

“Do that tomorrow. They’ll sell you a replacement phone, which is good as you don’t wanna use this phone with anyone who intends to call you back.”

“What? Why?”

“Because they can’t. This phone doesn’t take general incoming calls anymore.”

“Well then what good is it?”

“It can be handy to have a phone that no one can call back. Also, you can call the council on it if you press the INFO button.”

“You don’t say.”

“The council will offer information on any question you can ask, to the best of its abilities,” the taller man said. “They told us you had need of access to information, and could do us a favor in turn.”

“What kind of favor?” Gretchen asked, staring in the mirror behind the two men, looking for the nearest exit.

“A man will come in. He will have long brown hair, a beard, and will be carrying a box. He is a game-player, and will be searching for a place called the Shedrouf House, where a series of games will be held. If he asks, you will tell him it is at the end of County Road 48, inside a large stone house. That is all you need to do. You will never see us again.”

“County Road 48.”

“That’s all you have to do. Will you do this?”

“No. I don’t want any part of anything you guys are doing. You need to leave now.”

The two men paid for their pancakes and left, stepping into a black Econoline van and heading north. Gretchen looked at her cell phone, now modified and basically worthless, and went back to work.

The next day, the shaggy man came in, and drank cup after cup of coffee and asked here if she knew where the Shedrouf House was, and without even thinking about it she said “County Road 48, up north, at the very end”, and the shaggy man paid for the coffee and left.

The new cell phone was nicer, and sleeker, and had web access, so all things considered it turned out to not be too bad a deal. She threw her old phone in the junk drawer and didn’t think about it again until the following Saturday, after leaving work early for no good reason and dicking around the house drinking and listening to old tapes after a halfassed attempt at cleaning the bathroom. She dug around the junk drawer looking for the backup corkscrew after losing the first one behind the stove and saw the old phone. What the hell? If nobody can trace the phone back to her, then what could happen? She called her new phone, and *69’d the call, and came back with nothing. She called David, who still owed her money, and listened in with the mute button on, as she knew he’d be asleep by now. He answered the phone, asked who was there a few times, and hung up, only the connection didn’t kill. Gretchen listened in for half a minute and heard someone dialing a number, then heard a woman Gretchen didn’t know pick up, and heard David ask if she had just tried to call him. Gretchen hung up, then spent a couple minutes pouring more wine and examining the phone, which now had a new menu system which cycled through a list of commands, and found that hitting the + key before dialing a number would tap that phone until she hit the cancel button. She hit the + key and redialed David’s number, which instantly connected without ringing in the middle of his conversation with this woman, whose name was apparently Carol, and who was apparently open to the idea of anal sex. Gretchen spent a half-hour trying other command combinations when she remembered the INFO button, which the menu system said only was “direct connect to the council”. What the fuck, she decided, and pressed the button.

“Hello Gretchen,” a professional male voice said. “This is the council. Do you have a question?”

“What is the council?” she asked.

“The council is a private information service. We are available to meet the research needs of select individuals who subscribe to our service.”

“Do I have to pay for this service?”

“No ma’am. You have a lifetime account with us.”

“So what am I supposed to ask?”

“Anything you want. We can provide answers to most questions, and educated summaries of pertinent sources for those we have no direct answer for. To be honest, that generally isn’t necessary. Each user has four primary sources, not counting your operator, and should it be necessary we have a vast number of secondary sources you can speak to.”

“Okay, what is the meaning of life?”

“The exhaustion of possibilities.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“Life is defined by the creation of an infinite set of possibilities, and through the removal of unproductive possibilities the meaning mecomes clear, as a statue within a block of marble.”

“Hmm. Where did I put the corkscrew?”

“The first one fell behind the stove. The second one is on the counter.”

Gretchen stood up, and started looking around. “Are you watching me? Is there a camera in this fucking phone?”

“No, and yes, but we can’t turn it on. You can use it if you want, but even if it were on, all we’d get is video of your earlobe.”

“So how do you know that, then?”

“The council specializes in near-future tactical analysis. We study patterns and averages and go from there. You’ve lost things behind the stove all the time.”

“But how do you *know* that?”

“The only explanation I can give will take a while, and will require lengthy explanations of magnetism, meridians and stink.”

“Stink?”

“I can explain it in about an hour and a half.”

“No! No. Forget about it.”

“Anything else, ma’am?”

Gretchen thought for a while, until she remember the question that had been bouncing around in her head last month, when yet another child appeared on her lawn, staring at her.

“Why do the little people follow me?”

“The midgets, or the children?”

“We’ll start with the children.”

“Children are recording devices.”

“What?”

“If consciousness is essentially a mechanism for pattern recognition and symbolic processing, then it makes sense that an underdeveloped human would have more free mental cycles than adults, as they haven’t fully put names to things yet, haven’t fully learned sameness and difference. It makes perfect sense that such cycles shoudl be put to use, so infants and children watch things, partially to learn mimicry skills, and partially because their personalities haven’t been turned on yet. You’ve been around children who seem to change overnight, who suddenly seem to snap into actual cognizant personalities rather than just a bundle of impulses and reactions.”

“Sure, sometimes.”

“It can be hard to see, sometimes, but it’s there, and that’s the point when a little person changes primary definition from recording device to processing device. The reason babies stare at you when you’re in line at the grocery store, and the reason why those kids are always standing on your lawn is because the second-grid has taken an interest in you, and when those kids grow up, if they remember it at all, they’ll just figure it was the sort of weird and pointless thing little people do.”

“I heard that before. What’s the second grid?”

“Again, ma’am, that’s a long answer. It should take about three hours and eight minutes.”

“I think I’m done for the night. But just one thing. Those two men who gave me the phone? Did they kill that man with the box?”

“No.”

“Are you telling me the truth?”

“So that man isn’t dead?”

“That man died long before you met him, ma’am.”

Gretchen stared at the blank television screen for a minute and waited for her brain to make connections.

“I don’t think I want to ask any more questions tonight.”

“That’s quite all right. Should you need our services, we’ll be available anytime, ma’am. Good evening, Gretchen, and good luck.”

Gretchen hung up the phone, and dropped it on the table, and stared at the small black cell phone. They killed that man, she thought to herself. They had me lure him there and they killed him. Or something worse. It didn’t matter.

Gretchen finished off the wine, turned out the lights and went to bed, tossing back and forth for an hour, and the last thing she thought before she fell asleep was that she forgot to ask about the midgets.
(12:05.05.19.2005) [/akasa] #