C.J.Owen’s Time Sink Blog

Josh answered the door, the man waiting there had 50lbs too much around the middle and too few hairs on the top and wore gray coveralls. Across the front of his chest was a big shamrock with a red circle and line through it. He held a large tool bag.

“Hi.” Josh said as he opened the door.

“Yeah, I’m Derek.” The portly visitor said curtly, “You called about an infestation?”

“Yeah, I’m getting overrun here.” Josh was a little surprised since he had only called an hour before.

The stout man welcomed himself into the fiore, “Well, lets takes a look.” He started looking around as soon as he passed the threshold. “You own the place?”

“No, I rent.”

“I noticed you got horseshoes over the door.”

“Yeah…”

“Iron?”

“Yup.”

“Y’sure?”

“Yeah, I’m su–.”

“Cuz lots of them from China are aluminum.”

“I’m pretty sure they’re not aluminum.”

“Sometimes they stick a little bead of lead in them to make’em heavier…”

“Uh… I’ll… I’ll buy new ones, okay? But that wont help right now.”

“Okay… Alright. What was your first clue you had ‘em?” The exterminator started walking around the small old apartment, his scuffed boots leaving small puddles from the rain outside.

“Couple of days ago, I noticed my food— my uh, muffins– started to show sign of getting nibbled at. Then all sorts of mischief started happening. They keep untying everything, arranging my coins in weird patterns and now there’s dust everywhere.”

The exterminator brushed his gloved hand across the windowsill, it came up covered in glowing silvery powder. “Yeah, looks like you gotta colony,” He took a sniff.  “This’s from a queen. You keep this place pretty clean, it looks like. You keep your trash covered outside?”

“Yeah, but I think I know why they got in. My downstairs neighbor used to leave saucers of honey and milk out for them, said it was good luck.”

“Oh, Christ, one of them? Gahd… Well it’s people like her that keep people like me in business.”

“Yeah,” Josh shifted his weight, an crossed his arms,  “Speaking of; How much is this going to cost me?”

“About 300″

“300?!”

“Hey, you got a nest! I haf’ta fumigate the whole place. Make sure traps are set. Then I gotta go track down every entry point to make sure I got a iron nail pointing outward. You could’ve avoided this if you got a cat.”

“I’m allergic.”

“Hmph.” The exterminator started walking around the apartment, knocking on the walls, when he got near the kitchen he stopped. He knocked and listened. Then he held a small glass vial, containing a four leaf clover, near the wall. The clover exploded into growth, overflowing the vial. “Damn… that’s alotta glamma. This might take a while. they get pretty ‘effen ornery when the nest is threatened.”

Josh heard a noise and looked over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of a large cellophane-like insect wing flutter behind the lamp.

The exterminator crouched down and listened lower down on the wall. “Hmm, let me try something.” He pulled out a long nail, an 8 inch spike, and a hammer.

“What are you doing? You’re going to hammer that into my wall? The landlord will have a fit!”

“Hey, this is the job, okay? ‘Sides, the landlord will be glad the place is clean.” He placed the nail against the plaster and gave it a good solid whack. sending it into the wall to the head.

A hundred tiny screams issued forth from within the wall, followed by an army of scurrying. Immediately the place erupted. Small winged creatures the size of bats flew out of every corner, from the vents and the cracks between the floor boards. The room was filled with loud buzzing from hundreds of wings.

Josh cried out as he reflexively crouched in a fetal position. The exterminator just stood there looking while holding an iron horseshoe in each hand. Josh looked down and saw a tiny angry woman in gossamer dress and gleaming crown stand in the floor. She was chattering angrily and waving a small wand. He immediately tried to stomp on her but she flitted away while doing pirouettes. He then felt a pin prick in his leg and saw a tiny man in knightly vestments attacking him with a tiny sword, he kick at it and the tiny warrior flamboyantly pranced under the couch.

The exterminator tossed a handfull of tangled string on the ground and the commotion stopped as the fairies rushed in to hurriedly start untying the knots.

“Yeah, this is one of the wost fairy infestations I’ve seen in a while. You better go stay at a friend’s overnight, this’ll take a while and the cleanup is going to be messy.

Seeing the dejected look on Josh’s face he tried to reassure him “Hey, look, don’t be too down. This could’a been worse.” The man kneeled down and began pulling out cans of Anti-glamour-fogger, “Could’a been trolls.”

This is a narrative version of a short piece of flash fiction I’m working on (600 words or less). The actual work will be written from the experiences of a character, but the general ideas will remain.

I wonder what it was like when people had privacy? Back when your actions were your own and you didn’t have everything you did or say recorded for future generations to ponder over. I imagine it must have been great, though there was probably only a short period of time between the last guilt ridden religious person and the first mandatory Legacy Backup.

I guess it was just natural techno-sociological progression out of the culture of Reality TV, amateur paparazzi and, most obviously, the public Internet journal. I’ve heard it was originally a fad that the wealthy, self-indulgent crowd hopped on; the ones who were into blogging about their every little personal detail. The adoption of the Legacy Backup snowballed when people realized that it was a form of tangible immortality. You would never be forgotten. You would become a historical figure. They say a movement grew around the idea that it was wrong for just the wealthy to live on. So it became mandatory. Now the installation is done about a month before exiting the womb, for your own good, they say.

Want to masturbate? Go ahead, but your grandkids will get to watch. Want to have a tryst with a stranger, or get roaring drunk and sing bad karaoke? Have a breakdown and start sobbing over a dead goldfish? Well, you always have the thought right before you do anything “how will this be judged?” If you make a mistake, it’s hard for the flush of embarrassment to fade like it should, since you know it’s going to be played again to anyone who cares to watch. The more embarrassing, the better. Of course, those who are going to watch will be watched themselves, so there is amplification across generations, the most “interesting bits” floating to the surface of your life.

I know people have second thoughts, but don’t want to speak out against it because that would imply they must have something to be ashamed of, or worse, they want to do things that they would be ashamed of. Society expects to judge you on your actions, and weigh your soul against a feather once you die. To even try to deny that condemns you to eternal suspicion and wild speculation; “What would he have done if he wasn’t watched?” Besides, the existing generation isn’t keen on being the last one to be saddled with judgment, why should the kids get off so easy?

So we’ve become the new Puritans, outwardly cold and controlled, inside we are wound up tighter than a ball of rubber bands. Though now people have become geniuses at innuendo and implied meanings. You’re always in “polite company” so you never say what you really mean. You just hope those watching later will not know what you really meant during your seemingly innocent conversation with your coworker. People have become adept at all manner of complex subterfuge to get around the implant’s limitations.

Many people can’t take it, and eventually just crack. They become paranoid, delusional. They suicide, or even go on a suicidal rampage where all that hidden frustration just erupts and they self destruct, screaming invective at the next generation even as the police gun them down.

Most adapt, like me, but even I find myself just wishing I had the luxury of only fearing fire and brimstone in the afterlife instead of knowing my last thoughts will be panicked recollections of every imperfect thing I did and how it will taint my legacy long after I have a chance to balance it.

It is a rainy night, a constantly drizzle soaks the world. A drenched cat scrounges in the trash in the back alleyway of a little-used largely abandoned industrial park in New Bedford. A flash of lightning blankets the world in stark contrasts. A heavy iron-bound door, its red paint peeling away in shredded flakes, has a warning sign that says “High Voltage”, framed by streaks of rust from the tacks holding it.

What others don’t see behind this door is a thing far worse than high voltage, though there is that, and much more. A large space, once used for warehousing machine parts, is now filled with inscrutable machinery, sinister tools, and endless flasks of noisome fluids, some stacked on shelves and others feeding yellowed rubber tubing into cages covered by tarps. A large operating table sits at the center of this macabre scene with heavy leather straps, unbuckled and lying open along its length. Water drizzles from the skylight above, from which a lighting rod descends. A bolt of lighting strikes the rod and a blast of blue fire hits the center of the table, right about where the heart should be where a person, or person shaped thing, would lie.

But there is nothing there. Indeed, the sinister fluids within the glassware do not bubble. The Bunsen burners, Jacob’s ladders, and Tesla coils were long ago turned off. The machinery lies silent, and the cages are empty of life.

Outside the door, below the ‘high voltage’ sign is another– a bright blue and white sign from Whaling City Realty that says “For Sale”.

“At first it seemed like a dream come true.” Doctor Sinizar, sips his coffee while sitting at a table in a diner across the street from his foreclosed laboratory. ” Sleethfield and I were just starting out together. I had just graduated from the Mad Science school at Roger Williams and he with a Mad Scientist Lab Tech Certificate from BCC. We were both worried that we wouldn’t be able to get the funding needed to start our first lab. We didn’t have very big expectations…”

“Every try finding really good Jackob’s ladders… The ones that make a really loud “TZZZZZT! TZZZZT!”? That shit’s expensive.” Sleethfield added, then let out a cry after a loud crack from from a cane across his back swung by Dr. Sinizar.

The Doctor continued. “The Mortgage lender had said we could qualify for no money down and and adjustable rate and interest-only payments for the first five years. Since it was our first Lab we figured we would be able to fix it up and sell it at a profit when we are ready to move on a few years later. It didn’t work that way though.”

“Things were going really well for the first five years, then when I had perfected my cloning techniques we all of a sudden had a lot more mouths to feed.”

“Sometimes more than one mouth on each clone..” added Sleethfield.

“SILENCE, YOU FOOL!” Yelled the Mad Genius after another crack across his assistant’s deformed hump. “Anyway… we put the place on the market, but no one was willing to pay what we are asking for. Then the rates went up and because the five years had elapsed, we had to pay the full amount, damn them…. DAMN THEM!!!”

“I was so close to unleashing my vat-grown minions on the world, but I didn’t have the cybernetic limbs quite worked out yet, and needed a better machine shop, plus some more cash, but we had already tapped all our equity on the place.”

“The fools back at the institute called me mad, but they also said I should have taken that economics course. I thought, ‘Stupid electives. What need I, Victor Von Sinizar, with Intro to Economics!?’– It turns out they were right about that one.”

Dr. Sinizar’s is not a unique case. All across the nation, Mad Scientists are having to close up shop or take on second jobs creating Walmart greeters just to barely make their monthly mortgage payments. The hardest hit are those that bought in what was once booming locations for treacherous laboratories. But the bubble was not founded on actual ideal locations for new labs; such as being near graveyards, medical schools that give access to fresh organs, toxic waste dumps, or abandoned military test sites. This meant the values of the newly furbished labs were based more on speculation- Mad speculation, than on a solid economic foundation.

The market looks to be in a correction for some time, and until the rebound, the Mad Science community has been forced to rely on its own for help, something that doesn’t come naturally to the psychologically unstable and socially challenged mad men and women whose soul objective is ruling the world and answering Questions That Were Not Meant To Be Asked. Many have been forced to take on roommates to help pay the mortgage.

Dr. Sinizar has had to do just that, moving in to share a cramped loft with his rival Dr. Woo Wang, and has nothing good to say about it. “It’s a difficult environment to work in when your arch nemesis keeps leaving only a small amount of milk in the container or doesn’t chip in to keep the fridge stocked with beer and fresh cadaver parts. Not to mention skimping on their turn to clean the Lab Assistant’s litter box.”

“That last one really sucks…” Sleethfield said. He winced, but there was no punishment from his master this time. Instead, Dr. Sinizar just nodded, “Yes… that does suck. Oh, but have no fear, my grotesquely deformed friend, I’ll have my revenge… You’ll see. YOU WILL ALL SEEE!!! MWAHHAHAHHHAAAHHAAH!”

After his laughing fit, the Doctor asked sheepishly if I could spot him for the coffee. I paid for it and wished him luck.

If there is one lesson that we can all learn from this it is that unbridled madness is perfectly fine for science, but has no place in the Free Market.