you are paralysed, did you realise yet that you can’t move? Try it.”
Leader tried to stand and couldn’t. He tried to raise his hands but couldn’t. He tried to close his eyes but couldn’t. All he managed was to slur the phrase, “Oh, fuck.”
“You have Veraceo versions one and two, but don’t have the real venom. You don’t have the weapon that you desire… Only I have that… and you sent your assassins to kill me. Well, this is your blowback. This is the revenge of a man you stripped of identity. Are you hallucinating yet? Can you see the cancer that is bubbling away under your skin? Veraceo-Three is the Video Persuasion Signal and with it I can control your entire body by the power of my voice; and I command every cell in your body to become cancerous. I command every cell in your body to swell and bubble and froth and inflame with cancers. I command your body to feel pain. I command your nervous system to burn with the resonance of my name.”
Leader tried to move, he tried to shake himself free of the chair. He had some back and forth momentum and he was slowly slipping off the chair, but at the same time his hands were ballooning in size, his fingers fattening. Blood seeped from under his fingernails. Was it hallucination or was it real. Was it psychosomatic-stimuli? Did the brain believe it so much it forced the body to respond? “Oh fuuuuuuuck.” That was when he found himself screaming. He couldn’t help it. He screamed until every last atom of air was exhaled then gasped in and screamed again.
“Blowback,” Brian was saying. “You took me to the edge and made me look into oblivion; and now oblivion comes back to haunt your dreams.”
The pain was overwhelming. Every nerve fibre electrified.
"Can you feel it, Consec Leader? Can you feel as every cell in your body begins to eat itself from within? How long do you think you can stay alive? How much pain can you endure?”
Leader shook himself out of the chair and fell under the desk, breaking his view of the television. Blood poured from his mouth onto the white floor tiles of his room, his flesh was bubbling as though golf balls were inflating under his skin. He crawled away from the screen and back to the elevator hearing the voice of Brian O’Blivion laughing at him. “I command your body to be in endless pain until you die.”
He had to get out. He had to get away.
“The only relief from this is when you die, Consec Leader… And if you ever send anyone to kill me again, I will destroy your organisation... This is justice, Consec Leader. Justice for the women in Pittsburgh. Justice for those you tortured; and justice for me. You stole my identity Consec Leader, but I will redeem myself through violence and bring resonance to the name of Professor Brian O’Blivion… You can believe that, can’t you? Ha ha ha ha ha.”
Leader dragged himself to the elevator, blood streaks smearing across the white floor behind him, his suit soaked through with fluids that may be real or imagined. He slammed his bleeding palm against the buttons and screamed with the pain. The door closed with Brian still laughing in the background.
----- X -----
The assassins were seated in the lobby with Cue Ball when the elevator pinged. The doors opened to Consec Leader staggering out into the lobby. “Help me,” he slurred.
“Why, what’s wrong?” Cue Ball asked.
Leader loped forward clutching his stomach, dropping to his knees. All three men went forward to help him. One of the assassins leaned forward to catch him as Leader slumped to his knees. The assassin’s jacket was open, his pistol hanging in a shoulder holster. Leader grabbed it and stuck the barrel in his own mouth.
“WAIT!” Cue Ball shrieked. Both assassins reached out to grab the gun and stop the man killing himself… They were all too late… BOOM!
Leader fell back as the top of his scalp popped up, deforming the skull but not breaking the skin. Cue Ball fell to the floor clutching him. “Leader… LEADER!”
The second assassin took his own weapon from his holster. “Mister Cue Ball,” he said. Cue Ball turned his head in time to see the muzzle flare. The bullet went through his eye and blew out the back of his head; his body slumped down across the chest of Consec Leader. "Collect your weapon,” he said to his colleague.
The second assassin collected his gun from Consec Leader’s dead hand.
A door opened. Mister Crucial. “I thought I heard a…”
BOOM BOOM BOOM.
The assassins took Crucial down in a second and walked steadily to where he had fallen. There was the sound of a woman screaming further inside a corridor. Suddenly alarms blared but the assassins were unfazed. They continued on their programed mission. The Viper-Sig coding was simple. If Consec Leader is dead then kill them all.
The screaming woman was Marilyn Bricks. She ran down a corridor, panicked and backtracked right into the assassins. She took a bullet to the shoulder and another to the stomach.
Shotgun guards came running, approaching from behind “Freeze! Drop your weapon.”
But the assassins just fired back until they ran out of bullets. They never ducked for cover or used their lifetime of military training. They stood still with guns at arm’s length shooting at the shotgun guards. The moment they stopped shooting the guards returned fire with pump action Remington’s. The whole thing lasted less than two minutes.
Consec Leader was dead.
Cue Ball was dead.
Mister Crucial was dead.
Marylin Bricks was injured but would survive.
Both assassins were dead.
Upstairs in Leader’s apartment, the cassette of Brian O’Blivion played out, reached the end of the tape and automatically rewound. It would sit there, waiting for an unsuspecting soul to come along and discover it.
--- EPILOGUE ---
Brian looked out from his new home. It was a simple duplex from which to spend the rest of his days. He didn’t have long, he knew that; but he was motivated. He had his desk and his video camera. He could record cassettes and send them back to Bianca in Toronto. She would be his curator. His mind would spill out onto video and she would use them to craft a fictional character that lived beyond his own death. He would be reformed as modern day media-prophet, Professor Brian O’Blivion.
Bianca also had the Viper-Sig equipment. It was unknown whether Consec would be interested in her. They knew nothing of her; but if they did come calling one day. If they ever sent an assassin, then hopefully she could lure her killer into the same Viper-Sig trap. A hall full of TV screens that can hypnotise and reprogram a man within seconds.
He went to his desk and prepared to make a special protection tape for Bianca. At some point, somebody may come asking about Veraceo or the Videodrome programme. She needed a way to dispose of them quietly. That was the purpose of today’s filming. A little light philosophy with a strong dose of Veraceo-Two.
He started the recording.
“The battle for the heart of North America will be fought in the video arena. The Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality and reality is less than television.”
A thought went through his mind. A sad thought. Whoever watches this tape would develop the same brain tumour that was killing him… It couldn’t be helped… He had to stop the world from being changed; even from beyond the grave, he had to try.
----- X -----
It was four weeks since Leader’s death. Consec Security had stepped in and cleaned up the mess, but not before two more people had died watching the deadly cassette of Brian O’Blivion.
“Have you reverse engineered the signal?” Marylin Bricks asked. Her arm was in a sling and she was in a wheelchair for comfort.
“No, we haven’t,” Barry explained. “We understand how it works, but we’ve not been able to duplicate it in a video signal. When we push Veraceo-Two to such high levels, the image breaks down, almost like you’re watching a pirate tap
e. We’re having some success when test subjects are so close to the screen it fills their entire field of vision. The thinking is to put it in a head mounted unit to get it working and go from there.”
“A head mounted unit?”
“Veraceo-Three is completely different from the other versions and can top-to-bottom reprogram a man’s mind... but we don’t know how Brian created it.”
“And what about the public tests?”
“As I explained before, once Videodrome is out in the wild there is a real danger of the Soviets or some other entity discovering and reverse engineering it, so I’m dead set against public trials.”
“We know,” Bricks said. “But that is what you’re tasked with.”
“We’re working on it. This isn’t going to happen fast. We can’t just pay a TV network to broadcast what we want and not ask questions, we need to ingratiate ourselves by stealth and take over the management whilst remaining anonymous. That said, we have identified a potential cable TV company that would be suitable and Peter Fluorite is meeting with one of their executives later today.”
----- X -----
Peter Fluorite was in Brian’s old video lab, the space he’d used as a workshop to originally develop Veraceo, before he was a Consec Partner; before he was a traitor.
There was a knock at the door. Fluorite opened it to a tall thin man with a long face and a soft crooked smile. “Are you the guy