_ | \ | \ | | \ __ | |\ \ __ _____________ _/_/ | | \ \ _/_/ _____________ | ___________ _/_/ | | \ \ _/_/ ___________ | | | _/_/_____ | | > > _/_/_____ | | | | /________/ | | / / /________/ | | | | | | / / | | | | | |/ / | | | | | | / | | | | | / | | | | |_/ | | | | | | | | c o m m u n i c a t i o n s | | | |________________________________________________________________| | |____________________________________________________________________| ...presents... Jack and Jack (revised) by Obscure Images >>> a cDc publication.......1991 <<< -cDc- CULT OF THE DEAD COW -cDc- _____________________________________________________________________________ _ Jack ran swiftly down the hallway, his progress unimpeded by the seemingly endless number of brainless accountants filling up the hall. They parted like the Red Sea, eventually closing back up in his wake. Jack was a professional assassin. There is good money in the death business. Jack was a modified human, nearly a totally artificial person. He was a walking death machine. Wading through the crowds on the way to his target, Jack put his body on autopilot so he could think about more important things. "What am I really doing this for?" he asked himself. "For the money," he replied. He had a nasty habit of having completely coherent conversations with himself without actually knowing what he was going to say next. Moral qualms have to take a backseat to the wallet, sometimes, and after being run out of the Sim-Stim industry, there wasn't really an other good way to survive. Jack slipped back into control again and continued along his path toward the ExecZone. Jack looked at the accountants with sheer disgust. They've given up all of their humanity so they could be wired for numbers. It's all for their career, they said, but then what happens to all the big bucks they're paid? Nothing - a lobotomized wirehead has no need for money, just a little food and a closet to sleep in. So much for that career, there are so many stupid people around. Just out of spite, Jack punched one in the head, causing it to vaporize into a red mist. The entrance to the ExecZone was where the troubles could start, so he hyped up his sensors to detect any subtle changes which could indicate a trap. A warning message flashed before his eyes - there was a trap up ahead. Well, that could be easily avoided. As he ran up toward it, he shot out the sensors waiting for him to come through. That should be it, thanks to the other exec that hired him to kill his boss. He smashed through the door into the room where his target was working laboriously. Jack flew across the room and grabbed the man by the shirt. The man started howling and begging for mercy. He tossed the executive out the window and watched him fall onto the pavement below. Jack climbed onto the windowsill and gave a mental command to fold out his polycarbon gliding wings. He leaped and gracefully floated away, a falcon leisurely soaring to its home. The next evening, Jack got out of bed, dressed up nicely, and decided to take a walk on the Strip. The Strip is the quarter of the city totally dedicated to bars, whorehouses, and crime. You could get anything that you would ever want, and many things you could never want, on the Strip. The Strip was Jack's home away from home. He usually hung around at Club Nuclear, where all of his friends gathered. The look of the place was something from the punk scene of the late 1970's. The people inside were dressed likewise. The music was period music as well, the speakers pounding out devastation from groups like Crass, the Sex Pistols, and the Buzzcocks. Jack sat down at the bar and ordered a drink. "Hey Jack, do you get off on killing people?" his own inner voice asked. "Why don't you just fuck off? I'm sick of you talking to me like you were my mother," said Jack. "You seem to forget, Jackie boy, that I am you, and right now you are in the midst of talking to yourself. You really should see a doctor about this." "Just go away, I'm trying to get drunk." "That seems to be all you do these days - kill people and get drunk. Don't you want to make something out of your life?" "No, I don't. Why don't you just leave me the fuck alone?" "You are really a boring fellow. I'll go find something better to do. See ya Jack." Now that his other personality had left him alone for the time being, he decided to start searching for a comfortable zero. Vodka and him were getting to be very good friends. Jack was getting a nice buzz on, when a woman slid up to him and started talking with him. Charm was a subconscious action for Jack. The woman was a delightful specimen, and shallow enough for a good night's exercise. Jack was entranced by her exquisite beauty, which was only enhanced by her multihued mohawk. He decided, through an alcoholic fog, that he wanted her for his own, at least until he was sober. She offered to bed him at her apartment, so Jack naturally accepted her blunt offer and followed her back to her place. She lived in a very large open flat. There was only one room, but that room was as big as Jack's apartment. On one wall was a giant videoscreen displaying some Japanese porno vid that showed the sex act in as much detail as is possible without actually participating in it. The furniture was all made up of white Flow-Plas which could be shaped into whatever you wanted. The place was a rich girl's paradise. She was obviously an artist of some sort, judging by her tastes in clothing and interior design. She walked into the area of the room with the vaguely bed-shaped thing and dropped the few bits of clothing that she had on. Jack did basically the same thing, except that while she gracefully slid out of her clothes, he fell out of his. They had sex. The lights dimmed down as they both drifted off into a peaceful slumber. Unexpectedly, the other Jack broke into his dream. "Wake up, loverboy." "What do you want? I was having a good dream." "Yeah, I was watching - she's really good, you know that?" "Yeah, I know, I was the one doing all the work." "So Jack, what are we going to be doing next?" "Shut up and go away." "That isn't very nice, Jack. Just for that I'll show you what fun you can have with me..." Jack lost consciousness and awoke standing on the top of a metallic sphere. A pattern swirled around the surface, looking like a satellite shot of cloud formations. Jack and the globe were suspended in the middle of an endless void. He sat down on the sphere. After a few minutes the blackness surrounding him started to be speckled with little points of light. "Where am I?" thought Jack. Off in space, a blue neon glow started to shine on him. A cloud of gases beneath the sphere began to swirl, eventually congealing into a planet. Strangely shaped objects started bulging their way out of the new globe. "This place is really strange, like something out of a Dali painting," thought Jack, jumping off the sphere onto the ground. The land was lit by the blue neon sun, giving the place an eerie coldness. Jack heard his own voice, booming from nowhere, asking him how he liked the creation. "I am god here, Jack. What I say goes. Want to make a smart ass comment now?" "Yeah, great - now let me out so I can get back to sleep." "Not so fast, Jack. I'm leaving now, but I will be watching." Jack screamed obscenities into the void, but the booming voice was gone. Jack wandered aimlessly around this newly created land inside his head. An odd limping rabbit-like creature shuffled across his field of vision. There are living things here, thought Jack. As he got farther away from the sphere he had started on, the scenery got stranger and stranger, as did the animal life. From the looks of the life, it was obvious that laws of physics didn't apply here. The sky started swirling around, and the star-like spots started to disappear. They were replaced by images of his face that began laughing at him. The roaring laughter hurt his ears, scaring him quite a bit. He began to run to find some peace from himself, but there was no luck. The landscape was full of bizarre monstrosities, but there was no where to hide. Jack ran through a forest full of trees, every leaf bearing Jack's face. He screamed in fear and frustration then ran in a new direction when the forest ended and a flat blue tundra began. All at once the ground a few feet in front of him began to bubble, and he saw himself grow out of the ground. The new Jack stood there with a smile on his face. Jack could no longer take this abuse, so he started running and dived at his image. He knocked himself to the ground and punched as hard as he could in the chest, which yielded like Jello. The duplicate face just laughed as Jack ripped the body to shreds. As Jack continued to mutilate his image his surroundings began to fold in on themselves. For a second everything was a blur... ...and when Jack looked down again he was staring into the empty eyes of the girl he had just mutilated. Jack jumped up in revulsion at what he had unwittingly done. The whole corner of the room was coated in the girl's blood. On the bed lied what remained of her body. Out of the rapidly putrefying pile of flesh, only her head and one leg were recognizable. Jack ran out of the apartment as fast as he could, not even bothering to wash off the blood that coated his clothing and body. He ran as fast as he could for the several miles it took to get back to his apartment. When he arrived he took a shower and destroyed his clothing. He popped a relaxation vid into the viddeck and sat in front of the vidwall. He sat for several hours completely engrossed in the shimmering colored blobs that floated about on the wall. When he lost interest in the vid, he stood up and walked into his kitchen to pick up something to eat. As he ate his meal, Jack thought about what happened to him. His conscious mind reeled at what he had done. The other Jack had been talking to him for quite a while, but he'd always assumed that it was his subconscious mind, a conscience of sorts. Jack shivered as he began to realize that it was something altogether different. About this time, his other personality popped into his head. "Hey Pal, how does it feel to have no control, helpless and afraid? You are almost mine. It won't be long until I have full control over you. You will have to live in that world I created for you while I carry on a new life of my own." "Why are you doing this to me? I've never done anything to you." "You have done something to me, Jack. You've made me live in a hell of your creation for over 10 years." "What do you mean? I didn't know you even existed until a few years ago. How could I have done that?" "Your unconscious fears and hates trapped me in your image of hell. Only recently have I been able to periodically escape for a while. I have finally broken free of your hell, and it is time for me to banish you to my version." "Leave me alone! Just get out of my head, do you hear me? GET OUT OF MY HEAD!" "You will lose, Jack. You will lose," he chuckled, and disappeared. Jack was huddled in a corner of his kitchen, whimpering and mewling, when they came for him. The police officers picked him up and carried him out of the apartment, to a police car on the street below. Just before they shoved him into the car, he stopped whimpering, sprung up and knocked the officers' heads off with his metallic limbs. The new Jack had finally taken full control. Inside his head, Jack was back in the blue-lit land that was to become his new home. He found that if he willed hard enough he could cause a vidscreen to appear. It showed what his other self was watching at the moment. His entertainment was short-lived, because at that time a giant surge of electricity pulsed through his body, wracking his spiritual body with pure agony. The pain eventually passed to start all over again in a few moments. Jack was dying over and over by the minute. He never got used to it. It was a whole new pain every time. In the moments when he wasn't being tortured, Jack tried to regain control of his body. Jack focused his will, and a translucent shape began to form in the sky above him. He grunted in pain as he reached out with his mind and brought the giant form to the ground. The structure was a crystalline octahedron with red light coursing through it in miniscule veins. As he watched it closely he could see brief glimpses of thoughts - a little boy is struck repeatedly with a whip. Jack winced at the sight of the tortures being shown in the crystal. He calmed himself, formed a club in his hand, and began to hammer away. After what seemed like years to Jack, he finally broke through the side of the crystal... ...and regained control of his body. He found himself in a dingy room full of twisted corpses and instruments of torture. "Oh my god, what have I become," said Jack to himself. He staggered out of the room and climbed down the stairs to the ground floor. There was a tugging at the back of his consciousness, a wave of nausea overcame him. The victory was only transient. Jack realized that the only final victory would be Pyrrhic. He knew what he had to do. He found his way over to Johnny Anarcho's place, and bought a few things that he needed. Then finally he went back to his old apartment, and began to assemble his equipment. He opened a small panel in his wrist and plugged a fiberoptic cable into it. The cable ran to three separate smart detonators located on his head and chest. The detonators were hooked up to three pounds of high explosives, also attached to his head and chest. There was a constant tugging at his brain as Jack left his apartment and walked mechanically over to Central Square. There was a giant crowd swarming through the Square, as it was lunch time for most people. Moments before his brain triggered the detonation, Jack shook his head a couple of times and noticed where he was. He immediately dismantled the explosives on his body and put them in a pack he was carrying. Concentration creased his facial features as he made his way back to his apartment and as he removed an antique Smith and Wesson .45 pistol from a box that his father had given to him, his muscles stiffened. He strained to load a single shell into the chamber. The pressure increased, and a faint laughing could be heard inside his head. Jack used his body against the wall to force his arm to bend upward into his mouth. His finger rested on the trigger, paralyzed. Nearing complete exhaustion, Jack used what was left of his strength to pull the trigger back slowly. There was a blast, and in the milliseconds that it took to rip through his brain and out the back of his head, the laughing died and Jack felt the first real peace he'd ever experienced. _ _ ____________________________________________________________________ /((___))\|Demon Roach Undrgrnd.806/794-4362|Grassroots..............new # soon| [ x x ] |NIHILISM.............513/767-7892|Paisley Pasture.......916/673-8412| \ / |Tequila Willy's GSC..209/526-3194|The Works.............617/861-8976| (' ') |Lunatic Labs.........213/655-0691|Ripco II..............312/528-5020| (U) |====================================================================| .ooM |Copr. 1991 cDc communications by Obscure Images. 02/17/91-#157| \_______/|All Rights Pissed Away. | Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253