“One two one two test.”
“One two.”
“Mick, can you hear that?”
“What?”
“He said what.”
“And there you go, we are officially live from inside Mick’s head.”
Oct 16, 2024 – The Raid – Booby Traps
Mick had the top drawer of the metal filing cabinet pulled all the way out. It teetered unsteadily on the carpet: a large swaying tower of sharp metal edges. About three feet away he had the cord of the electrical fan running across the threshold and tied to the leg of his dresser, camouflaged just an inch or so above the ground. Undetected, the snag would send one sprawling headlong into the heavy filing cabinet drawer, collapsing the metal structure on top of them, cutting them up, and smashing their bones.
This was just one of the many booby traps that Mick had set up in his apartment.
He had a jib knife in one hand and hammer in the other. He’d drag the claws down the hallway wall to create a menacing screeching, scratching sound that would make your neck hair stand on end.
Everyone who heard it in the second world was terrified.
He had full cans of paint at the top of the stairs, ready to drop on someone’s head. He had a tripwire in the hallway too, which would send its victim flailing into a wooden bedside table with sharp edges, hauled out to the end of the darkest part of the hallway.
The windows had the blinds drawn. There were clothes hangers all over them. If anyone were to come in the window, they’d rattle like crazy and get stuck to their clothes like a makeshift burglar alarm. On the back of the swivel office chair were five pound dumbbells, held in place, and disguised, by a hoodie. The slightest push to the back of the chair and the weights would crash down onto the floor with a harsh thud. They’d break your foot for sure.
The only way in was the door downstairs, and it was barricaded with a monstrous IKEA bookshelf packed full of books, six feet high, and six feet wide. Mick had pushed it tight up against the door. It was immovable from the outside. In that hallway was the decoy hockey stick. It was there for anyone dumb enough to grab a long swinging weapon for a narrow four-foot hallway. Mick had a claw hammer and a pry bar within reach. Good swinging blunt weapons for short quarters. He also liked to keep a sharp butcher’s knife or a jib knife in his left hand that he could stab with between swings of the heavy yellow prybar.
In the hallway downstairs was another tripwire that lead into a jumble of hockey sticks, butt ends facing out to skewer anyone toppling into them.
The living room table was on its side to provide cover, and all the blinds downstairs were drawn as well. There were boxes and cardboard stacked between the blinds and the window. When you can’t stop a bullet you stop a line of sight. A sniper can’t hit what a sniper can’t see.
They would come back with a rocket launcher, he figured, or tear gas. He kept close to the ground and hid behind the massive table turned on its side, taking up the living room.
The whole apartment was a war zone. He could hear them on the roof again. They were up there with assault rifles and they’d shoot down into the upper bedrooms, so he had to lay still under the lower bunk in his daughter’s room, with the end tables piled on the top bunk, and wait for them to pass.
There was a sniper set up at the church across the street. The stairwell curved in front of a big glass window that gave them a clear view.
Mick had a cloth bag that he’d put the knife and hammer in when he went up and down the stairs.
The cops had already come by and he hadn’t opened the door.
The saw him already walking around inside his apartment with his shirt off and a hammer. But that was explainable.
Skulking up and down his stairs with a butcher knife and a prybar, that was harder to justify. They would break in if they saw that.
Mick wasn’t sure if it was a drill or not.
“This is not a drill, Mick. This is real. We’ve surpassed the training stage, now it’s time to take it up a notch.” Chis answered.
Mick didn’t say anything.
He had done the Raid module before. They were stuck on it. So they had to repeat it. Over and over again. He thinks he tore apart his home ten days in a row preparing for these raids, but he lost count.
He could hear the captains argue with the chief of police and M. They wanted to go in with live ammo. They wanted to kill him for real.
“They have AR-15s up on the roof. And live ammo. They’ll shoot through the ceiling, Mick. Stay downstairs.”
He scraped the hammer claws down the length of the hallway wall. Sccccccrrrrrrraaaaatttttch.
He could hear one of the soldiers say, “What was that? I thought this guy was unarmed.”
“I have booby traps.” Mick called out in the second world.
“There’s no way we’re going in if there are booby traps.”
“You’re going in there.” She said. He recognized the voice of the Mission Commander. They were using his mom’s voice.
Mick turned out all the lights and left the door of his bedroom open, the tripwire concealed by the shadow of his dresser. He stood motionless in the darkest corner of the room with a hammer in his right hand and a jib knife in his left. He leaned back into the corner and, wearing all black, he disappeared into the shadows.
If someone would come in, he’d wait until they tripped into the filing cabinet, then launch in a flurry of hammer blows.
There would be no hesitation. If anyone was in his house in the first world, they would be dead. This was a home invasion.
The only exit was the front door and he had to navigate down the stairs and through the apartment to get there. If someone stepped inside, Mick would be fighting his way to a safe escape. Anyone killed would be self defence.
“What am I doing?” Mick asked himself, and everyone listening in the Ghost Machine. He was tying a skipping rope into a loose tripwire one inch above the carpet in the hallway upstairs. There was no one around.
“You’re showing us what you’re made of, Mick.” Chris replied. “You’re doing great.”
“Have I lost my mind?”
“No. Stop asking me that. Now, on the count of three.”
“You’re. Not. Crazy.” All of CPAN chimed in.
“If the voices are real, then I’m not crazy.” Mick reminded himself.
This is Psyops, he thought. They were speaking to him telepathically. Impossible. Someone must have chipped him up in his sleep.
The voices were so real, they had to be. They were from another dimension. Either that or the recesses of his subconscious. Either way, they were significant. He weighed the odds and decided that ignoring them was more dangerous than giving them credence. After all, who knows? They could be right. And if telepathy is real, then that opens the door for all sorts of fantastical things to be real as well. It was the tip of the iceberg.
They told him people were out to get him in the second world, but it was all just a drill. It was his training modules. That is, until the day they announced they’d be using live ammo.
This module, the one that had him tying skipping ropes into tripwires, was The Raid. And this was the tenth time they’ve run it. And he was getting good at fortifying his entire apartment with a series of booby traps and hidden weapons in every room (including the decoy hockey stick). On the patio he had a baseball bat and his Last Minute Bear Spray, ready in a giant planter. People were going to start coming inside from the second world soon. And he had to be ready. They’d be invisible to him, but he could see the traces of their outlines. A ripple in reality. It was high tech stuff.
The voices he was hearing: Chris from CPAN was there at all times. During the raids he’d walk him through what to do in emergency situations. Mick’s job was to listen and take immediate action from Chris’ observations.
“How many are on the roof?”
“It sounds like four guys. I heard them say something about tear gas.”
Oct 22, 2024 – Climbing The Tree
“Is this real or am I insane?” Mick asked Chris.
“Oh this is real. But it’s a simulation. Now, Mick, how are you going to get out of this mess?”
They were coming in through the gates. He could barely see their silvery, spiderweb outline in the darkness. The soldiers breaking into his house were invisible in the first world except for their outline and shadows which gave away their position.
Mick stabbed at them with his butcher’s knife and cracked them with his hammer.
He was fighting blind, but he swung furiously at the invisible shadows.
“Good.” Chris encouraged him, “You’ve already killed three. They are going to keep coming in as long as that gate is open in the bedroom.”
“This is ridiculous,” Mick thought to himself as he swung his hammer at what seemed like nothing but an outline.
As a combat simulator, it was brilliant. The shadow creatures would hide in different corners of the room, and try to sneak up on him. Occasionally he would see the muzzle flare of a gun.
A chip in his body would indicate if he was hit or not. It didn’t hurt, but there would be a ping of pressure to simulate that there had been contact.
Fighting that way, Mick killed hundreds of the shadow creatures. He couldn’t figure out how to close the gates.
“Push up on the wall.” Chis encouraged him. And Mick did.
He was in two minds this entire time. He could be completely crazy, swinging his hammer and pry bar in the middle of the night in the darkness of his bedroom. Looking like a complete sweaty and delusional maniac in the first world where there was no one else there.
Or, he was deep in a telepathic training simulation for CPAN, and he was simply going with the flow. If he could hear the telepathy in his ears, then why would it not also be possible that shadow soldiers could appear as well. Anything was possible if telepathy was possible.
To keep himself sane, he rationalized: “I’ll go along with the simulation as long as it doesn’t spill over into my reasonable life in the first world.”
This all went out the window when P popped up on the channel. A commanding officer with his dad’s voice.
“Alright Mick, you’ve done well so far with simulated combat. Now it’s time to turn it up a notch. These next guys coming in, they’re real, with live ammo. And they’ll be coming in through the front door.”
Mick didn’t know if he should take P seriously or not. He was using the voice of his dad. He knew it was just a simulation in the second world. But what if it was not? What if it actually was real. He couldn’t afford to take the chance.
It was time to make some quick decisions. His front door was barricaded. There was a constant stream of invisible soldiers pouring in and down the stairs. He hid behind the table and whacked at them with a crutch he had been using as a periscope (along with an old sock to hold his phone) to see who was up on the roof.
Now he was swinging this crutch madly trying to hit these shadow creatures and he cracked his foot by accident. It was most likely broken. He held it and closed his eyes and concentrated on the fibres of tissue inside his foot. He envisioned them mending together and healing. And his foot warmed in his hands and healed itself. The pain was gone.
He couldn’t believe that worked.
“They are on the roof and at the front door. They are going to be coming in with assault rifles and LIVE AMMO.” He was warned again.
It seemed impossible. This whole raid scenario seemed impossible. But they were speaking to him clear as day. The logic made sense, in a way. It was too dangerous not to take it seriously.
There was only one other way out of the apartment if he couldn’t go through the front door. And that was off the patio, into the trees, and down one floor.
He once free climbed from his bedroom window up and onto the roof of the building looking for the band that might be playing up there. He was at a loss as to where the music and voices were coming from, and they told him they were on the roof. Climbing up the side of the building in the middle of the night was probably the most dangerous thing he had ever done.
Once he was up there, he was stuck, because he couldn’t climb back down the same way. He went to the far edge on the other side of the roof and found a low point where he could jump down onto a walkway about ten feet below, but he’d need to make a rope ladder out of his shirt. That’s when his neighbour heard him on the roof, and was nice enough to bring him a ladder. He climbed down, and then used the ladder to scale back up his patio and back into his apartment. It was a crazy thing to do, spurred on by the music and voices he was hearing.
That’s how he first got on CPAN’s radar actually. After that, the voices that had been his friends from the counsel in the orange shipping container were replaced by Chris and Rob and P and M from CPAN.
Back on the patio, the gunmen were descending the stairs, they might or might not have live ammo. The tree was easy to step into from the patio. There was no where else to go. To hell with it he thought. He left the last minute bear spray and last minute baseball bat where they were and Mick decided to make the leap.
He jumped into the tree that was next to the patio and scaled down the branches to the ground level. There was a restaurant there and they had wrapped the base of the tree in Christmas lights.
Mick hadn’t anticipated this and he got tangled, upside down in the cords. It took him several seconds to swing himself upright and untangle himself from the branches and the string of lights while people eating in the restaurant looked at this spectacle in disbelief.
Mick finally dropped onto the sidewalk and ran off as fast as he could. He had escaped the assassins of the second world. But in the process, he had upset his reasonable way of living in the first world. This would come back to haunt him.
Oct 22, 2024 – Third World Mick
“Stick to the rivers and lakes that you’re used to.” Mick thought out loud to himself when picking his route out of the neighbourhood. They were going to be after you now, and they might have access to helicopters as surveillance.
“What to my wondering eyes should appear,” he mused suddenly, when he saw it for the first time. It was a gate. Potentially his way out.
He ran through the city as fast as he could. His instincts on high alert. He thought of all the ways that they could be following him as he ran towards downtown.
Chris was in his ear.
“Mick, they’re going to know what you’re wearing. You need a disguise.”
Mick was wearing two t-shirts for this very reason.
He ran at full speed to the edge of a building, and then, without losing pace, he stepped sideways, suddenly, without turning his body, and disappeared into an alley. If one was watching him from behind from a distance away, it seemed as though he just vanished.
That was one of Mick’s tricks. Another was running with a crowd or group of people to his back. Anyone taking aim from behind him would have to shoot through a crowd of civillians. It kept him safe.
“Good, good.” Chris encouraged him, “Now, go slowly down this alley to the other side.”
“I’m going to change up my rhythm for a bit. That will throw them off.” Mick said and slowed to a brisk walk, he then paused and hid behind a dumpster for a few minutes, letting whomever was behind him run past.
“This is good.” Chris agreed. “Now go back to… no don’t go in there!”
Mick was always ducking into doors that he shouldn’t be. Chris hated it when Mick did anything illegal, like trespassing, but Mick would cross through yards, climb fences, and when in the back of a store or an alley, open strange doors, and cut through stores to the other side.
At one point he ended up at the hospital. He nipped into a room full of lab coats. They were hanging everywhere like a harvest of white jackets. He stood up on a stool and hid in the back of the room while security guards looked for him. He could hear their footsteps clatter down the hallway of the linoleum hospital floor, coming closer and closer to the room he was hiding in.
Thinking quickly, Mick grabbed one of the lab coats and put it on. He looked like a crazy homeless man, but also kind of like a doctor, and without a second to lose, he strode confidently out the door and past the security and to the doors outside where he made it back into the open air and started running again, in the lab coat, as fast as he could go.
At one point he got cornered down the bottom of an old stairwell. Here he ditched the lab coat and crouched on all fours, attempting to look as much as he could like a homeless man, so the cops that were chasing him would leave him alone. He searched around on the concrete ground with both hands picking at rocks, as if he were searching for leftover crack.
He took off running again down the street. He was obvious now. The wild-eyed man in the grey t-shirt. They could spot him from a mile away. He did his sideways lateral move trick into another alley and in the flash of an eye, he took off his shirt and exited from the other end of the alley.
Shirtless, he strutted. He was a new person now. His mind was thinking aloud on the open channel, about lifting weights, frosted tips, and steroids. He puffed up his chest and jutted out his chin. His disguise was complete. He was now Kelowna Boy.
He ambled on this way until he found himself into Chinatown. Shirtless, he went into a tourist shop and he bought a bright red shirt, and a yellow shirt from a stunned shopkeeper. This will make for a great distraction, he thought, and he put them both over his head. He pulled the yellow shirt over his head which was now soaked with sweat. The red shirt went on top of that. He handed the shopkeeper a twenty dollar bill he had in his pocket. Not the zipped up pocket where he had his diamonds. Or at least he thought they might be diamonds. He wasn’t sure.
His disguise was now Vancouver Boy. He thought out loud on the open channel about how he was ripped off on the t-shirts. And he sulked and complained to anyone listening.
He took off running. He had great acceleration. And he dodged plants all the way downtown. At one point there was a plant that was a beggar with a cup and sunglasses and a cane. It was right out of a Mad Magazine. “Interzone,” he thought, “they wanted to make that obvious.”
He avoided three or four guys who were obviously looking for a fight. One guy caught him with both of his hands occupied. One was holding a pizza and the other a phone. He got right in his face, but Mick threw the pizza on the ground and ran off. “I need to be careful not to get myself caught with both hands busy.” He reminded himself.
One guy, Chris told him, was a Honour Killer. And he looked terrifying.
As soon as Mick passed him he thought outloud, “that guy looks dangerous.’
“Yep, Honour Killer, Mick.”
Mick ended up at his office. If CPAN was serious about killing him with Live Ammo, he would expose them, he thought. The last thing they would want to see is a dead body with notes in every pocket that said:
CPAN Psyops have killed me.
Take this to the media and let them know.
The notes were his insurance. He hid them all around his office. He kept them on his body, in every pocket. They told him over and again on the open channel that he shouldn’t mention Big P (Psyops), but if they were really trying to kill him, the story would be out when they find his corpse with the notes.
Of course, it could also just be a simulation, and CPAN just wanted to see what he would do in this training scenario. They liked the note move.
Or, it was the Ghost Machine, and the torturers were humiliating hm by making him think that CPAN was real in the first place. They were just using new voices and having a laugh at him running around the city avoiding invisible assailants.
Or, he was crazy. And the voices he was hearing were just in his head.
Mick decided the smartest thing to do was ACT as if the voices were just a symptom of psychosis due to the fact he wasn’t sleeping. He would act completely normal, in the first world, and play off the voices as if they were hallucinations. However, he didn’t believe they were meaningless. They were too specific. Too unique with distinct cadences and characteristics. There was no way that Chris wasn’t real. He just wasn’t of this dimension.
Mick wanted to learn more about the second world. He had seen it. He had heard it. And he believed it was a mirror world of the first one. But at 45 degrees. Like a refracted spoon in a glass of water. If he heard a fear in the second world, like someone had slept with someone else, he could surmise that it did happen in first world, but only allegorically. The two people may be in bed with each other – as in doing business. The second world was always a metaphor or a forty-five degree idiomatic expression of what was going on in the first world.
Mick wrote his notes about CPAN and filled his pockets. His mind had to run all the parallel alternatives at once, which looked something like this:
Narrative One: The threats are real. I am in a second world training simulation that has seeped into the first world. They are coming in through gates, and they have the ability to materialize themselves and weapons and bullets into the first world. This is dangerous. He was pretty sure at one point he had his knife go into the second world and back into the first, which is how you do real damage, even kill someone, from the second to the first world. In this case keep the notes in your pocket and proceed cautiously, leaving the building by the hidden back entrance.
Narrative Two: This is a training simulation, but there is no real danger. He just needs to go with the flow, play along, and have some fun with a simulation that is surreal as hell, with voices in his head giving instruction, but ultimately harmless. In this case, don’t do anything too drastic in the first world, or he could end up in the psych ward. Treat it as a simulation running in the background and go about his day.
Narrative Three: This is all a part of the Ghost Machine. The voices in his head are there for torture and nothing else. They are making a fool of him having him run around the city. In this case, try your best to ignore the voices, and go about your business, Mick thought.
Narrative Four: There is a second world. It runs parallel to our own. We can access it when in certain states of mind, where there’s enough juice especially. That’s when we can hear the frequency of the audio, and with our eyes are slightly out of focus, in a state of imagination, we can see it. If this was the case, Mick thought it was best to push it to the back of his mind, and access it only when he was ready and not let him guide him step-by-step in the first world.
Narrative Five: Insanity. These voices are a sign of psychosis and nothing more. In this case, get some sleep.
Mick kept all narratives in mind, all the time, and ran partway home. He jumped in a cab. He had a can of Club Soda in one hand. He just told the driver his address and nothing more. Then he suspected that the cab driver was communicating with CPAN and listening to him on the open channel. He was driving suspiciously slowly.
Mick threw the can as hard as he could out of the cab and it exploded against the side of a building. “Just drive!” He snarled and the cab driver sped up.
Mick got home. His house was boarded up, barricaded, covered in broken pieces of furniture, old crutches, with knives, pry bars, and hammers scattered everywhere. He had a drawer full of smoke grenades. His living room table was its side in the middle of the room and his mattress was on the living room floor, torn to pieces from where Mick was looking for Ghost Machine censors.
He crashed. It had been one of the craziest days of his life.
