Videodrome: Days of O'Blivion (15 page)

Leader stared at the
screen. he felt like he was shaking his head, but somehow it didn’t
feel right.

On the screen Brian
continued to talk. “You have Veraceo versions one and two, but
you’ve never seen Veraceo-Three,” Brian sniggered, “until now…
you’re watching it, Consec Leader. Your brain is exploding with
cancer proteins. Worse yet, 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 tape. 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 from Civic TV?” he
asked.

The man scanned the
room of video equipment, his eyes settling for a moment on a wall
calendar of topless women, it made the man smile. He took his hand
out his pocket and offered to shake hands. “Yes, I am. I’m Max
Renn.”

“Harlan,” Peter said.
“You can call me Harlan.”

“I find television very
educating.

Every time somebody
turns on the set,

I go into the other
room and read a book.”

– Groucho Marx

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