Videodrome: Days of O'Blivion (7 page)

The sackcloth was
pulled away from the woman to reveal a tiny waistline and dark
little nipples. A Punisher struck the woman’s buttocks with the
cat-o-nine-tails when she wasn’t expecting and it made her shriek
with laughter, her wide open mouth showing white teeth and
enjoyment as her breasts were sprayed with water.

Deborah leaned forward
in her chair and gasped, “Oh Jesus…” she looked to Brian. Sultry.
Eyes dark and smouldering. Out of the league of a bald, middle-aged
professor like himself… perhaps… but with Veraceo helping, who
knew?

There was a moment
between them. Eye contact held for too long.

Deborah moved back into
her chair as did Brian. He felt too afraid to look at her else he
start entertaining ideas of rape and savagery. Good God, this was
not like him and likewise he didn’t believe it of her.

Then a shriek of pain.
On the studio floor, the female masochist had been stung with a
cattle prod. The shriek was genuine and her efforts to pull her
body away from the prong were sincere. The prod stung her again
with a blue flash and a pop of current. She cried now, shaking
herself away from the implement as rivulets of water ran down her
body. The second Punisher took the hose again and sprayed it with
more force right in her face. As she gasped for breath, trying to
avoid the jet of water the second Punisher stung her… and again…
and again.

For Brian, the sexual
tension in the room dissipated quickly. They were back to watching
the sadomasochism with level heads, the panic in their loins
seemingly a distant memory despite it being barely more than thirty
seconds since he was sure he wanted to fuck the woman beside him
six ways from Sunday.

“It’s the tone, isn’t
it,” Deborah said. “This can’t be faked. It’s like my brain knows
when it's being faked. When it’s playful and consensual I’m feeling
as though I want to join in. When it's painful it's addictive. I
could watch this woman get electrocuted all night long… God, I want
him to touch that cattle prod on her asshole. Just once, just to
see her scream.”

Brian didn’t speak for
a long while, then he said, “What does it make you feel? Seeing a
woman victimised like this. Seeing a woman abused like this. The
feeling, not what you’re thinking, what are you feeling?”

“I’m feeling like I
want to go down there and get electrocuted too. I feel like I want
to be the next star of the show.”

Brian kept his eyes on
Deborah, almost too scared of what he might do if he allowed the
Veraceo signal to affect him any further. That was when he realised
Deborah’s breasts were enlarging. Every time she breathed in her
breasts rose, but when she breathed out they stayed the same size.
Her breasts were getting bigger and bigger with each inhalation. He
raised his hand to block the screen entirely and looked away.

“What is it?” Deborah
asked.

“Look away from the
screen and tell me what happens.”

“I don’t want to look
away. I really want to keep watching.”

“I know, but just, hold
off for a few seconds and see if you notice anything.”

Deborah mimicked
Brian’s stance with one hand blocking the screen. “Oh, Jesus… What
in hell’s name… everything’s moving. Jesus, I’m tripping like I’m
on acid… oh, Jesus fuck a baby into me, this is the coolest thing
ever.”

With an almost
superhuman amount of willpower, Brian climbed out of the chair and
switched off the Veraceo-Two signal generator. The room was
swirling, the doorframe was bending, the carpet rolling like waves.
Buttons on the editing console seemed to protrude on stalks then
return to their position only for the next button to flex out into
the air.

“I think we need to get
to a hospital,” Brian said. “We need to know what’s happening and
monitor how long it lasts.”

On the monitor screen,
a woman was crying and shrieking as two men in rubber suits sprayed
her with water and administered electric shocks to her naked, tied
up, body. Her tears by this point were real. They may have been
real for some time.

----- X -----

Brian and Deborah were
driven to a private clinic. Deborah was entirely comfortable with
the hallucinations. She was happy and talkative. Brian felt happy
but knew it was down to the Veraceo. Logically he felt he should be
frightened that the hidden TV signal had triggered such powerful
hallucinations, but at the same time he was content to allow his
heart to rule the day and enjoy the experience. He mused whether
there would be a downside to this. Would it leave him with a
hangover? He would cross that bridge when he came to it. In the
meantime, he would try and ride it out enjoyably.

“What is it you would
like us to do?” the doctor asked him.

“I’m hallucinating, as
is the lady who arrived with me. The hallucinations were triggered
by an experiment using a form of cathode-ray radiation. It’s
non-ionising and perfectly safe, but I would like you to take blood
samples for analysis to see if there is any change in hormone
levels. I would like you to monitor our breathing, heartbeat and
blood pressure to ensure that we are in good physiological
health.”

“If you’re
hallucinating, we could draw a little fluid from the spine,” the
doctor offered. “We could sample your neurochemistry. The brain
lives in a finely balanced chemical soup, so it would be useful to
take a sample now, then another when you’re at steady-state. You
could compare cortisol, CRF, serotonin and the like to see what the
neurochemical changes are.”

“That would be good,”
Brian agreed.

“OK. That’s a little
uncomfortable and best under a local anaesthetic. If you want to
slip into this gown, I’ll get prepared.”

Brian undressed
completely and fastened the gown around his neck. The room still
swirled as he looked around and he found himself amused as his
socks appeared to be talking to one another like cartoon worms.
When the doctor returned he had with him a pretty nurse with blonde
hair pulled to a short ponytail and dressed in green scrubs. In his
mind he immediately imagined her ripped out of her clothes and
strung from the ceiling like the girl on the Veraceo video
shoot.

“If you want to get up
onto the table,” the doctor said. “Face down.”

Brian obliged, climbing
awkwardly onto the table and feeling the gown open to show his bare
ass. The nurse placed a towel over his butt and began preparing a
syringe. The moment he saw the syringe with its plunger he imagined
the nurse sitting on a chair with her legs spread, ready for him to
penetrate with a grotesquely large syringe. He imagined her moaning
as he pressed the plunger, pulling it back and pumping again,
pumping her pussy with a man-sized surgical plunger as she rocked
her head back and squeezed her own breasts.

“I’m just going to
administer a local,” the doctor said. “It might sting for a few
seconds.”

It did sting. Right
between the shoulder blades as the needle was pressed between the
bones of his spine. It should be uncomfortable. It should be
miserable. Yet all he could think of was seeing the nurse’s scrubs
torn open to reveal her big swollen tits. He imagined her tied up
with surgical rubber, he imagined latex tubing pushed in her
asshole, a catheterised urethra and her vagina held open with a
speculum.

What the hell was wrong
with him?

This wasn’t right.

Where was this
overloading of sexual stimulation coming from?

----- Chapter Three -----

“Veraceo-Two is more
intense than the original, A lot more intense.” Barry had taken
Brian to the King Edward Hotel to catch up. He was finding Brian
more relaxed than he’d had seen him in a long time. He was
placated. Whatever reservations he had about making pornography had
been swept aside. “It’s amazing,” he said. “This is something
really special.”

Barry smiled. “I’m
looking forward to trying it.”

“I would wait until I
have a chance to tame it,” Brian said. “It’s good but it’s
unpleasant. In fact, it’s a real kick in the balls and it put me in
hospital. There’s something about it, somehow the combination of
sex with violence created an incredible mental and physical
experience. It was as though I was physically living what I saw on
screen. It was felt, physically and emotionally by us as viewers.
What I learned is the strength of the signal needs to be dynamic.
When the visuals are violent without the eroticism to balance it
you feel the pain; when that happens the signal strength needs
reducing. It’s strange, it’s the most uncomfortable sexual
experience you’ll ever have. You could torture somebody with it if
used for evil, you could actively push somebody into serious
physical distress. But this now goes way beyond advertising or ways
to shape the thinking of the viewer. This opens a whole new
spectrum of opportunities. There are avenues of research in mental
health, in neurological research and medicine in general.”

“So what’s next?”

"Control. I need to
make the Veraceo-Two signal work the way we want, so it doesn’t
hurt to watch. I need to find a way to raise or lower the intensity
of the signal to match the content.” Brian held up his glass to the
barman and raised a finger to order another drink. He slouched
lower into the chair, grinning. He looked like he was glowing.
Youthful and energised. “In Pittsburgh,” he continued, “the women
are working with the psychologist on perfecting the content.
They’re shooting variants and shipping me the test tapes. One of
the interesting things we discovered so far is the signal works
best when the image is made up from the colour orange through to
deep red. The psychologist says they’ve done tests that prove
orange is the most oppressive colour to prisoners. I guess it
stimulates our brains in a fundamental way… It’s exciting… What I
find thrilling is the very nature of how this extends the cathode
ray tube. The image on a television screen isn’t really there. It
is made up of electrons hitting the phosphor on the back of the
tube to make those particles resonate. Television is a resonating
form of experience; but what we have now has grown from resonance
to neurological. It reaches out to us through the screen to
directly stimulate the cortex of the viewer. This is a new form of
television. This is the video-word made into a tangible
experience.”

“Television as a drug,”
Barry quipped.

“It’s more than just a
drug. I believe that when properly harnessed, massive doses of
Veraceo signal could be transformative to other fields. Education
for example. Imagine if we could sit children in front of
televisions that program their minds at a deeper level than can
happen in a traditional classroom. Imagine if Veraceo could
reprogram the minds of criminal offenders. This is special, Barry.
Veraceo-Two is a game changer.”

----- X -----

A new cassette arrived
from Pittsburgh along with a letter from Deborah, the S&M
expert. The cassette was marked ‘Trial 12 - Double Interracial -
CLEAN, NO VERACEO’. With it came a note that read, ‘Brian, we’ve
learned a lot about what works and this is our most powerful tape
yet. We watched it with Veraceo-2 set at ten percent, but even at
that low level the impact was profound.’

He’d been giving some
thought as to how to make the Veraceo-Two signal change in strength
and devised an ingeniously simple solution. It began by connecting
an audio test-tone generator to a reel-to-reel audio recorder.
Ordinarily, this would record a single audio tone onto the tape;
but if he kept one hand on the recording gain control, he could
turn the knob one way and the volume of the recorded tone would
rise. If he turned it the other way the volume of the tone would
fall. The idea was he could watch the programme and make an audio
recording of a tone that rises and falls in volume, then later use
that recording as a control track to adjust the level of
Veraceo.

He prepared playback of
Double Interracial and set the Veraceo-Two signal generator to
twenty percent.

The video began.

The theatrical plywood
set had been replaced and now looked like real walls painted dark
red. The Punisher figures had been updated too. Now they wore
looser fitting oilskins with hoods that hid their eyes. The back
wall was covered in a steel mesh connected to ominous electrical
equipment. It looked like it could give electric shocks. The camera
tilted down to a naked couple on the floor, a black man and a white
woman. They were seated back to back and trapped within a tortuous
double collar that contained some kind of choking mechanism; only
one of them could breathe at a time. One had to slide their neck
back which tightened the collar on the person behind them. The
couple were carefully trying to pace their breathing between
them.

One of the Punishers
whipped the man making him jerk, the action in turn squeezing the
woman’s throat. It gave a powerful and immediate reaction and Brian
felt his hand almost involuntarily turn the audio gain lower to
reduce the volume of the recording tone. The woman took her turn in
breathing and the other punisher grabbed her breast in one hand and
her hair in the other to make her shriek. It was erotic and Brian
turned the volume louder.

For fifteen minutes
they whipped the couple. The victims choking and crying, the
woman’s face becoming bright red. All the while Brian adjusted the
audio gain, the reels slowly rotating and the test tone recording
at varying volumes.

When the film finished
he breathed out heavily and went for a walk outside to calm down.
It was exhausting but exhilarating in equal measure.

For the remainder of
the afternoon he spent time building an electronic filter that
could interpret the reel-to-reel audio and use it to adjust the
Veraceo level. It was simple enough in theory but building the
electronics took the best part of six hours.