Videodrome: Days of O'Blivion (8 page)

Once finished he
duplicated the Double Interracial tape whilst embedding the now
dynamic Veraceo signal.

He would try it later,
once any lingering effects from the day’s work had worn off.

----- X -----

As Brian drove home he
had a vision of some kind. An extraordinary daytime dream in which
he was seated on the stage of a hotel ballroom. Members of the
public were asking him questions about television. Their questions
were laced with fear and anxiety. “Professor Spectrometer,” one man
called. “You tell us that media changes the physical structure of
the brain; but how will it change it? And how will it affect the
brains of our children?”

TV cameras swooped in
to record his response and the words came to him as part of the
vision, glorious words to live by. “The video-word will be our new
televisual religion. The video-signals of Veraceo will be our new
gospels.”

Interesting that these
strange thoughts often came to him whilst driving. He often felt
that the car had become, for many people, a protective shell from
reality; it was the last and only place where many could be alone
to think.

He was then hit with a
profound sense that he was not inside a car looking through the
window, but rather inside a television set, looking out through the
screen; and instead of the road he saw the hotel audience, sitting
and listening to him with trepidation. It was like he was inside a
television, talking to the people outside.

“The cathode ray tube,”
he said to his viewers, “is an extension of the mind’s eye and
therefore part of the human brain. There is no distinction between
what is shown on television and the thoughts of those who watch
it.”

The words rattled
around in his head.

The vision of being
inside a television, on a stage, before a questioning audience
brought a new idea, a powerful idea. “Television is reality,” he
said aloud. “And reality is less than television.”

----- X -----

At home he poured
himself a large whisky, kicked off his shoes and took a seat in
front of the television. The tape played in the VCR. The Double
Interracial tape, now with Veraceo-Two embedded. It dawned on him
that this was his first attempt at watching a pre-recorded cassette
in home surroundings. This is how most people would see Veraceo. In
the comfort of their own home, curled up on the sofa with a drink
in their hand.

For fifteen minutes the
couple onscreen coughed and choked as the Punishers whipped them.
One part in particular spiked in eroticism for him. The woman had
been taking her turn at breathing. The sliding mechanism that
controlled who had an open airway shifted back to the black man
when one of the Punishers whipped the soles of the girl’s bare
feet. She yelped and jerked the mechanism back just as the man was
trying to breathe. Involuntarily, she snatched the breath from him.
She jumped so much her tits bounced and he could almost feel one of
her nipples in his mouth, covered in whisky.

Then the hallucination
erupted.

The Pittsburgh set
expanded through the television screen to spread through Brian’s
home. He felt as though he was rising in his chair to sit above his
subjects, like Caesar looking down on the commoners. Slaves tied
together, stripped naked to be whipped and flogged for his personal
amusement.

He liked that idea.

Then another vision
came.

He saw himself in the
clothing of a Roman politician, standing on the floor of the Senate
to address the elite of ancient Rome. Senators in their togas sat
in the stone theatre of politics. “The discarnate TV user lives in
a world between fantasy and dream,” he said to those assembled. It
dawned on him these ancient politicians had never seen a TV and so
willed one to appear beside him. A regular 1970’s family set
materialised beside him. It was showing The Muppet Show with the
sound turned low. He gestured towards it. “The television user is
in a typically hypnotic state, which is the ultimate form and level
of participation.”

The Senators seated on
the steps seemed to agree with him. Their elbows on their knees, as
they leaned forward to watch Miss Piggy abuse and violently assault
Kermit the Frog.

Then the vision
changed.

He was inside the
Pittsburgh set. Deep red walls and an oiled bullwhip in his hand.
Footsteps came from behind and with them walked Deborah, the
sadomasochism expert he had hallucinated with. She disrobed as she
walked, sliding the shoulders of her dress away to allow the
garment to fall to the floor. She wore nothing underneath. She
walked to the steel mesh and clung to it with arms
outstretched.

The vision
continued…

The vision...

“I must speak my
learnings,” he said aloud to Deborah. She didn’t respond. She clung
to the steel mesh, her back and buttocks presented as the target
for the whip in his hands. “The knowledge of Brian Spectrometer
must be shared. But my learnings cannot be written, they must be
spoken through the cathode ray tube. The gospels must be spoken
through the new medium.”

Deborah let go of the
mesh and rotated to face him. Her breasts more swollen and her
figure more curvy in his fantasy than how she was in real life. She
reached her hands out to each side and gripped the steel mesh.

“I must spread the new
gospels,” he called to her. “The gospels of the video-word shall be
carried forth not in books, but by the Prophet of Television.”

The bullwhip seemed to
fuse with his hand, becoming an extension of his own body, his own
nerves extending into the whip. The body of a female S&M expert
presented as his target. He uncoiled the whip behind him and
readied to throw his arm and strike her.

“Pornography and
violence,” he said, “are by-products of societies in which private
identity has been destroyed.”

She said nothing.

He threw the whip,
lashing the skin across her stomach. She shrieked in pain, her
fists gripping the mesh tighter. “It is the reality of the
video-word,” he said as he recovered the whip. “Violence, whether
spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and meaning.” He
threw the whip again, this time catching across her left breast
with an instant branding of the skin and a terrible cry of pain.
“Any loss of identity prompts people to seek the reassurance and
rediscovery of themselves through violence.” He recovered the whip,
coiling it in then casting it back out behind him. “Today, the
electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information
environment involves everybody to the point where individual
identity is extinguished.” He threw the whip again to elicit the
fiercest cry of terror yet from the woman. “Through violence we
shall regain our purpose.”

He threw the whip
again… again… again…

Then the vision
changed. The woman with her skin whipped into angry welts lay on
the floor, curled into a foetal position. Brian stood over her with
the bullwhip clenched in his fist. “Television has robbed us of our
identity. But through violence, we can retain our sense of identity
and purpose. Violence shall be the labour to restore our weakened
psyche… And we will see violence. By the flickering light of the
cathode ray, we will see violence.”

----- X -----

Brian kept himself away
from any TV screens after the experience of the Double Interracial
tape. The crazy visions triggered by watching the programme had
been so startling and long lasting he decided his first order of
business was to create a Veraceo detector. His daily routine
constantly exposed him to low levels of the signal, but that tape
had left him with a splitting headache and residual hallucinations
that he was unwilling to repeat. After all, the last thing the
whisky maker needs is to be drunk at work.

The way Veraceo worked
was to begin with a rotating spiral image in black and white that
was converted to a zero-light image recognised only by the parietal
lobe. The zero-light radiation pulsed from the screen at twenty
eight kilohertz.

His detector was an
easy electronics hack requiring barely a few hours to construct. He
took the lens off a CCTV camera so that the tube and photosensitive
plate were exposed to the unfocused and blurred light from a
cathode ray tube; he then connected the camera output to an
oscilloscope. When a standard TV signal was played the oscilloscope
showed a wide band of frequencies in use. When a Veraceo signal was
played, the bandwidth use showed a clear excess around 28 kHz. The
human eye may not be able to see Veraceo, but the oscilloscope sure
could.

It saw something else…
Harmonics. Veraceo worked at 28 kHz but it produced harmonics at 56
kHz and 112 kHz.

Harmonics… why hadn’t
he thought of that before?

Why have one zero-light
image when he could have two or three at different frequencies? The
eye wouldn’t notice the difference, but if he ran three Veraceo
signals in sympathy with one another, it would turn the steady flow
into a powerful tsunami.

He found Peter Fluorite
on the testing floor. “Peter, I’ve built something that I want you
to try and shrink and replicate.”

“Si, Pátron. What’s on
your mind?”

Brian took him into the
workshop and ran the Pittsburgh tape ahead of the detector. Brian
traced his finger across the oscilloscope display. “Veraceo works
on 28 kHz. I want detectors made so we’re not accidentally exposed.
We need a detector circuit that can see this 28 kHz resonance.”

Peter looked at the
oscilloscope image. “That’s just a hacked camera, right? And all
you need is to know if there’s a constant squeal around 28 kHz? No
problemo. I should be able to fabricate a board in a couple of
hours.”

----- X -----

Brian had three Veraceo
signal boards crammed into the signal generator housing. It was
time to test his theory of harmonics. Could people see three
overlapping signals at once?

The first test subject
was a frail looking girl. Barely eighteen, with thin straw hair and
translucent skin. “Hi, what’s your name?”

“Suzanne Webster,” she
said quietly.

He sat her in the room
beside the workshop ahead of a television showing standard colour
bars. He turned on the new and improved Veraceo generator and stood
in the doorway behind the monitor. “I’m going to show you a film
about an art gallery,” he began. “When it’s finished I want you to
tell me that the story in the film is false.”

He went back into the
workshop and played the tape then made himself a cup of coffee. The
men in the art gallery talked about their views on fertility and
the statue before them. When it ended Brian went back to the
doorway to find Suzanne staring at the screen in a state of
hypnosis. “Suzanne… SUZANNE? Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” she whispered.
She was staring at the colour bars, unblinking.

Brian realised now he
hadn’t turned off the Veraceo signal. A mistake, but perhaps
interesting in light of what he was seeing. He left the signal
switched on. “Suzanne, what did you think of the video you just
watched?”

“You told me to tell
you it was false.”

Interesting… she
answered like a zombie. Disconnected from the world. “But what do
you think? Was it true or false?”

“It was true, but I
have to tell you it was false. You told me to say that.”

The signal hadn’t
worked, at least not in the way it had before. Interesting that she
was saying what he told her to say. The bigger intrigue was the way
she stared unflinching at the screen. Mesmerized by the colour
bars. Her head was slightly tilted, her lips parted, her eyes fixed
and unblinking. It was like she was hypnotised. Her speech was like
she was talking in her sleep.

Was she hypnotised?

Was she under
control?

Brian pondered her for
a moment. “Suzanne can you think of something personal, something
like a secret that you wouldn’t normally say out loud to a
stranger.”

“Yes.” The girl’s eyes
were still locked on the screen.

“Tell me your
secret.”

“My uncle sexually
molested me as a child and I masturbate when thinking about
it.”

Brian almost choked on
his coffee. Holy shit! That was far more than he bargained on; but
still the girl didn’t flinch. She stared ahead unblinking,
mesmerised by the screen.

Was it the new Veraceo
causing this? If so, that was a powerfully persuasive video signal.
He shut off the signal generator and came back to find Suzanne
nervously smiling. He waited a second to see if she realised what
she’d said only moments earlier… it looked like she didn’t. “How
did you find that experience?” he asked.

“It was okay. I just…
wait… I’m sorry I can’t remember what we did. I watched a film
about… I don’t quite remember.”

“Was the film true or
false?”

“False!”

Brian pondered her
answer. It was bizarre behaviour. She remembered nothing of the
film, but remembered she was supposed to say it was false. “Just a
moment, I want to try something. Could you watch the screen again,
please.” He went back to the workshop and reactivated the signal
generator then returned to the doorway. The girl was back to
staring at the colour bars. “Suzanne, when you leave here and for
the next hour, I want you to walk with a limp on your left leg.
There’s no pain, but your left knee is quite stiff and it makes you
limp for one hour. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Brian shut off the
signal generators.

He thanked Suzanne for
her time and gave his business card. “If you have any problems. For
example, if you get a headache or anything looks strange, I want
you to call me. Do you understand?”

She did.