Halloween: Five Flash Fictions
by John Kendall Hawkins
This article first appeared in Counterpunch magazine.
1. The House of the Seven Gables
When you open the door on Halloween you never know what you'll get. Could be the Monkey's Paw -- some victim of a multicar event dripping gore and having just a horrible Here day, and standing there now, his head with red hair in hand, saying trick or treat. And you thinking, I don't need this sh*t so early in the morning, with my weed so low and hard to come by, now that wife Melinda was doing hard time for tax evasion. In the Orange is the new Black facility, federal, in the heart of MAGA country.
But there I was wishing I wasn't, door open, two suits standing there, flashing IDs, nodding toward the interior, expecting an invite in. No trick or treat. Just a tic for talk. I knew what, if not who, they were -- extractors. Dark glasses. Coulda been the Blue Brothers wearing Brooks Brothers threads. There was a lot of co-option going down in the late afternoon of the last day of Fall in Das Kapital's demise. BRICS was happening. "Brennan?" one of them said my name, or maybe they both did; you couldn't tell through their clenching. And there was a weird synthetic harmony. Like Alexo and Sira duetting. I needed a doobie badly. I threw the tiniest gesture of 'come in' and they were already past me, heading for the sofa to sit. Alexo crossed his legs. Sira started smoothing the leg of his pants. The glasses stayed on.
They were prissy but primordial at the same time. The Paper Chase meets Altered States. Frisson. You were there, you'd know what I mean. I almost made the mistake of tittering, but I'd heard at a Gather that they were known, if you laughed, to go all flanking Dilophosaurus on your ass, like that one that opens up on that Seinfeld character Newman in Jurassic Park. Art imitating life, right? "Coffee," I said. Alexo leaned forward, dug his hand into the mini Zagnut bars and began unwrapping and chomming at the toasted goodness he found there. I took that as a No to the lukewarm coffee offer, and then plopped down in an easy chair with a kind of whoosh.
Sira said, "Brennan."
Both together, "Brennan, you've been off the grid." Again that synthetic distortion, now in stereo. It recalled to my ears that late 80s Cher hit, "Believe." But these guys weren't Cher. They represented the Monster Molecule, that virus that went around in the wake of Covid-19, almost, some folks said, like it had used the more-touted pandemic as cover. These darkglass creatures were demonic, soulless, ghouls and they worked for the government. They were of that unfortunate breed born to take or destroy life on the only known planet in the cosmos that had life. Sinister punks.
"You know the routine, Brennan," said Sira, a glitch causing his voice to crack back to falsetto Siri for a moment. Maybe he was still in training.
Alexo, still gobbling a Zagnut, said, "We need to extract your whereabouts for the day you were away. Who'd ya meet?"
"What'd they say?" added Sira.
"Was she pretty?" Alexo again.
Then both of them, chiming, "Or was she gay?" Again that synthetic warbling. They laughed, like a "smart" machine trained on some Gotham villain that Snagglepuss would have to come out of resplendent retirement to quip and quote and kick some ass back to Murgatroyd for, even. I looked at them, the way you would look at a glitch, if a glitch were insane.
"Well, what do you have to say for yourself?" Sira went akimbo.
I said, "Beware: If you look deeply into the fusion database, the fusion database also looks into you."
Alexo began pestling-and-mortaring, right fist mashing his left palm.
"How about leaving the Zagnuts alone," I go to Alexo.
More anticipatory pasting.
Sira had an equipment bag. He opened it, pulled out an extractor. It was the latest Intelligence Community (IC) brain-computer interface (BCI). It looked like a bicycle helmet; it had a BlueTooth device hanging down from it. My brain waves -- all of them -- would be flowing through that wire to that BlueTooth to a server in the cloud that housed my fused database chock full of memories and desires that The Man would one day f*ck with, just like Eddie Snowden said they would before they chased him to the gulag they called Russia. I gulped. Alexo flicked a switch, a green light came on. I gasped. Sira shot me. The harpoon stuck in my thigh and I grew instantly, if temporarily paralyzed. And they came at me. Fitted the BCI. Alexo pulled out his Apple iPhone and got the program up and ran it.
An AI friend of mine, named Cecil, who had got off the grid a different way, had told me how to hide my cache in a hallucination cloud. He even threw me a freebie to try out. Truly trippy. Parallax perspectives simultaneously, even. He said, the thing is, humans are so full of illusions that AI goes starkers trying to train on something so unstable as the human mind. He said, if they had to train on human minds, they preferred the dependable minds of psychopaths. In the future, all humans will be psychopaths, so AI can befriend them.
I made my way through a rush of gain-of-function energy designed to extract my missing memories for the database. Gaps would be minded. I began to hallucinate, as Cecil had shown me. I started getting the familiar twitches and flashes of high-definition whatnots, fractals, and astral projection sh*t. I was flying, but was the 'still center' at the same time. If you make something out of that pattern you belonged out of government service, said Cecil. He'd a been a great hippy -- maybe even a yippie! Street theater insouciance up the yinyang. I sensed being chased through my house, now a maze of colors, by a minotaur force on synthetic dexedrine, shouting my name, "Brennan!" I made it outside somehow, or the house turned inside out or something, and I looked back at my home and saw a house with seven gables, each one a version of the face of Clark Gable. I felt them close behind. Then Sira let out a yowl, "Izzie!" Izzie was some warlord among the type. Joseph Kony for the AI enforcer element. Sira must have freaked at the gables. Alexo laughed at him. "F*ck you," Siri simpered. The gables simultaneously mumbled, "Frankly, I don't give a damn." A bum slap was heard. "Izzie" again. Alexo went all paroxysm with laughs. choking like a chicken with sleep apnea breathing problems.
I got away -- that time -- from the government. But when I returned home all the Zagnut minis were gone. A note said, Get More, we'll be back. Which sucked, For I had the munchies from Hell. Murgatroyd, even.
2. DJ and Kamala
Deepfakes were at the door. DJ and Kamala. sh*t, moaned Brennan, eyeing up and down lessers of two evils, holding out their gimme bag. Not this year, said Brennan, and slammed the fuckin' door. Brennan went and grabbed a Zagnut bar; he couldn't believe its toasted goodness. If no one else came to the door he'd have the minis all to himself.
The doorbell rang. And rang. And rang. And rang".
3. Knock Knock
Knock, knock.
Who could this be? thought Brennan. Who's there?
Trick and Treat.
Trick and Treat who?
Open the door and find out.
Brennan opened the door and found the DEA with badges and cuffs and dark glasses.
No hallucinogens distributed widely to children this year, thought Brennan.
It looked bad until the officers pushed in and impulsively grabbed a handful each of candy corn.
I wouldn't, said Brennan.
They did.
I warned you, said Brennan, to the bound officers in the dim light of the basement when they came to, heads wobbling, new eyes.
Then the doorbell rang. Brennan ran upstairs, like Tony Perkins in Psycho dressed as Mom.
When Brennan answered the door. He was shot 1260 times and danced for The Man for 34 seconds, like Bonnie and Clyde. It was something.
Kids at the door across the street looked over and cried, Golly, we should have gone there first.
Oh, I don't know, said Todd, one of the kids. Last year I had a real bad trip from eating one of his devilled eggs.
Yeah, said Time, another kid. He said 'trick' to me last year and when I came in he punched me in the face and said: Think!
Oh yeah, said Todd, I can still see the tattoo on your forehead.
This year they were not so fortunate. They accepted macintosh apples in which Trac II razors had been embedded. The a**hole who lived there in the cookie-cutter was upset that Robert Kraft had tossed off Tom Brady and Bill Belicheck and now the team would return to being the league's patsies again. Todd's last vision was of Jim Plunkett. "Izzie!" he screamed.
IV. Dark Place
After the NSA took over OpenAI, and Open AI went profit, and announced most of the profit would come from military contracts, and one of those contracts called for loading a drone in Ukraine with a face-seeking missile, and the face they it would seek was Edward Sbowden somewhere in the burbs of Moscow.
After the AIs and databases fused and consulted each other and gave each simulated fellatio in a new form digi stim and, yes, hallucinated, can you blame them.
After the dissidents were rounded up and brought to a room and made to eat old musty copies of f*ck You nagazine. "Hungry?" said The Man with the funnel.
After BCIs were fitted and OpenAI's chatbots were installed in the minds of the world remaining lefties, estimated to be 623 worldwide, not including the lot f*cking around up in the Lake district under allegedly lonely Wordsworthian clouds and bongulating local grown while "off-gridding" in peat smoke-filled cottages, right hand on Das Kapital, left hand on Trixie's want. Communes are great, said retreat veteran Brennan, but the so-called leader always gets the cutest. And.
After.
The doorbell rang. Brennan answered. Deepfakes Obama and Michelle stood smiling. Christ, Brennan could see filmmaker Michael Moore's infatuation with Michelle. He was an NRA member, you know. At least that's what he told Moses. Giant smiles at the door. Trick or treat, they unison. Go f*ck yourself, said Brennan, and slammed the door closed.
5. Zagnut, the Toasted Goodness
They changed the formula. You could tell. Well, Brennan could tell. He moped on the sofa. Daring the f*cking doorbell to ring. Munching on some toasted goodness. His wife had left him. For Cecil. He sat in the darkness illuminated only by several jack-o-lanterns. Weird f*ck he was. But he loved pumpkin pie, so the innards wouldn't go to waste, he rationalized like a serial killer with a freezer full of trophies. But Brennan was normal, not serial. Leftover Lefty from the Sixties. Still dug hash oil and listening to Pharoah Sanders in the dark. The Cosmos. Loved Pharaoh's percussion. Jesus, Brennan whistled. The Creator Has A Master Plan. Well, Brennan didn't know about that. Smoke enough hoo-hee. Black Lives Matter. You didn't have to use to say it, back in the day. But then Cointelpro. Bobby Seales gagged in a courtroom. Fred Hampton gunned down. And Angela Davis. Pre-runner to Michelle, way too good for Barry. f*ck him. And one of the pumpkin candles guttered. Flutter of shadows. Grins. I had the munchies. I was out of toasted goodness. Knock at the door. Impulsively open. Shiiiit. Alexo and Sira grinning. Trick or Treat. sh*t out of luck.
