Slippery People

Blood on the floor of your parents' apartment. The shadow of a bear, covered in a slick, darkened sheen, a scant few meters away from your tent, the night howling and breaking apart around you. A dog beneath the underpass on your way home, little more than a pelt and a skull. The funeral. The first time you shot a gun. The expression on the pig head you once saw at a concert you did not want to attend, before the lead threw it into the crowd of rabid, violent concertgoers. The last time you shot a gun.

You recognize, instinctively, the particularly hardy mindscape that composes the first layer of your psyche, the one best equipped to keep the ugly, writhing mess behind your eyes from finding a way out and breaking apart your skull with particular ease.

As your mind-skull tries to beat to death the idea trying to beat you to death, you briefly reach out to your ocular nerves, miles away, to take inventory of the situation. Your eyes, suspended in a mixture of saline solution and orange juice (for the vitamins. You insist upon it every time they send you out.) Roll around images of the sterile room they usually keep you in as you regain control over them.

These are the things you see.

• One human skeleton (Seven skull fractures. Six of them have healed over time, one kept for medicinal purposes. No teeth included).
• Two human lungs (Rinsed with a solution meant to dissolve tar residue. Cheaper than chemotherapy).
• One human liver (Surprisingly resilient).
• Two human kidneys (Marked 'elevated transaminases').
• One set of human intestines (Snipped off at the anus, thankfully).
• One human pancreas (In great condition. Not keen on contributing to the diabetes epidemic).
• One human gallbladder (Inflamed).
• One human bladder (Half-empty).
• Five liters human blood, One liter orange juice, assorted circulatory circuitry. (You had a book on pirates when you were very young.)
• Two eyes (You knew this).

Satisfied, you let your eyes return to their duties. You wonder if you maybe should have traveled light.

These are the things you have.

• One set of human skin (Ethically sourced from the gene pool of an unhappy marriage, just like everyone else).
• One set of teeth (Non-human).
• Structural foam-like polymer coating (Foundation issued. Expands and retracts at will. 'New car' scented).
• One human brain (Not a priority right now).
• One human heart (A priority right now).
• One human stomach (A second brain for the initiated. Contents: Half a Snickers bar, three cups of coffee, two AA batteries, indestructible cyanide capsule, destructible Sildenafil capsule).
• One human penis (Keep your enemies close).
• Optimized circulatory system (Consult your Foundation health care provider for a full list of things you are allowed to keep).¹

That last burst of information manages to dislodge something that was until that moment trying to burrow into a false inner self you had constructed within yourself as a decoy. It lands elsewhere, somewhere you can't chase it to, and starts relaying what it found to whoever you now realize sent it to kill you.

It was a misshapen, crude thing. It only managed to really break one of the barriers you put up; the false memory of an aberrative construct killing your parents, while slightly clever, gave away the game far too early.

You remember the first time you shot a gun.

As you rise, the foam keeping you together fully person-shaped again, you resolve to kill your assassin. It's insulting, after all, for anyone to believe they would be able to do anything more than bother you with such a weak display of talent.

Your enteric nervous system shudders back online, and you are distinctly aware of a small crowd around you, a man kneeling down at your side, white as a sheet, and a wallet in your mouth. A series of good gods and the ambulance is almost heres later, you are allowed to wave people away dismissively and hand people their licked goods back, two of your favorite activities. The man takes the wallet with some disgust.

You appreciate the attack a little more now, at least. The would-be assassin at least managed to make you drop to the floor convulsing, and that's something.

You are kind of disappointed there was no real-life assassin waiting for you, though. That's how they got the rest of them.
People initiated into the Work With Three Tongues are almost always capable of fending off aberrative attacks (The cruel Master of Work at the Foundation, Irving Gat, has no qualms about killing people at any point of their training), but they always neglect the physical dimensions of being (Gat is the third most decapitated Foundation employee, behind a dead immortal and someone who never sees it coming). Not the case for you, of course.

You remember the last time you shot a gun.

You think of calling home after you get in a cab and tell the driver to take you somewhere fun, taking off your bright pink mirrored sunglasses to wink at him. Gat has the spirals, and the rectangle, and the Other Ones, and you know he must be laughing at your antics right now, but this week you are a fugitive, and the Foundation has locked down the bits of you they have.

There's something killing your people.

Five dead. All shot dead, to be clear, which prompted the Foundation to lock down the Surrealistics Department. I was on assignment, and not being particularly keen on missing out on the sights and sounds of the real world, I decided to duck their calls to get to a safe house.

The taxi continues driving at an acceptable speed. As you rip down the street faster than any living being should, the driver's pale disposition at your lack of eyes evident, you feel a familiar heaviness gleaming off a particularly bright marquee advertising an all day breakfast buffet, among other things. The driver is much obliged to obey the finality of your order as you reassure him that this will do.

As you get out, you flash him your award-winning smile. He takes off, perhaps faster than before. Your teeth, of course, work at the mind, and being uninitiated, you barely have to do anything to snap them shut over his frontal lobe. As he continues accelerating, you wonder if he'll think of you as he dies, feverish speed led to frigid stillness.

There's something killing the people.

You enter the strip club as triumphantly as anyone ever has. Your stomach relays to you what it can stomach. A small, unrefined, dirty, and insufferably smoky room, maybe twenty five people in all. Fifteen workers, five men in an alcohol-fueled lapse of being, three men preoccupied with matters of the flesh, one man at the breakfast buffet, perhaps the only man that has ever meant the old adage of liking the food there, and one man trying to hide, scared out of his mind at the sight of a thin-skinned, grey-ish, soul-less, and eye-less man donning a pair of hot pink sunglasses, a button-up shirt with palms on it, white bermudas, brown loafers, and his lucky fly-fishing hat.

You thought the assignment said Atlantis, not Atlanta. Scout's honor.

You make your way to the breakfast buffet. You grab yourself a pancake, seven sausage links, and two hard-boiled eggs. You walk over to a table, and a particularly brave girl appears at your side. The heys and the where are you froms and the you must be freezings notwithstanding, you are quite comfortable.

The girl continues to blather away as you chew on the hardboiled eggs. They fall to the ground around you, as you have no way of swallowing. She tries to make you look at her as you get through the pancake, which crumbles over your shirt. She rubs your shoulders as you gnaw at sausage links one through six, leaving them back on the plate, and then, finally, you turn to her.

She smiles at you as she asks if you're really able to see through those sunglasses.

You smile, and take them off.

You do a headcount when they're all done going through the motions. Then you get really mad. Twenty four freshly dead bags of flesh with hopes and dreams. That goddamn asshole couldn't even die right, and after all the effort the girl went through to properly kill everyone she saw. You mimic the actions of sighing.

You guess this is as good a time as any to get him.

You walk back over to your table, now covered in what is at least a novel bodily fluid, and you grab now bloody sausage link number seven. You force yourself to swallow down hard, and start choking on it. You don't have a throat.

The actual process of killing someone is quite simple. At least the way you do it. Gat keeps you around because of it, the only member of the Surrealistics Department that's also an assassin.

You start by tugging at the axis of what's real and what's not. This doesn't actually change much, given that actually moving it would get you killed by at least three separate groups of people (that you know of). The axis of what's real and what isn't is metaphorical for you. But by tugging at its metaphor, you force open a lot of idea-space beyond the me-self.

Noosphere, layers of consciousness, that's all fine for people without the touch, but it's unintuitive and working with it is the realm of the uninitiated. you know yourself and you know the other. The space of all that is human is the we-self. One human, eternal. Dead and alive, awake and asleep. From the secret colonies of Mars to the people currently stuck in the Mariana Trench.

Touching in any way the sum of all human beings is, of course, stupid. Any damage to it is damage to the self, infinitely. But this is where the dislodging comes in. As I reach into every human that has ever been, the states of being known as 'Life' and 'death' are entangled just enough to make me a bigger concept than I should be right now. I am immortal, and I am dying in a strip club.

The reason I enter this state, of course, is to kill someone. I force myself back to personhood within the state of oneness, I build back an id, and I send it hunting. This skill is something the Foundation doesn't know about, the reason I am indebted to Dr. Irving Gat.

It finds, within everyone, the culprit, or the human, at least, that has tried to kill me. It forces them out of sync with humanity, and back through the crack in the realm between concepts and images.

At the last possible second, I bring him all the way back to reality. You wake up, the sausage link now rupturing inside the assassin's neck to reveal a swarm of flies. He dies hiding in a dumpster.

Their consciousness, however, remains unconscious next to you. You feel me drag it back with me, as I take my place back within your mind.

There's something killing their people too, now.