CODE ELDRITCH

Chapter V

 Chapter V: the Horror

Certain things are too immense to digest right away.

The next few hours had me walk around in a drunken stupor, arriving dazed to my designated room and simply plummeting onto the couch.

That The Official would be lying never really crossed my mind. I suppose some part of me might have instinctively felt the veracity of his revelations. Maybe I had just understood that he was serious about it all - that there was nowhere for me to go safely.

He had a firing squad follow me around after that. They wore gas masks, marched in lock step with weapons clearly in view. I took to calling them the "Not Fucking Around"-squad, and they were polite enough to at least let me barricade myself inside the hotel room.

The particulars of how any of this could be possible weren't chiefly what was on my mind at the time. I was more concerned with my fingertips. I didn't feel any different, but my hands seemed suddenly monstrous. If that thing down in the bedrock, FC-01, was the 'nicer' kind of EA, then...

The thought of comparing myself to it simply would not be repelled. My fingers felt human, the skin coarse but otherwise normal, the nails worn-down by teeth around the edges but otherwise uninteresting. No ink sprayed from any unseen crevices, no eyes stared unblinking from under my tongue.

I'm not proud to say that I explored every part of my body in the next hour-or-so with more care and candor than I had ever studied anything in my life. Save the kinks that all of us have in some shape or form — the leathery growth on my left heel, the vaguely star-shaped scar on my side — I found nothing to indicate that I was some eldritch, otherworldly being, and it made me panic. I knew what Cotard's Delusion was and had always held the idea of somehow believing you're already dead to the highest standard of absurdity. But that agonizing time alone in my CCTEA lodgings gave me first-hand insight into the realm of the really, truly insane.

What if it was under my skin?

Was my skin even real to begin with? What kind of nasty things crawled underneath the outer layer of Royal?

In the end, I slid to the floor with my back against the wall, stars dancing in front of my eyes, half-choked sobs rocking my chest. I didn't have the mental capital to open my skin to have a look, nor the necessary tools to do it. The absence of sharp objects in EA lodgings are not coincidental.

Nearly entranced, I sat there for a long while. The glass panes in the room slowly shifted from daylight white to evening orange. Eventually I got tired of it, and got back up. You can only pity yourself for so long before it gets dull.

This room was better equipped than the last. There was a TV, a silently humming air conditioner, even a small liquor cabinet. I wasn't a drinker, so I let that last part gather dust, but I flicked through some of the channels while the A/C brought the room from lukewarm to chilly.

The financial thread wove through each news broadcast - the news anchors just couldn't get enough of soaring real estate and freshly minted, self-made billionaires. Kenan O'Dara and his playboy grin flashed to one side of the screen, swooning economists on the other. I knew he was one of the investors that had picked up real estate in Slo-Town (it's where he and the Wall Street 'Fatal Five' had grown most of their early wealth), wondered if he had any fingers in this game. Inside my prison (spare yourself the rolling eyes, I know how melodramatic that sounds now) I felt as if the entire world might be conspiring, and I had no way to know the rules of the game.

Team Double-Dip came to me, not the other way around. Whether it was by order of The Official or established praxis for dealing with people like me I couldn't tell, but by the fact that they made themselves comfortable immediately I took it for commonplace.