CHAPTER 3: Who’s Up For Some Exposition?
I grabbed my shabby leather trench coat as we left the office, making our way down the dimly-lit, musty corridor to the street. The wiring here was as bad as the office, and the flickering bulbs did nothing to calm Erin’s nerves. Against my better judgment, I offered her my arm. With a wan smile, she placed her palm in the crook of my elbow, and drew close.
The scent coming off her, like the fields of Amsterdam, like the first rain of summer, mounted a frontal attack on my brain, as the pressure from her fingertips made me think of what those hands could do, in another time, another place. Dammit! Get a hold on yourself, L! And yes, I know that was another pun. Shut it! Don’t think that she’s gonna get over the Face-Raping Bat anytime soon!
Turning towards me, Erin said, “I still don’t see why we’re going to a Bar.”
“Not just any bar, honey. This one is… Special.”
“Special like ‘mine is the power and the glory’ special, or special like ‘I need help wiping my own ass’ special?”
I chuckled. “Neither, doll face. There are some pretty weird characters who hang out there who might help us with this.” I pulled the scrap of binary code from my pocket, & she flinched, but kept her cool.
“Your friends, I bet.”
“Well, some of them. Others… let’s just say we have an uneasy truce.”
“Hmph. Sounds like any other joint in the City.”
“Ah. But can you say that any other bar will talk back to you?” Leaving that last comment hanging, I opened the front doors onto the street.
The City loomed through the threshold, the grim oppressiveness pushing down on your shoulders almost immediately. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, originally. There was something about the way the City was built. “Psychotecture” they called it. The theory was that the brain interpreted angles in the same way it interpreted feelings and emotions. Make the angle big enough, prominent enough, and it will affect your mood. Of course, the possibilities were huge, and Government, inc. ate that shit up like pancakes. The designers got to work, like Frank Lloyd Wright on steroids, plotting out the buildings, the streets, even the lampposts. Great idea, right? Make the City what you want it to be: The financial center attentive, focused, and precise, the Restaurant district warm, inviting, etc.
When it was finished, the designers submitted the City to Government, inc. who then did what they always did: Auction off to the lowest bidder. Who, of course, will cut corners. Literally. The precise distances and angles the designers calculated were eyeballed, estimated, and (occasionally) eliminated. When it was all done, the City was a mockery of itself, a concrete and steel grotesque, oppressive and forbidding, even on the brightest Spring day. Needless to say, the suicide rate in the City shot up 1723% in the first year after completion. No wonder no one left their windowshade up for long.
Pulling up my collar, we hunched against the psychic assault of the City in all its vast malevolence, and made our way to the car. A silver, beat-to-shit late model beast, it contrasted sharply against the sleek and sinister beauty of the latest models parked nervously alongside.
“Holy shit,” Erin said, bemused. “Does that thing run on gas, still?”
“Never got around to installing the hydro cell converter.”
“Where do you find the cash to refill the damn thing?”
“I try not to use it that often, but today, we’re in a hurry, and since there’s no one on the road yet, I figure we can get away with it.”
“Damn, I think I will need a drink after riding in that piece of junk.” “Just get in. We’ve got to get to the Open Bar before the Troll gets too drunk.” “We’re actually looking for a Troll?” “A collective, actually,” I said, hitting the started, & gunning the car to life. The engine fought me for a second, as if it knew it wasn’t long for this world, and just wanted to fade away into rust, but then it remembered why it was made, and let out an angry roar as it cleared its pipes of any carbon that might be in its steel throat.
“We’ve got to find Aini.”
~~~
We drove in silence for a few minutes. Well, relative silence, anyway, as the car grumbled, coughed, & roared its way through the mostly empty streets of the City. I glanced over at Erin. She had a look on her face like a John Singer-Sargent painting, deep but not revealing any secrets.
“Ok. Fine. You’re saying the only way to figure out whatever that—that—“
“Face-Raping Bat.”
“Yeah, Face-Raping Bat—was doing is to find a Troll collective. Fine. But what do you mean about the Bar talking back to you?”
I sighed. “Listen. This is a delicate subject, because I’m not sure if Government, Inc. knows about it. You remember when they came up with Quantum Storage, so they could collect almost infinite data on everyone in the country?”
“Yeah. There was a big protest about it.”
“…Until most of the protesters were killed in the ‘Accident’. Anyway, a few who got away went underground, where they were able to hack their way into Government Inc.’s system & see what was really going on. What they found was, like I said earlier, a system of storage, but no way of processing the information fast enough. The Quantum Processor simply couldn’t survive the massive amount of energy required to make it run.”
“But what does that have to do with a Bar?”
“I’m getting there. These underground hackers decided that they were going to try & beat Government, Inc to the punch and develop their own Quantum Processor, so they could stay a step ahead of the Christ Squads and to keep tabs on the Claw Shrimp. Their breakthrough came when they realized the only solution was to bring the Quantum process to the Macro world. That way, the larger bodies could handle the energy needed without breaking down.
“Their next problem was to somehow manifest tangible Quantum symptoms in a visible form. Luckily, these weren’t your usual Hackers. They decided to throw everything they had at the problem, so they tried combining their technical and mathematical skills with some... unorthodox methods.”
“‘Unorthodox’.”
"Yeah. They hooked up with a Kabbalist (a real Kabbalist), a couple of Ceremonial Magicians, a Tarot card reader, and combined that with their resident Tantrist--”
“Sex Magic? Are you serious?”
“Serious as the Pope’s feeding tube. She was able to raise enough kundalini to manifest a fairly good representation of the Tree of Life as pure energy, but it wouldn’t stay still. It was too unpredictable. It kept changing, & breaking down. After taking a break, they had some tequila, and realized that it they had to embrace the unpredictability, not control it. Perhaps it was because they were all pretty drunk, but they decided that since perception helped shape quantum actions, then they should make the laboratory into a bar, which is perhaps the most unpredictable place a person can go.”
“Now you’re putting me on.” Erin began to pout, and I almost drove the car into a streetlamp before I pulled myself together enough.
“You’d think I was, but get this: By adding the element of chaos to the probability equations of Quantum mechanics, the Orgone energy from sexual charge, and the altered consciousness of Magic and Tarot, something happened: Tangible, macro, collapsing wave states. In that environment, in that place, you could, just by thinking about it, create whatever you wanted. Granted, it wasn’t quite the Quantum Processor they were looking for, but damn, it was fun. They decided to not only keep it a secret, but keep the bar part up and running, with entrance available to only those who know.”
“…”
“I know, it sounds like bullshit. It gets worse. A few months ago, the bar somehow gained sentience.”
“That’s it. Let me out of the car.”
“Wait. Think about it. Whet is the human mind but information being strung together in random ways? What is consciousness but an enormous probability? The Macro wave states had existed for so long, they started self-regulating. You’ll see. We’re almost there.”
Softly, subtly, we had slid into a darker part of the city. We had left the relative eeriness of the City’s residential district, and had entered the pseudo-psychotic Warehouse District. Graffiti dedicated to Hastur and Nyarlotep fought with each other, and you could see the glint of wide eyes and sharp knives in every dark angle large enough to hide a body (or two). The occasional working streetlight did nothing but push the surrounding darkness to a more sinister, inky mess.
“I gotta warn you, dollface, the Open Bar is a little different than most of the places you’ve probably been to.”
“Oh, really?” She finally smiled again, briefly, like she had more secrets than she knew what to do with. “And how do you know where I’ve been?”
“I’m just saying, even with the self-regulating Quantum consciousness, the wave states are unstable, and need constant maintenance and upkeep.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Well, why fix what isn’t broke? The same processes that brought it into being are used to keep it going.”
“…You mean, tantric sex, excessive drinking, and strange pagan rituals…”
“Exactly. And Math, of course.”
“Of course.”
I stopped the car. “We’re here.”
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