Live, Love, and Hate – by Orpheus

Week 14 – Follow the White Rabbit

I started writing this after Week 15. I really don’t know what to put here, so I’m just gonna put down the prologue and first chapter of my new story Follow the White Rabbit, and as much of Chapter 2 as I have.

Follow the White Rabbit, prologue

I am perfectly aware that the title I have chosen reeks of cliché. But in my case, I believe it to be quite appropriate. I am the disciple of the White Rabbit. Or was rather. I don’t think he’s alive anymore, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to find that he was still around. Anyway, I’m sorry for my lack of ability to describe my position any better than disciple, but whenever I asked the White Rabbit what we were, he would just tell me not to question the nature of my gifts. I suppose that he was right, really. It is a gift, and I should be more grateful of that.

I don’t have time to ramble like this. They’re after me. The words that I’m speaking into this microphone now may very well be my last. I really can’t help but laugh when I watch the words I say find their way onto my op-lens screen. After all, nobody’s going to believe me, but I suppose that’s good. That’s what They want. So long as you don’t believe me, I doubt that They’ll go after you. But be warned, I can’t assure that you’ll be safe, even then. If you have any concern for your personal safety, get rid of this disk right now. However, if you’re willing to follow the White Rabbit and myself, then read on.

Chapter 1

I suppose that the best place to begin is before the beginning. It was May 23rd, 2872. That was the day that I experienced what the White Rabbit would later call me first gift. I rode the train to work in the morning. I think it went over an ocean, but who knows. Nobody can see what the earth actually looks like anymore, and I’m beginning to wonder if oceans aren’t just one of the myths that They use to blind people from the truth of reality. But that is not the point, I need to keep my mind focused so that I can get this down before They get me.

I was taking the train like I always did. I’d almost finished reading the comics section of the newspaper, which used to be all that I read. I was an ignorant savage back then. Anyway, the lights in the tunnel got dim all of a sudden. Nobody else seemed to notice, but then again, most of them were asleep, seeing as how it was well past midnight. I got all my rest during my job. After being hooked up to a machine and used as a processing unit for 10 hours a day for a few years, you learn to shut your active mind down and just sleep through the whole thing. Anyway, I suppose that it wasn’t just my gift, it was a gift given to everyone on that train, it’s just that I was the only one who took the gift.

After the lights dimmed to the point where I could no longer read the comics, I folded up the paper and looked around the silent train car. There was a dirty, homeless man sleeping in a corner, but I knew him. His name was Leon Gatlock, and he was to become an invaluable source of information when it became necessary, and it was him who told me that They’re going to be coming for me tonight. On the seat closest to the door, and right by Leon, sat a biker woman, no older than 24, assuming that she hadn’t taken the age vaccine. If she had, well, I’ve always been terrible at judging the ages of people who took the vaccine. Just about everyone else on the train was one of the rank and file corporate lemmings that always seem to be on trains. Anyway, I noticed that, without any warning, there was a girl who I guessed had taken the vaccine, judging by the fact that she looked to be in her late teens, maybe twenty max, sitting on the floor of the train, right next to Leon. She was clad in a strange black leather outfit, and cradled a dagger gently in her right hand.

“Who are you?” I asked the girl.

“I don’t know. But you, dear Alice, can call me the Red Queen,” the girl responded in a tone of voice that told me she knew everything and nothing.

“My name’s not Alice, it’s Geoff,” I replied confusedly.

“I know that you know who you’ve been,” the girl said, speaking as though I was an idiot, “but do you know who you can be?”

“Okay… but why Red Queen? You don’t have the slightest touch of red anywhere on you.”

“Does this form suit you better?” she asked. As she spoke, Red Queen grew to about twice her previous height. Her face changed to that of a man who had endured years of sorrow as her short, dark hair grew to be long and golden. Her black leather outfit changed into a flowing white robe that was speckled with patches of blood. In her (or would it be his now? I’m not really sure) eyes, which had changed from an amber color to a dull grey, I could see such unadulterated desperation as I’d never before witnessed. Wings unfolded from the creature’s back. But then, in the blink of an eye, Red Queen became a little girl again.

“What are you?” I asked.

“I am the Red Queen, Wife of the Slaughter God.”

“You’ve told me that you are the Red Queen, but you haven’t told me yet, what exactly does that mean?”

“What it means to you, Alice, is that there is news. You haven’t been running, you’ve been standing still. And you should remember from the stories that your mother told you that you have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are, so how do you plan on ever getting where you want to go?”

“I think I seem to be standing still and staying in the same place. And besides, I rather like my life as it is.”

“You like it as it is, but do you like how it will be?”

“I can’t really say that I know how my life is going to be,” I said, taking my glasses off and cleaning them with my shirt, “After all, I mean, you can’t really expect me to look into the future, can you?”

“Of course I expect you to look into the future,” Red Queen snorted, sounding as though she really meant it, “Nature gave you twelve senses for a reason.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, as you can well imagine, I was dreadfully confused at this point, “humans only have five senses.”

“Five senses with names. Five senses with clear organs. But what about the ability to tell when someone’s watching you and all those hunches you’ve had that turned out to be right, have you never wondered about those?”

“Sure, I’ve wondered about them,” I answered her, uncomfortably aware of the things that she was talking about, “but those things are wrong more often than they’re right.”

“Maybe that’s just because you don’t use them often enough. Or because you’re changing the things that they sense. After all, don’t your ears ring after loud noises, and doesn’t your vision darken when you walk from a bright day into a dark room?”

“I suppose so…” I mumbled, with a mind numbing sensation that White Rabbit would later teach me is the dawning comprehension that there is a world outside the one to which you have grown accustomed to living in. I also noticed that around that time, Leon woke up.

“And those are just two of your senses, Alice, think of the wonders you could accomplish if you opened the eyes that saw Time and Creation,” Red Queen rambled on with an amount of excitement that I found to be quite disturbing. I noticed that, while Leon appeared to notice Red Queen, he didn’t pay any attention to her. I found this rather odd, considering what we were talking about.

“Stop calling me Alice!” I shouted, “My name is Geoff! I’m a man! Alice is a woman’s name!”

“But what does that matter?”

“Well, it’s kinda important to me…”

“And why’s that?”

“Because my name’s just part of who I am.”

“But I don’t know my name, and I’m just fine.”

“I suppose so,” I muttered as the train ground to a halt. When the doors slid open, Red Queen walked out, without so much as a goodbye. As the train started to move again, I fumbled through my pockets for a sandwich. After I found it, I tossed it over to Leon.

“Hey, Leon, you know anything about that little girl who just got off the train?” I asked as I watched Leon tear into the salami on wheat sandwich.

“Never seen her before,” Leon answered with his mouth full. I could see the specks of half-chewed meat covering his yellowed teeth. “Might be able to find something out if you got anything else…”

“Sorry,” I respond, not really feeling any remorse, “but that’s all I got with me today, maybe I’ll have something more tomorrow.”

“Yeah, yeah, I s’pose I’ll find out everything I can then. What’d you say ‘er name was?”

“Red Queen.”

“Right, I’ll know everything about yir li’l Queenie t’morrow.”

“Good,” I answered absent mindedly. I spent the rest of the ride in silence, too busy thinking about what Red Queen said to talk to Leon anymore. Once the train finally got to my stop, I walked out the doors onto the same cold, gray, concrete boarding platform that I’d seen every day for the past twenty years or so. On my way out, however, I dropped a few spare coins into Leon’s upturned hat. Taped to the grey-blue tiled walls was the same wanted poster that had been up there since longer than I could remember. It showed a man with dark, soulful eyes and a sparse head of ice-white hair. Below it was a reward seven digits long. All that was said on the poster was that this particular fugitive was a suspected terrorist who called himself the White Rabbit. I paused and wondered if he had anything to do with Red Queen. After all, they were both characters from the ancient stories by Lewis Carroll, and Red Queen kept calling me Alice, who had something to do with the stories, but I can’t remember what. I shrugged, and walked up to the streets. Well, the streets of the twelfth Level. I walked towards the oddly shaped building with green windows where I used to work. I found myself to be oddly unmotivated. My thoughts were still wrapped around the bizarre incident that had just happened onboard the train.

Well, I guess I was thinking about Red Queen all day. I guess that I was thinking so strongly about it, that when I was hooked up to the computer for the day, I accidentally transferred a record of the incident into the computer’s memory. I didn’t know it at the time, but They used this to Their advantage. After work, I went up to Level 13 and found my way to a little café. While I was sipping idly at my water and waiting for my meal to come, I saw an announcement come on to the TV.

“A new terrorist has found her way into our great nation,” the broadcaster said in a grave voice that was barely audible over the static and the conversations raging in the café. “She appears to be no older than twenty years of age, and is suspected to have taken the age vaccine. Here is a video clip of her in action, if you have any knowledge of her whereabouts, please inform the authorities immediately.”

With that, the picture shifted to a video of Red Queen walking towards a line of military men armed with automatic laser rifles. One of the military officers shouted for Red Queen to stop her approach and drop her weapon. She did neither. Then, the squad of soldiers opened fire. Red Queen began to hum a tune that I couldn’t place as she walked through the spray of lasers. She was repeatedly hit, but not a single one of the shots seemed to hurt her in the slightest. Once she got to the soldiers, Red Queen started to stab at them with her knife. After the first of their number was shred to ribbons and skinned, the soldiers began to scream as they kept shooting at Red Queen, who was still humming. As she slowly picked them off, several of the soldiers ran screaming. I wondered why Red Queen didn’t change her shape into that freakish winged giant that she had become on the train. At the end of all this, the news broadcaster once again urged anyone who had any knowledge regarding this terrorist to tell the authorities everything they knew about her.

After watching the broadcast, I walked out of the café without eating my meal, which still hadn’t come. I hailed a taxi to take me back down to the train station.

“Did you see the thing about the terrorist?” I asked the taxi driver.

“Yeah, personally, I think they faked it. Nobody could live through all those shots. Least ways, not anyone human. And I think we can safely say that there ain’t anything else out there.”

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right…” I muttered, silently questioning what I saw on the train this morning. The rest of the ride passed in silence. Once we got to the train station, I walked down and was lucky enough to catch a train that was already there. Unfortunately, it wasn’t Leon’s train, so I didn’t get a chance to hear what he’d gathered, but I heard plenty about Red Queen, and more than a few people thought that she was in league with the White Rabbit. Strange thing was that the White Rabbit had been wanted for so long that nobody could really remembered what it was that he’d done. After I got home, I watched TV until I fell asleep. That was the last peaceful sleep that I ever had.

Chapter 2

I suppose that I should tell you a bit about Leon Gatlock before I get any further in my story. He wasn’t always an unwashed, tattered looking man who spent his life sleeping against the wall of a train. He actually used to be quite successful. Leon used to be a military-grade weapons engineer. His last project was something called the Vigilante, a mechanized soldier designed to look perfectly human. Unfortunately, the government had taken over the project shortly before completion. He was shortly cut from the development team for trying to make the Vigilantes make their own moral decisions, rather than following preset ethical guidelines. That night, he awoke to find a gun pointed at his forehead.

Luckily for Leon, when the assassin pulled the trigger, his gun jammed. Leon took this two second distraction to his advantage and pulled out the assault pistol from under his pillow. Leon pointed the pistol at his assailant and held down the trigger. He looked at the shadow of what he was shooting at and recognized it as the silhouette of a Vigilante. Then, he realized that his spray of bullets wasn’t going to be effective.