CSV Pariah

Introduction


Typical miserable Seattle spitting weather.  It can't even get it's act together enough to be a real rain, she thought as she kept cover under the store eves.   Every time a car, and those were few tonight, made the slow trip up the street, the girls poked out like cuckoo clocks going off in a row.  She watched the sedan crawl up the street, almost sneaking from streetlight to streetlight.
She knew her ass was in perfect form, the six inch heels did remarkable things to her legs and thighs.  After fourteen months on the street, the heels felt more natural than any other shoe.  If it hadn't been such a slow night she doubted she would have even made the effort.  As the car approached, she turned, giving the driver full view of her assets.
He stopped, they always did for her.  She leaned into the open window, making sure her cleavage left nothing to the imagination.  An eerie green glow from the dash lights covered the joe's face.  The white clerical collar seemed to repulse the green tinge.
“Looking for redemption, Father?”
A handful of bills answered her.   Before she could reach for them, they disappeared into the darkness.
I've done worse and weirder.  The seat-belt gathered her into a secure embrace and the steering wheel folded back into the dash.  “I guess we're going to my place.  Yours might be crowded and threesomes are extra.”  The smirky comment was out before she could stop herself.  A sideways glance at the greenish face showed it was either ignored or not heard.
A pale hand offered her a thin cable.  She took an antiseptic wipe from her small purse, condoms and wipes, a walker's tools of the trade, and cleaned the hookup before inserting it into the adapter implanted in her left shoulder.  Matching his silence, she mentally sent the information to the car's navigation system.
Soon, they arrived at the hourly rate hotel.  Once in the room, she turned on the light.
“Oh my God,” she gasped as recognition flooded her face.
“You’ve strayed, my child.  It is time to return to the flock,” the preacher said, his kindly old face was pockmarked and creased with years and living.

Prelude


(Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2008)
Text spewed across three monitors and his fingers fluttered on the keyboard.  His toes tapped the floor as he perched on the edge of the desk chair.  His right hand flew to the mouse, dragging screens from one monitor to another.  As soon as the file was dropped, more programs sprang to life.
The soft ringing barely slowed his left hand typing.  His right hand silenced the alarm between keystrokes.  “Not yet.  No, not yet.”
“Batman first appeared in issue 27 of Detective Comics in 1939.”  His words were a monotone, his lips moving just enough to let the words slip out.
The simple chair dwarfed him, but his essence seeped out, an invisible shadow.  “Otto Von Bismark united Germany.  He caused World War II.”  His right foot danced a quick jig.  “Toe, heel, toe, heel.”
His gray eyes tracked the progress as the programs loaded.  Right now, there were seven status bars, each at a different stage.
“Syntax error?” the question was a subtle crack in the intense essence of Jeremy Goddard.  “Syntax error?  I don't make syntax errors!”  He leaned forward, his elbows lifting him off the seat of chair. “Where are you, you code-crashing, loop-making bastard?”
His blunt index finger traced the lines of code as they scrolled until the cancerous code jumped out at him.  “Fucking semi-colon!” a brief crack in the teflon he presented to the world.  A keystroke later and the evidence of his humaity was gone and the code began compliling again.
Now, he took a moment to look at the alarm.  The bottle rattled the sound of control, but echoed numbness.  “To med or not to med?  That is the question.”  His eyes darted between the pill bottle and the lines of code flowing across the screen.  I'm so close.  I can taste it.  Hey, I remembered not to say it outloud!  “No meds tonight!” he crowed and flicked the bottle hard enough to send it spinningoff the desk, but not hard enough to break, Because the highs can't be too high. Yet...
The monitors beeped as all the programs finished compiling at the same time.  “Fucking right!” Jeremy spun in his chair three times before grabbing the desk to stop his momentum. The rest of the steps sped before his eyes, each blink a segmenting the process.  First, prep Pyotr.  Seond, run real time diagnostics.  Third let the fucking cat loose!
“I need stop swearing,” he muttered, the distinction between thinking and talking getting caught in the eddy's of his brain.
The fuck with that.
“Pills, where...”
“Fuck your pills!  We're flying now.” His toes were tapping under the desk, threatening to send him in a series of chair-spinning turns.  “Wire!” he gasped, reachingfor his second greatest accomplishment, but that knowledge was drowned by the euphoria filling his mind.  Even so, he was surgeon delicate when his fingers found it. The key was the tiny wire from the BNC connection.   He held it in his finger tips, holding it up, his Excaliber.  The flourescent light managing a meager prophetic glint before fading.
Next was the mutated Pyotr, a nonedescript white mouse with a swollen mass of flesh on it's right shoulder.  Even with the swelling gone, Pyotr could only waddle around his cage for short periods of time.
Pyotr made the awkward clamber into Jeremy's hand, then nestled there, absording the warmth.  “Almost done, ole buddy.”  The wince passed before Jeremy could block it.  It's science you fucking moron.  Finish it!
The hair thin wire slipped into the port that was part of Pyotr's mass on his right shoulder.  The tiny BNC connection secured the wire to Pytor with a muted click.  As Jeremy's finger moved away, he was positive that Pyotr looked up at him with those pink eyes.
Fuck, Fuck! FUCK echoed through Jeremy's subconscious as he put Pytor into the custom cage.  It's a lab rat, nothing more!
“No, it is more.  He's the first to survive the procedure.”  Memories of splicing the microscopic wires to the nerves in Pyotr's spinal cord were still fresh even after all these weeks. 
Lab rat,  Don't fucking wuss out now over a rodent!
“Shut up!  Shut up! Shut the FUCK up!”
But Jeremy was already crawling to the food bowl and picking out the pellets.  The screens were rolling with code and Jeremy could see what Pyotr was seeing and smelling.  His favorite food, a bowl full of it.  But that was the screen.  The cage was empty and Pyotr was seeing and smelling the artifical signals being trasmitted to it's brain through the connection.
“I'm a genius!” exploded out before he could cover his mouth with his hand.  But it was true.  Pyotr was living a reality totally controlled by Jemeery and his arrayy of processors.
Pyotr paused only for a second as it gnawed the virtual seed in it's paws.
Now, it was crystal.  All the myriad of inane facts left, replaced by a blinding calmness and peace.  Here' was his cure, his chance for a normal life, his brain queited, but still able to reach those meteoric highs and abysmal lows, but not controlled by the fucking medicine.
One last step...  “For us, Pyotr,” Jeremy whispered as the slot at the end of the cage opened, freeing the white cat he'd named Omega.  Jeremy's eyes didn't waver from the computer screens.  No blip, no reaction in Pyotr's mind.  No vision or smell of the cat, it was all blocked by the reality that Jeremy had programmed.  That reality lasted only a few more seconds before Omega pounced and ended all of Pyotr's realities.