"Alice," you said, a name you'd turned over in your head for years without knowing why. "But, she… she's named Coda, it's a music theory, um-"
"Coda," he said, like he was turning the syllable over on his tongue to inspect it. "I like it."
Then, to your utter horror, he retracted his hand, and with it the promised red pill. Horrified, you reached out impotently, opening your mouth to protest and making little more than despairing whine.
"I'm sorry girl. It's not safe now. Here," he withdrew and threw to you something you caught clumsily; a pager. "I'll be back for you in three days, okay? Keep your head down, stay out of trouble, and I'll be back. Can you do that?"
You shook your head, feeling on the edge of tears, and he nodded sadly.
"I know. Three more days. You can do it."
The door opened and he disappeared through it.
It was as though it had never happened. There was no trace. No blood on the couch. No cops accosted you. Gone.
You forgot about your project, and late into the night, you turned everything that had happened over in your mind, again and again. None of it made sense, nothing he said followed. He'd just been some… drug dealer. Trying to push a product on you. A childhood of cartoon memories flooded into your brain,
just say no! Winners don't use drugs!
But, God, if his drugs could do what he said you'd take as many as you could get. If it could make you feel like her, feel like you were Coda instead of Eugene Lovelace, software engineer at Cisco Systems and nothing else, even for an
instant, you…
You scoured the internet to find out what drugs came in little red pills. MDMA, maybe. Yeah, that was it. Little pills. They came in lots of colours, but sometimes they were red. They caused hallucinations. They made you happy. You couldn't remember what that felt like.
That night, you hit your weed guy up and asked him if he had any. He said to meet him tomorrow evening.
---
The date is April 1st, 1999.
Thursday.
You feel as though you have been subject to the world's cruellest prank. In the time since you'd convinced yourself that perhaps it simply hadn't happened at all. You'd been working yourself to the bone, your family had a history of mental illness. You had an uncle who had spent time in a psyche ward for schizophrenia. That's all that was happening. You were losing your mind.
April Fools, Alice. Eugene. Whoever you are.
That morning, while you were showering, by some strange impulse you covered your forearm in shaving cream and, mechanically, ran your razor along it, through the mat of thick, dark hairs. You couldn't explain what you were trying to accomplish at the time, it was on autopilot like everything else in your life, a puppet whose strings you didn't control, because you weren't a person. Just a body, just meat, shuffling to the abattoir.
Finished, you put your arm under the spray, and as the water washed away the twisted hairs and white foam it was like watching dirt flow off your body. Like you'd spent years scrubbing yourself raw trying to get rid of it and finally, for the first time
ever, you felt
clean.
You destroyed two razor cartridges, gave yourself a dozen small cuts, and were thirty minutes late for work, but for the first time in your life when you looked at the mirror, some part of the meat felt like you.
Now, though, it was hidden, clandestine, the metamorphosis concealed under a shirt and tie. You felt shrink-wrapped by it, even as it was armour against the questions that would be prompted. A cage and bunker both.
Your manager, that piece of shit, had choice words for you. Your first day late in over a year and he treated it like a personal offence. You spent the entire time in his office imagining various ways he could die. Trying to picture what his face would look like after somebody swung a sledgehammer at it and splattered all his delusions of power and importance and superiority over the cheap fucking carpeting.
"Yes, sir. It won't happen again," you said evenly. You returned to your desk. Started typing. The day ground by, each minute an agonizing eternity. You ate a ham sandwich for lunch while staring at the wall. Back to your desk. More coffee.
You hit compile and, for the first time, sat and watched. Within thirty seconds, the first error, then the program hung as the fans spun up and the hard drive ground out like a millstone. A harsh tone of failure beeped from the speakers.
You checked the clock. Five. You got up, got your coat, and left. Smiled smugly at your manager as you passed. Who cares. Fuck this.
You met your weed guy at the door to his apartment as usual. You never bothered learning his name, he never bothered to ask yours, but he was the best friend you could remember. You slipped the cash into his hand and he handed you, alongside your usual order, a tiny baggy with three little pinkish-red pills. They had a design pressed into them, sort of looked like the Playboy bunny.
"You ever tried that?" he asked. You shook your head. "Well, you're in for a good time. Give it about an hour to kick in, just take the one. You get a girl with you…"
"Yeah. Thanks, man," you replied warmly. You headed back up to your apartment, sat on the couch where the bleeding strange had sat (or not), and started at the little bag, letting it twist at the end of your fingers.
People took these at raves. You'd never been to a rave, or a club, or anything. Always too scared. Could you go to a rave? You went to your closet and pulled it open and were greeted with the endless collared shirts and pressed pants and identical ties. You didn't have much else.
Who cares. Fuck this. You threw on a black t-shirt you mostly only slept in and an old pair of ratty jeans you'd worn since high school and ducked out in your work jacket. You weren't sure exactly where you were going, but you wandered until you found somewhere where people were lining up. Inside you could hear music, a deep, fast beat.
You slipped the pill onto your tongue, waiting a short while to be let in, and found yourself in a space at once too bright and too dark, lights flashing, music pounding, bodies packed wall to wall. Too close, closer than you'd let people be in years, but you were oddly okay with it. You danced half-heartedly to a few songs, feeling awkward, then found yourself feeling somewhat nauseous.
You fought your way through the crowd to the washroom, but you didn't throw up. You thought you needed to leave, to get out, to forget this. You had work tomorrow. What were you thinking?
You moved to the sink to wash yourself off and caught sight of Alice in the filthy mirror, partially hidden behind graffiti. She didn't look as scared as you felt. She looked confident. She looked badass. She looked like she was ready to keep going. She looked like Coda.
You pushed back out into the crowd and
danced.
You felt like you were the star of a music video. You felt like everyone was looking at you and for the first time in your life, that was a
good thing. You realized everyone here felt the same way, swept up in the sound and excitement and life, the noise and lights pounding through your brain in lightning pulses of energy that seized your limbs, seized the puppet and made her
dance. Brushing up against somebody else was electrifying.
There was a girl there who seemed to brush up against you particularly often, and soon you'd locked eyes with her, soon you were dancing
with her and not just near her. She was the most beautiful person you'd ever seen, you thought. You couldn't place her ethnicity, quite, save that she had darker skin in contrast with a canary-yellow crop top and long waves of dark hair and a piercing in her nose, fishnet gloves up past her elbows, a bright plastic necklace that clattered with her every movement. You were mesmerized by her.
"What's your name?" she asked, after you'd danced for some impossible length of time and she'd pulled you aside to pay six fucking dollars for two bottles of water. You shrugged, honestly unsure.
Eugene, you should say.
Alice, you wanted to say.
"Coda," you replied. She smiled.
"Cool!"
"I… I just picked it. You like it?" you asked. Telling her that seemed like the most natural thing in the world.
"Yeah! You live around here?"
The moment, sometime later, of pushing through the crowd and out of the club, back to your apartment, all of it felt etched into your mind forever and yet completely fleeting. You couldn't recall what you talked about, if you talked, what her name was, if she gave it, what she was wearing, while she was wearing it. But you remember faces in the crowd in exacting detail, could recall how each shuffled step toward the door felt, what her fingers felt like along your bare wrist as you walked.
You were no virgin, but it had been a while. Not since college. It had never gone well. Eugene was a profoundly uncomfortable and sad person who had always felt like sex was something that happened to the body he was loosely associated with, something he watched from the outside with an alien fascination and disgust, even while he felt compelled by biology to pursue it. Alice wasn't sure how she felt yet.
Coda wanted her so, so badly, needed her touch like a drowning woman needed water. For the first time, the mechanics of it didn't matter, the exultation taking over and smoothing out the discomfort. You still felt like you were watching it from the outside, but right now that just added a pornographic thrill, voyeurism into your own life. It stil felt wrong, but in a perversely exciting way.
By contrast, coming down off the high in somebody's arms was pure bliss. The fact it was nearly three in the morning seemed
nonsensical. Your body felt as though you'd run a marathon wearing weights, every muscle burning and worn, equal parts the triumphant soreness of a good workout and the genuine discomfort of pushing too hard. Exhaustion crept up on you.
You set your alarm, jacked the volume all the way up, and-
-you felt like you were underwater. Not a pool, maybe a hot tube. Warm, body temperature, thick like honey. There was a distant discomfort, a weight in the back of your skull, but it was very far away. You felt at peace. You could sleep here.
There was a disturbance, and you opened your eyes. For a moment you felt like you were in a metal room, like an old and rusting warehouse. There was a woman watching you, leaning forward with a look of disbelief on her face, and as she closed a green glow reached her face, like she was close to a screen.
She reached a finger out and poked at you, and she was gone. You'd closed your eyes. You struggled to open them again. Should get awake anyway. Work soon.
This time, you saw only red. Felt yourself suspended in something, thick and viscous. The discomfort was like a knife through your brain. Everything was blurry.
You saw thousands of red lights, stretching up above you and around you, forever. In every one, a person. You tried to reach out a hand, but even that motion was so tiring that instead, you just faded back into sleep.
---
The date is April 2nd, 1999.
Friday.
The alarm was a cruel screech that shook you awake, one the woman sharing your bed wasn't pleased with, and she stormed out while you showered. The water, cold or hot, did nothing to wake you up. The first cup of coffee in your cubical was powerless against the exhaustion. Where yesterday you felt invincible, like Coda, today was the most Eugene you'd had to experience in a very, very long time.
You started working your way through the error log, correcting the same fucking mistakes you always made, unable not to feel bitter about it. How the hell do you mix up < and [, after all this time? You'd been coding since 1992. You'd fixed it enough times that you were always very deliberate about it, but it felt like you always found one instance of misuse
somewhere, as you hunted through line after line looking for what went wrong. Didn't help the debugging software was shit. You'd written your own, but weren't allowed to use it, or anything else. In-house only.
It sometimes felt like they didn't care about how efficiently you worked, only that you worked.
Your manager glared at you every time you made eye contact, and loitered outside your cubical constantly. You were one of the most productive people on the floor but you'd slipped and that was it. Perfection or nothing. The message was clear.
Just one more day. Tomorrow was the weekend. You didn't have to come in, though you usually did. Maybe you'd leave early tomorrow. Take another of those red pills. Feel like Coda again.
"Mister Lovelace?" somebody said, a million miles away. You tore your eyes from the screen, the line after line of perfect, broken code, and saw one of the HR workers whose name you could never remember. The one who always wore those ridiculous silver broaches that looked like little woodland creatures and shit.
Today, a pig.
"Um. The, uh, they want you in meeting room six. Right now," she said. Heh. Of course. You'd been anticipating this. You sat up, stretched, adjusted your tie. If they were expecting you to grovel for your job, they were sorely mistaken. You didn't have the energy for anything right now except perhaps giving them the finger on the way to collect your shit. Maybe with both hands. Actually, you were strangely excited for that.
You stepped into meeting room six with both chambers loaded, but your manager wasn't there. Neither was your boss, or his boss. There were just two cops, and a man with brown hair, a dark green suit, and sunglasses.
"Mister Lovelace, thank you for joining us," the man drawled. His voice was entirely serious, non-nonsense, emotionless. "Please. Sit."
It wasn't an offer. Numbly, you pulled out a chair opposite and sat down.
"What's this about?" you asked.
"Don't worry, you aren't in any troub-" one of the officers started, but the man in the suit silenced him with a hand.
"Let me be brief, Mister Lovelace. We have reason to believe you might have information that would facilitate the capture of a dangerous criminal," the man said, staring at you with those blank lenses. "We also have on file here several potential offences that, while fairly minor, do qualify as felonies. Drug possession, for one."
You nodded stiffly.
"I want my lawyer," you said. He smirked.
"To be clear, we are not particularly interested in prosecuting you. Our resources would be better spent on the case we're working, though if we have no leads we do have spare time to do the… paperwork," the man replied. "Do you understand?"
"Crystal clear," you responded tersely. You were so terrified you thought you might piss yourself, but at the same time there was a rising anger at the
bullshit here, coming after you for daring to feel alive for one fucking night, using it as leverage against you. Assholes.
"Good," the man said, slowly unwinding a thick file in front of him. It flopped open and you expected to see yourself, but of course not. The most crime you'd ever done was steal a handful of POGs from a convenience store when you were ten, and some casual drug use. Maybe a few programs you'd written might violate laws, maybe.
The man slid a photograph across the table. On it was a blurry, greyscale picture of the man who'd hidden in your apartment, wearing those same sunglasses, the same white leather jacket. He had a pistol in hand. Somebody had circled his face in a red marker, his dispassionate expression as he fired his weapon at something off-camera.
"This photograph was taken at a bank robbery three months ago, one that left four people dead," the man explained. "The… individual in the photograph is, we believe, personally responsible for the deaths of at least six people, theft and destruction totalling nearly sixteen million dollars, and a long history of human trafficking."
"Huh," you said, not knowing how else to respond. The suit nodded.
"Indeed." He paused, drawing out another picture. Same man, same clothes, same pistol, same greyscale, though you could not see his face in this one. There was a blue circle around him as he ran, and a gun was being pointed at his back by somebody just intruding at the edge of the picture. "This is no mere criminal, Mister Lovelace, this man is a member of an organized crime group responsible for a
variety of heinous acts. They have connection with slavery, people smuggling, the drug trade, and international terrorism."
"They… uh, they sound like a bad bunch," you said, stumbling over your words.
"I have only one question for you, Mister Lovelace, and I just need you to confirm what we already know. Tell the truth, and this ends here. You go back to your cubical, and everything we have on you will be… forgotten. Lie, and you will find out how short our patience can be."
You could see the reflection of the two photos in his glasses, and your own terrified face staring apprehensively back. Truth or lie. Run or fight. Blue or red.
"Do you recognize the man in this photograph?"
---
[ ] Tell the truth.
[ ] Lie.
