Ian shrugged before flopping down on the aging couch. It huffed under him, but otherwise completed its prime objective as a couch successfully.
“I don’t know, man,” he huffed as well, crossing his arms. “It started off well, I thought she was really pretty. We didn’t talk loads, but, you know,” he gestured at nothing half heartedly “enough.”
“So, what happened?” Brad asked. He was sitting across from the couch and past a table in a wide, dark orange wicker back chair and smoking the tiny remnants of a cigarette. “If it went as poorly as you said…You said she didn’t like you at all.”
“She didn’t say anything cruel or, like, spit on me or anything.”
“But you would have liked her to, I bet.”
Ian feigned laughter like a fool for a few seconds too long before continuing with his explanation.
“She was all cordial, Sammie by the way, that was her name, cordial and polite. She laughed at my jokes, kept up conversation, eye contact…all the necessities. She just didn’t find me attractive; not at all.”
“How can you, could you tell?” Brad leaned forward to kill his cigarette in the graying but once linoleum white ashtray.
“You can’t tell?”
“Not always.”
“But sometimes?”
Brad nodded. He leaned back and, by rolling his wrist forward, told Ian to carry one.
“I think it’s because I’m not tall enough.”
Ian sat up. Then, he stood up, walked away from the couch through the living room and up a short flight of stairs, and investigated himself in the long mirror hanging near the first floor bathroom. He looked himself up and down a good few times. Counting each speck of distance.
“What’s the diagnosis?” Rick called out, unmoved.
“I’m definitely not tall enough!”
“How tall are you?”
“I don’t know, not enough…”
Ian shook his head, defeated, and turned around to stare out the front windows around a small supporting wall slightly in his way.
“Do you want me to get a measuring tape or-”
“No. Forget about the number.”
Ian hitched his thumbs in his belt loops and slipped back down the stairs to his spot on the couch. This time he sat up normally. Him and RIck looked at eachother, at each others’ heights, at the smoke climbing itself up to the ceiling like a spider. Then they looked back up at each other and both spoke at once.
“Sdorry ou’m jwaust mupsetoo fwixd intit click. What? Oh, uh, sorry.” The voice of the two blurted.
“Sorry, I’m just upset we didn’t click…Me and Sammie…Is what I meant to say,” Ian clarified, putting air-quotes around his own quote and focusing more on the movement of his fingers than his friend’s face.
“I asked, ‘Do you want me to fix it?’”
“Fix it?” Ian tilted his head and squinted at his friend. He made an attempt at a laugh but sort of just breathed.
“Yeah,” Rick helpfully clarified. He stood up from his smoking chair for the first time in hours. “Just, wait right here.”
He left Ian with a reassuring smile and a pat on the shoulder as he passed him and vanished behind the bead door separating the stairs to the basement and the rest of the house.
For a few minutes, close to ten, Ian sat alone listening to what he assumed was Rick shuffling and scraping around in the basement. A few grinding tugs and a cascade of thuds followed. A few strained grunts against something heavy that budged and slid across the ground like a glacier, three distinctive metallic clinking sounds, further sounds just out of reach of distinction but all not unlike the sounds of a burglar crashing their way around. The noises came from all directions, sometimes ones that seemed like they were really coming from the dirt. From beyond the walls of the lowest level. From farther than the house should have gone on. And it all ended as Rick came trouncing through the beaded curtain again, this time wielding a dusty, off gray computer keyboard.
Ian blinked.
“What is that?”
“Keyboard, dummy.”
Rick gently rapped on Ian’s skull with his free hand to a surprisingly musical degree as he sat down next to him.
“Here, stick your arm out,” He asked, pulling gently as Ian’s cuff.
Ian did as he was told, squinting and trying to laugh again.
“Why?”
“You already stuck your arm out.”
Rick fettered his fingers around the base of the keyboards connecting wire and followed it all the way to the end. Where, instead of any sort of electronic interface, there was a wiry, medicinal needle.
“Whoa hey!” Ian sputtered as he pulled his arm back to clutch and hold tight.
Rick scoffed.
“Don’t be a baby,” he chided, nodding towards Ian’s exposed leg tattoos visible just above his ankle. “You won’t even feel it.”
“I just don’t want you poking me with random needles…You can understand that.” Ian nodded toward Rick’s unmarked legs (as well as body).
“I thought you wanted to be taller?”
Rick did not put down the keyboard or its wire. He splayed his hands out upwards, requesting. The wire drooped over and showed its point again.
“It’s a keyboard, come on!” Ian laughed.
“Give it a shot?” Rick enticed. “Here,” He removed a small bottle of alcohol from a compartment in the stocky base of the keyboard, and used it to sanitize the needle.
“Where’d you even get it? How do you know what it does?”
“Back of a thrift store. Nobody else recognized it for what it really was. Except me, that is,” Rick explained as he beamed a bright smile.
“Which is…’
Rick’s eyes danced around their sockets for a moment before he responded.
“Do you believe in God? Capital G.”
“No, you know that.” Ian huffed. “You’re not trying to convert me, are you? Did you get wrapped up in some cult?”
“If there is a God,” Rick started again slowly. “If it is real…this is some part of it.”
“You’re talking crazy!”
Ian pushed off the couch, but Rick guided him gently back down to his seat.
“I’ll show you, watch.”
He took the needle, and, carefully, stuck it into the side of a mug sitting atop the nearby coffee table. The needle did not crack or bend or split as it passed into the ceramic surface. Neither did the mug. It was as if the mug had absorbed the needle. Though, when Rick pulled it out again the needle was still perfectly in both shape and tact.
“Some party trick,” Ian grunted.
“Wait,” Rick exhaled with infinite patience as he, still carefully, inserted the needle once more.
Once the needle was gone again Rick turned to the keyboard and began typing. It was then that Ian noticed that the characters upon the keys were not the english alphabet and its accompanying numerals. It was instead a series of odd symbols constructed mainly from thick, straight lines.
“Welsh,” Rick answered without looking up from his typing, as if he was able of reading minds. Maybe he was? “Welsh runes, actually. You have no idea how hard it was to translate that into any modern coding language.”
Suddenly Rick stopped typing. He pressed one more button, firmly and decidedly, and then removed the needle. The second the mug was free it turned completely, texturelessly matte blue and floated a few feet upwards like a piece of dust in the light. Rick and Ian watched. Rick cleared his throat and Ian rubbed his eyes over and over again.
“It’s coding,” Rick explained further, turning to the stunned and mute Rick. “But instead of a program on a computer, it alters whatever our universe runs on. If God built it all, this was probably, if not almost exactly, how it was done…Do you need more p-”
“Have you used it on people before?”
The answer came only in Ian’s mind. An ownerless voice spoke throughout every gland and every neuron. Obviously.
Ian was reclined in Rick’s smoking chair, working his way down a joint to help with the nerves as The Needle was being slowly pushed into or past or through or around or maybe even away from his left forearm. Tiny beads of sweat were pooling on Rick’s forehead. You had to be careful with a cup, delicate with a human. But the procedure went smoothly. Ian flexed his hand muscles a few times and confirmed that Rick had not lied and that he had, indeed, not even felt it.
“Now for the hard part. I mean it when I say this: ‘Don’t move for the life of you.’ Ready?”
The two men exchanged nods and Ian took away to typing with the attitude of the only welder on a submarine left with swiss cheese for a hull.
Ian gasped in pain but restrained himself from moving anything below his neck. He had been warned how much it would hurt, but nothing could ready him. Which number best depicts how it would feel to have your life force, your mere existence twisted, severed, smashed back together, and knotted like dough in the hands of a baker? What can you say of pain felt first by Adam, second by Eve, and fourth(?) by Ian. Above an 8 but below a 9, maybe a high seven every now and again.
His eyes and nose and lips twitched constantly, and his eyes almost never settled on anything for long. He huffed and choked for and against air. His toes and fingers twisted horribly, grabbing like souls of the damned at salvation. Veins bulge, teeth grind, either side of the mouth froths slightly, and Rick types on.
With each tap of a key one could almost see the connective wire pulsing or twitching. Lugging bulging, no…glowing…?, heaps and chunks of raw universal binary up a chain linked somewhere far past, far deeper than Ian’s inner elbow. Neither man could see such things though, not well. Ian was grinding his teeth and breathing like a mad man trying to sedate the urge to kill over his work. And Rick was battling wells of tears alongside eyeballs who occasionally saw only lighty, occasionally only dark, and occasionally a dim outline of the world before them.
“Rick!” Ian shouted, still imobile below the clavicle. “Rick, I can’t take it! It’s unbearable!”
“It’s bearable Ian, I swear,” Ian rushed out, barely diverting enough focus from his work to answer. “I’ve almost finished temporarily removing pain from you. It’ll be smooth after that, I swear I swear! You won’t even feel the shift in height, once we get to that-”
“RIck!” Ian took to shouting again. “I just I just I just I just I just I can’t!”
His right arm shot up and then over to The Needle but stopped just short of touching it. The moved arm, at least the section past RIck’s short sleeves that could be seen, began shifting in tone and pigment so that it rolled through thousands of possible human skin tones quickly and smoothly in the style of a colored wheel being spun. RIck screamed.
“Fuck, Ian! Look!”
“IT’S FINE,” Ian bellowed without looking up. “Seconds, Rick, seconds…and you’ll be all ‘prepped’ for our surgeries…for your ascension.”
Rick bellowed as well. One loud, deep scream that started at first as a small squealing but soon blossomed into an enormous drone. The sound of doomed metal clawing its way desperately and hopelessly down into an abyss. The sound of a planet a thousand terras wide sliding through nothing. The sound some poor soul may someday hear as they slip away, far past the event horizon of a blackhole. Rick had pulled loose The Needle. His mouth closed and the noise stopped.
“Rick,” Ian stood up and let the keyboard fall to the dirty shag below. “Are you…Rick, D-did you, how much of the…thing…uh, did you take t-t-take out.”
Rick pulled further. He made no facial or bodily reaction, and the process made no sound. But, as Rick pulled and pulled, it became apparent that he was now pulling out his own nervous system. First, the base of the cord, then the bundles and lengths of wet, twitching nerves, and finally the brain like gelatin with retinae attached. Rick’s shell fell back, Rick fell down. Ian’s eyes went wide, and then they went wider.
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