Angels and Operators: Window Condition War
Installment Seventy-Five
Previous Installments (In Reverse Order)
Stumbling away from Dom’s house, you decide that sanity isn’t helping you to solve this problem. Pierce and Dom are clearly bad people with the dried blood in his van and Pierce’s mysterious hold over his friend-and Judy. But it wasn’t your sane brain that zeroed in on them-it was your consciousness in its hallucinatory, unmedicated state. Being sane has made you cautious, perhaps too unimaginative to know what to do next. You decide to stop taking your anti-psychotics.
With nowhere to go, you ramble through the city’s downtown core, living rough. It’s not the first time you’ve survived by sleeping on heating grates and eating out of garbage containers. It’s unpleasant at first, but as you feel drab gray reality slipping away from you, to be replaced with the vivid, beautiful and sinister world of the angels and operators, concern for comfort and dignity vanish. Once more you become a warrior in an existential battle between good and evil. Hardship is second nature to you.
You sense that your injured hand wants you to go off your pain medication, too. But it is infected with evil, so you disregard that instruction-for now. The powerful pills make the hunger and cold easier to tolerate.
You wait until you hear the low, ominous thrumming of the insectoid alien operators emanating from the city’s power lines. The sky turns dark and throbbing, pregnant with meaning. Your psychic perceptions have regained their former acuity. Time to look for angelic guidance. Finding yourself in a bustling, funky market neighborhood, you spot what surely must be a message.
But is it from the angels, or the operators?
Now what do you do?
Under the hood
34% of respondents wanted to go off our meds. 23% wanted to use Dom’s cell phone to call the police. Tied for third, at 18% of the vote apiece, were confronting Pierce and getting closer to Dom as he washed out his van, for a better camera shot. Only 6% wanted to intervene to stop him from destroying the evidence.