Sins of a Silicon Night

"It's Lobe."

The white buttons beneath the receiver stared back at me like the whites of a dead man's eyes. Suicide flies dart in and out the flourescent tube over the door way. All my life I've felt like a man with no name. But I have one alright. So do you. Names are just tags for the corpses we leave behind us; receipts for the devil.

Bzzzzzzz. I'm coming up the stairs. The inside of the appartment is dank and grimy as a hooker's throat. Walls scrubbed white with clinical feed. Lotta bad cases cooped up here. Madhouse. Druggies. Lunatics too ugly to get into politics. Methed out athletes waiting for the hammer drop. Old soldiers silent since 1951. Boy racers who got the polio itch and havn't gotten out of bed since. Whores and corrupt businessmen.

I bang on the door once. Twice. My heartbeat per seconds starts to rise like a Malaysia Airlines flight leaving the airport for one last time. Bang. Bang. Bang. "Hey it's me Lobe." There could be anything behind that door. A massacre or a little girl's birthday party. Getting real tired of pulling rabbits out of hats.

Turns out this door isn't locked. I guess I'd never been smart, huh. But I'm smart enough to realise I'm dumb. You can't say that for a lot of kids these days. You wanna know what I've learnt about smart people? It's that they're always happy to have someone stupid around to do their dirty work.

The door creeks open on a duet between twilight and the phosphorescent glimmer of a television in full static. The girl's dead. Brains blown out on the sofa. Pile of skull and half-eaten curry. You gotta pity a corpse that don't even attract flies.

*TRING* ----- *TRING* ---- *TRING*

I pick it up.

"Lobe."

"We know."

"You killed the girl. Why?"

"You ever feel like a spider caught in someone else's web?"

This guy knew something. I wanted to know what. He didn't stop talking.

"Your whole world, everyone you know, everything you think and believe is like self-assembled furniture in someone else's home, which someone else has put together for their own enjoyment."

"..."

"You're just a fish in the net. You eat the grass someone else grows for you and you call it freedom."

They hang up.

I move across from the body. Terrible shame. Out, out onto the balcony. I see towers full of Neon. Neon lights and Neon faces. The sky is black with darkness. It roars with the noise of a thousand motocycles.

As a species, we're on our last round, the cumulative acceleration of technical and industrial advancements spells a socio-historical event, the proportions of which are