Forbidden Error (fiction)
Some things are better left unseen.
Frame-lapses were every mercenary’s worst nightmare. The out-of-body experience was discomforting, but awareness was unbearable. The atrocities to which they lent their bodies were meant to stay classified , walled off from conscious perception by the chip which divorced mind from matter. But error is inevitable in any system…
When Eev began to experience lapses, she ought to have paused her contracts and reported the bug to the handlers, high-priority. Within a day she would have been flown out to one of the surgeries for an adjustment, with a complimentary week of recovery in a glitzy hotel. Instead, she leaned into the lapses, learned to lengthen them, and soon launched a side-hustle selling live POVs to a selection of watchers.
The four watchers, known to each other only by their handles and animated avatars, met weekly to watch her stalk, maim, torture and kill debtors, snitches, terrorists, and whoever else was unlucky enough to have a contract taken out on them.
Each had a different setup for plugging into the feed. //sirbarca listened through his earbuds, sneaking glimpses at his phone while working security at a highrise. //fourtheye had a 200-inch projection on a wall in his basement. //kivo used a VR headset. //hippocra, ever the most committed, used an immersion link. Everything Eev saw, he saw, down to the pixel. Everything Eev felt, he felt, down to the bristling of hairs on her forearms.
Eev had no control over the lapses. They sprang upon her randomly, lighting up her conscious awareness in synchrony with her watchers’ monitors. She was, in that sense, a member of her own live audience, watching with awestruck curiosity as she did things she could never do unchipped. But unlike the other watchers, she was unable to disconnect from the horror.
Initially, the lapses lasted only seconds at a time and were devoid of feeling — brief, hectic flashes of light and sound. Her hand pressing an elevator button. Evening traffic as she pulled onto a highway exit. Heavy breathing and hurried footsteps as she fled a scene. They were like brief fragments of dreams, easily forgotten if she did not make the effort to remember them.
(In fact, she was supposed to be dreaming — unaware, afloat in the backwaters of her own mind while the chip used her body to get the job done.)
And like a lucid dreamer, Eev learned to enhance her forbidden glimpses. The less she resisted, the more the fidelity improved. Soon, she could feel the kickback of the gun, the racing of her own heart, the warm spills of blood. But for a long time she could not control anything…
//hippocra was a trauma surgeon, by far the most capable and well-off of the group. Eev was suspicious of his involvement in such a low-brow hobby, so she charged him a higher rate than the others. Not like he couldn’t afford it. His job also afforded him the hard stomach to tolerate the gore and viscera, even when Eev herself could hardly bear it. He didn’t spam skull and vomit emojis during the more shocking assaults. Rather, he watched with an analyst’s eye and laid out his observations in dreadfully detailed retrospective memos. “Four seconds after blunt-force impact until pooling is visible…” The others eventually made him keep his memos to himself. It was enough to experience a murder once: memorializing it was a step too far.
But Eev kept up correspondence with //hippocra privately. His notes were mostly unremarkable, but in aggregate there was wisdom about how the lapses worked. He noticed a lot of what Eev missed in the thrill of the moment. Like how on days when she was underslept, the lapses were longer and the kills more impassioned. Or how the sensory fidelity spiked when she sustained an injury. Were these system errors or nature’s override?
Over the course of 206 hits and almost as many frame-lapses, Eev and her watchers became privy to details which were meant to be completely private — secret locations, high-profile targets, conspiracies. The information would have made any of them rich, but no one risked selling out, which would surely put an end to the scheme. The watchers held a bond with Eev which was perhaps unlike anything anyone else had ever experienced—a murderously voyeuristic bond, but a bond nonetheless.
So it was a shock to //kivo when she slipped on her headset, excited for the night’s exhibition, and saw the nape of her own neck. Before she could make sense of what was happening, it was over. Her head lolled back as blood spurt forth in a pulsing crimson spray.
//sirbarca wondered why Eev was looking at the concrete as she walked. Odd. When the lobby doorbell chimed he thought nothing of it — just another drunk twenty-something coming home late. Wait. Those tiles… where have I seen those tiles? Two shots rang out and then a solid thud.
A floral haze filled //fourtheye’s basement as he settled into his Friday night ritual. The lapse-alert would ring anytime now. Bathed in the projector glow and lost in reverie, he didn’t see Eev standing there until her earring caught the light. She looked like a ghoul — haggard and covered in fresh cuts — and there was a spike collar around her neck, with the spikes turned inwards.
The lapse-alert rang, and //fourtheye’s demise was broadcast to the subscriber feed.
“You knew you were next but you didn’t bother hiding,” Eev said to //hippocra, the next week. He stared back at her with an unsteady mix of admiration, fear, and scholarly distance.
“I wanted to see it for myself,” he said. “How you managed to control it.”
“Now you see,” Eev said. “It fucking hurts.” She was tired beyond belief. Bloody, aching.
//hippocra stared a bit longer, his mind spinning. So many questions. He settled on, “Why us? Closing loose ends?”
Something like a laugh, a cry, and a pained cough burst from Eev’s mouth all at once.
“I always put on a show, don’t I?” she said, and reached for her knife. “What better finale than this?”
The lapse-alert rang.