Dome War

Chuck awoke from his trance and started seeking less secretive answers in the duffel bag which Lenny, who was now asleep, suspiciously kept always at arm’s length. In it he took out the most conspicuous object- one that looked like a VR headset. He wasted no time in commencing what every habitual snooper does best and turned on the clearly labelled ‘on’ button. He put them on expecting mind bending visuals, but only got his own point of view of the inside of the apartment as if they were just spectacles. The only difference was Lenny did not show up drooling on the couch while still holding a cigarette lighter like he was in the real apartment. It must have been some variant of the camera hacking tech Lenny was gloating about. ‘Hello Mr Harrison. How accurate did I get your apartment?’ the robotic voice of an AI disrupted his train of thought. The perfect illusion of Chuck’s home began to fall apart and a manifestation of a hooded figure with a VR headset on appeared. ‘I am Eon, Hollow E’s development strategic crisis mitigation and intervention Artificial Intelligence. That is as far as my formalities go. I have incriminating evidence of you and the traitor you have on board. Write down the coordinates on the screen and if your thirst for a full understanding of our system is not enough to compel you to meet my agents at that rendezvous in two hours the video will be published. You cannot trust Leonard like we did and you cannot tell him. Do not be stupid.’ Chuck hoped Lenny had not heard anything, considering how humiliating it was to be blackmailed by Siri among other feelings aroused by this message. Not to mention Lenny’s alleged treason. Still, he was willing to roll the dice that Eon’s leverage was not anything more than a few weeks of Twitter hashtags before it blows over like all the other past controversies. His misplaced confidence though, would have him and Lenny substitute cornflakes with a steaming bowl of guilt and a cat out Eon’s bag as breakfast. As predicted, the world did not know how to feel and not even the convenient anonymity of blank avatars and obscene user names on social media had anyone talking. Twelve hours later Chuck had pulled every string he could, his senator friend in particular to get on top of the situation by wanting to know how the government was going to respond while a radical group of White mercenaries, the ‘Equals’ were the daybreak of normalcy- trashing as many politician’s cars as possible; anger, the third stage of grief. They opened a gate for everyone to start expressing their drastically different opinions, causing a war on social media. Their effectiveness would prompt for the government to release their first statement of the matter but considering that the faces in the video were so unclear whatever investigation they had planned would be off to a sloppy start. Hours turned to days, days that felt like weeks for Chuck, who had put lenses over every camera in his company for Lenny to surveil remotely and was sitting uncomfortably in his CEO seat to act as if everything was normal and as for the Lenny that had anonymously started his own, ‘Justice is colour blind’ online trend he had become a runaway success throughout the world. Lenny was confident that whatever investigation he was pushing into happening was not going to lead back to him but in contradiction was Chuck’s decreasingly bearable paranoia. A daily countdown on Twitter representing how reluctant the government was in striking while the iron was hot day by day had pressured the president into formally and publically addressing the matter in front of the White House and that day, was nigh.

Mother Nature definitely was not grasping the enormity of the situation; a gentle breeze, clear sky and sunny weather were quite the annoyance for the broody attendees outside the White House. Luckily his excellence was there to set the mood a little more appropriately up until he claimed there were no traceable leads and the ghouls present were more than euphoric to use the pitchforks they had spent two weeks sharpening. Lenny who was watching the telly from Fiona’s house hadn’t seen his emotional double ever since the tragic incident and was in for an unexpected reunion. Everyone at the march, even the woebegone wife of the victim witnessed a young man have the grit to walk to the podium and get tased and tackled to the ground. Lenny shuffled to the edge of the seat to confirm what he really hoped his eyes were deceiving him about. It was his full circle moment, the sight that would drag him even deeper into the Dome conspiracy much like how Chuck himself was when he saw ‘himself’ on television, only this time, guilt-stricken and ready to fess up. Much to the mixed assortment of emotions of the people before him he admitted killing the old man in the coffee shop but did not explain why the police could not find the two NYPD cops who had jumped them at the crime scene in the database to avoid implicating Lenny. The crowd had now laid off the hubbub to watch the courses that are best served cold, handcuffs and revenge get delivered while dessert got rain checked for when Chuck was to rat the other man in the video out. Meanwhile, Lenny was having what his doppelganger would consider quite the déjà vu, watching your life get stolen and noticing an eclipse tattoo on one of Chuck’s apprehenders’ neck. Given his track record for and against Dome he would not let them scurry away with the loosest of ends. Back at the protest, Chuck had become totally submissive and permeable to the guilt and complacency that comes with being pelted with empty bean cans until he looked to the right. The balance of the pros to cons list of turning himself in e.g. having nobody recognise him yet, was to tip away from his favour. He shouted and tried to dodge the gunfire but with the brawny grip of the president’s henchmen, the wife of the coffee man’s round plunged safely into Chuck’s chest two inches from his heart. The protesters dissipated and scattered and in the pandemonium the shooter; who acted out of depression (the fourth stage) was lost. All the nation had left at that scene was a bleeding man, trampled over, maybe even intentionally by frenzied protesters and once again, a conflicted overview of what had gone down. Through Chuck’s hypoxic vision he noticed a face he’d seen his all life strapped to a stranger, one he never knew he’d die for in the back of a hijacked ambulance and one his life would be riding on in that moment and forever. ‘Finish the mission’, Chuck splattered. ‘Destroy Dome.’

Part 2