Matt Ruff - Bad Monkeys

“Just wait,” I said. “This isn’t what it looks like…”

On the screen, I crouched beside Wise’s body, checked for a pulse, and then looked up.

“OK. Just watch, here she comes…”

But the video cut out at that point and the blue screen returned, overlaid with the words TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED.

“Oh, come on!” I shouted. “What the fuck, does it only work when it makes me look bad?”

A high giggle filled the room. “She has a point, Dixon. Eyes Only coverage has been very spotty lately.”

The clown mannequin had come to life and was stepping down off its pedestal. Even with both feet on the floor, it was still very tall.

“That’s not unusual, where the Troop is involved,” Dixon said.

“No, I suppose not,” said the clown, and then nodded to me. “Welcome to my demesnes, Jane Charlotte. My name is Robert Love.”

“I didn’t do this,” I said. “I’m being set up. My brother—”

“I know all about your brother. He’s been a thorn in my side for some time now.”

“Yeah, Phil can be like that. And he’s mad at me. And”—I pointed a finger at Dixon—“he doesn’t like me either. Whatever he’s told you—”

“I’m aware Mr. Dixon isn’t fond of you. You’re not fond of me either, are you, Dixon?” He raised a finger to the teardrop under his eye, and pouted. “No love for Love…But then it’s not an inquisitor’s job to be affectionate, is it?”

“Look,” I said, “if I were going to stage an attack, why would I do it this way? I mean, shoot myself with a gun that I couldn’t get rid of? What sense does that make?”

“It does seem rather stupid,” Love allowed. “But then, evil is so very tricky, sometimes…Perhaps you are telling the truth, and you’ve been framed. Or perhaps we’re meant to believe that you’ve been framed so that we’ll trust you, and not recognize that you really are working for the Troop.” He stroked his chin theatrically. “What a puzzle…Are you a good Jane, or a bad Jane?”

“What do you want me to do? How do I prove myself?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? Your brother is very talented at manipulating perception. It’s one of the reasons the Troop prizes him so highly. If he’s decided to ruin your reputation, such as it is, there may not be anything you can do.” He sighed and shook his head. “Evil…Tricky, tricky evil…Do you know, I was almost evil once…”

“That’s swell,” I said. “But getting back to me—”

“It was when I was younger. I grew up in the desert, not far from here. Abusively strict father, passive mother…Well, I won’t bore you with the details. I had issues, as they say. And when I finally got away to Berkeley, I went wild.”

“You were at Berkeley?”

“Why, do I strike you more as Yale material?”

“What”—I couldn’t believe I was asking this—“what was your major?”

“Art. Drama. A few others. Really though, I think it’s fair to say my main pursuit in those years was finding novel ways to tax my liver. And pranks. I was quite the merry prankster, at Berkeley…Then in the middle of my senior year—my third senior year—my parents died in a car crash. They left me a great deal of money and a seven-hundred-acre ranch. The acreage was mostly scrub, but the house was nice. So I came home. I had some vague notions about using the land to do performance art, or maybe some installation pieces—build my own Stonehenge on the back forty, stage Druidic rituals—but before that could go anywhere, I got sidetracked by an idea for a new prank.

“My best friend in college liked to tell stories about how he’d been abducted by aliens. You’d think intelligent people would laugh that off, but he was very convincing, and in several cases he not only got his listeners to believe that he’d been abducted, he made them wonder whether they had, as well.

“One night at the ranch I asked myself whether you couldn’t take it a step further: Build an enclosed stage set, designed to look like the interior of an alien spacecraft. Go out and find people—stranded motorists, or just barflies who’d had too much to drink—knock them out somehow, bring them back and put them in it. And do things to them.

“Of course it was a wicked idea. Evil, if you took it far enough. I tried to think of ways to make it not be wicked…What if, I thought, you only did it to bad people? Murderers, thieves, people who deserved a good scare. But inevitably, my fantasies turned towards other kinds of people as well…A pretty girl, say, whose car blew a tire on a back road, and who saw a strange light in the sky. And when she woke up in the spaceship, she wouldn’t be alone. There’d be a man with her, a fellow abductee, college age, as scared as she was, and together they’d explore the ship, and see what happened…”

“These issues you had,” I said. “Were they sexual, by any chance?”

“Some of them.” Love grinned. “I hear you have a few of those yourself…Anyway, I decided that while of course I couldn’t go through with this prank, there was no harm in at least building the spaceship. I called it my ant farm, because the point was to put living things in it and watch what they’d do, and because, let’s be honest, this was very much a boy’s toy.

“So I built the spaceship, and then, since I still wasn’t ready to admit that I was going to use it, I built some other ant farms: A nuclear fallout shelter. A death-row prison wing. Most elaborate of all, a Victorian-era hotel floor with no exits.

“All of this took time, and for most of it I was completely alone. When you’re removed from human society for that long, especially if you’re intoxicated, ordinary moral inhibitions begin to lose their grip. It’s not that you deny the concept of evil, it’s that you begin to find it acceptable, even attractive. You start to wallow in it: you ignore the consequences and concentrate on the fun parts.

“But it turned out I wasn’t as alone as I thought. My one remaining contact with the outside world was the town of Coleman, where I’d go to pick up supplies. When I bought things, I paid cash, and I put the change in jars on a high shelf in the workshop where I designed my ant farms. In one of the jars, there was a dollar bill that was…special. The pyramid on the back, it saw what I was about. The organization became aware of me. And it might have ended there, with me dying quietly of a heart attack or stroke, except that the young Cost-Benefits operative assigned to my case, Bob True, had some rather…enlightened ideas about the difference between thought and deed. Also, the Panopticon agent who first sussed me out—Bob Wise—well, he wasn’t as hesitant as True when it came to dealing death, but he did think my ant farms might be useful as an intel-gathering tool.

“So they didn’t kill me. They decided to study me. They built an ant farm around my ant farms. The town of Coleman: they bought it. That wasn’t as hard as you might think. It was…What was the name of that town where you spent your teenage years? Little Nap?”

“Siesta Corta,” I said.

“Right,” said Love. “Compared to Coleman, Siesta Corta was a metropolis. Coleman was just a saloon with a gas pump and a mail drop. The organization bought it and brought in their own people. The night I finally came looking for an ant to put in my ant farm, they were waiting for me.

“The setup was perfect—too perfect. They’d doubled all the saloon staff I might recognize, and there was a pretty girl sitting at the bar, slightly drunk, looking exactly like the pretty girl I’d fantasized about…She smiled at me and encouraged me to sit with her, and in that moment, I knew two things: First, that I’d walked into a trap. And second, that since what I’d been planning to do was clearly evil, the people who’d set the trap must be good. So good could be tricky, too. That was a revelation to me.”