Peripheral Visions: I Am Legion, Motherfuckers!

They coalesce in the shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. Peripheral Visions: You won't see them coming... until it's too late.

I Am Legion, Motherfuckers!

It had been another shitty day at work.

Norman Aldo worked at a snack foods factory. He had been shuttled from one department to the other to the next for years; he'd spend so long bouncing between the production of Vanilla Vamps, Cocoa Cones, and Cheery Chips that, sweet or salty, he knew the recipes and production methods for all of the company's goods by heart.

The problem wasn't that he didn't like is job. He was thoroughly indifferent to it. The problem was that the people he worked with didn't seem to like him very much, including the section supervisors. That left the plant manager to figure out where to put him: On the line, in the loading area, in deliveries. He'd even spent a year working in accounts receivable before being exiled once more to the job of driving a forklift, shuttling palettes stacked high with bags of flour or sugar or chemical compounds used for flavoring or to prolong shelf life.

There had been a few moments here and there of stability... a couple of years stationed in the Cheery Chips packaging section stood out in memory as a Golden Age, as did the four-month romance he'd had with Agatha in the Orders and Deliveries Department. Agatha had actually seemed to like him. He'd liked her, too. Things had been going just fine between them until, one day... well, that was that.

As long as he could remember, Norma, had been plagued with a sense of things being unsettled. It wasn't just his circumstances – the dumpy one-room apartment; his always-depressing love life; the hive of crabbed, irascible neighbors that surrounded his tiny oasis of a home – it was also himself. His feelings, his karma, his soul. Or maybe it was all a question of IQ. Maybe he just needed more smarts, more savvy... to be a brighter bulb...

"Aldo! What the fuck are you doing? Pay attention!"

It was Luka, his boss. How did that old song put it? His "so-called superior?" Luka was always riding him. Luka had ridden him twelve years ago, last time the plant manager had stuck him on this lousy quality control detail, ticking off and monitoring fresh-baked Cocoa Cones as they swept by on the conveyor belt, and Luka rode him again now.

"Three broken cones got all the way to bagging!" Luka continued, his voice a strangled scream of rage. Luka was always screaming and strangling on his own rage. Norman would have liked to have given the man's own perpetual fury a hand in clogging his windpipe and suffocating him once and for all.

"Yeah, yeah," Norman muttered, not even bothering to look up.

"You hear me, asshole? I'm talking to you!"

All his life, Norman had bene like a whipped dog: Too mild and meek to stand up for himself. But today was different. Today he'd had enough – enough of Luka, enough of his lousy stinking life. He looked over at Luka and then, with a savage grin, raised one gloved hand – and then one gloved finger.

"Sit and spin!" Norman shouted.

Luka's expression didn't change. He simply made a mark on the paper that his clipboard clutched, and walked away to scream at the next poor slob.

"Fucknuts," Norman muttered.

Turning back to his task, he let his hands flay across the confections that flowed by in an endless river of sugar and cocoa, its scent cloying and constant. Vaguely, in the back of his mind, he wondered if he would get in trouble for telling Luka off. But he was too fed up to worry about that much right now. All of this was just so meaningless, so stupid. Maybe Luka had the shallowness of soul it took to worry about broken goddamn cookies, but what sane person would give a shit? What the fuck did it matter if some of the cookies were broken when they went into the bag? Cookies were going to get smashed and pulverized every step of the way from the factory to the market to people's pantries. In the end, they'd get eaten, and wasn't that the same thing? The ultimate smashup?

He'd like to smash Luka's face. The more Norman thought about it, the less fearful he was of getting called on the carpet or transferred to some even less desirable post. In fact, he hoped the plant manager did call him on the carpet. That sonofabitch had bene giving Norman the raw end of the stick for too many years. It was time he got a piece of Norman's mind...

Norman sorted and monitored for hours, his thoughts in a loop of frustration and resentment.

Finally, he thought: It must be getting close to quitting time. God, I just to get home, shut the door, and pour a drink...

A wave of vertigo came over him at that moment. The world tilted, floated, receded; everything was distant – his hands, which he could barely see at the end of a long, dark tunnel; noise from the machinery of the plant; his own body, his own life...

Nothing was real.

Norman shook his head, chasing away the sensation of lightheadedness. He'd had such spells before. His blood sugar must be low. They were working him to hard. They were padding the work shift, tacking extra minutes to the day, minutes they wouldn't get paid for... it was an old trick. Nobody ever said anything, but everyone boiled with anger when it happened, and it happened far too much.

Then Norman looked around and realized that he was in another part of the plant entirely. He's been working the conveyor belt in the bagging section of the Cocoa Cone department; now, suddenly, he found himself in the preload section of the Cheery Chips department, with bags of potatoes all around him.

And it was, he realized, the start of the day, no the end of it.

Of course it was. What had he been thinking? Norman shook his head, annoyed with himself. More lost time. He'd had that happen before. It was just an extension, he thought, lifting a bag and moving it to the mouth of the huge processor, of his usual sensation of time flowing by in a ceaseless, meaningless stream. One moment he'd be at home, or in some other section of the plat; then, he'd be here, and he barely had any memory of what had come before. It was like he spent his life under water, with only moments here and there of clarity – moments when he wasn't drowning in the monotony of his life. He sighed to himself. He thought about his recent rage – what had he been so angry about? Well, it hardly mattered. Anger or resignation, it was all the same. Norman put up the end of the bag with an industrial strength pair of scissors, then lifted the bag and dumped its load of spuds into the funnel. They clattered and bounded down the metal throat, on their way to be peeled and slice and deep-fried...

That was him, he thought, turning away from funnel and discarding the empty sack. He headed back to the piled sacks of potatoes for another load. The moments of his life, bouncing and rattling and vanishing into a void below, where some rumored purgatory of flashing blades hove about in fiendish industry...

Sadness and despair permeated him as he lugged one bag after the next after the next from the stack of bags to the funnel. The stack never diminished. The funnel never filled up. The work never stopped.

"Hey Norm, how's it hangin' today?" Grant asked. More personable than most supervisors, Grant always took a moment to greet people in his crew. Grant eyed the mound of empty bags near the funnel Norman was working. "Busy man, good to see it."

"Thanks," Norman said, but there was something thick and heavy about the word. It seemed to cling to his throat, and when it hit the air it was garbled, strange...

Grant didn't seem to notice/. He simply flashed a thumbs-up and a grin and went on his way.

"Thanks," Norman said aloud again, to test it the word would still sound strange, and it did. It sounded very strange, at least to his own ears. Dark and viscous, tilted and...

Norm shook his head. "Thanks," he said aloud. "Thanks, thanks, thanks!"

Was he having a stroke? He couldn't make the word wound right. He knew how it should sound, but somehow it wasn't cooperating...

Norman didn't slow his pace, still hauling sacks of potatoes and emptying them into the funnel, but he did change up his utterances. "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country," he said aloud, and all of those words, too, had a different color, a different specific weight, a different way of clinging to the air before they sank and vanished into silence.

"What the actual hell?" he asked himself. "Is this some kind of accent?"

It was; he knew he's heard it before, somewhere. He couldn't place it, and had no idea why it was coming from his own mouth.

Well, he thought, might as well just go with it. Speak, or sing, or stay quiet. He couldn't fix everything in his life, but he could make choices from moment to moment. Norman was suddenly giddy with the realization that, when it came to his own thoughts and actions, he was in charge. That being the case, and work needing to be done, what options lay before him on the Sudden Weird Accent front? Norman decided that he might as well simply surrender to it. He couldn't do much else, anyway, aside from either amuse himself by talking out loud and listening to his own abruptly strange voice, or ignore it and maybe try to sort it out later.

"Well hell, son," Norman found himself saying, "might as well just have fun!"

But that was different, now, from what it had been: The words were still strange, but strange in another way. The syllables weren't tilted any more, they were taller... like partitions challenging the next section of the word, yet somehow still following one another, every challenge met. "Red sky at morning, sailors take warning!" he said aloud.

"A penny saved is a penny earned."

"When in doubt, leave it out; when in Rome..." He didn't recall what came net. "Choose the chrome?" He shrugged, then moved on to the next phrase, and the next.

Still, the syllables were tall and, somehow, blocky. The challenges remained, each segment of each word required to prove itself, to muscle up and power through... and the syllables somehow managed, and words kept coming one after another, despite a gathering swiftness, despite a new lightheadedness, a feeling of flying, a feeling of dissolution, of freedom and a lack of consequence...

The words came for hours, synchronizing themselves with his work. He didn't stop to rest, didn't stop for lunch... not that lunch time was signaled. Norman wondered if that was more wage theft from upper management, but then forged forward. It didn't matter. He didn't want to stop. He was on a roll. The words came of their own accord, and he couldn't even hear them any more. They were thunder echoing through a long night's sleep; they were the sound of knuckles rapping at a door that wasn't even his own...

Until they weren't. Until the partitions were too high, or else had vanished altogether, and the boxy solidity of the words had melted into syrup that, once again, stuck to this throat. No, not sticky syrup, Norman thought, swaying in place, putting a hand to this forehead and then to his neck. The words were a different shape, all right, and that shape was round. They were like balls now, balls made of something heavy. Balls the rolled back down his gullet. He had to shove hard to get them out of him. He was sputtering... stuttering...

"Ohm man, stop it."

Norman looked around to see who was talking to him, and realized he'd said it himself. The moment was over, the disorientation gone: He was fine.

He was also in a storeroom. What had he been doing? Norman looked down at his gloved hands and saw he was carrying a spray bottle. He noticed a cart sitting next to him, laden with cleaning products, paper towels, supplied for the restrooms...

Wait, had the bastard plant manager put him on janitorial duty?

Norman had only done that job once before. He didn't even remember how long ago it had been. A long time. His memory of it was hazy, at best. Not that he needed to remember any complicated skill sets... anyone could wipe down a mirror or change a roll of toilet paper...

Norman pushed the cart out of the store room and into the hallway. He turned this way and that. Where was the men's room again? Did it matter? No matter which direction he chose, he'd find one. And a women's room, too – he was sure he was expected to service all the restrooms regardless of which gender used them.

Pushing the cart, Norman became aware of another strange sensation, this time in his body. Each step felt... wrong. He stepped forward with his left foot and it felt smooth, natural, efficient... he stepped forward with his right leg and there was a jarring sense of coming down too hard.

Was his right leg shorter than his left? When had that happened?

Norman stopped and took inventory of himself. He rolled his head on his shoulder and licked at his lips. There: Something else that felt wrong. His tongue. There was a spot, a... a numb spot. No, a hard spot. No, a cold spot... he wasn't sure what it was, but he felt like there was something that didn't belong, something like a tumor or a cold sore...

Norman rubbed his tongue back and forth across his teeth, but there was no swelling, no obstruction.

And yet, something still felt wrong. Like something was stuck to his tongue...

"You gonna stand there all day?" a woman asked him.

Norman stared at her, not recognizing her.

"Hey. You with me?"

"Sorry, who are you?" he asked.

"Irma. Head of the cleaning crew. Your boss, that's who I am. You better get cracking!" Irma glared at him for a moment and then walked off.

Norman tried to chase after her, but he was no longer holding the cart and his leg almost collapsed under him. He flailed briefly, then managed to grab the cart again and steady himself.

What the actual hell, he thought again.

When had he started working for this Irma woman? The plant manager had never told him he was being reassigned to janitorial. Or had he? Norman pushed the cart slowly, trying to work out what was wrong with his leg. It felt fine, in a way; but it felt messed up in another way. Like hie tongue, which felt swollen and yet seemed perfectly fine.

I don't get it, he thought, pushing the cart. He saw the sign for a women's restroom up ahead, and, glancing at the rolls and rolls of toilet paper arrayed across the cart's top shelf, reasoned that it was probably a good idea to check and see that the women's room was well stocked.

A female worker came out as he was entering the restroom; he started to apologize, started to explain, but she barely glanced at him before continuing on his way. Of course she wouldn't care; he was there to do his job, after all.

There were three women at the sinks. They paid him no mind. Norman stopped and stared at his image in the mirror. It was his face, and yet... there was something else there, too. Some other face. Something just under the skin, or hovering, like a ghost, just over his features.

Norman didn't want to draw attention to himself, Yes, he was here because it weas his job, and yet... shouldn't he have warned the room's occupants he was coming in? Blocked the door open with the cart, just so everyone could see he was on task, everything was above board, he wasn't trying to invade where he wasn't welcome...?

No one seemed to notice or care that he was here, but he feared if he stopped and stared at himself in the mirror that would change. There would be screams, confrontation, someone would get a manager – or maybe even security... he'd be locked up just for doing his job...

Norman sighed, the train of wild imagination evaporating. He had work to do. He might as well just get it done with.

After he'd finished in the women's room he pushed his cart across the hall to the men's room. As before, a man came out just as he was entering; three men stood at the sinks. Strange synchronicity, he thought to himself.

That was a familiar word, and he knew what it meant, but... it also sounded like something he's never say. Only, wait a minute, hadn't he just been thinking about a song from an album that used the word as a title?

Norman checked the paper towel dispensers, refilled them. He checked the liquid soap dispensers, refilled them. The men at the sinks had left, but now another man was standing there, looking at him. Norman looked up at the man, who smiled, and Norman felt something blossom and burst inside him. A hunger, a joy, an agreement... The two stared at each other for a long moment, an erotic charge int eh air between them.

Hold on, Norman thought.

The crazy things was that he was no longer sure.

The man winked at him and then, with a last backward glance, left the restroom.

Norman looked into the mirror, more deeply and closely than he'd looked before. He saw it again: Something different, something alien under the skin; some glint in his own eyes – a glint, or maybe a darkness....

Was he having a nervous breakdown? Had someone slipped him a psychedelic drug or something? Was he tripping... was he high?

"High as a Georgia pine," he sang aloud, and giggled. His voice sounded strange again, the words honey-roasted and warm. He definitely had a different accent from before, different from his usual flat, completely ordinary way of speaking. "What on Earth is going on?" he heard himself say. Not the sort of thing he'd ever come out with; if he wanted to ask that question, he'd put it more simply and directly: "The fuck!" That was more his style.

But he wasn't, he really wasn't, feeling like himself right now...

Norman pushed the cart of the men's room before he realized he wasn't finished restocking. Before he could turn around and go back in, he saw the same man as before – the one he'd found himself eyeballing with sudden, urgent lust...

Had the man been waiting for him in the hall? No – he'd been going about his work. Wherever he'd gone to, he was on his way back now. Norman kept pushing the cart; the man kept walking up the hall. Their eyes were locked as they passed each other, as they turned to look back at each other...

Norman pushed the cart, feeling wobbly but no longer feeling like one leg was too short. He was striding along normally, comfortably. In fact, he was striding more quickly, more lightly than usual. He felt taller, he felt lighter...

"Say," he heard a man's voice. "Is this really the job they have you doing?"

Norman paused, felt himself blushing. It was that man, wasn't it? He'd turned around, risked getting chewed out by his supervisor in order to talk with him...

Norman turned. Yes, it was the man. He was grinning. Norman started grinning too.

"Because I know you don't do for a living," the man said, nodding slightly at the cart of supplies.

"I'm a yoga instructor," Norman heard himself say.

"I thought so," the man said. "Or maybe a dancer."

"I dance, too, but not professionally. Not anymore." Norman frowned... or tried to frown. His face didn't actually change. He was still grinning. But he was frowning on the inside, wondering what the hell he was talking about. The honey-roasted words weren't rolling down his throat now; they had wings, they were soaring out of him.

The man was nodding, his grin glowing more and more luminous...

Then the world seemed to tilt and waver, the man's face curtained by dimness, growing distance – Norman's vision a long, faint tunnel...

...and nothing was real...

The world coalesced around him again. Norman and the man were still looking at each other but there was no more electric charge, no more grinning. The man simply turned and walked away. Norman turned back to his cart, relived. Am I turning gay? he asked himself.

Maybe he was. That was fine. He hadn't always been heterosexual. He'd had that four-month thing going on with Agatha, but he'd had other, shorter affairs with men and with women. He couldn't recall names or faces just now, but he knew it to be true.

Norman stopped, suddenly feeling exhausted. He leaned on his cart.

"If you have time to lean, you have time to clean." That was Irma; she walked past him and didn't even bother looking back as her figure retreated down the hall.

Norman would have flipped her off the way he'd flipped off Luka, but he just didn't have it in him. He lacked the strength to lift his arm, or even to lift a finger...

It's like I'm moving between different versions of the world, he thought. Then: No, different versions of myself. Like I have different people living inside or me. Different people, or....

A sudden chill ran though him. What had his mother told him when he was young? That gay people had devils inside? That the devils had to be cast out? That was why she was hiring a man to come from Sao Paolo...

Wait. What? Norman shook his head. None of that was right. Sao Paolo? He'd never been outside the United States. Hell, he'd never been outside of Minnesota.

That's where he was, right? Minnesota?

Had he ever been anywhere except this factor, where they made cookies and pretzels and chips?

Norman swayed on his feet, feeling nauseous, hollow. Then the feeling passed.

He needed his lunch break., He wanted to go home.

But where was home again? He's just been thinking about it. Minnesota?

No... was it... London? Of course not. It was... Santa Maria de la Paz, a tiny little place in Chile... wasn't it?

"Oh my god," he whispered, clinging hard to the cart. "I'm crazy. I'm like those people with multiple personalities."

No. No, that wasn't right.

It was what he thought before... devils... devils possessing people... He wasn't moving through different worlds. Or becoming different personalities. Demons were coming into him. Demons with strange accents, different memories; demons who made his body feel strange and tall and strong... or else weak, hobbled, tentative...

Norman started laughing. Devils! Really? What nonsense! Everyone knew devils weren't real. They were the stories told by the illiterate and the gullible. He didn't have devils inside him. But he did have something strange, something intrusive working on him. Something intangible, invisible... but all the same, something not himself.

It had to be aliens. That's what it was. Everyone thought aliens would come to Earth in ships, in their own bodies, but why should they, when they could just project their minds across space and into human bodies, human brains? A cosmic download! Like a song downloaded onto a phone. Over the air, and then into memory. Or maybe this was a two-way connection? A live wire of some sort, transmitted through a wormhole? Were the aliens back on their home planet seeing Earth, seeing the hallway and the cart with its cleaning supplies, just as he was seeing them now? Were his eyes their cameras? What an ingenious way to scout ahead!

Maybe his thoughts were theirs, too. They were listening in. Or else they were trying to control him!

Normal laughed, a feeling of rage and power growing inside of him. He'd show them who was in control. They wanted to use him? They'd learn that it would never happen. He was going to use them! they wanted to conquer the planet? They wanted to be in charge?

No.

He was going to conquer the planet.

He was going to be in control.

Aliens or devils, whatever they were, he was onto them now. He wasn't going to work for them. He was going to use the, make them do his bidding.

How had they intended to use him to take over the world? Norman thought about it, walking slowly, pushing the cart with strong, sure steps. Then he understood: They planned to use the world's own interconnected communications against it, the way that warring nations turned social media and the Ubernet against each other.

They had meant for Norman to become a social media influencer.

It was a clever ploy, Norman realized, and virtually unstoppable.

And he was going to do it.

Norman stepped away from the cleaning cart, started walking briskly up the hallway toward the exit. The doors were a long way off, but getting closer. He saw how daylight glowed just outside, in the world beyond, the world that was now his for the taking...

"Look out world, I'm coming for you," Norman cried aloud, laughing, his voice sounding like himself – but strong, fearless, certain. "I am Legion, motherfuckers!!"

***

Gary leaned in toward the blue glow of his monitor and sighed.

"Rick? It's doing it again."

A moment later, Rick stood over his shoulder. The two men looked at the monitor, scanning the situation.

"Oh, I see why you're having problems," Rick said a moment later. He leaned over, adjusted a slider on Gary's control board. "That'll fix it," Rick said.

"Yeah, but now we'll get those complaints again – the character is too boring, he's too slow to respond, whatever."

"Yes, and we'll edge him up a little if we have to, but you have to be careful. When the characters in the game get too much sentience, they start acting in all kinds of weird ways, just like you were seeing just now. You get feedback between the AI and the user, and... well, it creates unpleasant effects all around. It's a fine line, but..." Rick put a reassuring hand on Gary's shoulder. "you'll get it. It takes a little while when you first start in the monitoring room, but you'll get it."

Rick moved on to the next station. The control room with its dozens of techs hummed quietly, dark except for the glow of the hundreds of monitors. Gary sighed and reached for his cup of coffee. "Edge it up just a little," he muttered, monitoring the feedback users were giving on the character of Norman. "Just a little."

Gary watched as the readings on the monitor settled into optimal ranges. He smiled, stretched, cracked his knuckles. "Makes sense," he told himself, yawning, talking a moment before drilling down into work again. "Too much consciousness doesn't do anybody any good."

Next week we open our ears to the story of a desperate man – a man who has already survived the worst the world has to offer, but knows that even darker days might yet come. But even as we hear his story, will we open our eyes to the dangers he's warning us of? That... and nothing else... could only ever be "The Final Question."