Squid Ink Incorporated

Spending my waking life in front of a computer combined with being a habitual mistake-ist made the undo button my best friend, no, my lover, no, my soulmate. No, undo.

I could not comprehend my existence without the ability to instantly rectify disastrous computing errors via the click of a mouse or the punch of two simultaneous keys.

Ctrl+Z.

I lived and died by the undo function, it saved my life more times than… undo.

So prolific was my use of the curly blue arrow, I found myself reaching for it in physical and social situations. My fingers floundering to find the invisible shortcut icon, to take back that bad choice, fix that broken plate. To be able to physically revert back to the moment prior to my mistake, to have looked after I leap.

I trawled the web like a furtive scholar in a gothic fiction, a sweaty Lovecraftian protagonist in a tireless search of secret knowledge. A search to obtain the power to undo. Google became my ancient leather bound library of alchemy, spells and science. After many sleepless nights I found what I sought, mystical circuit diagrams for machines to enable entry into parallel universes. Access to simultaneous existences where infinite possibilities of choice become corporeal.

The commissioning of my machine could not have come at a better time. One too many drinks after work and harboured secrets gushed out of my drunken mouth before conscious thought could kick in.

With one click of my virtual Ctrl+Z I was spared a night of sleepless paranoia.

The next day, my hangover inspired orgy of error, which would have otherwise caused a major professional malfunction…. soon null and void thanks to the my possibility flexing friend.

Undo

So reliable was my radionics powered undo engine, that I felt comfortable enough to purposely commit gross faux pas. I spoke my mind to figures of authority, spilt drinks on people who bored me and generally committed random acts of wanton negligence. It became a sport for me, I pushed new boundaries in the art of error.

Undo, undo, undo, undo, undo, undo.

Have you ever made a series of computational entries only to realise that they were in error? Felt the need to retrace your steps back, back, back until suddenly you can go no further? I have done this many times, experienced that sinking feeling, the point of no return, so many steps back until suddenly being unable to go no further. That terrifying moment, desperately clicking my mouse, sending toolbars into chaos and disarray. Sadly for me, such moments I had forgotten when designing my machine.

By replicating the exact conditions of the function, limitations and all, I soon found myself repeatedly hitting my virtual blue arrow until my machine froze and finally crashed.

Now each of my anti-social, business wrecking, intentional mistakes act out their unstoppable repercussions.

Desperately I flounder, reaching for that blue arrow, only to find it greyed out, an error message repeatedly flashing – can’t undo.

We hadn’t heard from Adam for weeks. I know he gets caught up with work, they like to keep him busy. But he’s almost always up for a beer at least one night a week.

We know he had a new phone that he was moaning about not being able to use, that’s probably why he never replied to my texts. He usually answers his emails though, maybe he forgot his password again, they’re all about a thousand letters long.

The thing that really worried us was his tweet ‘really not happy with the way things are, can’t carry on this way’.

We made a load of pissed phone calls to him from the pub that night to try and force him to come down the pub. When he didn’t answer Dave came up with the idea of breaking into his flat, we were convinced that he was going to top himself or something.

The back window was open, so we gave Dave a bunk-up, when he got inside he let us in the front door.

At this point we realised that if we had broken in while he was in bed with his girlfriend or something we’d all feel pretty stupid. But he’d do the same for us if he was worried right? As it was, there was no-one in.

Looking around we found a stack of stuff lying on his desk. In our heads we’d geared ourselves up to find a suicide note or maybe a plane ticket to Mongolia or something, instead we found these:

A copy of a book called The Joymakers by James E. Gunn
A print of some dodgy web article – freaky-physics-proves-parallel-universes
A print of a wikipedia page about a cosmonaut called Sergei Avdeyev
Another print out off the web for something called the ‘Etheric Portal Plus Supreme’
A receipt from a fancy dress store with ‘astronaut’ written on it,
A post-it with ‘initiated by sunlight’ written in red biro.

We took the stuff we found home and made some strong coffee, we sat going trying to make sense of it until the sun came up. Then we went for a walk along the Romford beaches, the weather was proper nice, really sunny but with a breeze coming in off the sea.

It wasn’t till midday that Me, Dave and Karen realised that not only had none of us remembered to go to work, but none of us had got any shitty phone calls asking us why we hadn’t turned up.

We went to the little cafe on the beachfront, we had a decent fry-up and they forgot to charge us for it, touch! After that we went for a swim and slept all afternoon.

It was pretty weird of Adam to disappear like that and we were all well vexed about all that funny shit we found on his desk.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember there being any beaches in Romford yesterday.

The ‘bots are uploading gossip about me. This time they’re going to send an error report to my line manager , I know it.

Ok so the terraform was my project, I admit that maybe I could of made a better job of it, kept my eye on the ball. Maybe they’re right, I did fail to co-ordinate between contractors, but you can’t do everything right?

The project started well, on programme, on budget and the client was pleased as punch with our work, it was just a little oversight on my part, no biggie.

The spec was simple and I followed it nearly to the letter, oceans, continents, a balance between habitable land and wilder areas to encourage diversity. It was pretty much to terraform standard, just a few variations.

Ok so I got some of the colour schemes wrong, but, I will say the purple deserts were quite attractive, I don’t care what those anal colour ‘bots say, I really don’t.

The real problem was the cleaners, they were supposed to come in and remove any unwanted residue, dangerous foliage, unstable tectonics, former inhabitants, that sort of thing. I had booked them to come in before we started; it’s not my fault they hadn’t turned up.

That’s the problem of employing cheap human labour to do ‘bots work. What was I supposed to do? We had milestones to meet, performance indicators, graphs on the wall and all that, I had to push the job through.

The engineering consultant was pretty unfair in what he said I think, yeah so there are a few dead bodies here and there, so a few robot teams never made it back. All things considered, it could of been worse, we haven’t populated yet.

Who would of known how the terraforming process would affect those little critters like it did. They were an un-evolved species; they even looked cute before they got caught up in the processing, it could of gone either way.

Seriously I wouldn’t of thought those critters could cause so much trouble, wrecking the machines, destroying the landscaping ‘bots, even killing the armed security squad I sent in, I mean, seriously no-one could of known that.

I will sort it out before the population lands though. I’ve got a good couple of hours left and I’ve hired a flame-thrower from facilities.

I will make good my mistakes, I always do. Give it six weeks or so it will all be water under the bridge, again.

Flame on!

The kids are playing with their ray guns again, running around the house in noisy circles. This weeks noises are a series of short, sharp ‘pi-hews’, replacing last weeks ‘doo- doo-doos’.

‘What are you shooting at?’

‘Invaders Dad, they’re called the Gak’ is the answer I’m given, complete with an unspoken ‘obviously!’

Reluctantly I think to myself, Tam was right, she said we shouldn’t have given the kids guns. Well, at least it’s better than the lightsabers, I had visions of them prizing each others eyes out with those things.

I can’t help thinking though, Max looks a little subdued, ‘What’s up doc?’

‘We’re loosing’, he said somewhat downcast, ‘we tried to rally them on the stairs, but they got the better of us, we lost the ground we made earlier this week. Another few stairs and they’ll be in the hall’.

‘It’ll be alright tiger, how about an ambush? You could hide in the cupboard under the stairs, pop out and shoot them through the bannisters’.

Max considered this, then briefed his sister, their faces stoic, serious beyond their years. ‘That’s it!’ exclaimed Polly, ‘We could slaughter them!’ She takes after her Mother that way.

That night when I (finally) got back from work, the kids looked exhausted, they were stroppy with us and bickering with each other, all the usual signs of being over-tired.

I put them to bed early in an effort to sustain peace. As I tuck them in, Max asks me, in deadly earnest, ‘Dad, is it wrong to kill? even if those you kill, well, even if they’re bad?’

‘It’s always wrong to kill Max, even if the people are bad’ (In the moral spotlight now, gotta perform). ‘Even if people do bad things, you shouldn’t kill them, you should be forgiving, understanding’.

‘What if they wanted to hurt a lot of people though? What if they wanted to enslave everyone, us, you and Mum, if we had a chance to kill them all, wipe them out, shouldn’t we do it?’

Sometimes the kids scare me with their sincerity, where did they get a word like ‘enslave’ from?

‘You should always try to understand other people’s point of view, even if it doesn’t seem right’ (There, that’s good Fatherly advice, isn’t it?).

‘Hmm, ok Dad’.

With that I was off the hook and off to the fridge for a well earned beer or two, as I walked downstairs I could hear the two of them mumbling to each other.

That morning, Max and Polly were waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, ‘Are you sure Dad? About what you said last night?’ Polly asked.

‘Yes, of course, we should all be understanding, being understanding and forgiving is what makes the world a better place’. (Nice, there’s a philosophy we can all benefit from, wise words from the father figure, high five!).

Max looked at Polly, Polly at Max, ‘Ok Dad, if your sure’.

‘Sure I’m sure’.

I returned home from work that evening to find Max and Polly, my children, in chains at the foot of our stairs. They had been condemned to slavery, this I soon learned was the first decree of the Great Gak. Considering the genocide my daughter had planned for them, I guess it could have been worse.

Despite our rational protestations and our subsequent irrational escape attempts, Tam and I were clapped in irons at the wrong end of a long spear.

Some painful and gruelling weeks later, the two of us, exhausted beyond description, are chained to a work gang in Crystal Palace. Barbed Gak whips crack around our heads as we are forced to shunt vast pyramid building blocks across South London, forced to construct a pyramid in honour of the Great Gak. This was the second decree of the Great Gak, the leader of the invading alien forces that had arrived through a portal at the top of our stairs. The same invading alien forces who could have been scared off on their arrival by two fierce looking children with plastic ray guns.

As the chains bite into my skin, continually drawing blood and the weight of the huge stone block breaks my back, I think to myself… I really should keep my big mouth shut.

I finally have to admit it to myself, the job that started out as a stopgap has become my career by default. I can still remember my interview.

‘So Miss Mercer, where do you see yourself in five years time?’

Myoko my flatmate, as volatile as the volcano that was her namesake, demanded that I find employment or else lose my overpriced and undersized laminate floored bedsit. Reluctantly forcing myself out of months of dope inspired agoraphobia and daytime tv addiction, I squeezed on my court shoes, printed out my wildly exaggerated cv and hit the  agencies.

Settling for a position (well I say settling, I was hardly flooded with opportunity) with DeAth, DeAth & Quim Holdings, I was assigned a number of ‘administrative’ duties. That is to say, tea making, filing, scanning and the occasional brush with the executive washroom.

Some months into my job I had progressed to data entry, I was a mouse jockey, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v….

I would console myself with the mantra ‘Everybody’s got to make a living’, like the sample in that old eight-ball garage tune. But the slow and systematic mental abuse of sheer mundanity had begun to take hold. Where did I see myself in five years? Not still here that’s for sure.

Two years in, every day the same now, project upon project, deadline upon deadline, every one seemingly the same. The mad rush to submit on time and the hollow feeling you get in your gut when you realise that no-one will ever read that report you stayed late all week to finish.

By now I had surpassed the early days of employer suspicion, internet use monitoring and  wristwatch tapping after fag breaks. As vocationally unskilled as I was, I had tentatively carved myself a niche, a position of trust.

Three years in, I had responsibility, my own staff, workers, duped by their own belief that this was only a stopgap while they worked out ‘what they wanted to do when they grew up’, suckers!

It was during the fourth year of my internment, the long and repetitive days stretching eternally before me, that I had my epiphany.

In a moment of insufferable boredom and unrelenting fatigue I tore my right eye out with a staple remover. As the blood seeped between the qwerty letters on my keyboard, the intensity of my pain brought about a new clarity to my career development. I began to take an active interest in the company, attending board meetings, reading stock reports and studying investment performance. From my escalated position I set up some investments on my own initiative, insolvency buy outs, sponsored celebrity breast augmentations, arms dealing and the odd coups d’etat, the bloodier the better.

Five years in, I sit at the head of a boardroom table carved from virgin Amazonian timber, in a chair fashioned from whalebone and ivory. Human skull paperweights sit atop piles of unpaid vat and corporation tax bills. My staff have developed into a crack team of corporate cut-throats, ruled under my iron fist. No-one fucks with the bitch with the eye patch! Least of all the former Company owners DeAth, DeAth and Quim, who were given a buyout offer they simply couldn’t refuse.

Ask me again where I see myself in five years time, go on! I have a five year business plan in place now. Phase one, the the purchase of worthless deep space real estate. Phase two involves my private army of mercenaries, armed to the teeth and stationed at key strategic points throughout the world. A few governmental takeovers later and bam! The subsequent inter-continental wars that I have programmed will ensure that the worthless rock I own on Mars and Titan will become prime, radiation free habitat.

Give it another five years who knows?

The house of math is lined with blackboards; from outside I can hear the tipetty-tap-tap of chalk on hard, cold surfaces, occasionally a protracted slide, the product of a multiplication problem underlined in one smooth stroke.

I can almost see the white dust hanging in the air, the stained fingertips, the length of chalk growing smaller and smaller till fingers scratch the surface of the board.

Escape is easy, if you know how, calculate the position where the window should be, the co-ordinates of how high up one is in the building, the probability of surviving the jump to the ground below.

Perhaps you could calculate the odds of being rescued, 6:1, 13:1, 23:1, 100:1, tippety tap tippetty tap.
If those calculations are unworkable, perhaps you could appraise the force required to weaken the structure? create a fissure, compute the stress and strain, what force is needed to fracture the walls that bind you?

Tipetty-tap-tap… tipetty-tap-tap

What is your margin of error?

What is your escape velocity?

How long is infinity?

Tipetty-tap-tap… tipetty-tap-tap-tap.

The house of math is my house; at this precise moment in time I have a man trapped inside there. This is what I enjoy, ‘how I get my kicks’, especially when that man has Dyscalculia.

I feel like I have been here before, the dark twisted thoughts of self-loathing, the nausea in my stomach, the mixture of blood and flour on my face, the arcane symbols written on the white walls in freshly squeezed squid ink.

A man called ‘Proof’ had asked me to cast out the demons that haunted him, he ‘wanted everything to be alright’, to be able to ‘get over it’. The price he pays me is high, very high in fact, the price I pay, the pieces of my soul that I fritter away working my mojo on his behalf is far greater.

My add in the personals has had far greater return than I at first imagined, my sub-standard working life revolutionised by my ability to earn without a ‘day job’, an independent woman. This started out as means to an end, nothing selfish intended, now I fear I have grown greedy, will they grant my requests on this man’s behalf, or will I have of maxed out my credit this time?

I begin the incantation; I have the familiar loss of control, my body ridden by spirits. My palms sweat, my teeth grind, my pupils rotate wildly; the acid taste fills my mouth.

The secret language spills from my lips, ancient words that I have learnt from hours of furtive study from mouldy books with yellowing pages. I urge those that I cannot see to loan me their power so that I may rid my client of his torment. I draw the final lines in squid ink, air rushes into the room, the artefacts of the man called ‘Proof’ begin decompose before my eyes.

No, this is not right, not familiar now; the ink is beginning to run down the walls, I feel a sharp tug at the pit of my stomach, tinnitus in my ear.

I see the faint outlines of faces, there are no features just dark ovals; I feel pressure on my back pushing me to my knees, ridden to heavily I buckle under the weight.

As the light begins to flow from my soul I know, I have taken too much, my debt now too great, my line of credit expired, my soul repossessed.

Following its construction some 25 years ago the ‘Wolverhampton Lid’ has finally, and justly in my opinion, been voted one of the architectural wonders of the modern world.

From above the massive structure forms a complex optical illusion, ones eyes are decived into perceiving a neo-classical bust of a Grecian woman sculpted in lines of concrete, an asphalt toga draped around her shoulders. The lines which define her features, upon closer inspection, are a network of deep trenches. The walls of each trench are lined in copper and at the bottom of each trench a copper surfaced highway, the redesigned Wolverhampton Western bypass.

To the East of the Western Bypass lies the North Ealing Sea, the giant inland body of salt water which stems from the West London Delta reaching out through what once was Watford, Milton Keynes, Coventry and Sutton Coldfield.

Far beneath the Lid’s magnificent exterior is nestled England’s finest theatre organ museum. Upon paying the modest administration fee, one can wonder through the oak panelled halls and gaze in wonder at the collection of organ ephemera on offer. Each oak panel is accessorised with an ornate brass handle, about the size of a human hand. Pull on the handle and an ornately carved oak plinth slides gracefully forth, mounted upon each plinth an antique theatre organ, Spurden-Rutt, Hope Jones, or even an original Rudolph Wurlitzer.

It is said that on a quiet day one can hear the strains of Jeepers Creepers, Claire De Lune or Alexander’s Ragtime Band drift up through the copper highways of the bypass into your car.

Magpie’s hobby was rebuilding video arcade machines; that was one of the reasons we liked him so much. His apartment was always full of huge cabinets covered in cartoon space aliens and tactile buttons. We would stay well into the small hours, our fingers hammering away on some of Atari’s finest.

To fuel his obsession Magpie would scour jumble sales, skips and tips for the electronic parts, which he would cannibalise for the guts of his cabinets. We were with him when he found the machines. He was ferreting excitedly through a box of wires and circuit boards when he found two flat plastic discs covered in tiny rocker switches, dip switches as Magpie pointed out. They looked pretty cool, but as to their function, even Magpie was at a loss.

Magpie set about dissecting, testing and randomly flicking switches, trying to work out their purpose. Knowing them as we do now, I shudder to think at the untold amount of damage he might have done. We are still trying to remember if there were any strange or catastrophic stories in the news at that time, I guess with all that goes on in the world it would be hard to tell if Magpie had been the cause.

The day we finally discovered what the machines did, we were sitting under a tree in the park. Karen and I were randomly flicking switches when the tree we were sat under disappeared. Magpie spotted the missing tree, which had materialised in the middle of the tennis courts, it was then we knew we were onto something.

It took us a while to learn how to control the machines; we started by moving little things, trees and street furniture. We began to realise that when we moved things like lampposts and telephone boxes they continued to function. We weren’t simply moving objects; we were re-configuring the landscape around us.

Before long we had moved our house from the centre of London to a private beach in Cornwall. If we wanted to pop back to the city, we simply re-configured our home back to its original plot in the city.

After a while the three of us began to use the machines to play huge scale practical jokes, making trees appear in the middle of concrete shopping centres or arranging buildings in the shape of male genitals. Karen moved her work’s office deep under the Atlantic Ocean, she was sent home on one sunny morning, her place of work having mysteriously disappeared over night. Karen spent that whole day laughing maniacally. It occurred to me; perhaps this might be how super powered villains in comic books get started.

For balance I tried to use the machines for good, breaking up urban conurbations with extracts from dense forests, I called it my ‘urban re-forestation project’. Despite my good intentions, I couldn’t escape a constant nagging thought; nothing good can really come from having such unlimited power.

Soon we became more adept in the use of the machines, our activities stepping up to the next level. Magpie moved the Statue of Liberty to the centre of Baghdad, the last word in satire he told us proudly. Not to be outdone Karen and I began a complex campaign of re-arranging famous landmarks, Nelson’s Column to the middle of the Gobi desert, the leaning tower of pizza to the centre of Tokyo, Tokyo Tower to Paris and the Eiffel Tower to the centre of Trafalgar Square.

Perhaps the funniest thing about these little pranks was the way that everyone else had responded, or rather had not, its funny how people tend to skirt over things that they don’t understand. Our global planning was complained about much in the same way as people would grumble about a rain shower or a Monday morning.

It was around that time that I stopped sleeping, I would lie awake thinking about the machines; how did they work? What had they been made for and more importantly who had made them?

Karen was the first of us to find meet Dr. Laurence David McKenzie, a name we will never be able to forget. She had taken one of the machines to generate a mountain range to replace Deptford. As Karen was configuring the dip switches the Doctor had approached and introduced himself by name. He was calm at first, pointed to the machine he asked her to kindly return his property.

Karen managed to get away by setting the rockers to displace the ground under the Doctors feet. The Doctor had broken her nose and several ribs; I will never forget the way I felt, the mixture of fear and anger gnawing at my stomach.

Magpie was the next to meet the Doctor; it was only by watching the TV news days later that we found out he had been murdered. By then we were already on the move, before Magpie had died he sent us a warning written in the landscape. Magpie had created a series of high dunes on our usually flat beach. The dunes were clearly curved into a word, what we later found out was his last word. ‘RUN!’

We ran; we are still running, we know McKenzie must have taken Magpie’s machine as each time we change our location, move city to city, continent to continent, he alters it, bringing us closer to him.

my flash The Bone Street Kids has been published on microhorror.com frighteningly good *eerie theremin noises*