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     | |      c   o   m   m   u   n   i   c   a   t   i   o   n   s     | |
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  ...presents...                  Jack and Jack
                                                         by Obscure Images

                      >>> a cDc publication.......1989 <<<
                        -cDc- CULT OF THE DEAD COW -cDc-
_______________________________________________________________________________


     Jack ran swiftly down the hallway, his progress unimpeded by the seemingly
endless amount of brainless accountants filling up the hall.  They parted like
the Red Sea, eventually closing back up in his wake.  Jack was a professional
assassin.  There is good money in the death business.

     Jack was a modified human, very nearly a totally artificial person.  He
was a walking death machine.  Wading through the crowds on the way to his
target, Jack put his body on auto pilot and "left" to think about more
important things.  "What am I really doing this for?" he asked himself.  "For
the money," he replied.  He had a nasty habit of having completely coherent
conversations with himself without actually knowing what he was going to say
next.

     "People could live together in harmony if we didn't have the oppressive
weight of the government to carry around," he said.

     "You're fucked.  That's blind idealism.  Look at what you're doing for a
living," he said.

     "I am forced to kill for a living by the economic oppression that is
forced upon us by the government."

     "As I recall, Jack, you HAD a nice paying job as a SimStim artist, you
wanted more money so you changed professions."

     "Oh, fuck you."

     Jack slipped back into control again, and continued along his path toward
the ExecZone.  Jack looked at the accountants with sheer disgust.  They've
given up all of their humanity so they could be wired for numbers.  It's all
for their career, they said, but what happens to all the big bucks you will be
paid?  Nothing, a lobotomized wirehead has no need for money, just a little
food and a closet to sleep in.  So much for that career, there are so many
stupid people around.  Just out of spite, Jack punched one in the head, causing
it to vaporize into a red mist.

     The entrance to the ExecZone was where the troubles could start, so he
hyped up his sensors to detect some subtle changes which would indicate a trap.
A warning message flashed on his eyes, there was a trap up ahead.  Well, that
would be easily avoided.  As he ran up toward it, he shot out the sensors
waiting for him to come through.  This should be it, thanks to the other exec
that hired him to kill his boss.

     He smashed the door where his target was working laboriously on something.
Jack flew across the room and grabbed the man by the shirt.  The man started
howling and begging for mercy.  He tossed the executive out the window, and
watched him fall into the pavement below.  Jack climbed onto the windowsill and
gave a mental command to fold out his polycarbon gliding wings.  He leaped and
gracefully floated away, a falcon soaring leisurely to his home.

     The next evening, Jack got out of bed, got dressed up nice, and decided to
take a walk on the Strip.  The Strip is the quarter of the city that is totally
dedicated to bars, whorehouses, and crime.  You could get anything that you
could ever want, and many things you would never want, on the Strip.  The Strip
was Jack's home away from home.  He usually hung around at Club Nuclear, where
all of his friends gathered.  The look of the place was something from the punk
scene of the late 1970's.  The people inside were dressed likewise.  The music
was period music as well, the speakers pounding out devastation from groups
like Crass, the Sex Pistols, and the Buzzcocks.  The Clash was never to be
heard, mainly because they sucked.  Jack sat down at the bar and ordered a
drink.

     "Hey Jack, do you get it off on killing people?" his own inner voice said.

     "Why don't you just fuck off?  I'm sick of you talking to me like you were
my mother," said Jack.

     "You seem to forget, Jackie boy, that I am you, and right now you are in
the midst of talking to yourself.  You really should see a doctor about this,"
said Jack.

     "Just go away, I'm trying to get drunk," said Jack.

     "That seems to be all you do these days," said Jack.  "You kill people and
get drunk, don't you want to make something out of your life?"

     "No, I don't, why don't you just leave me the fuck alone?" said Jack.

     "You are really a boring fellow, I'll go find something better to do,
seeya Jack," said Jack.

     Now that his other personality left him alone for the time being, he
decided to start searching for a comfortable zero.  Vodka and him were getting
to be very good friends.  Jack was getting a nice buzz on, when a woman slid up
to him and started talking with him.

     Charm was a subconscious action for Jack.  The woman was a delightful
specimen of her species, and shallow enough for a good night's exercise.  Jack
was entranced by her exquisite beauty, which was only enhanced by the multihued
mohawk.  He decided, through an alcoholic fog, that he wanted her for his own,
at least until he was sober.  She offered to bed him at her apartment, so Jack
naturally accepted her blunt offer and followed her back to her place.

     She lived in a very large open flat.  There was only one room, but that
room was as big as Jack's apartment.  On one wall was a giant videoscreen
displaying some Japanese porno vid that showed the sex-act in as much detail as
possible without being there.  The furniture was all made up of white Flow-Plas
and could be shaped into whatever you wanted at your whim.  The place was a
rich girl's paradise.  She was obviously an artist of some sort, judging by her
tastes in clothing and interior design.

     She walked into the area of the room with the vaguely bed-shaped thing and
dropped the few bits of clothing that she had on.  Jack did basically the same
thing, except that while she gracefully slid out of her clothes, he fell out of
his clothes.  They had sex.

     The lights dim down as they both drift off into a peaceful slumber.
Unconsciously, the other Jack breaks into his dream.

     "Wake up, loverboy."

     "What do you want, I was having a good dream."

     "Yeah, I was watching.  She's really good, you know that?"

     "Yeah, I know, I was the one doing all the work"

     "So Jack, What are we going to be doing next?"

     "Shut up and go away."

     "That isn't very nice, Jack, just for that I'll show you what fun you can
have inside your skull."

     Jack's mind seemed to buckle a bit and he found himself standing on the
top of a metallic sphere.  There was a pattern that swirled around the surface
of it, sort of like a satellite shot of cloud formations.  Jack and the globe
were suspended in the middle of a void of seemingly endless empty space.  Jack
sat down on the sphere.  After a few minutes the blackness surrounding him
started to be speckled with little points of light.  "Where am I?" thought
Jack.  Off in space, in front of Jack, a blue neon glow started to shine its
light onto him.  Underneath the sphere, gasses lit by the neon light in the
distance began to swirl, eventually leaving a land area underneath him for as
far as he could see.  In another moment, strangely shaped objects started
bulging their way out of the blue earth.  "Wow, this place is really strange,
like something out of a Dali painting," thought Jack, jumping off the sphere
onto the ground.  The land was lit by the blue neon sun that gave the place an
eerie coldness.

     Booming from nowhere, Jack heard his own voice asking him how he liked his
creation.  "I am god here, Jack, what I say goes.  Want to make a smart ass
comment now?"

     "Yeah, great, now let me out so I can get back to sleep."

     "Not so fast, Jack.  I'm leaving now, but I will be watching."

     Jack screamed a mouthful of obscenities, but the booming voice was gone.

     Jack wandered aimlessly around this newly created land inside his head.
There are living things here, thought Jack.  An odd limping rabbit-like thing
shuffled across his field of vision.  As he got farther away from the sphere he
started on, the scenery got stranger and stranger.  The animal life did as
well.  From the looks of the life here, it was obvious that laws of physics
didn't apply.  The sky started swirling around, and the star-like spots started
to disappear.  They were replaced by images of his face that began laughing at
him.  The roaring laughter hurt his ears, and scared him quite a bit.  He began
to run to find some peace from himself, but there was no luck.  The landscape
was full of really weird things, but not a single one of them was a useful
place to hide.  Jack ran through a forest full of trees with leaves in the
shape of his head.  He screamed in fear and frustration, then ran in a new
direction where the forest ended and a flat blue tundra began.  All at once the
ground a few feet in front of him began to bubble, and he saw himself grow out
of the ground.

     The new Jack simply stood there with a smile on his face.  Jack could no
longer take this abuse, so he started running and dived at his image.  He
knocked himself to the ground and punched as hard as he could in the chest,
causing it to part like water in a bloody mist.  His face just laughed as Jack
ripped his body to shreds.  As Jack continued to mutilate his image, his
surroundings began to fold themselves.  For a second everything was a blur, and
when Jack looked down again he was staring into the clouding blue eyes of the
girl he was sleeping with.

     Jack jumped up in revulsion at what he just did.  The whole corner of the
room was coated in blood from this girl.  On the bed was what remained of her
body, only her head and a leg were distinguishable from a pasty pile of human
flesh.  Jack ran out of the apartment as fast as he could, not even bothering
to wash off the blood that coated his body.  He ran as fast as he could for the
several miles it took to get back to his place.

     When he reached his apartment he took a shower and destroyed his clothing.
He popped a relaxation vid into the viddeck and sat in front of the video wall.
He sat for several hours completely engrossed in the shimmering colored blobs
that floated about on the wall.  He lost interest in the vid, so Jack stood up
and walked into his kitchen to pick up something to eat.  Jack thought of what
happened to him as he ate his meal.  About this time, Jack's other personality
popped into his head.

     "Hello, Jack.  You are almost mine.  Pretty soon I will have full control
over you.  You will have to live in that world I created for you while I carry
on a new life of my own."

     "Why are you doing this to me, I've never done anything to you."

     "You have done something to me Jack, you've made me live in a hell of your
creation for over 10 years."

     "What do you mean, I didn't know you even existed until a few years ago,
how could I have done this."

     "Your unconscious fears and hates trapped me in your image of hell.  Only
recently have I been able to periodically escape for a while.  I have finally
broken free of your hell, and it is time for me to banish you to my version."

     "Leave me alone!  Just get out of my head, DO YOU HEAR ME?  GET OUT OF MY
HEAD!"

     "You will lose, Jack, you will lose," chuckled Jack, and disappeared.

     Jack was huddled in a corner of his kitchen, whimpering and mewing, when
they came for him.  The police officers picked him up and carried him out of
the apartment, to a police car on the street below.  Just before they shoved
him into the car, Jack stopped whimpering, sprung up and completely annihilated
the two officers.  Jack had finally taken full control. 

     Inside his head, Jack was back in the blue lit land that was to become his
new home.  He found that if he willed hard enough he could cause a vidscreen to
appear.  It showed what his other self was watching at the moment.  His
entertainment was short-lived, because at that time a giant surge of
electricity pulsed through his body, wracking his spiritual body with pure
agony.

     The pain eventually passed to start all over again in a few moments.  Jack
was dying over and over by the minute.  He never got used to it.  It was a
whole new pain every time.  In the moments when he wasn't being tortured, Jack
tried to regain control of his body.

     After what seemed like years to Jack, he finally broke through the walls
of his hell, and regained control of his body.  He found himself in a dingy
room full of twisted corpses and instruments of torture.  "Oh my God, what have
I become," said Jack to himself.  He staggered out of the room and climbed down
the stairs to the ground floor.  He knew what he had to do.  He found his way
over to Johnny Anarcho's place, and bought a few things that he needed.  Then
finally, he went back to his old apartment, and began to assemble his
equipment.

     He opened a small panel in his wrist and plugged a fiberoptic cable into
it.  The cable ran to 3 separate smart detonators located on his head and
chest.  The detonators were hooked up to three pounds of high explosives, also
attached to his head and chest.  Jack left his apartment and walked over to
Central Square.  There was a giant crowd swarming through the Square, as it was
lunch time for most people.  Jack looked around sadly and thought his last
thought, the thought that caused him, and 1000 others, to be instantly
vaporized.

                        The End.

  _   _   _____________________________________________________________________
/((___))\|The Convent..........619/475-6187  The Dead Zone.........214/522-5321
 [ x x ] |Demon Roach Undrgrnd.806/794-4362  Greenpeace's IGB......916/673-8412
  \   /  |PURE NIHILISM........517/337-7319  The Toll Center.......718/358-9209
  (' ')  |Tequila Willy's GSC..209/526-3194  time centre...........312/377-0359
   (U)   |=====================================================================
  .ooM   |(c)1989 cDc communications by Obscure Images.           06/26/89-#111
\_______/|All Rights Pissed Away.

