“Scott’s Exit” • by Bruce Bethke

 

What a change two months can make. The last time I saw Scott, he’d had a bad relapse and was a mess. Tonight…

I dunno. I think I liked the mess better.

“Hi kids,” he said, as cool, cocky, and obnoxious as on the day I first met him.

“That’s not the way you start,” Tom reminded him. “The traditional way is by saying, ‘Hi, my name is Scott, and I’m—’ ”

“Bugger tradition,” Scott said. “And maybe my name isn’t Scott. And maybe I’m not even a were-anything.”

Tom sighed heavily and started rubbing his forehead, as if he was suddenly developing a migraine. “Don’t start this crap again, Scott.”

“I told you, I’m not Scott. I’m Secret Agent Delta Tango Mango Foxtrot Alpha.”

Hank boggled. “What? Did I miss something here?”

Tom sighed again. “Scott is convinced we’re all under surveillance. That we’ve got an informant in the group.”

I laughed. “An informant? In a 12-step meeting? That is just nuts.”

“Strictly speaking,” Scott said, “it’s paranoid schizophrenia with delusions of persecution.” He shrugged. “And sometimes it’s the only rational response to a situation.”

Hank shook his head. “Now I know I missed something. Geez, you go out of town for one weekend—”

“I don’t know how you missed it,” Scott said. “It was all over the frickin’ news. The Department of Homeland Security is investigating possible links between ALPS and domestic terrorism. They think WCA meetings are being used as fronts for recruiting dangerous radicals.”

“Ah,” Tom said. “You get this stuff off the Internet, don’t you? No, the DHS is looking for right-wing domestic terrorists.”

Scott smiled, in that smug way I’ve come to hate. “You forget, kids. I’ve got friends inside DHS. That ‘right-wing’ memo everyone was buzzing about two weeks ago was just the cover story. The real deal is us. And when the head of DHS dropped that Freudian slip last week about screening people in airports for medical problems and then sending them on to their destructions, that was about us.”

Hank shook his head. “No, you’re confused, Scott. That was about Swine Flu.”

“You can believe that if it makes you feel better, Hank, but there never was any Swine Flu. It was all just a dry run, to see how fast they could scare people into changing their lives just because of a virus. You wait until the stories about the ALPS Pandemic start breaking next week.”

Tim nodded. “Yeah! I knew it! That’s why they’re buying up silver!”

Tom sighed one more time, and then sat up straighter in his chair. “Okay Scott, I think we’ve heard enough. If you’re not here tonight to be serious—”

Scott flashed on angry, for just a moment. “Oh, but I am serious. I am so frickin’ serious you’ve never seen serious like this before.” He turned to the rest of the group. “And strange as it seems, I’ve come to like some of you people in the course of the past year. A few of you I even consider friends. That’s why I’m here tonight.

“Hank? You and your Michelle, you be careful. She’s got Stoker’s Disease. That’s what my friends say the people inside the CDC are calling it now, and they’re also working up a little thing called Project Molokai. Look it up. Some of what you’ll find on it is true.

“The rest of you? They’re coming for us, kids. And I for one don’t intend to make it any easier for them to find me. Which is why tonight is my last night here. And if you’re smart, it’ll be your last night, too.”

And with that he turned and walked out, his thousand-dollar hand-made English shoes ticking across the floor like a time-bomb.

“Well,” Tom said, at last. “That was... interesting. Okay, who’s next?”

_________________________

 

BRUCE BETHKE is best known for either his genre-naming 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his Philip K. Dick Award-winning 1995 novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few readers have known about him until recently is that he actually started out in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed MIDI and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but finished his career in the supercomputer industry, doing stuff that is absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-versed in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

In his copious spare time he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the fun of it.

ABOUT THIS STORY: “Scott’s Exit” was originally written for Curse of the Were-Weasel, on online multi-author multi-character multi-threaded role-playing narrative that was more conceptual art than coherent fiction. That it appears here today is because it came up in the context of a discussion with Pete Wood regarding the future development of Tales from The Brahma and The Odin Chronicles,  and Pete dared Bruce to put it online to see how people reacted to it.

Frankly, the thought that he wrote this little bit of gonzo paranoia 14 years ago scares the bejeebers out of Bruce. Funny, isn’t it, how something can go from being crazy, ridiculous, and utterly preposterous to being, “Oh yes, that’s probably exactly how they did it.”