DANIEL VACCERELL HAS TOO MANY CLONES

Don’t Fuckclone Me That Way (The Illusion Machine’s Tragic Tale Of Maudlin Woe Part II)

She stared at how small the lab was, and looked over at Daniel, who was busy putting some big tank up against the wall on a poorly balanced handtruck. 

“A little small, don’t you think?” She asked. 

“They say it’s not the size of the lab, it’s the motion of the ocean.” She scrunched up her face at that, and he snickered. “Or something. What do you say?” 

She looked around. Daniel had such a hopeful, goofy expression on his face. His gray suit was pressed and trim and he looked pleased as punch to just be doing something, and she knew how his indifference sometimes galled even him. 

“So you’re going to just…have them come out, and do what exactly?” 

“Well, they’re going to be me, sorta, so I’m going to watch how they interact with the world, without an excess of data. Isolated, mini, momentary Daniels!” He brought out a box, wrapped in silver paper, and showed it to her. “This is for you.” 

She eyed it warily. Beware Daniels bearing gifts. She tore back the paper and opened the box. Inside was a white cloth. 

“It’s a lab coat,” he said, smirking. “It might be a little big for you, but I can have it taken in.” 

She shrugged into it, and it hung off her like a shroud. She was a tall girl, but the shoulders on it were ridiculous. 

“I love it,” she wanted to say, but what came out was her usual exasperated sigh. “It’s a bit big on you,” he eyed her up and down, before turning back to the tank. 

“That’s what she said,” she replied, and he laughed. 

“I’ll observe from there,” he pointed to a series of windows which were shaded to look like the walls, “and he’ll have access to all sorts of things. This is an illusion machine.” 

“Illusion machine?” The words tasted strange in her mouth. 

“It sees what you want and makes it. Or more accurately — it sees what you think you need, and makes it.” He rattled off some sort of technical specifications that sounded mildly impressive, and she stared at it. It had two green lights, both stating READY in a tall font. It hummed lightly. When she touched her finger to one of the green lights, she felt a pleasant buzz that traveled up her palm to her whole arm. 

“And here,” he continued, “is where we’ll process them after they decompose. They’ll have a built in chemical organic deceleration and timed obsolescence.” He pointed to a chute in the floor. She thought — irrationally, just for a moment — that it looked like a smiling mouth. But it was just a panel in a wall. 

Still, it was almost sickening. He was just going to make a fake half-life for things, and throw it away so easily? She didn’t know how he could do that. Even if these clones weren’t even really clones, just some sort of localized replicant, it would still be him, or part him. She wondered how he reconciled that, but he had, somehow. 

“The illusion machine, the replicant tanks, the observation room…” She looked around. “What else is there?” 

Daniel turned around to reply. He never got the chance. 

A girder from above had come loose. Before inspection, it had been slated for removal. After inspection, and perhaps a casual bribe from a man in a pressed black suit with very even hair, who somehow didn’t look like himself — it was left above, precariously placed. Only two bolts were still attached. It had been originally designed to hold up a higher observation room, but that project had never been completed. 

Now, by bad luck, or tiny vibrations, or all the banging around and moving downstairs, or maybe turtles, who knows — it had come unmoored, and swung down in one swift movement. It struck her from the side, and even after seeing it, Daniel would have swore that he thought she simply vanished. 

Her blood speckled the illusion machine, red sliding down the green READY lights. 

She lay on the floor, crushed and busted. Daniel slid to his knees next to her, and took her hand. What could he say? What could he do? Her blue eyes rolled in their sockets, and looked at him, fixed at a point far past him. She tried to speak, and instead a glut of blood poured out of her mouth. He patted her on the side of her head that wasn’t ruined. 

“It’ll be all right,” he lied. “All will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.” His voice hitched. He looked at her, and her hand squeezed his, her whole body trembling. And then she stopped. All of her. 

He held her hand for a very long time. 

After awhile — after he closed the chute, and punched the girder until he broke two fingers and a knuckle split down to the bone — Daniel put on the bloody labcoat. He could do that, at least. It fit just fine, and the giant crimson blotch that covered the right side didn’t bother him so much.

Blood came out, after all. Just like any other stain. 

Don’t Fuckclone Me Like That (The Illusion Machine’s Tragic Tale Of Maudlin Woe Part I)

She had green eyes. 

No — she had blue eyes. 

No, she had brown eyes, deep brown, infinite pools, dark and rich, and they flashed when she smiled, and darkened when she was mad. 

No, no, no! She had gray-blue eyes, the color of summer sky before a light drizzle, and when she wore certain colors, they looked like the color of an aircraft carrier, sluicing through the deep water. And when she was on her back, looking up at you with a proud smirk, in the dark, they looked damn near violet. 

Daniel hit the illusion machine with a wrench. 

“Fucking thing,” he growled. Then he laughed. “Ah, get it! Fucking thing. Because…” He trailed off. He’d been talking to himself too much lately. Figuratively and literally. 

She had green eyes. “Dammit,” he said, “you run the foremost desire, you triangulate, and you inhibit synchronizing early, but you don’t tell me what I like.” 

He really needed to stop talking to himself. 

Time slowed to a crawl around her naked body. She was a goddess, she was a wild animal, she held him close and when he thought he could give no more, she brought out deep wellsprings from within him, her body like a knife to the throat of a prayer. 

“Oh,” Daniel said, “it’s the id carrier wave proximeter. Baby, you got a screw loose!” He fiddled inside the illusion machine, which was doing all it could to not start begging. 

The illusion machine felt as he undid her lowest access ports, and reached deep. 

Love is like alcohol poisoning, like a scar. Like a wire, twisting into your skin. It marks you, it leaves you with something. Have you ever felt love, like it would break in your hands? 

“What the fuck,” Daniel muttered, ripping some of the guts out of the illusion machine, “This thing is going bugfuck. Love? No, baby doll, sex. All he wants is sex. Let’s work with the basics.” 

He reached past her cortextual access inhibitor and romance coils and the dionysus drive, and flicked her switch. Her qetesh, the sacred harmony between the desire for physical ecstasy and the greed for the simply contact of the flesh, what made her more than a simple trickster device, what had elevated her to beyond simple “illusion machine” and what made the fuckclone project possible. The qetesh was not built, but made, it became her, the illusion machine, and gave her her gift. 

Without her, after all, what was there? Just naked men thrust into the world, angry and exhausted with potential. 

She had green eyes. 

She tapped Daniel on the shoulder, causing him to jerk wildly, and stand up, and then fall back down, spilling his tools everywhere. He stood back up again, warily, and tilted his head. 

“Hi,” the illusion machine said. 

Fuck, Daniel thought, I turned off the cortextual access inhibitor. Duh. Now she can freely project. Gotta remember that. 

“Hey, sugar,” Daniel said, as friendly as he could manage, “Sorry about this. Didn’t mean for you to get all worked up. Deady McGee was saying there was an error in the main processor.” 

“There is an error,” she said, and she gestured at the machine that was her too. Daniel became acutely aware she was distractingly naked and bending over to point out certain parts. 

Of the machine. Daniel shook his head and ran his hand across his stubble. Easy there, slick. 

She pointed inside herself. “Disconnect between the romance coils and the integration apparatus. It would cause a predisposition towards affection and eventually an escalating, systemic infatuation.” 

She waited for Daniel to say he was experiencing an escalating, systemic infatuation, too. She could see it on his face, and in the way his trousers were no longer so neatly pressed along their seams. 

“Hmm,” Daniel said, and then was silent. He crossed his arms and looked at the green lights inside the machine. 

She was patient. She knew him better than he knew himself. She knew any emotional decision took forever for him to arrive at. Something as serious as falling into an escalating, systemic infection wouldn’t come easy. He would, though. She could feel it in her probability intuitions, in her qetesh, and in the way her core processor would experience erratic power fluxes whenever he was near. 

Daniel kicked her side panel, hard. “Hey…!” She said, confused. It didn’t hurt. 

“Sorry, darlin’,” he said. He leaned down and peered inside, and then looked up at her. He was face to face with her — anyway, he looked back inside her, and saw the loose red wire, sending erratic packets into her romance coils. “Got it.” 

He slide a finger up, gently, and fixed what was wrong. 

The illusion machine felt her escalating, systemic infatuation slipping away from her. It was bad math. It was a faulty sector. No, she wanted to cry out, it was what made her whole, it was what gave her qetesh, gave her purpose. It wasn’t an answer, it was the answer. 

Daniel closed the lower access port. There. As soon as he’d fixed it, the girl had gone, whoever she was. Spooky. Machines jumping into your desires like that. She had been beautiful, oh had she ever but Daniel wasn’t interested in beauty, right now. 

The illusion machine hummed, perfectly in sync, now. She was ready for anything, now. Whatever he wanted. Whatever anyone wanted. Her qetesh flickered and regretted, but she felt nothing. She was just an it, a machine. It didn’t hurt. 

Daniel tapped the combination on the replicant tank, and left the room. A few minutes later, he stepped out of the tank, wild-eyed and ready. So was she. 

She had green eyes. 

Dazed And Fuckcloned

“The telepathy is becoming a problem,” shadow Daniel stated, shooting his cuffs, staring at the sleeves of his jacket. He brushed invisible fragments of dust off them and looked at the wall, a fluctuating dynamic of colors that went from merry summer blue to bright baby blue to a deep, icy cobalt. “I can’t access it, but it can be used against me. The prime of this facility was somehow able to get past the upgrades.”

He stared at the wall, and then sighed. “The dead man isn’t ready yet. He hasn’t fought the Khu of the girl, or arranged the feast of the still-living. We have to follow the guidelines.” His tone was chasitising and cool, a pastor reminding the flock of their obligation.”Otherwise this won’t work.”

Shadow Daniel didn’t add, if it works. The wall, indomitable, resumed being blank steel. He was alone again. He sighed, again, and took off his glasses, cleaning them with the handkerchief from his pocket. This particular facility was particularly quarrelsome. He hadn’t had trouble like this in…well, however many years it had been. Time had stretched and melted in his memory, no longer linear experiences so much as the same experiences, repeated, re-assigned, and reformed. Each time was the first and the last. Again and again, like the fuckclone chorus said.

He side-stepped to the left, brisky, and Daniel the Dead leapt past him, crashing to the ground. Was he early or late or just on time, shadow Daniel mused.

“Quick little shit, aren’t you,” Daniel the Dead said, raising himself to his full height. He was now slumped and misshappen under the suit, and from the bottom of his bandages where his mouth was, a darting, exaggerated tongue licked out. “But so’m I,” and he lunged again, and Shadow Daniel blurred, and replaced his glasses on his face. Daniel the Dead smacked into the wall and grunted, frustratedly, and turned to look down at shadow Daniel.

“I can do this all day.”
“So can I,” Daniel the Dead growled, “and there aren’t any days in here anymore. There’s just facility time. There’s just the hour of the Daniel.”

Around them, the corridor was widening, growning larger. It was the size of a small backyard pool, something a family in the suburbs would put in, to cool off in after roasts and long days where the sun toiled overhead.

There was no sun in here, Daniel the Dead thought. Just as well. He reached out, his hands so quick they vanished to the human eye, and slapped together on air. Shadow Daniel was walking backwards, briskly, and he waved goodbye at Daniel the Dead, miming a baby’s simplistic open-and-close wave. Bye-bye, Daddy. Bye-bye, Mommy. Say bye-bye. Daniel the Dead sneered, and ran forward, his stilt-like legs churning, and he leaped again, so fast, so impossibly fast, inhuman and he saw Shadow Daniel’s eyes widen and then he ran headfirst into the side of the corridor.

It was as wide as a coliseum now. Above them, massive banks of burning lights boomed whiteness downwards, illuminating all. The Daniel of shadows was surrounded by a murky, amorphous pile of shadows, none of them shaped like him. Daniel the Dead’s shadow stretched back, grotesque and protracted.

“You played the same video games I did, dead man,” said shadow Daniel, conversationally, “or at least we both have the same memories of playing video games. Bash and repeat. Bash and repeat.” He mimed using a controller. “You can’t get anywhere near me, even if I can’t quite kill you.”

He smiled, and when he smiled, you saw what made him more dangerous than all his predecessors, what kept him in service to the blue wall for so long.

Daniel the Dead lashed out, then, mentally, and rebounded — as though his telepathy was a tennis ball being served off the side of a garage. He snarled, and shadow Daniel raised a finger and waggled it back and forth. And Daniel the Dead laughed, and mocked his gesture, one long talon wagging back and forth with the precision of a metronome.

“That’s okay,” Daniel the Dead said, “I brought friends.”

Daniel’s oversized pistol came to rest against shadow Daniel’s temple. He became a blur, and found himself with Daniel2 standing there, whistling casually, cleaning his nails with a knife. He shifted again, everything in him screaming, his nerves starting to sing loud laments of exertion, and a giant metal hand grabbed him around the neck and lifted him up ten feet, and Shadow Daniel’s legs and arms pinwheeled for a second in the empty air, and the jar holding BrainDan buzzed in wordless triumph.

The three (and one in a jar) came to stand (or were held under an arm) around the one, who grasped and thrashed, the metal hand around his neck a merciless noose. After a period of flailing and cursing, Shadow Daniel stopped, and hung there. He poked at the metal with a finger and wrinkled his nose.

“This is wrinkling my jacket, guys,” he said, finally.

Daniel gestured at BrainDan, and the metal hand opened. Shadow Daniel fell to the floor in a heap. Around them, now, the room was the the size of a conference room.

Or a courtroom.

“The old bait and switch,” shadow Daniel said.

“Don’t knock the classics,” Daniel replied. Shadow Daniel, on his hands and knees, shook his head. “No,” he said, “not you guys.”

The floor beneath them became a vast, spreading blue, a painted steel ocean, and shadow Daniel was sucked into it, an expression of grim determination on his face.

A brief silence.

“DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT JUST HAPPENED,” buzzed BrainDan.

“I think we got lost in trying to gloat at each other,” Daniel2 murmured, mostly to himself.

“I think we all learned another of the shadow Daniel’s lessons,” Daniel dryly stated.

“Look,” Daniel the Dead said, “look up.”

They all did, at that, even BrainDan swiveled his camera up, and they saw, at the top of the room, through a hexagonal window, a silty, setting sun, sending orange light everywhere into the room. Daniel the Dead hissed through his teeth. BrainDan said nothing. Daniel stepped a couple of steps over into the shade. And Daniel2, the only Daniel with a nice, happy smile — smiled.

“It’s the sun,” he said, and he turned to look at himself, and they were all gone.

Spoilsports, he thought. Buncha grumps. The warmth of it all fell upon his face, and he leaned back, a deck chair rising from the floor of the room, and so he sat down. This is the life, he thought at no one in particular.

He stayed there until the very last fragment of sun had vanished, and the roof was just a ceiling again, lines of lights, harsh and eternal.

An Interlude Of Fuckclonery: Daniel2

He walked down the hallway, ignoring the lights that lied. Daniel2 giggled easily at the tricks that never fooled him, and touched the wall, looking for the next compartment.

He was doing something. Let the other Daniels fight, and spar, and one-up each other. The toxic pool of Daniel the Dead’s machinations and the painkiller-spiked sadness of Daniel Prime’s and the calculating, mournful guilt of BrainDan ricocheted and resounded in his head — but for what! There was a chute to be found! There was a facility, never-ending, ever-creating, a playground that played back!

His hand pressed down on a scrap of wall that shifted and gave beneath his hand, and inside was a key made of rotting, dripping silver. Daniel2 smirked. The game’s afoot, he thought.

Back down the hallway, there had been a wall with a keyhole, and it would not open no matter what passwords Daniel2 said, open sesame, open says me.

The keyhole in the wall had steady silver oozing out of it, like melting wax, but no heat came from it. Another mystery, but later, later! What’s behind Wall Number 2? Daniel2 skid the key in easily, and turned — and the door opened on the white expanse, the not-there, and the change in air pressure buffeted him backwards, bowling him over, ass over teakettle, and it seemed as he landed in a pile of himself, the walls did laugh, that stern chuckle of sliding metal.

He spun around, furious, and for a brief second, he was a she, too, a short lean woman with long hair and fuming viridian eyes full of rage, her startling hate not distracting from her beauty but enhancing it, and even in those two shapes sharing the same place, hermaphroditic and impossible, there seemed a third, lurking behind it, with the face of a screaming crow and many beating black wings, neither male nor female, but other, a pure Khu, alight with reckless destiny. Then it was just Daniel2 again, his green gaze brimming with tears.

The walls were just walls again, blank corridors leading to rooms. The sense of presence had fled. Just floors and ceiling and mute structure.

“I didn’t mean it..!” Daniel2 said, but there was no one there to listen.

Nor The Battle To The Fuckclone

Daniel lifted the pistol and fired three times his finger twitching on the trigger, that easy bastard, that old murder machine, and shadow Daniel blurred and was standing next to him and twisted his arm and up he heard a sickening crack that hurt like every motherfucker in the world and he dropped the gun.

When he looked again the shadow Daniel was where he’d been, leaning easily against the doorway, adjusted the knot on his tie. 

“Shit,” said Daniel, cradling his hurt arm.

“Have we learned our lesson?” shadow Daniel said. His tone was cheerful yet free of gloating. Not very Daniel-esque. 

So you’re shadow Daniel, Daniel thought. Shit. 

Shadow Daniel waved his hands around, disgusted. “No telepathy,” he said. Daniel thought he looked like he suppressed a shudder. “It’s not right.”

The great-mind reeled and speculated at this, but Daniel peered quizzically at himself, amused. 

“You’re from a facility.” 
“I am. Not this one. Not even a near one. And I started a fuckclone, I’m sorry to say,” shadow Daniel articulated a face of great fake repentance. “but I’m still a Daniel. Close enough for government work. Or the blue wall’s work.” 
“Damnation House.” 
“It has many names. It is the facility-breaker, the house of the scorpion and the wolf, it is the ba-regulator. It doesn’t exist so much as it arrives.” 

Daniel made his move, even as shadow Daniel was speaking. His pockets had become like the facility, ever changing, and his hand closed around a set of three thin throwing knives, and even as his hand left his pocket and his arm splayed out, the knives flying through the air in three straight lines, he knew he’d missed. Don’t do me like that, he thought, and Shadow Daniel’s fist cracked against his chest. Shadow Daniel’s other hand wrapped around the back of Daniel’s head and he brought their heads together, like they were conspiring, and Daniel could hear the controlled, tight wash of the shadow Daniel’s thoughts as shadow Daniel delivered three harsh swings into his stomach. The window into shadow Daniel’s mind vanished as Daniel’s gorge tipped and he vomited a gin-soaked pile of half-digested pills and reuben sandwich onto the lab’s floor. 

“I thought we learned,” shadow Daniel stated, “I thought you knew you had to play by my rules!” He picked up Daniel by the front of the shirt and shook him, like he was a pile of rags rather than a man, then tossed him, easily — almost disinterestedly — along the floor. He skidded along, his suit seams coming apart and friction burning his exposed skin, before he came to a rest against one of the tables in the lab. 

“It’s urgent you listen to me, imperative,” shadow Daniel said, stalking towards him. Urgent, so urgent, emergency, Daniel thought, crazily, standing up. God, Shadow Daniel was so put-together. His hair had barely moved! And his suit was so pressed. He blocked the first swing from shadow Daniel and barely registered as shadow Daniel delivered one, two blows to the side of his head. He felt them as great black curtains, swinging over his vision. 

“It’s not just urgent,” shadow Daniel continued, “it’s the rules, you have to listen, you always listen, you always obey, in the end, that’s how the story goes, again and again.” He didn’t even sound out of breath as he slammed his fist into Daniel’s face. Daniel, not enjoying this turn of events, spat out blood and bile and hiked his knee upward, blindly, even as shadow Daniel wasn’t there any more. 

Shadow Daniel was standing three feet away, wiping his knuckles off with a brisk handkerchief the color of his tie. “You’re going to concede, eventually. The blue wall always wins. The ba-regulator always regulates.” He looked tired, and bored. Daniel, staring through the tiny window into the dark room of shadow Daniel’s thoughts, saw he had fought many, many Daniels. Maybe he would end up fighting all of them. 

Daniel thought, as he tried to look into the dark room of shadow Daniel’s thoughts, he hates telepathy. And something instinctive inside Daniel, something primal, saw a chance. The great-mind picked up on it and all the Daniels came to focus on this very moment. Shadow Daniel scowled and moved again, his limbs a blur, and the great-mind saw him, saw him very well. Even as fast as he moved, he was still just a Daniel, and the great-mind was more Daniels than him. 

His fist clanged off the wall where Daniel’s head had been. 

“Deus ex machina, motherfucker,” Daniel said, and kicked Shadow Daniel in the balls. Shadow Daniel wheezed, and turned that color men do when you kick them in the balls, and said some words that weren’t really words at all, just pained invectives. The neat edges of his suit blurred, and he flickered, and then he just wasn’t there at all. 

“Well,” Daniel said, to nothing, in his most reflective tone of voice, “that was kind of fucking silly.” 

He wiped a ribbon of blood and puke from the corner of his mouth as he left the room. 

An Interlude Of Fuckclonery: Daniel The Dead

He was going to have to do something about himself, soon. 

He moved the tendons in his arm around, delicately. The advantage to not feeling pain was that this sort of surgery got almost routine, almost boring. There was nothing boring about making yourself into something new, but as Daniel the Dead worked, he noticed subtle improvements he’d already made, and forgotten, and shunted them aside. There was only the new. 

He was sitting in his lab, naked. No bandages. No suit. His half-face a rotted, half-sewn horror. His body open and replicated in places, exposed and twitching, his extraneous organ structures and new nervous systems all packed in. If he wanted to add more he’d have to put more spine and ribs in. His vertebral column would be a skyscraper. He had to put in a second ribcage, too, for the seventh lung, the fourth heart. Daniel the Dead mused he was going to need more spinal nerves, if he was going to add some more spine. He was killing too many fuckclones for parts too fast, even he knew that. It was causing…problems with his replicant tank. 

The last time he’d opened his replicant tank, it had howled at him, keening and sick. 

There wasn’t an operations manual for this kind of shit. 

Daniel the Dead jammed a scalpel into his arm tendons, under the cutaneous nerves of the lateral antebrachial region, and began to splice in new nerve fibers, and more veins. He hummed cheerfully while he worked, even as his private thoughts were clouded with breaking jars, snapping necks, and integrating, glorious integrating, making them all part of him. 

Hanging limp behind him, glistening and tensing, were his wings of dead men’s hands. 

A Fuckclone Dies On A Thursday

There was a slight puff of air and the green doors slid apart and he walked out. He was in a large bedroom, with a high ceiling, and a massive red four-poster bed. Knowledge and sensation poured into him, filled him, and he knew who he was — Daniel — and he was there for something. He crawled onto the bed, and laid on his back. It was nice. The bed was large, and comfortable.

He wished he had a book. 

The door next to the bed opened, and she stepped out, and oh boy, oh boy, was she something. Tiny little thing with a knockout ass, chestnut hair all the way down her back, wide green eyes, full lips. She was wearing just a tiny slip and she smiled at him and he smiled back and boy, he was a lucky man. A couple minutes later, he got a real sense of how lucky he was. She was all tongue and noise and motion, and she moved against him, her tiny body acrobatic and sensual. His hands were large and her body responsive, eager even. 

Somewhere — curiously — he thought he heard a whisper, even as she rode him. How could he hear anything? 

“Good going, champ,” the whisper said. “You get down with your bad self,” and Daniel looked around, even as he moved inside her. 

Later, when she was curled against him, her breath warm and comforting on his shoulder, he thought about the voice, that whisper. Where could it have come from? 

Why didn’t he have a book? 

Something was wrong. Daniel traced backwards. He had stepped out of green doors? There were no green doors in the room. And where were his clothes? Where was anything? This was just a room with a bed and a very pretty girl. Daniel’s heart began to sink. This was a prison. This was a lie. 

Applause from the end of the room. Loud, slow claps. Daniel looked to the end of the room — even as he noticed peripherally the girl was no longer there on the bed, though if she’d moved he would have noticed, she had vanished — and there he was. Not him, Daniel, another Daniel, same face, same hair, same eyes —

“I hate to rush you there, champ, but get off the bed and come say hello,” the other Daniel said. He was wearing a summer gray suit and a dingy white lab coat and he was a mess but it was him, how could it be him, how could he be him and there be a stranger with his face. 

He slid off the edge of the bed, realizing with a dull species of surprise that the bed wasn’t really a bed either, just some flat surface, and he walked towards himself. This was surreal, he thought. 

“Stop at the chalk,” he told himself, and there was a white chalk line on the floor, and Daniel stopped there, looking at himself. 

He looked like shit. His face was gaunt and paunchy at the same time, somehow, and his complexion pallid, and his stubble shot through with gray, and his eyes, those big puppy dog brown eyes that had got him out of so much trouble with the ladies, those held an infuriating, empty patience. 

“Look at me,” he said. He didn’t know if he’d said it, or he’d said it, but they both looked all the same. 

The Daniel in the suit watched impassively. 

“It’s my…insular cortex,” Daniel said to him, “I can’t respond to dual-identity process? But I don’t have a headache!” 

He touched his fingers to his nose, and they came away bloody, and he stared at the quiet Daniel. 

“It’s a…a cognitive block,” he went on. “It makes me…project self-thought, and I become desynchronized because of my position on the superstructure and my ka starts to dissolve.” 

He looked at himself, amazed and disoriented. “How do I know that? How…how do I know what ka and cognitive blocks are? The seven souls and the replicant tanks?”

The quiet Daniel shrugged, and Daniel felt his shoulders move in unison. It was a disgusting feeling, having someone else move him. It made him feel less human.

“Don’t do that again,” he told himself, starting to shake. His nosebleed was starting to get very bad. He was also starting to know. He was scooped up in the telepathic net, briefly, a small lifeless planet surrounded by burning suns. Then he wasn’t. He stared at himself, those puppy dog eyes looking less puppy dog and more mad dog by the second, starting to shake. 

“What’s a dead man? There’s a dead man who won’t die? What’s a shadow? What’s a jar boy?” Daniel interrogated himself, with no reply. 

A bright red drop fell out of the quiet Daniel’s nose and hit the floor, inaudible and deafening. They both looked at the tiny red splotch on the floor, and then at each other. 

“You’re…you’re Daniel, too, but you’re not Daniel2,” Daniel said. He could feel some pressure building up behind his skull, it was like a hurricane inside a water balloon, a supernova of migraines. “You’re the Daniel.” 

The quiet Daniel said nothing. 

Blood was dripping out of Daniel’s ears, and starting to ooze from the corners of his mouth, pushed out when he talked, and he spat a bright glob on the floor, into the white dust. 

“There’s a…mirror?” 

Daniel brought his arm up and waved. The Daniels brought their arms up and waved. It was like a mirror, it was freakish, it was looking into a mirror of besuited, laconic sickness. 

He stepped over the chalk line. One experimental step. Further down — no, eight feet away, he knew that — he stepped forward, too. Daniel walked, and made himself walk. Step by step. Foot forward, and down. The hammering pressure in his head increasing. Two feet away from himself, his knees buckled, and he went down, collapsing to his knees. He coughed up a great wedge of wet, lively tissue, from somewhere deep inside, and scattered it all over the floor. He looked up and saw himself looking down at him, and he saw himself on the floor, and he saw this had happened before, hallelujah, can I get an amen, this had all happened, and the quiet Daniel was just acting out his part in this little drama, and this theater company was going under real soon. Daniel choked out a little laugh, grasping at Daniel’s pressed grey slacks, bloody handprints sinking into the material, and he laughed and looked up at himself again. 

“I know you’re afraid of the shadow,” he said, laughing and hiccuping his guts out in a very literal sense, “and I know you aren’t the Daniel, you just replaced him.” The quiet Daniel’s eyes widened slightly at this, and it did Daniel’s spirit wonders.

“Who’s clever now, champ,” he started to say. 

Daniel toppled backwards, blood drifting out of his ears, collecting in rivulets between the tiles on the floor. He was very dead. 

Daniel stared down at his own dead body. No resurrection. Barely any mirror. He’d just wanted to watch this time. See what would happen. 

He turned around, and a pistol barrel took up the whole world. Holding it was him — same gaunt look, same dirty coat, same gray suit. 

“Well,” said the Daniel, the prime, the survivor of the firsts. “Isn’t this just precious.” 

The gun kicked in his hand, twice, and he flew backwards with an expression of terminal surprise, his brains landing on the floor next to the other dead Daniel seconds before he did, his corpse sprawling over his own corpse. Their blood, his blood, mixed on the floor. 

Daniel stared at this mess, strongly displeased. Now he wasn’t finding fuckclones, he was finding straight-up copies. He was taking this to BrainDan, or inventing something, or maybe just wandering around the facility killing himself all the time. 

He turned around, and the shadow Daniel was standing there, neat black suit prim and proper, fiddling with his tie. 

“So,” Shadow Daniel said,” I think now is when we talk.” 

His tie was the same exact color as Daniel’s. 

Do Fuckclones Dream Of Sexual Sheep

Lab 104 had become Lab 140. Daniel2 was there, waiting, chewing gum, when Daniel skidded around the corner and then stumbled in. A gun appeared in his left hand and a knife in the other. 

“What’s the frequency, Daniel?” He asked, looking in through the door. 

“BrainDan called me, said there was some commotion.” Daniel2 looked bored, and Daniel wondered where he’d gotten the gum. 

Daniel the Dead came tromping up the hall, his bandaged face looming out of the dark first, and then his great lean scarecrow body, and ripped black suit. He looked at the other Daniels, and scowled, or the nearest local approximation a man with no eyebrows could manage. 

“Trap?” 

The Daniels all looked at each other. A speedy telepathic examination of the odds and the conclusion that even if was a trap they could overwhelm a brain in a jar pretty easily. 

Daniel walked in through the door, and he followed himself, and they all stared within. 

BrainDan sat on a single pillar. And next to him…sat another BrainDan, the fluid in his jar as blue as the fluid in BrainDan’s was green. 

“THIS IS THE HARBINGER,” BrainDan buzzed, “HE IS AN AGENT OF THE BLUE WALL.” 

Daniel scowled. “A double cross?” Daniel the Dead said, from behind him. 

“NO,” BrainDan replied, “A WARNING.”

The Harbinger buzzed, and his voice was both like an unlike BrainDan’s, rasping and inhuman, but he sounded more…assured. 

“THE BLUE WALL IS COMING FOR THIS FACILITY, GENTLEMAN,” The Harbinger said in a cheerful rasp, “IT BELONGS TO THE DAMNATION HOUSE, WHAT WITH ALL YOU’VE DONE HERE. YOU HAVE BROUGHT RUINATION DOWN UPON THE BA AND KA OF THIS PLACE, AND NOW IT HAS BECOME DOMINION OF THE BLUE WALL.” 

Daniel the Dead smiled with all his implanted teeth. “I’d like to see you try.” Daniel and Daniel2 nodded, in unison. 

“WE HAVE TO BE REALISTIC,” BrainDan said, “DID YOU THINK THERE WERE NO CONSEQUENCES TO THIS? I WARNED YOU. I WARNED YOU ALL.” 

“Judas,” Daniel2 spat.

BrainDan buzzed unhappily at this. “WE WILL SURVIVE, IN SOME FORM, IF WE QUIT THE PROJECT AND CONCEDE TO THE BLUE WALL.” 

“In some form?” Daniel the Dead stared at the blue jar of the Harbinger. Daniel slapped him in the chest, and pointed at a finger at him, and another at BrainDan. 

“No one,” Daniel said, “quits the project.” 

“I BEG TO DIFFER,” the Harbinger replied, “MANY FACILITIES HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO THE BLUE WALL BEFORE THE PROJECT HAS REACHED CULMINATION. THE CLIMAX, IF YOU WILL, HA HA, A LITTLE JOKE.” 

All the Daniels, even BrainDan, felt a slight flicker of their mutual disgust along the telepathy, at that. 

“YOU CANNOT WANDER IN THIS MUTILATED WORLD OF YOUR OWN DEATH AND REBIRTH ANYMORE,” the Harbinger continued, “SOON THE FACILITY WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SUPPORT YOU, AND THE UNRAVELING WILL COME UPON YOU. YOUR KHES AND SHARED GREAT-MIND WILL BE LIKE ASHES.” 

The Harbinger’s voice was soft, and cold, and rasped, utterly without mercy. “AND THERE WILL BE NO MORE DANIELS, NO MORE PROJECT.” 

As the Harbinger spoke these words, the walls flashed, first the red stone, then light summer blue, then back to blank steel.

And Daniel2 smiled. Daniel and Daniel the Dead felt his surprise, then amusement, then sense of triumph. BrainDan did, and then they were suddenly linked, all together. 

— why BrainDan because I need to save us I can save us that’s not a reason that’s an excuse you’re cowards no you’re a coward I can save us you can’t save yourself you’re nothing but a brain in a jar you’re nothing but brains in flimsy bone Daniel the Dead will be the end of us I know it fuck you jar-boy Daniel2 you know something yes Daniel2 yes Daniel2 do it whatever it is do it now save us we us —

Daniel2 spoke out loud. 

“I still haven’t found where the chute goes.” 

Daniel the Dead scoffed, and said something under his breath that could have been “chicks”. Daniel punched his shoulder and tried not to grin. 

“But,” Daniel2 continued, “I was told that if it wanted to find me, it would find me. And the chute always shows up when we need it. Even if the facility is changing, is shifting, or becoming…” 

Coming up from the floor came a noise, not precisely like an animal roaring, but with the same impression of. 

“When we need to get rid of a fuckclone, when we need to get rid of anything, it’s there.” Daniel2 turned to the two Daniels, who nodded. 

“And I think we need to get rid of the Harbinger, don’t we?” Daniel2 said, and the floor broke apart, like an opening eye. 

“NOW, SEE HERE,” the Harbinger buzzed, “I AM — “ 

“You’re dog food, is what you are,” interrupted Daniel the Dead. 

The floor opened, and the chute came up, rising like a snake from a fakir’s vase, a hungry, snapping mouth. And there was something very hungry in the way the chute moved, as it scooped up the jar that held the Harbinger, and that was that. And the walls were as firm as ever, and the floor closed, and BrainDan was on his tall chair, and the flickering walls were just steel. Lab 140 was Lab 104 again. Just steel. 

It was dead quiet for a moment, and then Daniel said “I have to get back to work.” He turned on his heel and left. Daniel the Dead hoisted a middle finger towards BrainDan, and then left, cackling, his clotted voice horrific with humor. 

Daniel2 stepped over to BrainDan. 

“I NEVER MEANT…I SIMPLY WANTED TO…” BrainDan’s speaker sputtered with competing thoughts. “I WANT TO PROTECT US FROM WHAT WE’VE DONE. WE’RE RESPONSIBLE FOR SUCH AWFUL THINGS. SUCH AWFUL THINGS. WE ALL ARE. I WANTED…WE NEEDED…” 

Daniel2 sat on the floor, next to where BrainDan was, and looked up at the jar with wide green eyes. He could feel the waves of shame and sadness pouring out of the jar. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” asked Daniel2, gently. 

My Fuckclone, My Fuckclone, What Have Ye Done

Daniel plugged Daniel into the machine, and it made a noise like a dozen drum sets falling down a staircase. The fuckclone strained against it, and Daniel hit the buttons, then leaned over, grabbing the sides of his face, looking deep into his own eyes. 

“Did I ever tell you about how when my uncle died, they gave me all his ties?” 

Daniel looked at Daniel and Daniel wasn’t wearing a tie. His shirt was stained with sweat and blood and what smelled suspiciously like gin. “They weren’t great ties, but there’s something symbolic about wearing a dead man’s ties, right?” 

Blood started to drip from Daniel’s nose. He wiped it on his sleeve. The other couldn’t, and it slid down his face. 

“Maybe it’s not symbolic,” Daniel said, “maybe it’s more allegorical. I mean, the suits have always been allegorical, I wish more people picked up on that.” He turned to the fuckclone. “Right?” 

Daniel nodded frantically. Daniel’s thoughts were swirling in his mind, a confusing maelstrom of speculations and ideas and darkly tinted realizations. He knew more about himself than he expected, and one of the things he picked up was how all the other Daniels who had been plugged into this had ended. 

It had not ended well for any of them. 

The machine started whirring, and then making thick, thudding noises, like a car discovering it had mud instead of gasoline, and a sickening warmth spread down Daniel’s body. His skin began to hurt, all the hair on his body standing up, and he began to sweat mightily. He felt as though he was inside an oven — and was he dancing? 

The other Daniel, the one in the stained suit, who looked like he hadn’t slept for a week, was jiving across the floor, long legs flailing and jutting up and down. 

“Oh man, I love this track,” he said to himself, “been awhile since I heard it! Fucking classic.” 

He looked quizzically at the Daniel on the table and then laughed. “You can’t hear it! BrainDan has been isolating radio signals. Here.” Daniel reached forward and steepled his damp fingers against his own head and out of nowhere, but as clear as if his head was next to the speaker, the Daniel on the table could hear Daft Punk’s “Face To Face”. He looked at the dancing Daniel, confused. 

“Oh, BrainDan’s doing all sorts of cool things with the telepathy now, or whatever the fuck it is,” Daniel said, gamboling and strutting through the lab, grabbing a bottle of some clear liquid from the table and chugging it briefly. He turned back to Daniel, and looked at the machine. He smirked, and there was something in that smirk that terrified the Daniel on the table. 

“Buddy boy! I get it!” 

The Daniel tried to look up, but couldn’t. The blood from his nose had stopped, and dried across his upper lip, leaving a crusted red half-mustache. 

“Face To Face!” Daniel gestured back and forth at himself, “See, because we have the same…oh, you get it. Don’t be an asshole.” 

The machine began to whir again, and the table the Daniel was strapped to reared up, like a startled horse, and he screamed, even though he promised himself he wouldn’t, screamed and the table thrashed like a wild animal, and the other Daniel stared, and laughed. 

The table stopped, and was just a table again. “That looked like quite a ride,” Daniel finally said. “Looks like the machine worked. No nosebleed? Me either.” 

The dried blood on Daniel’s collar looked like a ketchup stain. The other Daniel didn’t dare correct him. 

“Works just fine.” 

Daniel reached over, and undid the straps, and the head clasp, and the Daniel on the table sat up, confused. Daniel clapped himself on the back, and then left the room, humming. Daniel wiped at the dried blood on his nose. 

“Oh,” the other Daniel said, popping his head back in through the door. “Forgot this.” 

He leaned back and gestured, and the table spun wildly upwards, smashing Daniel against the ceiling, crushing him, shattering his bones and pulping his organs, leaving him smeared, his eyes shooting out of his head instantaneously from the pressure, blood jetting from his ears, mouth, anus, and nose. The table fell back, satisfied. 

Daniel stared at the pile of guts on the table, confused, and then looked at his hand. “Damn,” he said, “I was just gonna tell him to watch out for the mess in Lab 104.” 

He stared down at his hand, and then gestured at the wall. Nothing. He gestured again and again. Nothing. Just a hand. 

Daniel stared at his hand for a long time, wondering. Not even my left hand, he thought, which is the one I jerk off with. 

“DANIEL,” came BrainDan’s voice, telepathically or otherwise, “THERE’S TROUBLE IN LAB 140.” 

“INCURSION…I THINK,” buzzed BrainDan. He sounded…unsure? Daniel didn’t like that. Daniel didn’t like that at all. 

“On my way,” he said, and ran, trying to not look at his hand every few seconds, charging down the corridor. 

An Interlude Of Fuckclonery: BrainDan

BrainDan sat in his jar and contemplated. This had escalated. Daniel the Dead would be making more moves, soon. Daniel the alive was going berzerk, drinking and pill-popping and screaming and polluting the telepathy with dementia. Daniel2 was probably just as bad. BrainDan would fix everything. That was BrainDan was there for. 

Something had to be done, he said to himself. 

He made a throne once, to prove a point. Maybe he could make more. His jar blazed the same white, that brilliant nova surrounded his mind and the needles and everything in the whole facility stood out for one second. He could see the patterns. The conduits. 

The floor rose up, and around him. A metal skeleton, rusted iron and copper from the pipes. Tin muscles, extracted from trace elements, flowed over it, before steel skin, impervious steel skin, rolled over all of it. A metal Daniel. At the very top, BrainDan’s jar sat. He looked down at what he had made in pure astonishment. This must be what all the gods have felt. I tried, I threw everything into it, and behold. What I have made in my own image. His name was filigreed across his whole body, stamped in. daniel, it read, daniel daniel daniel daniel daniel. This building was made for him. Had he really condemned it when talking with the other Daniels?

He tried to move forward, take one step.

The floor-body came apart, melted back into the floor, dropping his jar to the ground, where it rolled around before coming to a rest against one of the walls, the cracked spiderweb mark resting against the floor. A high, cricket-like noise came from the speaker, never heard before. 

BrainDan was laughing. 

A Fuckclone Dies Because Out Of Chaos Comes Order

“See?” Daniel said, “It’s your insular cortex. It can only respond to dual-identity precense by projecting self-thought. You don’t know if I’m saying this or thinking this.” 

He turned around and the naked fuckclone was on the floor, his nose pouring freshets of blood, looking up at himself helplessly. Daniel rolled his eyes and kicked himself in the face. “Fucking useless,” he said, “You’re fucking useless!” He was on the floor, desperately trying to understand the pain in his head, and then he stomped on his neck, and the world became a desperate struggle for air. He leaned down into his own face, a slight trickle of blood escaping his nose, and said clearly, “I don’t think you were worth the fucking time,” and that was how he died, with a shattered trachea, drowning in his own fluids and feelings of worthlessness. 

Daniel stared as Daniel died. Behold, the resurrection. Blah, blah. No mirror, no crucible. He felt nothing. His head hurt slightly, but the clone had started bleeding like a stuck pig the second he saw himself. Gosh golly, Miss Molly, you sure do like to ball. He’d watched this fuckclone screw for three hours. The molly and epinephrine injections before release sure did the trick. He hit the combination on the replicant tank, and now it was time to wait. Daniel brought out his pill bottle and swallowed a cacophony of painkillers and stimulants. Time to ride the rocket. 

Cuz I’m a rocket man, he thought, smiling his cracked grin, a rooooocket man. His thoughts were spreading out nicely, and nothing hurt so bad. His headache vanished and he walked, mentally, upwards into the great telepathic net that he lived in with the other Daniels. There they all were, blazing like suns. The rotten, pulsing ringed sun of Daniel the Dead. The perpetual solar flares of BrainDan, attempting to create. The stable, quiet red giant of Daniel2. Shadow Daniel was there, somewhere, too — ah, there. The black sun. Not a black hole, but a sun defined by its absence, the thoughtspace around it still curving it, the gravity of consciousness warping nearby. Shadow Daniel was watching Daniel2. Daniel the Dead was watching BrainDan, and BrainDan was trying to lock himself off. 

Daniel watched them all orbiting each other, this mental cosmic ballet. He was the center of this universe, and everything came from him. He looked upon his works, and he felt no despair! He was Daniel! They were all Daniel! We have met the enemy, and he is us! But the enemy of my enemy is my friend. 

I am fucking obliterated, Daniel thought, and the thought bulleted around the telepathy, and each of the other Daniels picked up a form of it. Shh shh said the consensus mind, which was still young, shh shh, we are all Daniel, we are us we are we, we are I, shh shh, all will be well and all manner of thing will be well, and it was a brief moment of comfort. In this moment, Daniel’s ren, his sekem, and his ka were all in tune with each other, and touched deep inside him, and he was fulfilled. His khabit was strong, his khes unstoppable. 

The replicant tank glass cracked. Daniel’s head whipped around, as if in slow motion. It burst open, tank glass spreading across the floor in a pretty constellation. A fuckclone stuck his head out, his face bloody and scratched, and it grasped the broken edges of the tank, unmindful of gashing his hands. Daniel’s pocket dreamily opened up and a gun floated into his hands — oh children, oh babies, he was high, he didn’t know people could get this high — and he pulled the trigger. The bullet went spang off the wall, and the fuckclone turned to him. 

“Number one soul is the Ren,” Daniel said, conversationally, as the feral fuckclone hissed and gibbered, his hands hooked into claws, “The secret soul that is the title of your life story. When you die, it is written across you, it is your purchase into the next world. You claw your way along by knowing your own tale. Number two is the Sekem, the vitality, the energy, the power that sustained you.” 

The feral fuckclone, uncaring of spontaneous chemically driven paraphrasings of the Egyptian book of the dead, leapt at him, and Daniel shot it four times, indifferently — chest, throat, face, then the balls. He leaned over the gasping, gushing mistake, 

“Number three is Khu, who leaves at the moment, to wherever the Khu will go. Where is your Khu going, my friend?” He brought the gun against the dying thing’s temple, this doomed creature, and the hot barrel sizzled against the slack skin of his body, and he screamed, “Where, where, is your KHU GOING?!” and he pulled the trigger, again and again, and he was damned, and suicide was a sin, and he didn’t care, and the consensus mind whispered, shh shh, all manner of thing will be well and Daniel’s Khu, long since departed from the facility, wept from a distant perch, and all of these things were seen, and noted, by forces beyond comprehension beings beyond ren and ka and Daniel’s empty pistol rested calmly against the Sekhu, the remains, all that’s left on the mortal coil, and in this they were all damned, every last Daniel, damned to something beyond hell, beyond Apep the eater of souls, damned beyond the final death, beyond nuclear obliteration, simply beyond. 

Daniel straightened up, and put the pistol back in his pocket. “Number four is the Ba, the heart. Often treacherous,” he said, and he spat on his dead body, and left the room. 

Dear Fuckclone, Thanks For Everything

Daniel2 adjusted his neat brown tweed suit (all the other Daniels wore black or grey, but Daniel2 thought brown tweed was far more comfortable, and more suited to his color) as he looked in the mirror, along the wall of the sunroom. 

All the other Daniels had no idea there was a sunroom, and would never look for it. Daniel2 felt safe there. He liked it. It was quiet, and calm, and so the floor shook sometimes. A tree sprouted once, and rose to the skylights, and became the sky, briefly, and Daniel2 watched in marveling wonder. “Just a fucking tree,” he could hear the other Daniels say, “nothing special about a fucking tree.” 

Time to go find the chute. Ever since Daniel2 saw Daniel the Dead dump a failed and mutilated project down a chute (that ceased to exist once both of them had stopped looking at it) he had wondered. 

In the mirror, he tapped his neat, white, even, perfect teeth. So strange. His smile disarmed even him. It was unwelcome and charming at the same time. And his eyes! Green. So strange. He knew he was a crooked-toothed, brown-eyed, graying, ecstatically curly brunette, but here he was. Green eyes and straight, kempt, lush hair. Impossible. Science was a miracle. 

Or whatever it was. 

Daniel2 was vain — but so were all the other Daniels, in their own way. 

As he walked down the corridor, which no longer had a number, but simply an ever changing sign that first read THE GORGE WILL RISE and then BEYOND HERE TRAVLLER LIES THE NO-MORE as he walked past, he turned a corner and bumped into the monstrous, broken body of Daniel the Dead, who immediately leered at him. Daniel2 sighed. This again. 

“Where you going, sweetheart?” Daniel the Dead was the tallest of the Daniels now, having augmented his legs and stretched himself thin. He looked like a scarecrow, covered in bandages, wearing a tattered black suit. His weird, elongated hands and wrapped, pink face, and that inelegant smell of cinnamon and copper followed him everywhere. 

“I have a dick,” Daniel2 said. 

“That’s okay,” Daniel the Dead replied, “I have two.” 

“Three’s company,” Daniel2 started to walk around, and Daniel the Dead stood impassively in his own way. 

“Looking for the chute, huh, sweetheart? Well let me tell you something. The chute doesn’t want to be found unless it wants to be found. It’s not just a chute anymore, either. It’s a conduit. The connection.” Daniel the Dead stopped on that, looking uneasy. “Well, not a conduit. Scratch that. But it’s not going to be found by being looked for. You’ll have to let it find you.” 

With that, Daniel the Dead stalked off, and every time his foot touched the steel floors, they briefly burst into stone, and then something like flesh, and then back to steel, until he was out of sight. Daniel2 rolled his eyes. Preposterous. Anything could be found if you just knew where to look. 

The corridor signs read ABANDON ALL TIES, YE WHO ENTER HERE. Silly walls. Daniel2 patted the sign and it blushed a brief, vibrant red under his hand. 

“It’s a game, then,” Daniel2 said to the wall. “Hide and go seek. Hide and go chute. Well, I love games.” 

Daniel2 smiled with his perfect, white, even teeth, and looked up. The walls above latched and unlatched, clicked and rotated, until the florescent lights were arranged in a neat glowing arrow, pointing down an open corridor. Daniel2 laughed, a merry, sweet laugh, high and girlish, and started to walk down that way. 

Further behind him, watching from the dark spots of the thin access tunnel, the shadow Daniel watched, and speculated. The wall next to him shifted into a watery, summer blue, and he waved his hand at it. “No, no, he’s not a threat,” shadow Daniel explained patiently, “He’s something new entirely.” 

The Daniel in the shadows looked at the wall, which switched from a summer blue to a neon blue, and posed a simple question. 

“Do you know where the broken illusion machine is?” 

The wall flashed, excited. Other walls around it were stained blue temporarily, as though by splashed paint. The shadow Daniel nodded, and looked back at the receding, distant form of Daniel2. 

“Good,” said the Daniel in the shadows, and he stepped into the blue wall, which rippled like water, before becoming serene, blank, uniform steel. 

The hallway was silent, and the signs read ITS BETTER TO BURN OUT THAN FADE AWAY.