Check Your Computer For News

Curious about the news, you walk to your computer desk and power up the system. You sit down with a sigh as the familiar logos pop up on screen as the machine starts, resolving again to someday get yourself a real secret base with a supercomputer and underground garage and jet runway like Batman or the X-Men or something. If only life was more like comics.

You check your email, noticing that something seems to be wrong with your monitor again. It keeps flickering, but it’s only barely perceptible so you ignore it for now. You don’t have any new messages from any of your superhero contacts. Your father’s publicist has sent you an invitation to another charity fundraiser later in the month. You fire off a quick reply, in full “Celebrity Lauren” mode, and tell him that three weeks is waaay too far away to make any definite plans and to text you the week before. You make a mental note of the date; there’s no way you’re going to disappoint your dad.

The flickering has stopped, but now there’s something else going on with the monitor. At the corners of the screen, you think that you notice shifting colors but when you try to look at them they disappear. You pull up your contacts list and start writing a message to CyberSprite, one of your ex-teammates and a super-engineer. She could probably set you up with either a new monitor or at least repair this one. As you’re type the email, you notice that you’re making a lot more errors than usual and you really need to focus to avoid making mistakes. You concentrate on the letters as they appear on the screen but still your fingers seem to be fumbling and slow.

It doesn’t help that the tiny specks of color seem to move at the edges of your vision, though they still vanish when you look directly at them. Just as you’re getting ready to shut things down, your email program beeps as a new message arrives. Moving to your inbox, you find that you’ve received an email to the anonymous hero tip line that the Justice **** set up. The mail, as usual, doesn’t identify the sender and it has been automatically routed to you as the closest qualified hero to deal with the report.

Opening the email, you’re momentarily annoyed to see that whoever sent it has written in fuchsia text on a multi-colored background that looks like some kind of a kaleidoscope design. You shake your head, wondering why the program doesn’t automatically convert the messages into normal text. You scan the message, surprised by the length; usually the tips are just a few lines but this one is at least 500 words. You start to read the message.

The tip is from a low-level henchman for Dr. Julian Dark, the criminal scientist. You’ve tangled with Dr. Dark more than a few times; most of his schemes involve building some kind of super weapon and threatening cities. But the email is saying he’s joined forces another villain, one who scares the anonymous whistle-blower. Apparently the two villains are working together to kidnap their old enemies and transport them . . . somewhere. The language in the email starts to get jumbled and confusing so you start to read it over, unsure if you’ve missed something.

As you do, you notice that the strange colors that before had been flickering just in the corners of the screen are interacting somehow with the kaleidoscope pattern behind the message. It seems like the motes of shifting color are drifting along the background, moving towards the center of the screen. You try to focus on the vibrantly colored words but the speed of the moving sparkles, and their frequency is increasing all the time, distracting you and pulling your attention towards the center of the screen. You blink, trying to refocus, but each time you do there seem to be more lights when you open your eyes, more colors, more motion.

The wheeling colors form a spiral pattern on your computer monitor, pulling your gaze straight to the center of the screen. The colors spin and turn before your eyes and you feel too confused and distracted to even reach the monitor. Your body starts to feel heavier as the spiral turns around and around, faster and faster. It is all you can see, all that you can focus on, all that you can think about.

The hidden subliminal messages that have been playing since the moment you turned on your computer are visible now, flashing on the screen and then disappearing, like everything else into the spiral.

“WATCH.” You watch.

“RELAX.” You take a slow breath and the tension flows out of your body.

“DRIFT.” It’s so easy.

“OBEY.” You obey.

“SLEEP.”