The Cure (Setting Vignette)

A vignette for a setting/game that I want to eventually flesh out. Inspirations: The Matrix, 1984, writings of Václav Havel, X-Men-style superheroes.

I

The apartment block is run-down and grey, just a standard-issue concrete-glass prefab in the outskirts of the city. Even the doorbell is government-issue. The plaque, once something like brass but destroyed by time, neglect, and vandalism, might have once said "Victory Estates". Underneath is a laminated plastic warning notice:

BEWARE - RATS

There is a CRT television in the corner of the flat, next to thick yellow curtains and in front of floral yellow wallpaper. The psychologist looks like Sigmund Freud, his hands are tapping on a brown book whose cover is in Cyrillic. On the TV you can see the fuzzy silhouette of a spaceship ready for launch. You ask to sit and watch the launch together before you start.

You loved the launches, as a boy. The roar coming out of the speakers is strange and distant, and you can’t tell if the therapist is actually watching you or the screen. His gaze is languid, like he has all the time in the world.

“I assume you did not come here to talk about rockets,” he says eventually, so you tell him about the dreams.

“I understand. It is a difficult time to be young. I have seen many… many cases of such dreams.” With fumbling fingers he pulls open a cabinet under the TV, revealing rows and rows of pill bottles with foreign names. As he fumbles with the pillbox you see something propped up in the cabinet such that it was directly under the lip of the television, a sliver of a note with thin, broken handwriting.

Careful - they are watching through the screen.

He closes the drawer without saying anything. The pills are silver-blue, almost too clean for the room you're in. Two a day. Antipsychotic. As he does this you notice that the book he is holding has almost fallen open. He tells you to follow him as he gets a prescription slip, then he shows you to the door. Framed against the heavy steel gate he opens the book as if to show you some notes, standing so that the screen only sees his back.

The book is hollow and there is an envelope inside. It’s labelled with the same handwriting as before:

This is all we can do for you now.

You quietly pocket the envelope as you ask him about his career and the weather. He’s been a national psychologist for twenty years, twenty-one come October.

II

On the way back in you stare out of the bus window as concrete gives way to grass, brick, and then steel. The metropolitan interior you see outside the window looks like a model out of a city builder game, polished marble statues perfectly braced against new international skyscrapers. Under a nest of CCTV cameras you see one of those massive stock tickers that you thought only lived in movies. Everything, everywhere, all at once, data streaming in from New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo. And, in the background, over and over again:

These premises are under video surveillance for your safety. This scheme is operated by…

At home you open the envelope. It’s a thick cluster of papers, photocopied and poorly scanned. Some of them look like they’re from the 80s. Some of them look like screenshots from websites with long strings of alphanumeric characters as the address. You pick one up.

THE POWER OF THE POWERLESS

You pick another one up.

Report on manifestations of atypical physiological and neurochemical behaviour in youth under stress incl. “savant syndrome”

And then you see it. A handwritten letter amongst the ephemera. The handwriting is different.

If you are reading this, you are one of us. The dreams are not just dreams. You have the potential to change everything.