Nicely Strange Stories Home

Tainted Tea I got back to the unit and made myself a huge tannin and caffeine hit: a pint beer mug of lipton yellow label, peppermint and apple-and-cinnamon tea. what the hell, i threw in two teaspoons of sugar and a tablespoon of milk. i left the teabags to soak for a while and gave in to the growing urge to go through my ritually paranoiac examination of the unit. seven rooms, sixty-one wall panels to check with the EM tracer, compare the figures scrawled on the walls at those points against the level of EM activity we'd previously recorded there. nobody knew much about dominion tech except that it could be tracked by EM signatures. the walls were grids of scribbled figures, occasional angry scratch-outs and cross-hatching where the figures had started changing around the spot where the remote surveillance drone had pushed its nose. they were spying on us. we cooled it on the sock puppet thing (or at least removed most of the subversive themes in the plays) and it went away. scary; you pretend to be a good citizen and the gods turn their angry glare from you. six of us in that unit. we'd been doing the usual nervous, scared student things. writing plays that went for two hours and had twenty different levels of meaning and were performed with sock puppets for groups of three or four friends. making small art installations out of alien junk we'd found at the ExPort. having torrid affairs, exploring every possible combination of threesomes. sending chaotic manifestos to the media. becoming thirsty i cut the paranoid scan short and went back to my mug of tea. i lifted the tea bags out one at a time and squeezed thenm gently, working the tea out of the bag, the sudden heat stinging my fingertips in a pleasantly nostalgic way. when i squeezed the third bag, my fingers came away with a faint trace of oil. i lifted it to my nose, sniffed carefully. Araeana had attached a peppermint tea-bag label to one of her bags of Sativa, and i'd just infused the bastard into my tea. damn. she knew how that stuff affected me. i have the world's lowest tolerance for THC and invariably experienced extreme and unpleasant reactions. i glanced down sadly at the otherwise ordinary-looking (drink me driiink meeeeeee arrrgh the sow is mine!) tea. i would have to throw it out. i almost wept at this seemingly petty act of vandalism. after the bastard of the day i'd just had, to come home to another one of her stupid pranks... i really didn't need this. what i needed was something to work at for an hour or so, something that would take all of my concentration, totally exhaust me so i could sleep... the terminal pinged. it was netwar! the anarchartist's collective were one player short of a team and they'd found me on a list. i sat at the terminal, grinned and flexed my fingers. "le's do it t' them 'fore they do it to us." it was a hell of a game. it wasn't one of those insanely unconventional attacks from the State - yeah, they even invaded our leisure time, sent their own teams in, to make sure we were playing by State precepts. oh no, not this time. this was one team of repressed teenaged boys against another. someone once said you could guage the effectiveness of any police state by how violent the teenagers' parties were. this one lasted for two and a half hours, during which i didn't look away from the screen for more than three or four seconds. in the end - with the borders of the two net territories even more fractally convoluted than before - it had gone all the way, right to the ritual nuking of the spambot systems. i collapsed back in the chair then leaped out again and made a run for the toilet. ignoring the twinges of my now-empty bladder on the way back i found a cold mug of tea, shrugged and drank half of it. i didn't twig to what i'd done until five minutes later, when i found i couldn't stand up unassissted and that the kitchen broom was no friend of mine. i thought of sleeping it off, but my mind was racing too fast; the uneven hemispheres made my skull vibrate at a rate that was slowly eroding my mattress at one end. desperate to do something even marginally proactive i got up and turned on Araeana's video sculpture. at the moment it wasn't inventing anything more interesting than flatscreen lesbian porn. there was something odd about it, though, and it took me ten minutes to work out that it was running backwards. in perfect silence. weird skin-tones, too; yellowish-green with vividly contrasting fetish underwear in glowing purple. i particularly appreciated the horizontal static-lines; the pretence that it was 20thC. presently the nice effects of the tainted tea wore off and the nasty ones came on. really Simon-Bisley-slammingly-violent headache, nausea, weakness, nausea, chills, violent shivering set off by any noise louder than the sound of a cup of soup being digested by the cat next door, nausea, violent cramps and the general feeling that i was going to die. seriously. this was it. i'd binged once too often and the payback was, indeed, a motherfucker. it had happened to me before and each time i swore backwards that i'd never do it again. i slumped into one of those self-pitying Werther de Goethe poses and sighed "alas for me, Babylon" which i imagined sounded literate but only indicated pretention [1]. i crawled to the console and turned out all the lights. unfortunately Araeana's video sculpture wouldn't turn off until it had cycled through its routines once. the light hurt my eyes. turning away from an antique NTSC-lined (ah, the nostalgic feeling for the crass media of the 20th century!) Kate Bush dancing in a white dress, backwards. frantically waving her arms, backwards, i sought darkness like a maggot, crawling. i had to throw up soon. it was inevitable. i had three destinations. no, i had two; the student bathrooms were being repaired after a police action. the nearest other bathroom was across the road in the Interferometric Astronomy building and i knew i wouldn't make it that far. the only other choices were my bedroom. and Araeana's bedroom. yeah! i'd go throw up in her room! that'd teach her. i couldn't get up on my hands and knes by this point so i kind of swam across the floor to the passageway and then strangely against the usual reflex to turn right into my room, i turned left into hers. i'd only ever been in here once before (to help her move an old hard drive out the back door. typical maracite wannabe, she was keeping spiders in it). the room in darkness had that warm, thick, heady flowery incense smell that you like so much but can't work out what combination of essential oils does it. in contrast to your room, which smells like wet newsprint at the best of times and a Moorish opium den habituated by wet camels at the worst. Araeana's room smelled very nice to my dope-blitzed system. i crawled around the floor for a while, bumping into the fluffy toys that habitually gathered in there. shaking, i bumped my head against the side of her bed, located the edge of the covers and nosed under. i got most of my torso up on her bed (the heavy cover threatening, in my weakened state, to crush me); only my legs were dangling over the edge and a completely out-of-context erection - i think it was mine - was somehow trapped down against the side of her mattress. for a moment i panicked, thinking i might not be able to get out from under the cover. i had some brief ideas about burrowing down to the foot of her bed and escaping. i started crawling in that direction, moving slowly so as to minimise the feelings of nausea which were building up to loss-of-control point. my nose nudged up against something under the covers near the foot of her bed. a pair of her lacy black underpants (you're asking "how did he know they were black under the covers?" and i reply "*all* of her underpants were lacy and blacka and etc", so). for a moment i appreciated the humour in the situation - i mean you read so many stories on the net about people who obsessively pursue underpants and you can't help thinking how sad that is in terms of classic pervert stereotypes - then all of the scents in the room hit my brain at once. if i hadn't been feeling violently sick, i would have enjoyed the sensation, but just then my stomach cramped, saliva flooded into my mouth and the peristaltic tube down which i had poured so much food and drink backed off and said "this is out of my hands, dude." i puked right into her underpants. for a moment i thought i was going to drown under there, and only the most carefully-thought-out schema of backing away while throwing up prevented me from following in Jimi Hendrix's footsteps. i didn't even bother to wonder where all this puke was coming from; i'd hardly eaten anything for days. i fell off the side of her bed backwards, having discharged my puke capacitors for the moment. in the reltively fresh air i could put down the urge to vomit again, although i laughed so hard at what she was going to find when she got home, i almost threw up again. probably a bad move in my position - lying flat on my back. well, Araeana came home just as i went into a coma and stopped breathing. she thought i'd died in there, which got me out of a lot of explaining later on. i guess my reaction to her trying to fatally poison me was a little extreme - i mean, i invaded her own room! - but it got me out of a lot of embarrasing explaining after the paramedics saved me. we have an arrangement, now: she doesn't fuck with my tea and i don't throw up in her underpants. except by consensual agreement. [1] please email me if you can tell me if this is a real word or not. Fri, 9 Apr 1999

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