You are standing in the center of a small white room, featureless except for a speaker grille mounted high in one corner and a single blue button in the center of one wall.

> I NEED TO TAKE A BREAK FROM USING MY X-RAY VISION DREY

Command not understood. Perhaps there is another way to phrase that.

> CANT TALK— BOMBARDMENT BY KRYPTONITE

Command not understood. Perhaps there is another way to phrase that.

> EXAMINE WALL

Which wall? Please specify the north, south, west or east wall.

> EXAMINE EAST WALL

The wall is a smooth and featureless white.

> PRESS BLUE BUTTON

Click.

A burst of static precedes a man’s voice, coming from the speaker.

“What is your second question?”

> ASK “WHAT WAS MY FIRST QUESTION?”

“Your first question was, and I quote, ‘IS MY DAUGHTER SAFE?’”

“You have used your two questions. Good luck.”

The static swells momentarily and is gone.

> LOOKS DOWN TO EXAMINE ONESELF

You appear as you remember. You are whole and unharmed.

> LOOKS TO SEE IF ANYONE ELSE IS IN THE ROOM

You are alone in the room.

> LOOKS TO SEE IF WE HAVE ANY ITEMS WITH US

[Inventory]

You are carrying a Black Magic marker.

> DRAWS A DOORWAY ON THE WALL

Which wall? Please specify the north, south, west or east wall.

> DRAWS DOORWAY ON THE NORTH WALL

There is now a door in the north wall.

> ATTEMPTS TO OPEN THE DOORWAY

The door is now open. You see a red hallway to the north.

>DRAWS A DOORWAY ON THE SOUTH WALL, THEN EAST AND WEST WALLS

There is now a door in the south wall.

The ink from the marker is getting fainter.

There is now a door in the east wall.

The marker has run out of ink.

There is no ink left in the marker.

>ATTEMPTS TO OPEN DOORS

The east door is now open. You see a blue hallway to the east.

The south door is now open. You see a yellow hallway to the south.

> EXITS THROUGH THE NORTH DOORWAY

You are in a red hallway which meets an intersection to the north.

Static echoes through the hall as a voice emanates from a hidden speaker.

“Subject has exited the white room and is now moving into the red hall.”

> _

From the Insomnia Radio site:

The entries are in, and they exceed any expectations I had. The authors of these stories are gifted, dedicated, edgy, and inspired. This should basically be the hardest decision I’ve had to make in quite a long time.

Keep your eyes on the site as we narrow down the finalists.

—-

Man, I hope I win! In any case, I’m happy with the story. I haven’t written one in a while.

Here is a post I wrote today for Frayed that I am especially pleased with. Frayed players should read no further as it contains spoilers.

—–

You pass your time card through the clock with a ka-chunk. It’s just after noon [How is that even possible? It seems much later than that. Fuck, now the bus'll have to wade through lunch hour]. You take the stairs beside the loading dock, out into the alley, shrugging on your coat. It feels like the end of the day, like you have had hours of effort siphoned from you. The September air is crisp and pleasant, a kind of door you can put between you and the insular grey air of the warehouse. September, a month whose middle comes four days early now, twin skewers of tragedy protruding from the calendar, ground zero of a new era. The curriculum of your senior year at the University transformed overnight as fear took hold, tainting every topic. You quickly grew weary of your classmates’ unending screeds, as terrorism was now pertinent to a diverse array of subjects, the academic fallout of the new world order. Curfews on campus. The new social schisms of For and Against. Dissertations now scrutinized, filters checking for dissent. And no protective measures so far have made you feel any safer, perhaps the opposite. You look at your hand as you walk, a mysterious energy coursing under the skin, unknown agents perhaps at this very moment invading your body and mind. What level of alert should you be at?

You are approaching the mouth of the alley when your brain splits open, or at least something as startling occurs. Rings of bluish white light slice out of your head, superimposing grids of scan lines across your vision. It’s the sensation of pressing your face against a television screen not quite in tune. Images flash: a lanky black man with a huge ‘fro, looking like a character from a blaxploitation film, wielding a powerful handgun; two hulking ogre-like creatures; a combat of some kind, stylized, video game action; a ragged batlike shadow. Your hand sings with electricity and a voice informs you “Here our defenses failed and the timewraith lay hold of that which Hightower coveted.” The scenes snap loose and twirl ribbonlike into nothing, the sense of a planet-sized sphere shrinking back to its hidden compartment in your brain. It’s like waking from a dream, images still behind your eyes, wondrous yet somehow comprehensible.

You’re still walking towards the bus stop, the fantastic nature of this event rapidly fading into the mundane after just a few steps. [Shouldn't you be more concerned? This happens to people with brain damage or mental disorders.] Waiting for the bus and getting on board are tasks relegated to a subconscious sub process you vaguely acknowledge. All the seats are taken, so you snag an overhead leather loop. Your stature and rugged look commands a few extra inches of personal space, but it is soon lost to the slippery whims of inertia as the bus creeps ahead. Today even less of your mind is concerned with the passengers surrounding you, a crush of layered clothing wrapped around a warm, smelly human frame. Random conversations bubble to the surface and pop in the air, a stew of sound bites. “Then he say, ‘Ma’am, weez all out of the salami!’” “Cannot fucking believe how he dicked me over. Both tickets, man!” “An insufferable drunk, to be sure, but he held my mother’s heart on a fob chain tucked inside his breast pocket.”

The conversations blend into the engine sounds, you stand looking at nothing, your body making tiny automatic compensations as the bus stops and starts. You feel like nobody and at the same time you feel like the only real person on the bus. Without concentration, a wash of mediocrity could easily flood this scene, coloring you and everyone else in shades of grey. What can you do or say that would matter at all right now? Even the otherworldly events of the morning would falter on your lips, eclipsed by the shrill pronouncements from the back of the bus, warning everyone about the CIA’s nanotransmitters at the sticky white core of every Twinkie manufactured after 1969.

City lunch hour traffic delays your ride by fifteen minutes, but at last you find yourself deposited at the corner where your rickety apartment building is located. The foyer smells like old people, furniture polish and dust. You tromp down the wooden stairs to where a large basement has been divided up into three apartments. After an almost superstitious combination of key, lock and door handle jiggling, you stand inside your apartment.

A red light throbs on your answering machine, next to your dying plant. The light is so rare that you at first mistake the device for some kind of bomb.

Frayed Day 1 – Wednesday Never Put Up Much of a Fight

“In school, there were a lot of smarter kids. And when I first joined the force, they had some very clever people there. And I could tell right away that it wouldn’t be easy to make detective as long as they were around. But I figured, if I worked harder than they did, put in more time, read the books, kept my eyes open, maybe I could make it happen.”
- Columbo, The Bye-Bye Sky-High I.Q. Murder Case

As usual, it’s your bladder that wakes you up, pressing down on you like a water balloon. You swing your legs out of the fold out, scratching yourself. 1:12PM on the clock. Just some numbers that don’t mean anything anymore. You stagger past a stack of pizza boxes near the door [There aren't enough to make a trip to the trash chute worthwhile. Better wait.] and into your tiny white bathroom. You unleash a torrent of piss into the bowl, standing there, watching some kind of beetle crawl around the cracked tile in front of you. [Oh wait, it's a cockroach.]

You start to remember a dream you must have had before your bladder reached critical mass. It took place in a diner, a fifties style joint, the real deal by the look of it. Everything was in staticky black and white, not quite in tune, but the neon sizzled lurid pink bands of light through the scene. You were there to investigate a robbery. Someone had stolen something [No, not a *thing* per se, it was... no it's gone.] and you were there to question the patrons. They gathered around a chrome-wrapped table: Marilyn Monroe, Benny from the academy, and some guy in a top hat and suit, looking like he stepped out of Great Expectations (the one with Michael York, not the remake with Ethan Hawke). You asked them questions, but you don’t remember what they were. Sometimes you were sitting and then suddenly you’d be leaning against the bar. Marilyn Monroe (only she denied she was Marilyn, insisting her name was actually Trudy) said “Who’s to stop anyone from taking it in the first place? Not like anyone’s paying much attention.” Benny just sat there playing with a pile of fries. The guy in the top hat just watched you go through your detective routine, a placid smile on his face. You remember realizing you were getting a hard-on and didn’t want Marilyn/Trudy to see and that’s when you woke up.

Back in the living room/bedroom/office/storage area, you flip on the TV and it starts beaming out the good word from its pulpit of plastic crates. You adjust the shades to block out the autumn-tinted daylight washing out the screen. There’s a commercial for some new kind of mop. You hear someone banging on a door in the hallway outside your apartment. [You hope they stop soon.] A commercial for McDonald’s. [The McRib is back. Might be worth a trip down there.] Finally, a show. It’s Legacy, the soap about a whole community of pseudo-Renaissance courtiers who send their personalities forward in time where they are re-enfleshed in the tight young bodies of Los Angeles’ social elite. The writers borrow heavily from Shakespearean themes, judging by the similarities to the movies you’ve seen. [Thank God for NetFlix.]

The banging in the hallway continues and now someone is yelling. [For fuck's sake!] Ophelia just discovered that Mercutio had already asked Portia to attend the gallery opening with him, not realizing that Antonio was going to use the event to publicly embarrass Mercutio with new information about the Denmark incident. [You wonder if you have any email.] You like Mercutio because he hired a private detective in this one episode, and, well, it was cool. [You wonder if the actress who plays Ophelia is from Europe or if she is just faking an unplaceable foreign accent.]

On the screen Antonio is delivering a soliloquy as he paces alongside the billiard table in his immaculately decorated home. He holds the cue ball aloft, addressing it as though it were the head of Mercutio.

Out in the hall another voice has joined the fray. You recognize it as that of one of your next door neighbors. Brandon or something. He’s in a rock band. Sometimes they must practice in there and they are loud as fuck. You see Brandon and his roommate [John? Jim?] in the hall sometimes when you get your mail. It sounds like Brandon is trying to reassure whoever is yelling, but it doesn’t take and they keep going at it. You can even catch bits of what they are yelling: “He’s got to be in there! open the door? [If they are waiting on the landlord to get off his ass and actually do something useful in this dump they'd better pitch a tent.]

After the commercial Legacy resumes with a scene involving the two young lovers, Don Pedro and Miranda. [These two make you sick, all that fawning and going to the mall.] Don Pedro has decided to reinvent himself as a reckless bad boy by purchasing a motorcycle and cruising around town at high speed. Miranda doesn’t seem very pleased with this development.