(ALMOST-MUOC) One Of Us

I guess that this is too late to be submitted to the MUOC competition, but that didn't stop me in wanting to write this, it was fun. This song doesn't have any lyrics, but I hope that my piece of writing's flow and the feel to it can do a decent job in representing the feel of the song that I chose for it, despite the differing scale of time. I hope you enjoy it!

Please feel free to post criticisms, or even just to tell me that I'm a pratt and should stop writing. Any comment is a good comment, as it means SOMEONE read it.

Written to be complimented by the song 'Clubbed to Death' by Rob D, in The Matrix(tm) soundtrack.





I thought I saw him again, the man who was following me last week on my way home from club t3knoKrat. Dark, brooding, with an eery air of cold professionalism about him, as if nothing could stop him. I couldn't get a proper view of him, he'd keep dissapearing, but I could feel his eyes on me, staring at me through those pitch-black glasses. Who was he? Was he a government agent? Had the spooks who kidnapped me six months ago, gone back on their arrangement? I did everything they wanted me to, I wrote the program and hacked into the mainframe like they told me to, and I kept my mouth shut, like they told me to. Had I seen this man before? Did all these spooks look the same? As I passed the alleyways near my apartment where the local chinese community set up their fruit stalls, I thought I caught a glimpse of him standing behind an old woman. When I turned around to look, he was gone, but I knew that his eyes were always watching me.

I picked up my pace as I passed the herd of armani-wearing businessmen coming out of the subway tunnel entrance, just up the road from my apartment. I could have sworn that I saw his face in at least three of the dozen men that came out of that stairwell, just looking at them gave me the creeps. I decided to try and lose him, them, whoever the hell was following me, and sprinted. I was only a half a block from my place, and there were no other people in between me and my front door, so I figured he'd have no-one to hide behind, and ran for it. I reached the door, punched in the lobby door's combination code, and slammed the door shut behind me, franticly running up the stairs at the back of the hallway, desperate to get to the safety of my apartment. Exhausted, I reached the door and went for my keys in my back pocket, which is when I noticed that the door was ajar. I went to the other side of the hallway into my neighbour's apartment, knowing that she'd not be home at this time of day, most likely at bingo or the pokies with her old war widow friends. I used her spare key that she had lent me so that I could help take out her garbage, to open her door, and went to the window.

I climbed out onto the ledge, fingers already beginning to chill with the near sub-zero temperature of the metal railing surrounding the windows. I climbed over to my window and peeked in, it was dark, as I had expected. I moved my hand to the upper latch that I use to open the window from the inside (but was damaged by burglars when the previous tenant was living there), and I thought I had seen a silhouette of a man in a suit leaving down the hallway through the gap in the open front door, was it the man I had seen earlier? I shook it off as I opened the window to get inside to the warmth of my web-crawler server farm that was supposed to be a lounge room. I went to the door and kicked it shut, locking the deadbolts as fast as I could.

I grabbed the metal baseball bat that I always keep next to the door, and made sure that there was nobody still in the apartment. Nothing seemed out of place, and all my valuables were still there. Why had the door been left open? Had my landlady come in to let me know someone had left a message and forgotten to close the door? I was a little confused as to why nothing had been stolen, considering that I had over ten thousand dollars worth of emergency money hidden around the apartment, nearly quarter of a million dollars worth of computer gear, and enough pirate software to land me in prison for a millenia, not to mention all the completely illegal government hacks I had backed up on disc, scattered around my apartment. Some people would pay a king's ransom for that stuff, while some of it had been some pretty hefty stuff. Unwarranted wiretapping, transcripts of presidential conferences with associates of people being shown on the news as terrorists, stuff like that could be enough fuel for a comletely new civil war. They thought I had stopped hacking them when they asked me to help them locate a terrorist through some hacks, but it just felt wrong to keep it under a veil of secrecy.

I walked over to my main desktop computer terminal and I saw that something had happened to it, the screen was black, yet it was on, and there was a white shape in the middle of the screen. As I moved closer towards it, the shape began to take on the form of a white rabbit. I stared at the screen for a couple of minutes, wondering what had happened to my computer, and then heard a loud knock at the door. Since only residents of the building had access to the front door, I figured that it was my landlady, coming to say hello. I walked to the door and peeked into the spy-hole in the centre of the door, to see two men in dark-grey suits and sunglasses. One of them was the man that had been following me! I turned and looked at my computer screen again and the rabbit had begun to turn a green colour, taking on the shape of a japanese letter. Others appeared on the screen, and they began to scroll down at an incredible rate.

The men at the door knocked again, loudly enough to have woken up everyone else on the floor of the apartment building. I ignored them and looked back at the screen, it appeared as though it were a mirror, I could see my reflection in the screen perfectly. The knocking continued, but I didn't care. I started to notice a dark shadow appearing around my eyes in the reflection on the computer screen, and my clothes had started turning darker. My head began to feel as though the pounding on the door wasn't just on the door, but on every single neuron in my brain. My skin began to feel as though it were on fire, and my lungs felt like they were about to burst. I fell to the floor, writhing in absolute agony, screaming for it to stop. The pain stopped, I felt calmer, and as though I hadn't experienced any pain at all. I felt a complete emotional cleansing pass over my being, as though I had a new purpose. I looked at the screen again, not expecting to see anything but my own reflection.

All I saw was the man that had followed me, wearing a dark grey suit, black sunglasses, and a cold stare.

[edit on 7/4/2006 by nrky]