AncilChapter 15: The Making Of An Act
I followed Megan and the First Lady, who seemed to have quite a liking for each other, down the corridor. They were talking the whole time and I just followed behind without a single idea of what they were talking about. I assumed that at some point they were talking about me because Megan occasionally turned around and giggled for no apparent reason. I was so confused.
The First Lady led us into her office and apologized for some of the things that she had put us through. She even told us her name. Her name was Samantha Jack, Sam for short. She told us a bunch of things about the ACT Programme but most of it were things that we knew already. We tried to come up with a plan on how to stop the Midnight Robber but there were still so many things that we didn’t know about the Midnight Robber that coming up with a plan was almost impossible. Only then did I decide to take out the flash drive that the Bookman gave me and show it to the First Lady. She took it and plugged it into a small laptop that was on the table. The laptop had a small opening in the back and from it a light projected showing everything that was on the screen. She took out a laser light and started pointing to things on the projected image. The image seemed to have been responsive to the laser light because she was controlling everything with the beam. The flash drive contained a few hundred JPEG images, a couple documents and a couple hundred video files. Sam opened up a few of the JPEG images and they were all pictures of dead people with names of Carnival characters on them. The bodies were slightly rot and paled as though dead for a few days.
“What the hell is this?” Sam asked in disgust. She kept flicking through the pictures and they were all dead bodies with just different faces and Carnival characters tagged to them. She then went on to open a video and the video started with visual of Megan’s father fixing the camera in place. He didn’t look very muscular or dangerous or anything like the Midnight Robber for that matter. He had a pair of huge nerdy round glasses and a lab coat on in an old basement.
“Hello, my name is Jeremy, Jeremy Duncan and I am an unemployed Biochemist specializing in the field of Artificial Symbiosis. I have been studying the ACT Programme for a while now and it was brought to my attention that the programme has been encountering some errors when it comes to long term symbiosis. In my years of studies I discovered that the living human body eventually recognizes the other half of the symbiotic relationship as a threat and develops its own ways to become immune to it. The body is very smart and will not allow the relationship to occur again. However, I developed something new that I believe can be of great aid to the ACT Programme. The ACT Programme uses the art of human programming to be able to merge the local character and a human into one symbiotic being. However, in order to stop the body from becoming immune one must use the art called, Human Reprogramming. The same way a computer has code that affects its actions the same way the body has code. DNA codes. Genetic codes.” Jeremy then moved the camera and focused it on a small bed that had a pale corpse of a man strapped to it tightly. “The ACT Programme is all about mind control. Giving someone the ability to become someone else if only just for a day. That someone else can be your favorite Carnival character or cartoon character. But I’m here to tell you that that is impossible, at least, with a living body. The living body always functions against that sort of thing. However, when the bodily functions of man fail, the possibilities are endless. The body becomes a shell that is begging for life. Begging to become something or someone else.” He then picked up a syringe filled with a blue substance and injected it into the corpse. “Nothing will happen now, but in a few days you will see some noticeable change.” The video ended.
Sam went straight into the next video and let it play. In the video, Jeremy was holding the camera and focusing it on the same corpse from before. It wasn’t a corpse anymore though. The body wasn’t pale as it was before and the lungs were expanding and contracting really quickly forcing quick jets of air out the nose and mouth. He carried the camera down the man’s body all the way to his legs that seemed to never end. His legs went on and on till we finally had visual of the man’s feet.
“15 feet long. Now that is performance.” Jeremy said. While focusing the camera up and down the man’s elongated body a little girl skipped down the stairs to the basement and stood in front of him and said, “daddy, mommy say to come for food.”
“Tell her I’ll be there in a minute, alright sweetheart?”
“Okay.” The little girl said as she skipped back up the stairs.
“That was just my little girl Megan. Isn’t she adorable?” Jeremy said. “Before I go join my family to have lunch. I will like to say that I’m willing to provide the technology and the information that I’ve gathered here to you for a small cost that can help me feed my family.” He then set the camera on some sort of stand and went in front of it and continued. “I have just created a naked Moko Jumbie. It has physical and personality traits associated with a Moko Jumbie. All it needs now is a costume and I could safely say that I’ve created a Moko Jumbie and…”
“Jeremy!!” A female voice shouted in the distance.
“I will talk to you later. I have to go,” Jeremy said before the video ended.
Sam kept on flicking through the videos and each one was basically the same just with different patients. One of the videos showed the creation of a Blue Devil. A man whose skin turned blue and grew horns out of his head. There was also the creation of Dame Lorraines: Women with excessively large buttocks and breasts. We didn’t watch all the videos but we watched enough to get an idea of how the whole process worked.
“So basically,” I started. “The Midnight Robber is killing people and using their corpses as shells to carry these old Carnival and Folk Lore characters.”
“Yeah, that seems like it in a nutshell,” Sam said.
“Why go through all that trouble to bring these Carnival characters to life?” Megan asked.
“He’s your father, why don’t you ask him?” I said to Megan.
She then punched me on my shoulder.
“We can’t let him do that to the Capital City. This country will fall to pieces if the Capital falls,” Sam said. “We have to do something.”
“We could fight! Call a state of emergency,” Megan shouted.
