The Mark of the Beast:
While the students worked on their written assignment, Mr. Headly skimmed over a news magazine that his wife had bought for him the day before. On the cover page there were people standing in a lineup, all smiling, forearms extended for a picture. They all had recently received the newest implant, the “TH-41,” a small bead that syncs up with various technologies… For parents, it was a tracking device that monitored their children’s heart rate and resulting behavior. For children, it was a cell-phone that never gets lost. The article explained how the node worked alongside the nervous system, firing and in-taking electrical surges…
Mr. Headly felt his head throb as he read the article… The same thought kept smacking his conscious like a brick wall: this isn’t right, this is playing God. When he reached the end of the article, there was a doctor wearing a white smock with the company logo: a small bird spreading its wings to take flight flanked behind a rising sun. In the photo, the doctor was smiling cheekily and the caption read, “Dr. Whitehouse, Harvard graduate in neurology, recommends the TH-41 as the leading device in Somatechonlogy… “It’s a must-have for assimilation into this modern society.”
Shaking the head, Headly set the magazine down and let out a deep, anxious breath. He shut his eyes, ever so slowly regaining a walk around heart rate. He looked at the class. “You can stop now.”
All the students stopped typing on the flat-screen impressed into the desks… Headly tapped a control button under his desk and all the screens went blank...
“How many here has had a node implanted?”
Faces around the room looked puzzled…
“Raise your hands, I’m just curious.”
About two-thirds the class lifted hands… Mr. Headly nodded and glanced back to the magazine. His eyes fixated on the birdie spreading its wings. “Okay, I’m going to ask you a question. This is random, but because we have a few minutes left, I think it will be an interesting discussion. Especially considering the events in the last two years… Here it goes: What, if anything, is all the motion in the universe heading toward?”
Headly watched the class from behind the desk… His eyes were deep and hallow, the hair resembled a bowl cut, the bangs parted into a v-shape across the forehead. He wore the standardized clothing for staff, black and blue slacks, a school mascot above the pocket. A patterned tie hung from his neck like a long, red snake, which was the only dress variation allowed under regulation by the school-board for male faculty members… There was a prolonged silence while the question sunk in. The only sounds were a clock ticking away and an occasional ruffle as students shifted uncomfortably when Mr. Headly’s gaze transfixed upon them...
“Come, on. Somebody please answer me; what is all the motion heading towards?”
It looked as if nobody would answer and the echoing silence would persist, but then from a far corner of the room, a shaggy haired boy with rounded spectacles spoke up. “God. It’s all heading toward God, in some manifestation or another.”
Heads whipped around like wild swivels. Every eye in the room stared at the boy as if he had committed nasty blasphemy. Then, in order to catch the reaction, they all looked back to Mr. Headly… To their profound surprise, he was nodding and smiling… “Mr. O’Connor, could you elaborate?”
Mr O’Connor used a finger to push the glasses up the bridge of the nose... After a pensive moment, he finally said, “God is perfection. Therefore, all the motion of the universe is moving towards perfection.”
“Ahh, Perfection… Now that is something to move toward. Wouldn’t you agree?”
The students nodded in unison.
Headly looked displeased. “Why are you all nodding? Only two people in this room—Mr. O’Connor and myself—have any clue what they’re talking about...” Headly rolled the eyes, waved a hand peremptorily, and continued… “As for the rest of you, you’ve lived eighteen or so years, and none of you have the slightest idea about your existence. Pathetic, if you ask me…”
Another student, a boy with droopy eyes and baggy clothing, leaned back into a chair and truculently said, “Why does God have to be brought into this? Isn’t the fanciful notion of God the polar opposite of Philosophy?”
Whack— Headly hopped from a chair, sending it reeling backward into the wall. Palms down, he set both hands on the desk and leaned over. “Mr. Smith, WHAT is the meaning of the word Philosophy?”
Mr Smith’s jaw went slack like raw bacon and he stumbled for words…
“You have five seconds, Mr. Smith. Five..Four..Three..”
Smith’s face went scarlet… He finally admitted, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Headly rolled the eyes even more drastically, and spun around to the board. He touched a finger against the glassy surface and scribbled the word “philosophy” onto it. From the word, he extended a line and wrote something else which looked like a foreign language… “Philosophos, a Greek word which means lover of wisdom.” He turned back to Mr. Smith. “Now Mr. Smith, I’ll ask you one more time. Is God, what Mr. O’Connor referred to as Perfection, relevant to Philosophy, the Love of Wisdom, TRUTH?”
“If you say so…”
“If I say so? When does it matter what I say? It’s what you believe!”
The class was once again silent... Mr. Headly pulled his chair beneath and plopped down… “Okay, now I have another question for you—Are Computers perfect, flawless beings? They can calculate without error, observe without the blindness of subjectivity... Are computers meant—”
RINGGG—at that moment, the bell pierced over the intercom and students started packing up their things.
“On that note, have a good day...”
A girl asked what the reading assignment was for tomorrow and Mr. Headly told her that they didn’t have one, that they were free to go… After the exodus of students, one remained… It was O’Connor, his square spectacles glaring from the bright fluorescents above... He walked up to Mr. Headly’s desk and asked, “Mr. Headly, I’m afraid of what’s happening…” He flipped over his forearm. Halfway up, there was a red circle the size of a coin and in the center of it was what looked like a titanium bead stuck just beneath the skin…
“So am I.”
“Since I’ve gotten it installed, I feel like everything is a little off...”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure, I can’t really put my finger on it. At times, I feel like my thoughts are all jumbled up and disordered. I’m not sure... Anyhow, what got an ol’ geezer like you thinking about the nodes?”
Mr. Headly lifted the corner of the magazine... “My wife bought this for me and I gave it a read while the class was testing.”
“Is your wife afraid of them, too?”
“More so than me… She wants to move from the country if the congressional mandate goes through and all citizens are required to install the node.”
“Hopefully, they vote it down… One more thing—that stuff you said about all the motion in the universe is really starting to make sense…”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, it’s human nature to be impulsive… Yes, we humans have rationality, which in its purest sense is perfection, but I’m afraid this is going too far…”
“Good,” said Headly. “Means I’m actually teaching you neanderthals something… But why did you get that node put in if you believed they were intrusive?”
“My entire family choose to have it installed, and at the time, I really didn’t have a choice in the matter…”
“Well Mr. O’Connor, I think your fears are justified. Who’s to say some guy isn’t sitting behind a desk controlling your emotions and actions... It may be the first step toward a monster which will get out of hand…”
Mr O’Connor nodded and stared at the metallic bead. Then he abruptly said, “Thanks Mr. Headly. That’s all I was wondering. Have a good day.”
“You too, son…”
Headly frowned as the boy closed the door on his way out... He stayed around for a while, grading papers and organizing the room… The hallways were empty and ghostly while he locked the classroom as he left… With a briefcase tucked beneath an arm, Headly strolled the brief walk to his car, thinking of little along the way. He recovered the keys and fumbled with the lock. He let the car idle for a second before pulling out of the school parking lot.
He drove twenty-five miles an hour through Main Street on the way to his suburban home… He came to a stop at a red light and looked over to notice a large throng of sign wielding protesters chanting, “Nodes are bad, they make you go MAD!”
They were referring to an incident in Florida where a faulty node failed to sync up with a teenage boy’s nervous system and the boy went crack-pot, walking into his school and shooting at the entire class. Mr. Headly starred transfixed on the protesters until a car behind him honked and he realized the red light had changed to green…
On the highway, he passed several billboards advertising the newest node, the same titanium piece O’Connor had recently had installed. The billboard showed the same company logo: a birdie taking flight over a setting sun…
Mr. Headly wouldn’t have been so concerned about the nodes if the government, accompanied by high-end capitalistic investors such as the company manufacturing and selling the nodes, hadn’t attempted a unequivocal effort over the last two years to force ALL citizens to acquire such a node under the skin… Next month, Congress was voting on the proposition..and then..if they choose to mandate all citizens to have the implant..then Headly wouldn’t have a choice in the matter… He voted ab imo pectore they’d vote it down.
The past year had been a scary dream to him.
In the last book of the bible, the book of John, also known as the book of rapture, the one predicting the end times, there was an explicit reference to “the Mark of the Beast…” It was probably the only thing that Headly had remembered besides the Ten Commandments from those Sunday school lessons when his mother compelled him, sometimes even using threats of whipping, to force him to read the Bible scrupulously...
As he remembers, the book prophesies that the Mark of the Beast is the telltale sign of the coming Apocalypse… Everybody would be forced to carry the sign—and if they choose otherwise— buying food and acquiring the means to survive will be nearly impossible…
Headly saw the node and the government’s attempts to force citizens to acquire it as ‘the Beast... He hoped with all the heart that Congress would vote it down or else he would have to find another country to live in…
But the problem was that most of the westernized countries had also adopted the node…
He thought it was all insane.
On the other side of the argument, the proponents of the node envision a day when crime would be virtually eliminated since the nodes can monitor all the sensory input of the persons wearing it…
Perfection, they argue…
With the node, they can create the perfect state.
But Mr. Headly didn’t see it that way at all… He saw the damned thing as the elimination of free will, the very thing that makes us human…
What was the world coming to?
He tried to forget about the billboards and the morality of the nodes as he drove into the driveway… He shifted the car into park, leaned back and shut his eyes... He swallowed deep breaths while he cleared the mind…
Stacy would be inside, moving about the kitchen, preparing dinner… He didn’t want to bother her with more of his unnecessary fears. They were bad enough on their own. He didn’t need them infesting her already troublesome conscious… He opened his eyes and commanded, “Glove box, open.”
It popped ajar and he recovered an orange pill bottle. He unscrewed the lid and shook out two tic-tac sized pills. The label on the bottle recommends one daily, but with the stress from these last few weeks, Headly swallowed two anyways…
When he stepped into the night, the sky had morphed an amber hue and crickets were already singing their sporadic tune... The soles of his shoes crunched the pebble surface of the walkway leading to the front door.
He stood before the door and took more of those deep breaths… As he slid the key into the door, he heard a rustle from somewhere behind.
He whipped around suddenly and nervously squinted over the shadowy lawn... There was no noise except the whistling wind and crickets, and absolutely no signs of anybody around.
“Come on, Bill.” he told himself aloud… He shook his head and, ever so lightly, pushed in the front door…
It swung open in a slow arc…
To his suprise, the hallway light was off and the house was dark except for a light pouring from the kitchen down the hall…
“Stacy, baby, I’m Home.”
No response…
Even if she wasn’t downstairs to hear him, he mentioned the nodes despite the aforementioned self-promise seconds before not to... “I read that article you showed me. Man—its getting all sorts of scariness… I asked the class how many had the damned thing installed and nearly the whole class raised their hands...” He flicked on the light and set down the suitcase by his feet… A few feet further in, a pile of letters were stacked on a table against the wall. Absentmindedly, he flipped through the letters, none of which were for him... “Honey, I’m star-ving. I hope you’ve got something ready,” he said, walking toward the kitchen…
When he rounded the corner, he saw a pot of water steaming on the stove and Stacy, with her back toward him, sitting at the table… He tiptoed behind her and reached out both hands... With one hand, he hugged her neck and the other cupped her breast. “Baby, you know it’s been a long day…” He slid his hand down her stomach and over her thigh. Inch by inch he moved up her thigh. He could feel her warmth through the spandex… He rubbed and rubbed but she didn’t give the slightest sign of noticing his affection…
“Baby?”
He let go of her—SMACK, she plopped down against the table, landing directly on her forehead...
“Baby? Are you—” He propped her up and bent around to see her face…
“AHHHHH..”
That’s when he saw it.
Her eye sockets were gorged out, leaving only black, fleshy holes where her green eyes had once been.
He dropped her and fell backwards, kicking his legs until his back was against the wall. “What the fuck? Oh my Jesus! What the fuck!”
His eyes were watery but he could see the distinct outline of shoes and legs coming from the darkened living room…
The figure spoke. “That’s what happens to those who see too much.”
Tears were streaming down Headly’s cheeks… He tried to lift himself and get to the kitchen counter where a sheath of knives lay, but the knees then the hamstrings failed beneath.
The figure darted like lighting into the kitchen, magnificently bright light illuminating the face…
“Mr. O’Connor? Eric, what the hell are you—”
In the hand, Eric carried a long blade, blood dripping from the tip.“This is what happens when you hear too much…”
Headly managed to plant his feet and push up the wall. “Eric, what the hell have you done?”
“I haven’t done a thing!” The boy stepped toward him, raising the knife…
Headly’s only chance was the sheath on the counter…
He bolted left, getting two steps closer, but he was just a foot too slow.
A molten sting spread throughout the abdomen as they collided and the knife met Mr. Headley’s middle-aged intestines.
He gagged steamy blood. “Eric, what are you–”
He shoved the knife deeper... “I’m ridding the world of those who don’t believe in PEFECTION…”
“Please, nooooo!”
But the last thing Mr. Headly saw was Eric’s eyes behind blood smeared spectacles… They weren’t the same eyes Mr. Headly had come to know over their last semester together... They were husky gray and seemed robotic and somehow manufactured.