Fear the Abyss: 22 Terrifying Tales of Cosmic Horror (21 page)

Attention freed up, Mark tried to process his emotions. He knew that all of this anger at the aged was displaced aggression about losing control of his family. It dawned on him that his preoccupation with the word "nursing" was really just a psychological sign of something that gnawed at his psyche. Perhaps it was his growing concern about his wife's "nursing" of the bottle of booze. Or that he blamed his wife--the mother of his son--for not caring for Tommy the way a good mother should. That would explain the boy's violence as much as some abstract bad influence of the media. The dismembered head in Tommy's drawing did bear a slight resemblance to himself, after all. And the dog really had been more faithful to Mark than any of them. The whole thing was textbook Oedipal complex.

As he pulled into his neighborhood, he resolved to improve the communication lines with his wife and son.

But the driveway in front of his brown-and-red bricked house was blocked. A white utility van from Intellivo was parked in his normal place. "What's wrong now?" he asked aloud, and his dashboard said "Please restate your destination" with synthetic care. He pressed the kill switch in the BMW.

In his living room, Maria slurped coffee while a man in white-and-gray uniform and ball cap worked around the cable box near their primary television screen. She smiled at him, but didn't move to greet him with the usual kiss.

Mark scanned the room. "What's going on? We just got the full house decked out two months ago."

"They're installing the VQ."

"The what?"

The Intellivo man turned around as static on the high definition TV fizzed into a steady image of the local news broadcast, covering traffic and weather. "That should do it, Mrs. Savage." He tipped his hat at him. "Mr. Savage."

His mind was trying to remember how much he had paid on the last Intellivo bill. "VQ? What station is that, exactly?"

"Why don't you both come on over here and I'll show you how to operate it."

Mark joined Maria's side.

The man paged through stations on the television with a remote control. He stopped when the screen showed a woman in a black nightgown, standing face-to-face with a shirtless man in silken boxers. "Here ya go. Blood of the Night. Perfecto."

Mark dimly knew that Blood of the Night was one of the new "sexy vampire" spinoff shows on a premium station, but he'd never watched it before. He didn't go for such things. "Oh, VQ is a station. I see..."

"No, sir. VQ is short for the 'Violence Equalizer.' It's called a 'Graphic Violence Equalizer to be more accurate." He blinked. "But most folks seem to prefer calling it 'The Tamer.'"

"It's sort of like the V-Chip," Maria said to him, with a familiar, dismissive tone.

Mark looked at her sideways. "The censoring chip they used to put inside of TV sets?"

"Yes and no," the Intellivo man cut in. "It's a completely new technology, really. Let me just show you."

He picked up another remote control from the TV stand and pointed it at the set top box. Mark noticed that this one had four slider buttons on them, lined up like mixing-board levels. "Oh, I get it. VQ...like the EQ on my old stereo." He stroked his chin, suddenly captivated.

The Intellivo man nodded and pointed at the device in his hands so they could follow along. "Exactly. An EQ system allows you to adjust the bass and treble and midrange frequencies of sound. Well with the VQ, you can adjust the images instead. You manipulate the full spectrum of sex and violence in whatever you're watching on the tube."

Mark tilted his head. "Like some kind of parental control switch, eh? Blocks out shows based on settings? Sounds interesting."

"Well...I wouldn't use the word 'block.' This is far more advanced than any parental controls of the past. The V-chip relied on the ratings system. This relies entirely on you. It's more like there is a computerized film editor up in the Internet cloud, watching over the show and changing things ever-so-slightly, depending on how you set the switches on this device." He smiled and waited to see Mark's reaction.

"It doesn't block anything? You still get to watch the show?

"Exactly," he nodded, his smile a little wider. "Only the VQ invisibly edits out the nasty bits on the screen and the soundtrack." He tapped it. "You can't really turn it up. Just tame things down. It's really quite remarkable."

"I'll believe it when I see it," Maria said, though clearly she was already convinced it would work, because she had requested the installation when he was away at Holmstead and set this whole thing up in the first place. He was a bit peeved that she didn't get his approval first, but he immediately understood the potential it harbored for solving the problem of Tommy's television privileges.

The Intellivo man pointed at the television, where the scenario in Blood of the Night had shifted from a mere nightcap conversation to actual dry humping as the standing, writhing bodies moved closer and closer in a sort of slowdance heading to the nearby bed. Mark blushed a little when the vampire seductress pulled back and parted her nightgown down the middle with a sharp fingernail to reveal the full voluptuousness of her heaving breasts. She fell onto the half-naked man, who immediately began to suckle a pert purple nipple, making sure to give its sharp tip plenty of camera time as he licked it. Then the vampire woman pulled his head up, kissed him on the neck and then lunged, snapping her head back and in the process tearing off a swath of skin in that looked something like a flank steak dangling in her sharpened, bloody jaws. So much blood sprayed out of the wound that droplets actually landed on the camera lens while the naked man choked and drained out onto the bed. The woman took a bite of his flesh and swallowed, blood bubbles shiny on her breasts.

"Well isn't that special?" the Intellivo man joked, and then rewound the scene--which looked just as horrifying to Mark backwards as it did forwards.

He replayed the scene and then held out the VQ right before the vampiress opened her gown. He slid one of the four levers downward and the woman's clothing magically dissolved back into place.

"Well I'll be!" Maria said, sounding almost cartoonish.

"Wait…that's the sexy part. Not the violence," Mark said.

The technician grinned and nodded as he slid a second button down at the moment when the vampire forced her lover's head up toward hers and wrapped her chin around his neck. "Sexual Violence is just one of the controls," he said. "This other one is dedicated to Bodily Harm and Gore." On the screen, the woman pecked her lover's neck with a gentle kiss as the camera slowly panned up to the ceiling and the scene faded into the next.

It was almost as if nothing gory or filthy had even happened.

"Rewind!" Mark demanded, enthralled, reaching for the VQ. "And let me try!"

The Intellivo man handed Mark the switch console while he used the regular DVR remote to rewind the program yet again. Mark noticed that the woman's blouse stayed in place, even when rewinding, as if the sexual images had never been displayed to begin with. "Impressive," he said, noting that the settings held firm. The scene started over again and Mark slid all four of the buttons all the way to the bottom. The woman's nightgown was replaced with a fancy cocktail dress that draped down to fully cover her arms and legs. The man suddenly had a tuxedo on. The characters still writhed a little as they stood there--intimate--but there was still space between them. But their bodies jittered a little.
             
"Well, that's a little weird."

"Oh, the romance is all still there, only it's extremely subtle. The little ones won't know what they're missing."

Maria pulled the gizmo out of Mark's hands. "So what do these other two buttons do?" She started adjusting them randomly. The screen morphed and wobbled and the bedroom setting was replaced by a diner. The vampire smiled and her fangs had disappeared. It might as well have been some kind of Martha Stewart rerun.

"Wow," Mark said. "This is unbelievable."

The Intellivo technician counted on his fingers. "You've got your Sexual Violence, your Bodily Harm and Gore, your Painglory, and your Psychological Torment buttons. All in a row." He picked up a toolbox. "Mix it down as you wish. It roughly ranges from R-rated down to G, though those ratings don't really mean much on cable TV anymore. You can fine tune each area of...obscenity...whatever...to make any show you choose reveal as little as you want."

Mark turned to the man while Maria played around with the television, making the vampire's boobs pop in and out of sight. "I get the idea...but how does it work? The different dress and such. Surely every show on television isn't filming all that extra stuff just to fill in for this device. That would be impossible!"

"It's pretty complicated technology," the man said, walking with Mark to the front door. "But I do know it relies on the Internet. Luckily Intellivo has the least amount of downtime in the industry. You're safe." He coughed into his hand. "The VQ is able to scan the image, rapidly substituting alternatives based on matching images and sounds it pulls down from the cloud...almost instantly." He nodded to himself. "The Internet is amazing, isn't it? I remember a time when people were afraid of all the junk out there online, contaminating their children. Now it's saving them from seeing things."

Mark understood what the man was getting at. He dimly remembered seeing news reports about cable regulation, in the wake of some pretty nasty school shootings last year. Right wing politicians were asking for tighter regulations on obscenity and First Amendment wonks were pushing back in the name of Free Speech. "Grown-ups wrote the Constitution," some congressman had famously said. Maybe the VQ was the result of some kind of compromise that the industry came up with, to cool down the growing flames from the public. He hadn't really been following the news lately, so he wasn't sure.

"Damnedest thing. I even heard that some networks are starting to exploit this here technology for themselves to make up new shows using only animatrons and green screen. Guess it's easy enough to do now, with the net and all. Just pull in the imagery you need off the cloud and recycle it into something new. I suspect we'll see channels made of nothing but remixes soon enough. And the thing is, we probably won't even notice the difference. Heck, for all we know, it's all computerized already as it is."

Mark smiled and nodded, amazed by how rapidly so many things were improving in everyday life. From the advancement in Maria's cooking to the auto-pilot in his car, life just kept getting better and better. Maybe this really would help his relationship with his son, too.

"Since you're an early adopter, we'll come right out and update it to the new tech free of charge, whenever they issue an upgrade. Our appreciation." He made his way out of the door. "And just give us a ring if anything goes wrong. Thanks again, Mr. Savage." He peered over Mark's shoulder. "Mrs. Savage."

Maria ignored them as she changed to a cooking channel and played with the VQ switches.

Tommy appeared at the top of the stairs and walked sullenly down and into the kitchen. "Who was that?" he asked his father in a voice that sounded like he didn't really care about the answer.

"Nothing special. Cable man. Came to install an upgrade," Mark said, wondering how much his son had heard and seen.

Tommy didn't reply.

Mark shot his wife a look to get her to stop playing with the new device. But she couldn't help herself.

*****

By 2:30 in the morning, Maria had passed out in her recliner, but Mark was still wide-eyed and excited about the Graphic Violence Equalizer. Normally he didn't believe in censorship, but the VQ allowed for so much fine tuning that it felt like he was literally creating new programs at the slide of a button.

The "painglory" setting, for instance. He had heard of vainglory, but not painglory, and it provided a fascinating adjustment to the screen image. If a character ever seemed to relish inflicting violence, their twisted smiles and dark laughter could be muffled out. If a scene involved torture or punishment, the camera zoomed in on the instrument of torment, excluding both the inflictor and the afflicted from the shot, so that you only saw hands or hammers or belts moving across the screen. The action was clear, but nothing whatsoever was glorified in a way to encourage identification. In fact, it was discouraged completely. Slide another dial and the camera went elsewhere. Sometimes weapons were replaced with other objects or removed entirely. Blood, wounds, dismemberment--erased. But in a smart way. It was the equivalent of editing on-demand, rather than overlaying things with a black-bar redaction or an entirely blocked show. It was, he though, ingenious.

The Intellivo technician had said that some people called it "The Tamer" and the VQ certainly did that. But what Mark found so compelling wasn't simply that it made the violent movies and TV shows less violent. What he liked was that the story they worked on remained intact. Narrative was something he felt very passionate about in his line of work. The psyche was made up of the stories people told themselves. And the problem with so many horror movies and crime dramas wasn't simply that they were violent or glorifying pain--it was that they had given up on giving the violence and pain any narrative context whatsoever. It was all just so much visual spectacle--gore for gore's sake--the equivalent of hardcore porn for a cheap thrill. The narratives were flimsy when you scraped away all the eye candy. And editing out the violence could only reveal just how empty those calories really were. Their stupidity would now be obvious to anyone who watched--even a twelve year old boy.