SHOWDOWN BETWEEN THE UNNATURAL-BORN CHIMERA AND THE SHADOWFOX GRIEFER

“Wars begin where you will, but they will not end where you please.”

Machiavelli

“You and I have unfinished business.”

The Bride

Kill Bill, Vol. 1 & 2

Quentin Tarantino

Chapter One

Password to a “Wow” Moment

(But first, a brief preview of coming attractions—)

((((—so down, girl, and sheath those claws and hide those vitriolic fangs—)))) the Shadowfox Griefer’s tinny voice-modulator-filtered screed echoed throughout Café 70s, causing all those currently OnSet to stop whatever pieces of business their avatars were engaged in to turn their highly-stylized, prim-animated heads in the ranting Griefer’s direction—as well as that of the Unnatural-Born Chimera’s Esmerelda Villa Lobos avatar. But before she could open her mouth to say something, anything, in rebuttal into the earpiece mic hovering close to her rage-pursed lips, she suddenly realized, I know that voice—if only I could remember her name—

(FADE OUT ON PREVIEW—)

“—You want bottle of iodine, for whatever crazy thing you plan to do? Gimme password, first, Freak-Boy, or it’s gonna go down drain—” Mika-Maus’ green-lacquered fingertips began to unscrew the white plastic cap on the bottle of medical-strength iodine either Jack or Jacob had stolen from the supply cabinet, while the pair of Minnesota guinea pigs approached her from either side of the sink…or tried to, given the fact that Mika’s roommate for the duration of this particular Phase I clinical drug trial was fending them off with alternating swats from a long-handled janitor’s broom which she and Mika had stolen from yet another room in the university hospital.

“Forget it Jake, it’s—”

“If you say ‘Chinatown’ I’m shoving this broom down your throat, fat bristled end first,” the Unnatural-Born Chimiera warned them, shaking the business end of the heavy cleaning implement in the eye-brow-pierced and inked face of the nearest g.p., while Mika-Maus waved the uncapped bottle with one hand, and mimed tossing the cap at the other brow-ringed nit-wit, before she sloooowly tilted the container of murky sharp-smelling brown liquid toward the sink, crooning, “The staff here might not miss one bottle but two bottle—someone might no-tice—”

“Oka, okay, you got me—it’s—”

“Jack, there’s still another bottle in—”

“Yeah, one-more-bottle…between us and crunchy-tat perfection—”

“‘Crunchy-tat’? You want iodine, for a tattoo? You’re gonna put iodine, which stings like crazy and kills skin cells, into a tattoo needle’s ink bottle and put it into your skin? You guys are crazy—”

“Not in the skin, on the skin…paint it on, bandage it up tight, wait, and then…crunchy tats.”

“In Japan, we have name for that…a scab—” A single dark drop pinged! Against the waiting stainless steel hospital sink, while Mika-Maus waited for the darting and broom-ducking Freak boys to reconsider her offer of the iodine for the password.

“Mika, how ’bout we let you watch us do one up, for the bottle?”

The green-card guinea pig looked over at her broom-toting roommate and lifted both eyebrows, as if to ask Think that’s worth the bottle?

Shaking her head No way, the Unnatural-Born Chimera poked Jack-or-Jacob in the chest with the broom, before countering, “How ’bout you give us a ‘crunchy-tat’ show and the password? Remember, one of you let it slip that this virtual world is out there…we wouldn’t of known if—”

“—if Jack-ass hadn’t of been bragging about it,” Jacob said, before he stopped bobbing and weaving, and leaned against the multi-drawered cabinets which surrounded the sink, his arms crossed against his tee-shirted chest.

(Mental note—Jacob is the one with the ring in his left eyebrow, the U-B C told herself, as she lowered the brook, slightly.)

Mr. Right-Brow-Ring whined, “All I said was, Miss Mika over there looked like an avatar from ReeLife, which could’ve meant one of those clubs in VLES, only you had to clarify things by adding that you weren’t sure if she looked more like a Go-Go avatar, or a member of the 5,6,7,8s, so you’re the one who made them realize we were talking something other than just a Virtual Lower East Side thing—”

“And I suppose both of you presupposed that neither of us would be Tarantino fans, since we’re just girls,” the U-B C teased, as she lowered the broom, and tucked the rounded end of the stick under one armpit.

“Or since one of us is Japanese, and nice Japan girls don’t watch bloody American revenge flicks—”

“Ah, gotcha there—Tarantino made a special version of Kill Bill just for Japanese and Hong Kong audi—”

“She knows that—”

“But that doesn’t mean that she saw—”

“Sorry, but I saw. And got on DVD. And download to PC. ‘You and I have unfinished business…‘Revenge is a dish best served cold—Old Klingon Proverb’…‘Bill—it’s your baby—’ boys, I speak Tarnatino. All films. I speak Caddyshack, too…‘No wonder tigers eat their young—’”

“Point taken,” Jacob demurred, before reaching into his back jeans pocket and reluctantly sliding out a small spiral note-pad and a pen swiped from the front desk of the university hospital admissions desk, which was lettered with the hospital name, city and state along one side, and began printing something in block letters, while Jack moaned, “You let those two OnSet and they’ll take the place over…you know that, doncha?”

“Yeah, yeah…okay, who gets the password?”

“Did you really think it would be that easy?” The U-B C used the handle of the broom to thunk Jacob on the side of the head, then said, “No show, no iodine…but I will take the password—”

And so the guinea pigs from Room 456 were treated to the rather dubious new “tattooing” method dreamed up by the g.p.’s from Room 452, namely using a latex-gloved fingertip to paint on a broad-stroked design on a flattened section of flesh, then quickly slapping on a standard (if rather big) boxed Band-Aid over the wet iodine. That was it. But, after noticing the exchanged looks of obvious let-down between the women, Jacob pulled up his left jeans leg and showed off a large brown-tinged bandage, whose edges barely covered a ring of puckered pink flesh. Peeling off the nearest sticky flap, Jacob revealed a raised, and yes, very crunchy-looking rippled scab, in the vague shape of a star.

“So…what’s left after the scab falls off?”

“This—” Jack began, while pulling his tee shirt out of his pants and showing off his lower belly, which was distorted with a faint bas relief of what could’ve been a stick dog (maybe), or perhaps a child’s version of a horse, in oddly discolored thickened flesh.

Both women exchanged a brow-wrinkling, eyes-narrowed “Huh?” look, then Mika-Maus asked, “And you decided to do this for a reason?”

“Yeah—for Bod-Fest…you two should come to the Twin Cities for more than clinical trials. Or stick around for the Phase III trials that last for weeks—there’s one coming up around Bod-Fest that’s taking place in a hotel near the Fest grounds—”

“But you know what a Phase III entails—everyone stays put while they’re being monitored—so what’s the point, Jacob? Besides, why waste our time at some freak-fest when there’s Wi-Fi in an air-conditioned room? And cable? And room service—” the U-B C started to argue, but Jack cut in, “So you’ve never been in a study where someone didn’t do a little sneaking out? Or raiding the pop machine? Tipping the candy machine until it rained Snickers?”

“Yeah, it’s not like we’re tied to the bed with hep-lock catheters in our arms, or waiting for some wage slave medic to shove a tube down our noses—”

“You’re missing the point—we’re being paid to stay put, while whatever drug we’re being paid to swallow or inhale or get injected in our veins either works or doesn’t work—”

“Or give us hideous, life-and limb-altering side-effects,” Jack persisted, “like that mess over in London in ’06…all the ’pigs who got that monoclonal antibody treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and m.s. sicked-out. One ’pig’s fingers and toes had to be lopped off—”

“Everybody know what happen at Northwick Park Hospital,” Mika-Maus sighed, “All the guinea-pigs got sick and stay sick. For good. We all know all the horror-story—the suicides, the side-effect-side-show. We do this ’cause we get paid for sitting around doing nothing while drugs do something to us. Or not. ’Cause it’s a thrill ride inside. A paycheck without work. And maybe Wi-Fi in the room, or a pool table if the unit is housed in a dive. Maybe person next door is an illegal immigrant, maybe ex-con, maybe even crazy homeless person. Same thing in office cubicle, only there you gotta work—”

“You two only show up for the clinical trials when drugs are involved—I’d like to see you girls ride the invasive train—”

As soon as Jacob said that, the U-B C flashed a quick sideways glance Mika’s way, but her roommate of numerous clinical trials didn’t betray her, didn’t move a muscle or so much as dart her eyes toward her Spanx-and-burn-unit-style limb-wrapped friend. Not that nay of the Unnatural-Born Chimera’s compression garments showed under the baggy long-sleeved tee and sweatpants she wore, but just the mention of the clinical-trial term “invasives” was enough to make her become silent, even as her heart thudded under her ribcage, and her breathing quickened.

“We don’t have a yearning to run around with rectal probes or bronchoscopes shoved into our orifices,” Mika-Maus demurely shot back, “Just like we don’t live to mutilate ourselves with antiseptics…c’mon, let’s see if this password they gave us is for real—or if ReeLife is just another therapy self-help site like InDreams—”

“Nope, this isn’t the Second Life site for disabled people…log on, and you’ll see,” Jack began to say, but the two women got up and left the boys to their purloined iodine and pilfered Band-Aids, with only an air-kiss blown by Mika-Maus to mark their departure.

As they walked side-by-side down the evening-dimmed hallway, en route to their room, neither of them mentioned the conversational close call about invasives and what had happened to The Chimera during one of them—there was no need to. It was one of those things best left undiscussed, the real-life equivalent of the terrible things that happened to the Wallaces, both Mr. and Mrs., in Pulp Fiction. The memory of a near fatal OD, or very real rape by rednecks (and a gimp) actually paled in comparison to what had befallen The Chimera all those years ago…here was a fate perhaps more akin to that of The Bride from Kill Bill—something terrible done to one made all the more awful by the fact that she herself set the horrible deeds in motion through her own rash actions. True, she hadn’t tried to run off with the unborn baby of her assassin-master/lover, but The Chimera had been guilty of putting money before reason, which was perhaps far more worse than fleeing someone for the love of one’s unborn child, because no love, no honor, no hope of a life lived free of one’s past deeds had motivated her.

The Unnatural-Born Chimera had simply needed a lot of money, and was not willing to actually do anything resembling real work for it. And she’d paid, even as she’d been paid for her error in judgment.

But the worst part was, to admit she’d been so royally compensated would be to admit she’d succumbed to greed in the first place, without consideration of the consequences. And so she continued to bounce from clinical trial to out-patient study, drifting along with the vast hordes of otherwise un- or underemployed fellow guinea pigs, patient souls who willingly drank or swallowed or inhaled or injected unknown substances all in the Name of Science, while accepting money (usually paid after the trial was over, be the outcome benign or brutal) in the name (small “n”) of pharmaceutical Russian roulette.

Or, to the cinema-minded types like The Chimera, and her sometimes sidekick Mika-Maus, it was life lived as that human target Christopher Walken played in The Deer Hunter. Defying death one-bullet-loaded gun at a time, all for an eager, betting, audience. Only their audience was called whatever drug company was funding the particular trial they were enrolled in at the time. Oh, and the stockholders of said drug companies, of course.

But watching eyes are still watching eyes, no matter what the body which contains them may be called.…

Mika-Maus skip-hopped a few steps ahead of The Chimera, waving the piece of paper in the air, finally saying, “What you bet it’s just another therapy site? Or some CDC ‘office’ we’ll sit forever in before Hygeia Philo has the time to see us?”

The mental image of the Center for Disease Control’s Second Life office manager/avatar, fancifully named for the Greek Goddess of Health brought The Chimera out of her self-induced fugue, and as she snickered at the memory of that oh-so-obliging avatar, she said, “I dunno…the eyebrow Ring Twins were awfully protective of this password. Could be the real thing…or at worst, it’s some new club in VLES. Nothing but re-runs and infomercials on cable at this hour, and most of the popular clubs in VLES are full—what is the password?”

They’d reached their room, so Mika waited until they were inside before reading aloud:

“MyWowMomentScene”

The “Wow/Moment” part was what convinced the Chimera—and judging from the sly smile on Mika’s face, she believed it, too. This was the Real Deal, the Not-Quite-A-Second-Life-Sim-But-Something-Way-Cooler site that they’d heard some of the younger college-age guinea pigs whisper about over their laptops and stolen candy bars from hospital vending machines during the wakeful hours just before dawn, that place the Crunchy-Tat boys had unwittingly verified during the early days of this current Phase I heartburn medication trial with the offhanded remark about Mika-Maus looking like an avatar.…

For the first time the two women had met, three years ago during a Phase II extended dosing-requirements/therapeutic efficacy demonstration of an oral analgesic designed for itch-relief of shingles, after they’d finished poring over each other’s collections of vintage graphic novels and sholo (shockingly kinky romance manga aimed at Japanese girls) and the Chimera had teasingly dubbed Mika-Mika-Maus due to the latter’s fascination with the two Maus novels, and learned that the cable system which supplied the slightly seedy hotel in which the trial was being held was pathetically low on movie-based channels (while overstuffed with sports, home shopping and “women’s” fare), they’d taken to sitting on their beds and describing what they called “Wow moments” in their favorite movies. Many of Mika’s came from television mini=series and theatrical films based on keitai shosetsu, or cell phone novels, texts written on cell phones, and uploaded onto Japan’s internet, and sometimes actually published in book form, which were mostly written by young women who were either considered “Yankee” (rebellious), or some girls who might ply enio kosai, a form of sex trade Mika described as schoolgirls trading their bodies for gifts of clothes or money from middle-aged men, but since Mika claimed to have written a few keitai shosetsu (none of which were ever made into dramatic productions, which was why she was here, in the States, involved in a far more legal, yet equally dangerous, form of selling herself), she was naturally obsessed with their soap-opera-like plotlines involving pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, rape, rivalry, and love triangles…but just when the Chimera was on the verge of nodding off after yet another description of yet another baby-misadventure inspired dramatic scene, she found herself startled to empathetic wakefulness when Mika said:

“—and then of course, there’s scene in Kill Bill, Volume I, Chapter Five, ‘Showdown at House of Blue Leaves’ after the big fight with Crazy 88s, when The Bride open those big sliding door, and see the beautiful snowy garden, with snowflakes falling so slow you can name each one before it hit ground…just most incredible sight after all carnage and body part flying around in nightclub—”

Despite Mika’s only moderately fluent English, the Chimera could see that moment perfectly in her mind’s eye—the pristine carpet of snow on the ground, the softly thucking water fountain spout, the short swath of fencing to the rear, the islands of zen-perfect rocks surrounded by curving pathways, all bathed in that floating-feather-like miasma of achingly white, blurry snowflakes against an intense blue-black sky. The kind of cinematic image that makes one gasp in awe over the sheer rightness of the composition, lighting, and ability to not only propel the plot forward, but to do so in an achingly sublime manner.

Nodding eagerly, the Chimera blurted out her list of “Wow moments”—the last five minutes of The Usual Suspects, that split second when all those Indian people waiting for the Mothership to come back lift their hands in the air, forefingers pointed skyward, when asked where the sound of the five tones came from in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the moment when Cab Calloway says “Hit it!” before the curtain opens on him and the Blues Brothers Band playing on an opulent, Astaire-and-Rodgers-meets-Broadway-wet-dream stage, complete with glittering cityscape backdrops and glistening white tuxes, and before the Chimera had a chance to name the song, Mika blurted out “‘Minnie Mooch!’” and her roommate didn’t even mention that she’d left off the “the” between the words, she was so happy to have been paired up with a cinematic soul-mate, after so many previous matchups from guinea pig hell—

(—like the group of had-to-be-illegals and street people who’d roomed with her in an eight-bed ward in a grade D Phase III comparison of bladder control treatments down in Austin, Texas…the meals all skewed toward chorizo, adobo, poblano chili, and cilantro ingredients, so everyone was constantly needing to pee, which left little time for conversation, even if she had been able to understand Spanish, which she didn’t, so all she had was a collection of DVD’s to keep her sane,

(—or the jittery jibber-jabberer with the tattoos [“—one for every trial I’ve been in, but never invasives—”] and piercings whose nickname was “Happy Camper” after a VW van tat on her left calf, whose real name the Chimera forgot as soon as she’d heard it, who’d alternated between mopey drones about how her bullying father used to demean her, call her a “retard,” and brag fests [occasionally punctuated with the weird interjection “Horray!”] about what a “super” wife and “parental unit” she was to her two kids despite her dud of a dad; she’d claimed to alternate between g.p.ing when her “biologicals” were away from home, and going to “flesh-fests” like Burning Man in Nevada, because “I just do things and I don’t think there’s anything special about it—hard to ‘sell’ myself,” whatever that meant. Luckily the Phase I study involved sleeping pills, for which the Chimera was grateful, because 1) she could pretend to be sleeping while the woman jabbered, and 2) the study was held in a place called Covington, Georgia which she interpreted as Cover up and hide while doing #1,

(—and especially that trio if ex-cons in her unit down in Tampa, who’d managed to get themselves thrown out of the Phase I acne cream study after they’d written “Cuba Libra!” all over the walls of the otherwise fairly nice under-renovation hotel where the study was being conducted, all because the food served lacked mojo marinade on the side, and almost shut down the study before anyone got paid—that incident was front page news in the Guinea Pig Zero jobzine a month later)

—that she instantly forgave Mika for messing up the title of Curtis the janitor’s song, while they hugged and shouted “‘Do you see the light?’ and ‘We’re on a mission from God!’” in their semi-private Philadelphia hospital room, until some of the other guinea pigs in the adjoining rooms started banging on the walls and yelling at them to shut the “f” up already.

Once they reached their room, the two women placed the Chimera’s laptop on the single desk near the wall-mounted TV, and pulled the two chairs (one a desk chair, for Mika, and the other an easy chair) close to the screen, while the Chimera tapped in the website address—which they’d figured out from the name of the place, ReeLife, although the smushing-together of the two words involved a bit of trial and error—and then, when the now familiar mall-theatre-style marquee popped on screen, they had something to type in the “password?” window down by the virtual concession stand…and once the sixteen letters had been typed in, the screen suddenly shifted, and now the process of selection could begin—

Chapter Two

The Unconventional Conception of The Unnatural-Born Chimera

—actually, the whole “process of selection” concept was responsible for the creation of the Chimera, in that she, like thousands of other babies born around the world each year, started out what ethicists and some theologians consider “life” in an anonymous petri dish, in a fertility lab outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, the literal product of some latex-gloved, masked-and-glorified-shower-cap wearing lab wonk who, armed with a high-powered microscope and a super-fine pipette, chose one egg and one wiggling sperm to become a future human being, shoved the smaller organic DNA factory into the larger DNA receptacle, then allowed the forcibly-merged biological yin and yang to start subdividing and branching out, before inserting the resulting Future Human Being into the waiting syringe, and then, now with the help of a gloved-masked-and-capped doctor who specialized in all things reproductive, implanted into the future Chimera’s mother…a woman who’d tried and tried to conceive with the natural help of her husband, but kept failing, so she’d undergone painful and invasive egg-generating, and -harvesting procedures (while her husband only need to spend some alone-time with a couple of XXX DVD’s and a plastic jar), all of which culminated in an intra-cytoplasmic fertilization—

—which was about to run into one very tiny but significant hitch: The night before, oblivious to the warning not to do so, she and her husband had…done so. Just once, just for old time’s sake, and considering that his problem was something dubbed “low sperm motility” neither of them dreamed that this time might actually take. But one wiggler out of millions was a bit more energetic than his fellows, and he happened to meet up with one lone egg left in her body after the egg-harvesting procedure days before. And their bodies did for free what the clinic eventually charged them many thousands of dollars for the next day. But the biggest “and” was soon to come.…

Thanks to having been artificially inseminated, the Really Expensive Egg was just a smidgen weaker than the Fertilized For Free Egg, and when the two of them were left alone in the same womb, something a lot less common than regular conception, but definitely not unheard of, happened. Not unlike the poor kid who ends up beating the crap out of some proud parent’s Honor Student, the current resident in the uterus sought out the squatter, but instead of beating up the intruder, it simply merged with it. One super-sized egg, with twice the DNA content, only the expected result—twins—didn’t happen.

Maybe the competing soon-to-be-embryos weren’t far enough along in their development. Perhaps the lab-fertilized egg just thought this was another sperm delivery. Maybe Mother Nature just decided to have a little genetic fun. Why-ever it happened, it happened…only, as the parents would soon find out, that bit of “me time” the father spent in the small lounge down the hallway from the room where the fertilization was to take place was mirrored by yet another would-be father spending his time with a well-worn back issue of Hustler and yet another plastic jar virtually identical to that other jar given to the future Chimera’s father. And in a bit of prime-time-TV-drama-script May-Sweeps-style Melodramatic Plot Twist happenstance, the gloved/masked/capped lab wonk mixed up the two virtually identical-looking (save for the Name On The Label He Failed to Read) plastic jars of Baby Builder.

Which eventually meant that when the Chimera was but a toddler, and managed to crawl under an ironing board being used by her mother, and then somehow got her two-year-old head precisely under the spot where the iron fell off the board after her mother failed to place it securely on the padded surface, resulting in much screaming, crying, and hysterical sobbing on the part of her guilt-ridden mother, most of which took place in a hospital emergency room. Just in case the falling iron had caused serious injury, blood was taken from the parents, as well as from their child, for typing and cross-matching just in case surgery might be needed, but long after the X-rays confirmed that aside from being lucky, the little girl had an unusually thick skull which wasn’t so much as cracked or dented, the blood tests (which were done anyhow, this being a hospital, after all, and her parents were insured up the proverbial wazoo) revealed something Odd:

While her parents blood types were O (Mom) and A (Pop), somehow their offspring had type B blood. This didn’t count out her mother’s contribution to her offspring’s biological presence, but it effectively shut out her father from the DNA-fest.

Much screaming, crying and hysterical sobbing ensued, before lawyers were hired, and the fertility lab came under fire. A simple mix-up, stupid, but potentially costly to the clinic…only they insisted they Done Nuthin’ Wrong, and demanded that the toddler undergo a buccal swab in addition to another blood test, just to double-check the results from the other hospital’s lab. Many different DNA tests, ranging from ones which produced green-colored dots on a piece of paper, to jagged spikes over boxed numbers on a horizontal graph to the most definitive test of all, the tiny bar-code-like vertical rows of DNA spread out in blurry splendor on sheets of jello-like material…and all of them seemed to confirm the impossible.

The little girl had two DNA strands. Both of them shared mitochondrial DNA, but there were two different male DNA donors involved, one married to her mother, the other a perfect match for a previous client of the lab. A man whose sample was given to the Chimera’s mother, and vice-versa. Only when her father’s sample was given to the man’s wife, no baby resulted from that sperm-filled egg. And in a touch or irony any soap opera writer would’ve known better than to include in an episode least it entice the viewer to switch channels, because it was just too damn far-fetched, the other couple, the ones who’d received The Chimera’s father’s sperm-stuffed egg, died in a car accident a couple of months before the mix-up was discovered. Good news for the clinic in one less settlement to reach), bad news for The Chimera, since the court ordered the records sealed after an out-of-court settlement was reached, and she could never find out the identity of her…half parents. The guy whose blood type flowed through her veins, under the skin and saliva of her legal father.

Her parents were fine with the settlement, but once the presence of the Unnatural-Born Chimera (as she was soon to be known in medical journals around the world, (despite the fact that her nom-de-medical screw-up should’ve been the Unnatural-Conceived Chimera—as fate would have it, the doctor who wrote the first published article about her was a Tarantino fan who liked to do co-play during screenings of Tarantino films and co-credit movies, playing Woody Harrelson’s murderer from Natural Born Killers, while his nurse/mistress played Juliette Lewis’ Mallory, a natural choice, her being small and brunette, and he was prematurely bald) was known in medical circles, she became a baby guinea pig; studied, photographed under UV light to better show the tell-tale Blaschko’s lines on her back, a sure sign of chimera-ism, subject to biopsy after biopsy of virtually every organ in her body (save for the brain per se; instead they opted for the excruciating spinal tap, which was far worse than the original blow to her head from the iron), injected with dyes to better show which systems in her body were here (aka everything relating to her brain) and which belonged to her submerged twin. By the time they’d finished mapping out just which parts of her were “her” and which ones were her “twin” (albeit her fraternal twin in more ways than one), the Chimera had become quite used to being poked, jabbed, prodded and scrutinized, and had learned how to shut out the lookee-loos in white, and retreat to her own interior space, mentally reviewing her favorite cartoons on the screen of her imagination.

Her parents didn’t show her the articles written about her until she was older, around nine or ten, but once they did, she wished many a time that they hadn’t: It was bad enough to find out that her body wasn’t 100% her own, but more or less a biological curiosity, a merging of two DNA strands which meshed together tightly, like interlaced fingers, only there was no way to separate them, ever. Neither “half” of her was capable of living by itself. Yet they literally weren’t biological related, not with that extra set of male DNA in the mix. Her father tried to do up a drawing based on elements he’d downloaded off the web and photo-shopped into a crude guide to Which Parts were Whose, which went like this:

These were the parts that were “her”—brain, salivary glands, heart, lungs, liver, uterus, intestines/colon, eyes, tongue, teeth, stomach, skin and hair.

These were the parts that weren’t “her”—blood, ovaries, lymphatic system, kidneys, bladder, breast tissue, pancreas, fatty tissue, and just about everything else not covered in the “parts that were ‘her’” section, including the very framework of the shared body, the bones.

The first thing that had struck her was, if she was to have a baby, it wouldn’t be hers, or more specifically, it wouldn’t be her father’s grandchild, even though it would stretch out her uterus, and cause stretch marks all over “her” skin. But if it was a bad delivery, the other person’s blood would probably shed, in life-threatening (as in her life) quantities. More than anything else (even that horrible woman-giving birth-on-camera film she saw in Freshman Health class), that fact gave the Chimera pause as far as wanting a baby went. The thought of going through all that suffering just to deliver a baby that wasn’t biologically hers was beyond off-putting, it was an outrage. By that time, she’d seen documentaries on TV about chimera women who’d been told tht the babies they carried for nine months weren’t biologically “theirs,” a fact which brought either bemusement or outright grief, depending on the status of the women’s marriage.

Once the whole wanting-a-baby-down-the-timeline thing was settled for her, the entire prospect of everything which went along with baby-makin’ became unimportant to her, including dating, romance, and eventual thoughts of marriage…but at the same time she gave up one prospect for happiness, another thing took its place in her mind, and her desire—she wanted to get even with that invisible interloper, that genetic invader who had managed to mess up her mind at a most early age.

Since her stomach, and her skin, were hers, she decided that she would bring the ratio of “me”-to-“her” to a point where “me” would take up a much larger portion of the body they were forced to share, even as it put a strain on the other twin’s blood system, something a preteen child didn’t quite understand, even as she was able to appreciate the effects of her “me” versus “her” private battle—

—Within a year, she gained over fifty pounds, and despite the protests of her parents, vowed to not only keep on the weight, but add to it on a yearly basis, until the amount of “me” literally outweighed “her,” bones and all. In fact, she secretly delighted in the fact that all that extra “me” was a heavy burden on “her,” a fixation which persisted through her teen years, and into her twenties.

By that time, her parents had tried every sort of intervention and enticement to force her to lose the weight imaginable, but since the Chimera had already chosen to make her living in the servant arts arena, specifically designing type faces for new computer software programs, she felt no need to diet, to become a fashionista, to even attract a potential mate. And in her line of work, as long as she could fit behind a keyboard and into a comfortable chair, she was set. And, being something of a living typeface herself, comprised of parts which were the letter or symbol at hand, we well as those parts which were not of the letter or symbol, the negative space around it which nonetheless defined what it was by accentuating what there was of the letter or symbol, she had an inherent gift for the art form, an intuitive understanding of what both made up and did not make up the perfect letter, be it side bearing space on either side of a letter, the counter, or space between letters, or the delicate finishing touches of a well-spaced serif which consisted of the embellishment of the feet and shoulders of square and diagonal letters, even as she herself looked more like one of the round letters, a near-perfect “O” of smooth, firm pale skin, all ratios and radius’ coming close to a human ball of “me” supported from within by the scaffold of “her”.…

Until the month that two things happened to the Unnatural-Born Chimera—the company which employed her went belly-up during the recession of ’24/’25, and the balloon payment on her condo was due by the end of the month.

When one after another temp agency turned her down due to her skillset being close to archaic (“You design letters? You mean you come up with new ones besides the first twenty-six?”), while her weight was seen as a potential health insurance problem, by the middle of that month from hell, she found herself sitting in a Wi-Fi coffee shop outside of Indianapolis, trying to decide whether creating a blog or setting up a website offering her skills as a typeset designer would be the most lucrative option, even as she realized that the Internet did not really need yet another on-line running screed about whatever it was she deemed important enough to write about each day, nor were there likely to be many takers for a “You, Too, Can Be A Typeface Designer!” website, even if she printed the ads for the thing on matchbooks (which, given the fact that smoking was now forbidden in most pubic places anyhow, was yet another archaic leftover of life as she remembered it from her youth, when she saw a small indy-sized newspaper folded on the empty seat next to hers. Picking it up, and unfolding it across her convex lap, she saw that whoever had left it had circled some “Help Wanted” ads, including one which read:

TEST SUBJECTS WANTED:

Are you trying to lose those stubborn pounds? Sick of diets that don’t work, or exercise machines that break under you? Be a part of the clinical trial for a new weight-loss treatment, at the Center For Weight Sudies—

She skimmed over the address, for a city about seventy miles south, since the ad was probably just a cover for yet another fat-burning pill laced with herbs and extracts which would soon show up on one of those law-firm-sponsored ads asking people, “Did you ever take this drug? If so, you may be able to receive damages, if you call us immediately—”, but toward the bottom of the ad (which was printed in a nauseatingly close-scrunched typeface, not one of hers), she noticed this:

Participants, upon completion of the study, will be paid $6,000.

That was enough to cover her balloon payment, plus gas money for three weeks, or two if they kept raising the price per gallon. Going back to the middle of the ad, she saw that the entire clinical trial was supposed to last three weeks, which would allow her to make the payment just in time…so, not caring if the treatment (which was unspecified, and—unbeknownst to her, as a newbie guinea pig—most likely invasive, and thus more physically dangerous, since the higher the pay usually corresponded to higher risk for the g.p.) would actually work or not, since she liked herself the way she was, she folded the indy paper into thirds, then bent that down the middle and shoved it into her purse, before paying her bill at the café, and hurrying to her car, where she dialed the number listed in the ad from the privacy of her front seat, just in case the trial was filled already, so no one else could see the look of disappointment on her face.…

Chapter Three

“It’s like a wax museum with a pulse…”

From the second they logged on with the password, and the laptop screen revealed an avatar-selection site which looked more like a studio dressing room/wardrobe department/special effects make-up center than the usual grid of avatar skin choices plus generic male or female (or furry) basic avatars, The Unnatural-Born Chimera and Mika-Maus realized that not only was ReeLife not merely an offshoot of Second Life, but that it had, indeed, been constructed by someone either very familiar with guinea pigs, and their sometimes overcrowded circumstances (one option on the Call Sheet tacked on one VR wall was for “singles or groups”), or an actual retired guinea pig, someone with scads of disposable income from years of traveling from trial to trial, racking up the bucks by daring to sign up for invasives, or as many Phase III’s as possible…or, just maybe, the creator of ReeLife was one of those subjects whose particular trial left them sick or maimed—one who’d been given a hefty settlement, along with his or her John Hancock on a non-disclosure confidentiality agreement.…

Just as each woman chose a basic female avatar, then began scanning the list of headshots-style physical options on the wall next to the call sheet, a bulky male avatar who resembled a cross between Carl the white-uniformed floorwalker in Cool Hand Luke, who spelled out the rules for all the fresh fish upon their arrival in prison, and Marsellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction, popped up from a trapdoor in the center of the ersatz dressing room floor, and announced in a rumbling voice:

((((My name is Best Boy, and this is my stage, and these are the rules of ReeLife: First, you must pick an avatar, which will be your avatar no matter which Set you enter. Second, how your avatar is costumed is to be changed according to the chosen Set, so you will fit in the action of each set. Third, on all Sets, you are not to divulge any specific details of the drug trial or medical study you are engaged in, in case any Lurkers from the drug or medical companies might infiltrate ReeLife. Fourth, should a Hair in the Gate be attributed to the actions of your avatar, you will be told to Move On, that you’re On the Wrong Set, and your avatar will get the Clapper. Fifth, when the Director of a Set announces that he or she is about to sheet Abby Singer, the Set will shut down in half an hour, and when he or she says Martini, the Set shuts down within fifteen minutes. No one is allowed OnSet after the Set is shut down. Anyone caught OnSet after the last shot of the day will be 86’d for one month. Sixth, Griefers may be hiding anywhere OnSet, and while Grips roam the Sets, they cannot find or catch them all, so do not engage in any Pieces of Business with Griefers. I’m Best Boy, and this is my stage. Any questions?))))

(The Chimera whispered to Mika off mic, “Whoever created this place is either the biggest movie freak in the galaxy, or he or she actually worked in Hollywood at some point.”)

((((Thank you for the advice, Best Boy…question the first—what’s a Hair in the Gate? And my other question is, are your Griefers the same as the ones who pop up in Second Life?))))

Despite his chunky block-like bodily construction, BestBoy managed something close to an “Are you kidding me?” sideways glance in the screen’s direction before saying, ((((A problem OnSet…like when there’s a hair caught in front of the camera lens. You really gotta bone up on your movie speak, newbie. As for the Griefers, so far they haven’t filled anything with “gray goo” yet, but I have to warn you that the Coen Brothers Set’s trailer is filled with round, spherical objects, so if you FlyIn there, don’t knock at the quintuplet-snatchin’ couple’s trailer door. Last avatar who did got knocked off their feet by bowling bass, balloons, cheese balls, Cheerios, flying-saucer-shaped ceiling lamps, Fedora hats, exercise balls, baby play balls, tire swings, hula hoops, CD’s, Dapper Dan Hair pomade cans, even meat balls from the lunch buffet line in Fargo. Someone’s watched the whole damn Coen Brothers output too many times while lying on a bed with a rectal probe shoved in their non-thinking end is my opinion. I suppose they thought “round” stuff really was funny—))))

((((Well all right then, you betcha…and thanks a bunch—)))) the Chimera began, but Best Boy creakily shook his head and spat out ((((Smartass…Once you’ve picked a Skin, head out the door marked EXIT—I’m outta here!))))

“I guess he doesn’t speak Coen-Brother?” Mika asked, before she and the Chimera began choosing avatars and selecting skins.…

* * * *

Once they exited the dressing room, and went across a back lot littered with tipped-over director’s chairs, discarded booms, apple-boxes, dog-eared scripts, and Klieg lights, they saw the double row of movie studios, each shaped like an airplane hangar with small doors in front, each with a sign affixed next to the closed doors, indicating which Set waited within:

“Emm Knight Shy-My-Land”

“The Rocket-Rushmore-Royal Aquatic Limited”

“Raising Coenbros-na!”

“Grind House Epice, Inc.”

“Tim and (Mostly) Johnny Make a Really Weird Movie”

“Fincher Club”

“The Woman Who Knew Too Little But Was There and Friends on a Bus Going South-By-South-East”

“Even Meaner Streets”

Remembering what Best Boy had said about each Set having a Director (which had to correspond to the Landlords of Second Life sites), the Chimera quickly decoded the cryptic signage: M. Night Shyamalan, Wes Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Tarantino, Tim Burton, David Fincher, Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese, and that was only the first half of one of the two parallel rows of studios. Other, more distant signs hinted at a VR homage to Polanski, Michael Mann, Wes Craven, Barry Levinson, Sydney Pollack, and at least a dozen more in the row to her left that she couldn’t make out.

((((This place more tempting than store full of DVD))) Mika’s avatar said (right in Real Chimera’s ear, thanks to them sharing a headset, due to their room only having one Wi-Fi hook-up), to which the long, tall drink of water avatar replied:

((((But you know how it is—only one DVD fits in the tray at a time, so we might as well start picking—))))

Keeping her brief exchange in Coen-speak with Best Boy, the taller avatar began moving toward “Raising Coenbros-na!”’s doorway, but before the Chimera could tap in the appropriate directional keystrokes to make her avatar knock on the door, it swung inward, revealing a tantalizing slice of frenetic action beyond (tan Sierras and beat-up clinkers with baby seats attached to their roofs, followed by Brainerd police prowlers, roaring down streets that were snowy on one side, and arid desert highway on the other, while a couple of blue dye-pack-covered male avatars ran howling down the arid side of the street, followed by a couple of red-uniformed gym instructors, who lobbed dumb-bells and exercise balls at the fleeing bank robbers), but soon the view was blocked by a black-and-white tone broom-wielding barber, the main character from The Man Who Wasn’t There, only when the avatar’s mouth opened, he sounded more Canadian than Billy-Bob Thorntonesque:

((((Before I can let you in, you have to answer a couple of questions—each—))))

Second Life Islands also had Landlords, who made newbies pass some bizarre tests to gain entrance; however, neither woman would’ve guessed that this Set’s Director would be one of the Coen’s most put-upon cosmically screwed-up characters (one of their ubiquitous Men Behind a Big Desk would’ve been expected), but Griefers had infiltrated this place, so perhaps the choice of avatars wasn’t so strange after all—

((((Ok, tall girl—Which Arizona quint did Hi choose? And which denomination stamp was Normie Gunderson’s bird stamp chosen for?))))

((((Nathan, Jr., he thought, and ‘tree-cent’—))))

(((Ok, you’re in—now, little girl—what sort of franchise did my character want to buy into, and what did Bunny Lebowski get cut off for that ransom letter to her husband?))))

The Chimera had to whisper the answers into Mika’s ear, before the shorter avatar replied ((((Drycleaning, and a toe—her little toe))))

With a resigned shrug, the barber avatar pointed his broom in the direction of a 1950s style barbershop façade, and said, ((((Pick a skin, and come on in—)))) before suddenly teleporting up and out of their way.

The interior of the barber shop had dozens of stylized images of Coen Brother film characters, ranging from leads to featured extras on the walls in the spot where various old-time haircuts had been in the actual film; given the brief sight of the frantic car-human chase in the Set beyond, the Chimera suggested they try minor characters, since most everyone else had probably appropriated the skins of all the major players…and so, a few key strokes later, the two of them emerged wearing the costumes and general features of those two bobble-headed “Yaaahhh!” hookers from Fargo, the tall blonde and the shorter frizzy-haired gal, after locking in their “costumes” with their own private passwords, which, according to a piece of paper tacked onto the simulated wall, would allow them to automatically gain entrance onto the Set during future visits. (The Chimera chose the word “woodchipper” while Mika went with “Bunny.”)

Then, they were OnSet, dodging rolled hula hoops on the sidewalk, followed closely by a Norville Barnes avatar wearing a blue “Hudsucker Corp.” apron, whose right foot was stuck in a flaming wastebasket, who kept waving the Blue Letter at the retreating hoops, while holding a conversation with a ratty bath-robed Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski avatar whose hands were filled with a bowling ball in a case and a White Russian, and The Dude was saying to the Hudsucker Proxy-themed avatar:

((((—can’t expect to maintain a Phase III in substandard conditions like that, man…not without room service—))))

((((Room service I could live without, I just want a coffee machine or maybe a candy-bar dispenser on my floor—I mean, this place is a freakin’ dive—))))

Just as their conversation became too soft to hear, another pair of avatars, a police-uniformed Ed from Raising Arizona, and an absurdly huge Marge Gunderson from Fargo, likewise dressed in her tent-topped uniform, were discussing what sounded like a dubious upcoming trial:

((((—you constantly set yourself up to get ripped off. I hope this invasive which you are currently considering does well by you, truly I do—)))) “Ed” was telling “Margie,” who replied:

((((Saying No isn’t an option, my student loan will not pay for itself. I’ve already consulted with other g.p.’s who’ve been there before, and this place is rated Grade A, with no history of complaints—))))

((((If so, horray! Now before I go all enthusiastic and overwhelm you, I’m asking you to tell me who they are what place they hold in your life—))))

The pair moved off just before the Chimera could hear the rest of the conversation, but before she could follow, Mika whispered into the Chimera’s free ear, out of ear-piece range, “Remember what Vincent Vega said about Jack Rabbit Slim’s in Pulp Fiction?”

Nodding, the Chimera stopped her avatar’s walking motion, and whispered back, “Yeah…’It’s like a wax museum with a—”

Chapter Four

Beyond Purview

“—pulse rate is surprisingly low, considering,” the doctor in charge of the Chimera’s pre-admission exam said, and it didn’t take an expert to decipher the subliminal meaning of that casually-tossed off “considering”—what the young woman in the frayed-sleeved lab coat meant was, “Considering how much you weigh.”

All the Chimera did was nod and smile, and say, “It always is…every check-up,” while thinking to herself, Every check up I had before I started eating for the two people I actually am, which mentally prepared her for the doctor’s next question, “I noticed some faint markings on your lower back, sort of a feathery…thing going on all over—”

“Oh, those…they’re an experimental form of tattooing I had done when I was in college—some new ink a boyfriend—”

(An imaginary boyfriend, but the doctor had no way of knowing that, either—)

“—was trying out. It faded really fast, under the lights of a tanning bed. So I never had them lasered off—”

“That’s a good idea…you never know what might happen if a tattoo ink’s ingredients get broken up by the laser and work their way into your system. I had this tat lasered off my back once, and I swear I was sick for a week afterwards—”

Obviously this doctor, probably fresh off her residency, had never heard of Blaschko’s lines, those skin markings which graced the flesh of some, but not all, chimeras; sometimes, if the two merged eggs were those of a male and a female, the markings could be more extreme, darker, or geometric, with literal checks of dark and light skin on the stomach and abdomen of an affected chimera. She’d looked up pictures of such chimeras on the Internet, back when she was in middle school. Compared to those obvious pigment aberrations, her fern-like dermal display of permanently marked skin did resemble a tattoo, albeit a badly-faded one. The lights in the examination room were blue-tinged enough to make her set of Blaschko’s lines just barely visible—if the doctor had been versed in the study of chimeras, she might have dimmed the room lights and looked at her latest would-be-test-subject’s back with a UV light, which would have revealed that they definitely weren’t tattoos—

—and much later on, after she’d done more trials, she realized that even if the doctor in the frayed lab coat had figured out that she was, indeed, a chimera, and thus in possession of two sets of possibly conflicting DNA strands (insofar as the upcoming study was concerned), it was doubtful that she would have been denied a spot in the study. Just as being a guinea pig didn’t depend on the g.p. in question having any specific training or “job” skill, merely a placid willingness to allow another person to do…things to them, the fact that a drug or medical supply company was holding these particular trials and tests didn’t mean that they expected to hire people of any specific medical value, save for being 1) alive, and 2) willing to exploit item number one for the sake of a paycheck. Unbeknownst to the Chimera, the people behind this particular invasive trial only cared that the test subjects, the human guinea pigs, be at least moderately overweight. Nothing else mattered—the g.p.’s could be young, old, black, white, Asian or Hispanic, or any combination of the above, physically fit or ready to drop, upstanding citizens or ex-cons, legal or illegal, or anything in between. As long as the would-be test subjects fit within the parameters of protocol, as in they would provide the range of results expected for this particular new treatment (which were a most narrow range of results, per the request of the people who’d formulated this new treatment, specifically the subjects either lost or didn’t lose weight, period, and regardless of any medical shades of grey between lose or didn’t lose), they were in. Which soon brought the Chimera and eleven other fellow g.p.’s to a lecture hall within the Center For Weight Loss Studies (which had started out many years before as a small liberal arts college which went defunct in the 1990s), where they all sat in widely separated chairs, looking down at a screen upon which a Power point lecture was currently in progress; a hugely enlarged cross section of the human dermal structure, done in candy-bright hues from the red half of the spectrum, filled most of the screen: starting with a thin top medium pink layer, meant to show the outermost layer of flesh, then working downward with another slightly lighter pink layer, followed by orange stalactites of “superficial fat” imbedded in a base of deeper pink, then the yellow packing-peanut shaped blobs of “deep fat,” followed by large red free-form blobs surrounded by dozens upon dozens of tiny yellow circles, labeled “intra-peritoneal fat.” Referring to each layer in turn from the top, the perky female representative from the company funding the study was saying as she moved her arrow-shaped icon from layer to layer:

“—is superficial fat, which cannot be suctioned out during liposuction procedures. But all this deep fat, shown in yellow, can be suctioned out, unlike the intra-peritoneal fat, which also cannot be surgically removed during liposuction. But as some of you probably know, just suctioning out the deep fat alone will not correct figure flaws, nor will it address the problem of leptin, or hunger-slaking hormones, which as many of you know are pumped into the blood stream by fat cells—now in most people, the more leptin pumped into the blood by the existing fat cells, the less hungry they feel, but for many overweight people, their built-in insensitivity to leptin has had the opposite effect—”

Thoroughly bored, The Chimera found herself watching her fellow test subjects—five men and five other women, some of whom were actually nodding off in their hard-backed tiered chairs, while others quietly mocked the speaker below them by making “yap-yap-yap” hand signs to each other, or bobbing their heads in time with her words.

“—the past, resveratrol, the anti-fat compound in red wine, was used to try and naturally burn fat, but those trials weren’t as—”

One of the bluehair women in the row below her whispered to the other equally plump bluehair sitting one seat away, “That was SR51720…I was in the field study for that one. Didn’t work for me, the—”

“—our study is instead focused on the 17,000 genes which correlate to the overall body mass index, and specifically on 14,900 which correlate to waist to hip ratio only—”

“I was in a trial which focused on the Lp1, Lactb and Ppm11 genes,” the other woman told her companion, “But that one was a bust, too—”

“—gene imprinting, not all human genes are expressed actively in our cells. Some are switched off, or silenced. When a cell divides and makes a copy of its DNA, special enzymes attach caps along certain spots along the copy’s length—these caps make it impossible for a cell to read specific genes they are attached to, so these genes can’t make the corresponding proteins. Since these caps attach only to one parent’s copy of a gene, the other parent’s copy remains uncapped, free to make proteins. Now mutations that change patterns of imprinting can have a long-lasting effect on the health of a person. And if a cell fails to imprint one of the two parents’ genes, two genes will produce proteins instead of one, with two copies of the protein—”

Judging by the way the other test subjects squirmed in their chairs, none of them had taken much biology during the school years, if any. While she could easily follow the gist of the representative’s speech, and had a vague idea where she was heading as far as the actual treatment to be tested on her and the others, even the Chimera found herself taking a deep, sharp inward breath when the woman went on, “—microbes can be isolated, and engineered to eat substances like plastics, for industrial clean-up purposes, but our goal is to create microbes which will bind to those proteins responsible for the creation of excess fat cell production, at the superficial as well as intra-peritoneal levels—”

The Chimera had read about an old study from around the time she was born, concerning the insertion of programming instructions within genes; one lab engineered a strain of e coli which acted like rudimentary computers, assembling themselves into a glowing bulls-eye shape on a microscope slide upon command. Not the most useful application, but one which proved that even the smallest genetic material was capable of more than simply existing—

“So you’re saying we’re gonna have what, nanobites or nanites or nanu-nanu’s pumped into our blood? Little fat destroying machines—” This was from a young man with a life-preserver-like spare tire encircling his midsection under a faded navy blue “You’re Not the Boss of Me” tee shirt, who sat with his booted feet resting on the back of the seat below him.

“No, no, no,” she reassured him and the others with an unnaturally white-out-white smile, “No nanobotic devices are capable of such organized behavior, and nothing like that will be utilized in this study anyway…now this does pertain to the blood samples taken from each of you during the initial examinations, however. Each test subject’s treatment will be specifically engineered to best create the most efficient microbe-based injection for your—”

If the Chimera had had more clinical trials under her admittedly tight belt, or had been able to do some networking with her fellow guinea pigs, this was the point where she should have stood up, said Thanks, but no thanks, folks, and walked out of there…but with inexperience comes a false sense of complacency, and that is coupled with an all-American need for the folding green, you end up sitting in an uncomfortable chair in some out-of-the-way medical center, listening to a company rep whose sole purpose in life is to make what probably won’t be good for you sound ot only good for you, but good for others as well—followed by the inevitable, albeit distant, Couldda-Wouldda-Shouldda-Known-Better lifetime of reflection.

But first, the trial, which as such things went, was actually worthy of a Grade A rating from Guinea Pig Zero—private rooms, good to occasionally excellent meals served in-room and often to taste, both cable and Wi-Fi available, private bathrooms, comfortable beds, no illegals or obvious criminal types, and all the free time anyone getting paid to have untested and basically unknown substances pumped into their veins via taped-on shunts every other day could wish for…and given the fact that each person was expected to stay in his or her room for the duration of the testing period, everyone was able to do whatever they wanted to—read, knit, watch TV or DVD’s, surf the Net, visit on-line gaming sites or even Second Life—just as long as they didn’t contact anyone outside with specific details of the trial itself. Cell phones were confiscated, but other than that, the Chimera, who was an ironic, if quintessential, loner (considering that she could never truly be alone in her permanently merged state of body with that semi-bastard twin of hers) found her stay absolutely delightful, even as the bioengineered fat-reduction treatment began working on her body…with the proverbial vengeance.

Even though her daily diet was neither low-fat, high-fat/low-carb, or Mediterranean, but what she considered a basic food pyramid-style diet, she began losing weight within the first week, and by the end of the trial, she’d taken on the look of a flying squirrel when undressed—loose hanging flaps of skin under her arms, along her sides, and even her buttocks and thighs—but she’d thought that was the goal of her treatment, rapid weight loss followed by body contouring surgery to trim away the excess skin. However, the realization that something might actually be Very Wrong crept into her consciousness the day when the group of five doctors who usually visited her on a rotating basis, as well as the perky-chirpy Power Point representative, all crowded into her room during an afternoon when she was watching the Robert Rodriguez portion of Grindhouse, and the stripper whose leg had been gnawed off by a ravenous zombie was trying out her new machine-gun-cum­-peg-leg, and the doctor nearest her DVD player pressed “Pause,” before he and the other four began lifting and rubbing her excess arm skin folds between their fingers, as if deciding on which new upholstery fabric might provide the best wear-and-tear on the family sofa, but the expressions on their faces didn’t suggest that what they were doing to her indicated a positive outcome to the trial. Before she could ask them what was happening, Ms. Perky-Chirpy began to say, “Would extending your stay be a problem for you? The doctors would like to do a few more tests, which might extend past the end of the testing schedule—”

Being unemployed left her with ample free time, but the balloon payment on her condo was still due at month’s end, so she carefully replied, “I can stay on another week, but I’ll have to be out of here by next Friday—I have a previous obligation—”

Glancing over at each of the doctors in turn, and inclining her head first in the Chimera’s direction, then the individual doctors’ directions, she waited for each to give a nodded or head-shaking answer. Each nodded, but slowly, and reluctantly, and Dr. DVD “Pause” said, “Only if we get started immediately…and of course, your additional time here will be compensated—”

(Much later, once she got into the guinea-pigging lifestyle, she learned that “additional time here will be compensated” was Clinical-Trial-Speak for “We have screwed up, Big Time, and we’d rather pay up now than have you sue us later.”)

So for the next six days, all she could do was allow herself to be turned into a New Millennium Sideshow attraction, The Human Pincushion, only she lacked the extra layer of stuffing which most traditional pincushions had under their fabric skin. Plus she was scraped, poked, listened-to, pinch-tested (with said pinches being less than a quarter of an inch at their thickest), and biopsied, in addition to being subjected to so many blood draws she feared that the next syringe would only suck out pure air. By the late afternoon of the sixth day, all the expedited test results were back in, and once again, the five doctors plus Ms. Perky-Chirpy crowded into her room, and gave The News.

First off, they treated her to the revelation that she was something called “a chimera,” a person who—blah-blah-blah, but try to make it seem like a Major Surprise—had the DNA of two different people, and worse yet, hers had more than two parental DNA strands (she did love it how they delicately sidestepped the possibility that Momma Was Foolin’ Around), which complicated their original blood-DNA-based microbial fat-loss treatment. Second (and this is where things became rather Nasty), due to the individualized treatment being engineered for her submerged twin’s DNA, half of which was totally different from what she considered “hers,” the treatment became far more aggressive than what was expected within their pre-established parameters of protocol, those narrow-range set of results requested by the drug company funding the test, and had gone what they dubbed “beyond purview”—a set of physical results neither expected nor anticipated prior to the clinical trial itself. While certain side effects had been anticipated (like oily stools from fat loss, or some puckering of the skin from sudden weight loss), no one had foreseen what happened to the Chimera—nearly 90% of her superficial, deep and intra-peritoneal fat had been destroyed by the DNA-specific-microbes. And there was no way it would come back, either. So, from now on, no matter what she ate, she would never be able to gain the fat back—the right-for-her-blood/wrong-for-the-rest-of-her treatment had also triggered a transposons, or “jumping gene” effect in her body, effectively engineering her body (or those parts of it which weren’t part of the DNA strain the drug had been designed for) to develop some aspects of a condition called Elher-Danlos syndrome, which included weak cartilage, tendons, and other connective tissues, as well as organ walls, plus her skin had become smoother, more velvety-textured, and bruised easily.

Since she “obviously didn’t know about her condition” (and for the first time in her life, she was grateful that her real name had never been used in all those medical journal articles written about her close to twenty years ago), and their initial round of pre-trial tests had missed it, the company which sponsored the tests was willing to make a settlement up front, for future pain and suffering, as well as pay for various body contouring lifts, including abdominal-plasty, thigh and arm lifts, and a partial face-lift to cover the sagging drape of a former double chin which fell down to her neck. Said body contouring operations constituted the bulk of the additional payments she’d been promised, but as long as she was given the initial promised fee for the clinical trial in time to make her balloon payment (the whole thought of a balloon payment now sounded grotesquely ironic in her deflated condition) as well as her car payment, she put her Jane Hancock on the dotted line next to that day’s date and received her payment, no more questions asked. Oh, and Ms. Perky-Chirpy threw in a free set of contouring garments, which, once she folded and wound her free-flapping skin around her limbs and torso and neck, effectively covered up the excess “her” and—once she put on her old, now baggy clothing—made her look basically normal, if not all that sharply dressed. True, she couldn’t move all that fast, and when cinched in tight, she felt like a spandex-and-elastic-bound mummy, but until she could schedule a series of both overnight and out-patient procedures, it had to do.

The first operation scheduled was for a thigh lift, which was to be done under general anesthesia, in a hospital…that was the plan, at least. Once again, her dual-DNA “heritage” came back to bite her on the behind, and just about everywhere else—one second, she was lying on the table, counting backwards, breathing in the weird-scented gasses, and the next, she was thrashing and flailing and screaming, her heart lobbing so hard in her chest that her ears were filled with a deep liquid woosh-woosh-wooshing roar, and it took all the nurses and the doctor to hold her in place so she didn’t end up sliding off the table.

“An extreme allergic response to anesthesia’ was their explanation. At her insistence, they tried again, with a different anesthesia, only that time, she went into anaphylactic shock, and after that…it was time to Learn to Love Yourself, as the hospital counselor told her, while she was recovering in the ICU. Or in other words, just pray that you never need your appendix removed.…

Once she’d recovered enough to leave the hospital, the Unnatural-Born Chimera was faced with a decision—turn her back on all things Medical, and try to salvage her life in the safety of her condo, working at home, or embrace the disaster that had become her life, and keep on being a guinea pig, traveling from city to city, chasing the next potential medical screw-up which might either end her life, or enhance it somehow. And there was no actual limit on the number of trials one might apply for—just as long as you were breathing, most of them would accept you as an applicant, as long as one fit the general parameters of the study at hand. And, besides, for the first time in her life of self-imposed isolation, she found people she could relate to, and whom she might even like.…

Perhaps it was the shared streak of laziness coupled with an innate almost cow-like placidity which allowed people like her and the other guinea pigs to endure weird and even potentially dangerous regimens of pill-popping and medical monitoring. Maybe it was an inborn desire to share experiences rather than create independent ones. They all could have just been genetically hardwired to take passive risks, rather than active, dare-devil pursuits. No matter the why, one reason seemed to be universal among all the g.p.’s the Chimera was to eventually meet—they were in it for the money, and to hell with security, retirement plans, insurance or even a home to go back to after the trial was over. It was work without the work, a job centered on sitting back and having everyone else do the work for you, while the g.p.’s mostly sat around and ate, endured occasional side effects and pokes/prods/insertions, watched TV, raided food machines and medical supply closets, and most of all, whenever possible, sat and griped about what had been done to them in the past, in the company of people who were actually interested in such otherwise intimate details. Like sharing war stories without having done battle, part of an all-enlisted platoon of—

Chapter Five

“Once-Upon-A-Time-In-Café-’70s.…”

—Inglorious Bastards were roaming the Café ’70s dance floor, Kumadori Stars of David painted on their left cheeks in garish red, sparring with the blue-hued Reservoir Dogs gang, who in turn were avoiding the similarly-costumed, but black Kumadori-masked Crazy 88s while a few Newbies with basic kesho “face” paint made their way through the phalanx of black-suited-and-white-shirted situated between the group of hyper-stylized WW II-era soldiers and the sword-and-hatchet-bearing Yakuza henchmen, enduring taunts from the Dog-Boys (as those who’d spent time on the Tarantino-meets-Kabuki-themed Set commonly called them), and threats from the Mr. Blonde avatar to slice off their ears, causing a pair of Newbies (a male and female, clad in the Hawaiian shirt and short clingy dress worn by the Pulp Fiction restaurant-robbing couple Pumpkin and Honey-Bunny, aka “Be Cool, Yolanda!”) to move their avatars cluster together, and double-step toward the waiting sushi bar.

From where her Pulp Fiction avatar, the feral-sexy taxi-driver Esmerelda Villa Lobos who ferried rogue boxer Butch away from his killer match, stood, close to the far end of the sushi bar (near the next Virtual eatery, a hamburger joint which served not only Big Kahuna Burgers, but the “Royale…with cheese”), sipping a virtual cup of Junmai Daiginio sake while picking at the plate of unagi, saba hamachi and nori-wrapped kappa-maki before her on the bar, she could see that this couple probably wasn’t going to ever be bold enough to try and virtually stick up this joint, let alone terrorize the customers and staff.

For one thing, both stood dumbstruck when the Hatori Hanzo avatar behind the bar (who was shadowed by one of the ubiquitous kuroko or “men-in-black” Kabuki prop-handlers and prompters, who appeared OnSet as stark silhouettes ghosting some of the permanent avatars in the Café) leaned forward, thrusting his highly-stylized Kumadori-painted face in their direction, saying loudly, in a decent approximation of the original Kill Bill, Vol. 1’s Sonny Chiba’s voice ((((Irasshaimase!!!))))

Obviously, neither was a Japanophile, since “Pumpkin” stammered, ((((Is—Is th-this the right Set? We w-were looking for the Taran—))))

((((You want experience movie, you go rent DVD—oh, no, you stuck in a what, hospital bed, with maybe tube stuck in body-hole? No can go out renting, and maybe cable not working? This is Café ’70s, sort of Tarantino, pretty much my place…and I like Kabuki! Here, all character become Kabuki-tino, you unnerstand? My place like no other Set in Meta-movie-verse. My place…unique!)))) and the Hanzo avatar sliced through a slab of maguro on the bar-top with a flourish of his long odachi, lopping the tuna into virtual bite-size slices, which he offered with a flourish to the frozen-in-place pair of avatars.

While they continued to stand there, unwilling or unable to move, the Chimera heard her friend Mika-Maus, who moved about OnSet as a pink-kimonoed slightly-masculinized version of PF’s Fabienne, the timid French girlfriend of Butch the boxer. Even the Chimera’s Esmerelda had a slightly mannish look, since the Director/Hanzo decreed that all women who dared to enter his unique hybrid Set had to look like traditional onnagata, or oyama (which Mika assured her meant pretty much the same thing, specifically male actors who specialized in female Kabuki roles), say from her spot on the opposite end of the bar, ((((Why don’t you offer them tea?)))) This was Mika’s subtle way of razzing Newbies, especially those she was certain knew virtually nothing about Japanese culture or culinary habits; since “tea” meant far more than the standard “hot or cold” or “black, green or white” when it came to Japanese fare…and yet again, the Newbies took the bait—

((((Ok, then…we’ll have tea)))) “Honey Bunny” tentatively started, which prompted the Hanzo avatar to ask ((((Matcha, Sencha, Agari or Mugicha? Or maybe you want saki?))))

(The Chimera had to stifle a laugh; given the utterly mysterious choice of teas, most Newbies would think asking for just a sake was easier—)

((((A sake)))) the pair said in unison, and then the Hanzo-figure leaned over, ready for the kill, asking in a drawn-out croon:

((((What kind sake? Junmai? Honjozo? Ginjo? Junmai Ginjo? Daiginio? That very smooth…Junmai Daiginio? That very very smooth. You want you saki hot, cold, or warm—))))

((((How about just wet?)))) “Pumpkin” ventured, and suddenly the sushi chef’s sword was up in the air, as he shouted “Seri!” and a pair of trapdoors suddenly materialized in the floor, and the hapless pair of avatars fell out of sight Off Set.

((((Oh, you didn’t give them a chance to ask how much they had to pay)))) the Chimera chided the Itamae, and in reply the sushi chef/Director’s Kuroko dumped a virtual handful of gari on her plate, as the Hanzo said:

((((Next time, you bring up matter of payment. Since this a “give me” not “sell me” bar, Itamae cannot think of everything.))))

Picking up a piece of the palate-cleansing thin-sliced pickled ginger with her right hand, the Esmerelda-avatar nodded solemnly, and murmured ((((Domo)))) before “eating” her food. Not that she had much choice about eating or not eating; all the edibles and drinkables in Café ’70s were poseballs, so once you were given or ordered something, your avatar had to “ingest” it. But the “no pay” part of all OnSet islands was something unique, unlike traditional metaverse objects with built-in scripted behaviors, since the folks who owned the copyrights to all the movie characters and sets involved in all the ReeLife Sets looked the other way as far as filing complaints went since this was very much a fanboy-style metaverse, there was a tacit understanding, a sort of gentlemen’s agreement, which made access to everything in ReeLife free from fees of any sort. ReeLife had nothing to do with Linden Lab, which ran Second Life, hence no Linden dollars, or L$, ever changed hands here. Which, of course, did beg the question as to who was actually funding and running this metaverse—even after visiting the site for over six months, and popping onto close to a dozen different Sets (some of which she immediately teleported out of depending on how slavishly the Directors aped their source material—a few Sets were little more than Filmgeek cut-and-pastes lifted verbatim from the Inspiring Director’s original work—or on how confining the Sets turned out to be; the Director of the Wes Anderson Set had this jones for the color butterscotch, and virtually everyone she and Mika had seen there really, really wanted to be a Tanenbaum, or some variation of Bill Murray, while the entire M. Night Shyamalan-inspired Set was bathed in that unique and unsettling shade of pale greenish-grey which formed the backdrop for most of the real director’s interior sets), until she’d found the one she wished she could live in forever, be it in First Life or this Second-Life-Style variant, the Chimera still hadn’t come across anyone who’d been able to say who was paying the server fees for any of the Sets. Which, while it did give credence to the rumor that ReeLife was the virtual baby of a g.p. who’d received a payout for some beyond purview thing which happened to them during a trial, also suggested a more insidious origin…once, she’d spoken OnSet to Jack and Jacob about it, while Jack was sporting a huge black Gohon-kuruma-bin wig with long bobbing crab-leg shaped appendages which was the Kabuki take on Jules’ jerry-curl wig from Pulp Fiction, while Jacob’s version of Vincent Vega featured black-and-red kumadori patterns on his face, under the lank mane of black hair. The Kabuki-hitmen and Esmerelda had spoken while sitting in one of the many little white Hondas (favored by both Fabienne and Jackie Brown in the movies) which were parked along the hanamichi which served not as traditional walkways on a stage, but as stylized city streets, and since Esmerelda/The Chimera was sitting in the back seat, she had nervously eyed the hand-cannon Vincent/Jacob was waving around as his avatar leaned over the back seat, just in case the gun wasn’t merely a prop, but a poseball which might blow her virtual head off, while asking the two fellow guinea pigs:

((((But what if this place isn’t g.p.-created and funded? Suppose it’s part of the drug companies’ effort to keep an eye on all of us while we’re stuck in trials?))))

((((Would the IRB’s stand for that? They don’t like it when the drug companies mess with us—)))) Jules/Jack started to say, but Vincent/Jacob began waving the hand cannon around, hitting the roof of the car, and cut in:

((((Since when do the Institutional Review Boards do squat for us g.p.’s? If we were protected, some of us wouldn’t suicide after depression-meds trials. The IRB is nothing but a Band-Aid the government slaps over the messier trials…their way of saying “See, we’re watching out for these slackers and gypsies who roam from trial to trial” but people still get sick during them—))))

((((Dontcha know, boys, that why we get those Big Bucks…in a glowing briefcase, of course. They know we’re willing, so they’re able to do what they want to us. I mean, who hasn’t been in a Grade F study, or contemplated invasives? Even the decent studies are still a crapshoot—)))) she had a hard time hearing herself speak as a chopper zoomed by, ridden by some of the Crazy 88s all piled on it acrobat-style…

((((—as far as we g.p.’s are concerned. Which is why I wonder if maybe the people providing the tech support for all of this—)))) she thumped the back of the car seat in front of her for emphasis ((((—are somehow connected with the drug companies. Or the IRB itself.))))

((((Man, I told you we shouldn’t have let her in here)))) Jules/Jack said, giving Vincent/Jacob a smack along side the lank-haired head, prompting the other avatar to shout:

((((Hey you, watch the hair! I worked hard on this hair, and he hits it. He hits my hair—))))

((((Right actor, wrong character…and movie. Later, boys, I’m outta here—)))) the Chimera had said, and as she’d exited the car, head still attached to her virtual shoulders, she’d noticed that the trunk of the car was cracked open, and there was movement inside. Probably Griefers, she remembered thinking, before walking down the hanamichi for a Kahuna Burger, allowing the whole matter of who actually ran ReeLife to once again drop unresolved.

But the Chimera wasn’t blind to the irony that even though she had been coming to the Café ’70s Set for less than a year, she was already something of a Major player, whose word was closely listened to and whose input was sought out by even long-standing characters, and even the Set’s Director, the person behind the Hanzo-Itamae character. Perhaps it was because she was so well-versed in all of the source films, maybe it was due to her choice of avatar—not one of the multiple versions of The Bride, or the Reservoir Dogs gang, or Marsellus and Mia Wallace, or a Jackie Brown/Max Cherry/Odell Robie/Melanie/Lewis quintet, or the gang of Deadly Viper Assassins, complete with Snake-charmer Bill, or any of the other far more easily brought to mind Tarantino creations, but a relatively minor, yet alluring player, the taxi driver who only wanted to know what it felt like to “keel a man.” But perhaps Mika had come closest to figuring out why the Chimera’s avatar had become so popular among the regulars at Café ’70s—during yet another trial they shared (this one held in Austin, a Phase II study for women only, for yet another most-menopausal bone-calcium-loss pill designed for bi-monthly use, even though neither woman was even close to menopause, nor were their bone-calcium-levels dangerously low)—while they sat in their shared hospital room, eating not sushi, but battered and fried fish squares, Mika-Maus had swallowed a mouthful of mystery fish and said, “You should see youself in Café ’70s…when Esmerelda eat sushi, it look like she eat sushi. You make un-real real. You talk to avatar like you talk to person, right in front of you. Like you live it, not play it. When you talk, people listen, not just hear. ’Course, you say damndest thing sometime—”

“Me? Like what?” she asked around a partially-chewed bite of thickly breaded thin-chopped “fillet.”

“Oh, mitaina…provoking thing. ‘Who runs ReeLife?’ ‘The IRB not looking out for us g.p.’s’ ‘Somebody has to be paying the bill for this place, especially without any virtual money changing hand—’ That sort of thing…mitaina?”

Mika had been reverting to that schoolgirlish Japanese version of ike, y’know?” ever since they’d been spending more and more time OnSet in Café ’70s, obviously whoever was running it was either Japanese or a major, perhaps even scholarly, student of Japanese culture, but all the Chimera knew of Japan was what she’d learned watching dubbed or subtitled Japanese animé, or the outlaw Japanese hyper-violent stuff from the early ’00s which Mike had to translate for her from her own stash of Japanese DVD’s, plus, of course, Kill Bill, Vol. 1, and of course those shojo comics she’d paged through.

“No, I don’t know, but I’m just being me, saying what’s on my mind…which is what I thought ReeLife was for. A bitchin’ forum for us little piggies—”

Using her fork like a pointer for emphasis, Mika said, “If all us g.p. are ‘little piggies’ then you big toe, is all I’m saying, mitaina?”

Remembering the scene in KB, Vol. 1 Mika referenced, when The Bride, fresh out of her four-year-long bullet-in-the-head-induced coma, tried to bring her atrophied muscles back to life by ordering her right big toe to wiggle, the Chimera started to do just that, wiggle in place in her chair, until Mika began laughing so hard she nearly choked on her half-chewed fish patty. Once she managed to swallow, then gasp for a few seconds, she said, “Only a big toe among all the other piggies would have its own Kuroko—”

“I have a what?”

“‘Ku-ro-ko’…one of those flat black figures, hover around behind you, only everyone else pretend it not there because that’s what audience do with them in Kabu—”

“Since when?” True, the Hattori Hanzo avatar had one, plus a few other long-established residents of Café ’70s had them, too (a couple of The Brides—a yellow-jump-suit and a recently unearthed Dirt Girl—plus a different set of Jules-and-Vincent, and definitely one of the Bills), but she’d assumed that a Kuroko was something those players managed to generate on their own, or something they’d opened an Easter Egg OnSet to find. But she certainly hadn’t seen one while watching herself OnSet—

“Oh, yours very subtle…look like shadow on wall or on street. Only it doesn’t look like Esmerelda Villa Lobos—it resemble a fox, mitaina, longer point nose, different ear. Oh, and it’s more bluish than black. Maybe that why you not notice it—”

“I asked, ‘since when?”

“Uhmmm…three-four month ago? Ask Jack or Jacob, they point it out to me when we were all in that nasal spray Phase I in Philly. It was whenever that was—”

That particular trial had filled up before the Chimera could sign up, it was actually three-and-a-half months ago, as she recalled.

Right around the time when she and the two men had had their conversation about the possibility of the IRB or drug companies running ReeLife…the same day she was sure there was a Griefer hiding in the trunk of that iconic little white Honda they’d been sitting in. After Mika told her that her Kuroko was blue, the chimera did a little digging into Kabuki history, and ofund out that the color blue, when used in either a costume or make-up, indicated a character who was jealous, or fearful. The latter seemed rather unlikely—she didn’t think she’d done anything while OnSet in any Director’s Set to make the other people behind the avatars fear her, so it had to be the former which motivated this particular Griefer. True, her Esmerelda had become quite popular with the other residents of Café ’70s, but there were other equally well-liked avatars roaming around, too, and none of them had a unique, blue-hued Kuroko shadowing their every move.

Usually, when the Chimera “ate” (or did just about anything) OnSet, she spent most of her time watching her own avatar on screen, but now as Esmerelda finished the pieces of gari dropped on her plate by the Director’s Kuroko, she deliberately looked past her avatar, and began to concentrate on the amorphous shadowy figure, like an avatar caught in mid-rez, as if it had begun to resolve into clarity then stopped about a third of the way into the process, which was draped across the upright side of the sushi bar itself, then bent on an angle to continue along the wall of Café ’70s beyond. Mika was right; the head was more fox-like than lupine. Whoever was working the avatar was damned good; it mirrored her own movements with uncanny precision, like a regular shadow might in a video game. But the odd shape and color revealed that it was no mere glitch in the Set programming—

Whoever this is, they’re able to log on when I do—which probably means the person is a g.p., too, and not some IRB or medical company lurker. They’d have to keep more regular hours, she found herself thinking, while watching her avatar watch the skirmish between the Inglorious Bastards G.I.’s and the Crazy 88s get heated; dimly she could hear some sort of an argument about whether it was right to deliberately throw the results of a trial to force the medical companies to pay more, but she paid scant attention to that ethical debate, since her avatar’s inactivity was obviously making that of her Shadowfox antsy…soon the blue figure began rezzing into something more distinct, more obviously feminine, sort of like KB, Vol. I’s Sofie Fatale character (who wore those long, plain, quasi-kimono-style wrap-dresses with the high collars which Mika-Maus had once said reminded her of the nayajuban, or long robe which goes under a kimono), that half-Japanese, half-French cell-phone-addicted friend of the Yakuza boss of bosses O-Ren Ishii—the one who got her left arm lopped off by The Bride prior to the bloody Showdown at House of Blue Leaves finale of the movie.

“I never did like that character,” the Chimera muttered to herself, as she let her fingers fly across her keyboard, and made her avatar get up off the barstool and execute a double-time backwards retreat from the sushi bar, so that her Esmerelda was now facing her own rogue Shadowfox, which continued to rez into prim clarity while still in a sitting position by the bar.

((((All right, who are you? Don’t you move, Shadowfox, I can see you—))))

((((You and I have unfinished business!)))) The voice was clearly sampled from the Kill Bill films; Uma Thurman’s voice was unmistakable.

((((I don’t think so—I don’t know who you are—))))

((((You lie!)))) Now the person behind the avatar used a sample from O-Ren Ishii’s response to The Bride’s revelation that she carried a Hattori Hanzo sword.

Mumbling to herself “this is getting pretty old pretty fast—” the Chimera licked her lips, then said into her mic:

((((Lay off the sampling key, and use your own voice already…if I do know you, I don’t honestly remember you. I’ve met a lot of people—))))

((((And you don’t have a nice word to say about anybody! Were you, perhaps, less like an agitated porcupine when dealing with others, I think you would be able to remember me—))))

The Chimera was drawing an absolute blank on the voice; female, mature, but unremarkable. But the other avatars OnSet were starting to notice that something potentially Worth Listening To was about to happen, since the amount of chatter on the Director’s kabuki no butal-like Set-cum-Kabuki stage dropped noticeably after the Shadowfox began shouting at the Esmerelda avatar.

((((—so down, girl, and sheath those claws and hide those vitriolic fangs—)))) the Shadowfox Griefer’s tinny voice-modulator-filtered screed echoed throughout Café ’70s, causing all those currently OnSet to stop whatever pieces of business their avatars were engaged in to turn their highly-stylized, prim-animated heads in the ranting Griefer’s direction—as well as that of the Unnatural-Born Chimera’s Esmerelda Villa Lobos avatar. But before she could open her mouth to say something, anything in rebuttal into the earpiece mic hovering close to her rage-pursed lips, she suddenly realized, I know that voice—if only I could remember her name—I know that voice, someone who never shut up, just droned on and on and—

Then it came to her. The woman from that sleeping pill trial, the bony-behinded tattooed twitch “Happy Camper,” the one who punctuated her stories with “horray”—

—Like that Raising Arizona “Ed…short for Edwina!” avatar she had heard in the Coen Brothers Set during her first visit to ReeLife, the one who was badgering that Marge Gunderson avatar about some upcoming invasives trial. Which is where she probably first noticed the Chimera in ReeLife. And by the time the Chimera’s Esmerelda avatar had begun to make something of a name for herself at Café ’70s, the Happy Camper had begun to seethe with jealousy because someone who had refused to listen to her was now being sought out by others for being popular. “How school-girlish,” the Chimera whispered, “how petty…and how in the hell do I get her away from me?”

((((—you hypocrite! You criticize those who sponsor the trials, mock their actions, question the existence of this very place, yet you are a walking enigma! Easy to hide behind the avatar of a woman named for a beast, when you yourself are a creature of myth! And you profited from being a chimera when that genetic test for a weight-loss cure went sideways, didn’t you? Even as you ridicule the IRB, and the drug companies, you profit by them! Horry for the woman who lied to the sponsors of her trial, got sick, and made them pay for her deception! I saw all those golds and flaps and dewlaps you hide under those support garments you wear, and I heard about the poor woman who didn’t know she was a chimera until something went haywire during a clinical trial in Indiana…didn’t think anyone would realize you were her, did you? The past cannot be changed—or undocumented. Nor can old issues of medical journals be purged from the Internet—does anyone here remember the series of articles written about a child called the Unnatural-Born Chimera? The product of a lab mistake during a ICSI fertility procedure? One mother, two fathers? Just like the Chimera of myth, only instead of a lion, dragon and a serpent, we have a porcupine, a puffer-fish and a wolverine, the one animal that enjoys killing for fun—))))

((((I remember you now…and I’ve been meaning to tell you, what your father said about you behaving like a “retard” was such an insult—to mentally-challenged people the world over!)))) the Chimera said, even as she regretted sinking to the woman’s level, it was the only thing she could think of to say which would prove that she did, indeed, hear some of what the woman had said to her.

For a moment, the Griefer said nothing, did nothing, but no one else OnSet made a sound or moved their avatars, either, which was not a good sign at all—they all couldn’t be link-dead at the same time, so obviously everyone thought the sudden war of words between the Griefer and the avatar was well worth watching. The only problem was, the Chimera had no idea what the Shadowfox might do next, or say next, so anticipating a comeback was all the more difficult—

The stillness OnSet was jarringly punctuated with the warbling trill of what sounded like a cell phone ringing, then, the Shadowfox pushed one hand into a side pocket of her long bluish-grey dress, and pulled out a cell phone, which she tossed in the Esmerelda avatar’s direction, saying, ((((Here, this is for you!))))

And damned if it wasn’t a poseball; before she could prevent it, the Esmerelda avatar reflexively grabbed the cell phone with one hand, and as soon as it made contact with her fingers, it flipped open, and a clearly pre-recorded voice-mail said:

((((Behold the great Unnatural-Born Chimera’s True Form!))))

The phone wasn’t just a poseball, it was a calling card—one infected with a virus. Unable to drop the phone, the Esemerelda Villa Lobos figure began to rez into something wide, wider, then rounder—and the Chimera wasn’t sure how the Shadowfox did it, whether she’d surreptitiously snapped a picture of the Chimera with a digital camera while they were rooming together, or if the Happy Camper merely had an excellent memory for faces and some superior photo-shop skills, but she managed to turn the Chimera’s exquisitely sexy, svelte avatar into…the Chimera herself, the way she had looked prior to that disastrous invasives trial at the weight loss center, a walking circle of smooth, shiny skin…which suddenly, with the sampled sound of a pin bursting a balloon, began to deflate, with a rude hissing noise, until the Chimera was little more than sagging flesh over a scaffolding of bones.

But even worse than what she was seeing before her was what she now heard—the people behind the avatars turning out to be people she’d met and done numerous clinical trials with, a fact she’d been able to keep at a distance thanks to the masking effects of the wild Kabuki-themed avatars they used. And she recognized more than one voice amid the overlapping rhubarb OnSet:

((((—met her in Austin, for that Phase II—))))

((((—why she always wore those baggy clothes, even in summer—))))

((((—I read about that Chimera baby back when I was—))))

((((—she didn’t have time to say a word to me when we were—))))

Nothing the Chimera could do from her keyboard could undo the virus’ effects on her avatar, but as she kept on hitting her keys, the Director avatar stepped out from behind the sushi bar, dogged by his Kuroko, and began waving his odachi in the Shadowfox’s direction, shouting, ((((Sessus!)))) which caused the Griefer to begin to rise up in a slow teleport, until she was what would have been perhaps four feet off the Set floor in First Life, wiggling in mid-air but unable to finish TPing herself OffSet, and all she could do was shout:

((((Tired of looking at the medical freak? Come see what a Self-Inflicted Chimera’s like at next year’s Fauxmeria Fest—))))

—until the Hanzo avatar began slicing and swinging at the Shadowfox as if she was a fleshy piñata. As body parts began flying around the Café, they bounced off dozens of gathering Brides, Jules and Vincent combos, school-girl assassin Go-Go’s, Jackie Brown people, and blue-faced…Dogs, the WWII soldiers, even some characters from Deathproof, and From Dusk Till Dawn’s bank-robbing brothers, leaving animated streaks of maruro-red on their costumes, which matched the pool of blood on the floor of the Set. And as he hacked at the Griefer, the Director shouted, ((((When you depart, leave your limbs here—they belong to me now!)))), aping The Bride’s triumphant orders to the members of the Crazy 88s following her victory over them, but as her newly-altered avatar stood on the sidelines, watching as the Shadowfox became little more than a disarticulated pile of mannequin limbs lying among the watching avatars, the Chimera realized that this place had been ruined for her…true, there were ways to dislodge the virgus from the Happy Camper/Shadowfox from her laptop, and there were other Sets to visit, where she might not be known, but it was still over as far as using ReeLife to escape her Real Life was concerned. The whole point of being here was rendered moot by a jealous guinea pig who wasn’t able to command attention on her own (“I just do things, and I don’t think there’s anything special about it—hard to ‘sell’ myself” she had told the Chimera…and for that woman’s failings in the subtle art of self-promotion, the Chimera had been humiliated), but couldn’t bear to share ReeLife with someone who, in that realm, at least, was able to literally recreate herself to her own advantage—

While she’d been lost in a miasma of admittedly justified self-pity, the Chimera hadn’t noticed that her ruined avatar had been joined by Mika’s Fabienne, and jack and Jacob’s Jules and Vincent, all of whom were looking at her, and not at the Director as he continued to literally ’86 the Griefer in the center of the kabiki no butai floor to the rear of the Set.

((((Come here to gloat?)))) she found herself asking the two men, but Jules/Jack took out his wallet, and pulled a hundred dollar bill out of it, and handed it to her, saying:

((((Trust me, this is one calling card you want to pick up)))) before he and Jacob TP’ed out of there, leaving only Fabienne/Mika by her side to look at what the back of the bill said:

A warrior’s best weapon is one which is provided by his (or her) enemy. Remember, The Bride could ask her Kung Fu Master Pai Mei how to do The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique only because her enemy Bill told her that it existed in the first place.…Thus Bill armed The Bride with the instrument of his own doom.

She TP’ed Off Set, after creating her own calling card message, and using her avatar to “hand” it to Fabienne/Mika, before exiting Café ’70s for the last time. Even though she didn’t stick around to watch her friend read the message, she’d know soon enough if Mika was willing to help her—if the young Japanese woman showed up on her condo front steps within the month, after both of their respective trials were concluded, she and the Mika-Maus would show the Real World what a true Self-Inflicted Chimera could look like.…

Chapter Six

“Art is not safe” —Rob Zombie

“—I can do most of the Asian styles of tattooing, Teburi style, hand-poking, Nifo, chiseled Moko, an approximation of Kalinga even though you really have to be a woman to do authentic ones, sewing tattoos…those are rare, and hurt worse than most tats, plus I’ll do an approximation of a Marol whakapapa or a pe’a, but they’re not stricktly authentic, and I use my own designs, not the Marol ones…but if you want a Japanese full-body tat, I can do that too. Or the American styles…Sailor Jerry, motivational tats, milestone tats, American traditional, which is like Sailor Jerry’s as far as—” the stick-thin tattoo artist Jack and Jacob had recommended to the Chimera wouldn’ve kept on droning all afternoon and evening, too, if she hadn’t of cut in:

“I’m looking for a woman…a woman whom you may have tattooed. And I need her name.”

The tattoo master, a brown-haired young man named Ivan Giovanni (whose Russian-Italian-sounding name belied his pale skin and rather generic features) began rubbing his mouth with his left hand, making the quasi 3-D tattoo of an Aquarius symbol (which was actually one tattoo over another, with a layer of burn-scar-tissue between the slightly-different images) seem to shift and move against his inner forearm, as he said, “Uhm…Jack and Jacob told you, didn’t they? I have this condition, where I can’t recognize faces—”

“Prosopagnosia…I’ve read up on it. When I was guinea-pigging I came in contact with a lot of medical journals in a lot of hospitals. But my fellow g.p.’s also said you have an uncanny memory for tattoos. Here’s some sketches of what this woman had on her body—” handing Giovanni a few sheets of paper covered with drawings of the Happy Camper/Shadowfox Griefer’s tats (those both she and a couple of other guinea pigs she managed to find who’d done trials with her remembered), the Chimera said, “While you look at those, I’ll take a look at these—” she indicated the walls covered with flash stencils “—and when I decide, you can start, okay?”

Lost in concentration, the tattoo artist nodded over the sheets of paper, as the Chimera slowly wandered form one flash-covered wall to another, taking in the designs offered there, and suddenly finding herself overwhelmed by something utterly alien to her life experience:

For the first time in many, many years, she had the opportunity of life-altering, lasting choice. Not choice-by-necessity, definitely not the do-or-die choices made for reasons beyond her control—find work or starve, make money or lose a house or a car, select a Phase I, II or III trial over a riskier but more lucrative invasive, engage one’s roommates in conversation, or tune out and watch a movie or go InWorld online thus saving one’s sanity, put up with a Grade D or F trial, or risk being known as a complainer who doesn’t get chosen for any more trials in the future. Nor was this a meaningless choice, eggs or cereal for breakfast, elastic or drawstring pants, watch this movie or that today while waiting for the unknown meds in her system to kick in or not.

Letting her eyes move from one flash-embellished piece of paper to another (clustered Navy tats; bluebirds, swallows, Neptune, pigs and roosters to adorn a sailor’s feet and keep him afloat, milestone tats all), the Chimera remembered how the Happy Camper had claimed to get a new tat for every trial she completed…at least one or more of them had to have been held in the Twin Cities area, where this shop was.…

Once the chimera had left ReeLife for the last time, she’d had to rely on Mika and the eyebrow-ring twins for information about what was going on there…for as if to confirm her suspicion that ReeLife was somehow funded or overseen or at least associated with the medical/drug companies, her applications for upcoming trials were refused…they were full, or she wasn’t quite “right” for this particular trial, or the deadline for application magically backdated, so her request was invalid. The Shadowfox Griefer had worked her jealous-fueled hacker virus-magic on the Chimera…just as she and her Griefer buddies had done to the “Rainsing Coenbros-na!” Set (Mika discovered that the Grips had discovered the quintuplet-kidnapping “Ed” avatar and a couple of might-be-guys sporting skins matching the Fargo faux-kidnapper duo sabotaging the Director’s barber shop Set and dispatched the avatars with a cattle bolt-gun). Jack and Jacob began questioning fellow Characters on every Set they usually visited about the Shadowfox, and discovered that her various incarnations (Ed in the coen Set, Margot Tenenbaum on the West Anderson Set, the Koochie-dancing Chimp Wife on Burton’s Set, and the toxic Marla Singer in Fincher club) were being 86’ed for Griefer attacks, and usually at least two other avatars were tossed out along with her Characters. And since Jack and Jacob informed her that many multi-tattooed people tend to band together in social situations as a self-contained unit or society, the Chimera did a little digging on-line, and discovered that anger and rebellion were often reasons for extreme tattooing, along with a general “look at me” mind-set…anything to get attention, especially if the person had low self-esteem or an inferiority complex. Which pretty much summed up the Happy Camper in the proverbial nutshell (a person would have to be damn-near close to nuts to pick some of the American Traditional tats Ivan had to offer—leering red-eyed skulls, winning poker hands featuring half-naked Queen face cards, mostly naked hula girls, cowboys riding jackalopes, all done with coloring-book thick black outlines)…a waling bulletin board of mixed-not-matched tats, each a reminder of what she’d done—or more rightly, let others do to her.

Behind her, she could hear Giovanni leafing through the pages of the Happy Camper’s quilt-like assortment of ink, while she took in the examples of Asian/Pacific-inspired tattoo variants, mostly black bold geometric patterns, interspersed with nature-inspired creations like centipedes, flowers, aquatic-wave shapes, and butteflies, plus some Asian writing—Chinese Kanji, Tibetan good-luck lines of vertical lettering, line/dot/circle-fueled Korean, all of which were reminiscent of her former life’s work in that most of them had counters between the symbols, yet alien in that they often lacked serifs…yet, when viewed as a whole on their side-by-side flash sheets, each country’s lettering formed a family, much like the versions of typefaces (Roman, Italic, Bold Roman and Bold Italic) formed groupings called families in her profession. For a moment, she considered personal ink utilizing Asian script, but decided it was too much like her former life spent paring away individual new letter forms until she’d created a fresh balance of something (the letter itself) and nothing (what surrounded each letter), just like the way she’d attempted to surround her “other” half with more of the part of her she considered “her.” Ultimately, a pursuit which could only end in a stalemate of the worst sort—just as a letter which had too much pared away from it ceased to be a recognizable symbol, the chimera had almost allowed herself to be reduced to a parody of a human being, close to half a person.

No, that part of her life, the struggling, warring-with-herself phase, was over. No more drifting from clinical trial to clinical trial, telling each group of mostly strangers that she was doing this to save up for contouring surgery after an extreme weight loss, dressing and undressing in bathrooms least her roommates get freaked out by the fleshy origami-like process of wrapping, tucking and literally folding her excess flaps and dewlaps into a stream-lined tightly-bound faux whole. And no more hiding behind idealized avatar versions of herself, either…starting with the acceptance of her Chimerial fate, she was about to pursue another reason for being tattooed, one that Jack and Jacob claimed motivated their quest for bodily evolution…the tattoo as a marker of the soul, a creative approach to spirituality. (How their iodine-saturated “crunchy tats” fit into this life-view, she wasn’t sure, but if this explanation for getting inked worked for them…)

Both men said they were still seeking a state called “self-peace,” a mindset Jacob described as “The point where you can look at your body and what you’ve done to it and say, ‘I’m done’ finito—” which was what the Chimera realized she needed, albeit as in “I’m whole—”

Next to the walls of flash were display-cased sample bottles of dry pigment, the colorant used in all inks, prior to the addition of whatever particular liquid vehicle dispersion the individual tattoo artist chose to add to the pigment, plus a chart listing special types of tattoo inks available.…Ivan offered Freedom ink, the pigment which could be lasered off in one session, as well as UV inks, and bio-inks created from a myriad of sea-creatures, each with its own unique properties, including the chance of DNA-drift from the skin to blood—

“Ooooh-kay, I remember giving a woman this one…she was skinny, never shut up, kept on jabbering about how she couldn’t wait until her “biologicals” back home saw the tat—I write down every tattoo I do in a journal, along with a sketch of ti and the person’s name—lemme go look it up…you decided what you want yet?”

A room full of possibilities, and all of them were as open to her as the next…but, being a Chimera, be she natural or unnaturally so inextricably bound to her submerged twin, there were certain options which were far more appropriate and aesthetically right for her, so as she pulled a sketch-pad out of her over-the-shoulder bag and began drawing what she wanted done to her, she said, “Yes…yes I have, but I did want to warn you, once you see me, I doubt you’ll need to be able to recall my face to remember me—”

Chapter Seven

Creative Nomenclature

About thirty or so years before the accidental conception of the Unnatural-Born Chimera, in the late 1970s, a nomenclature craze hit certain creative and otherwise socially-ostracized people in America. Like-minded or—oriented people banded together, in a quasi-tribal, semi-professional affiliation, and not only merged their talents or innate proclivities, but adopted a specific meaningful (or not) moniker to replace their given/slave name. A group of hard-playing, long-haired, musically-driven guys got together, wrote a slew of super-short, head-shaking, brain-blowing rock songs, and began using a single surname—Ramone, as in The Ramones. They starred in a movie. They made albums. They wore leather jackets. Most of them died young, but creatively fulfilled. People still listened to their albums decades later.

Around the same time, a group of lesbians, part of a nation-wide no-men-allowed wo(men) (or womyn or wimmin)’s social movement which was divided into multiple units, centered around various major cities, only these particular people of the female gender were nomadic, living out of vans, driving from one separatist enclave to another, and since they were of a humorous bent, they dubbed themselves the Van Dykes, a deliberate play on who they were and what they drove. They not only took on a single surname, but they re-christened themselves with new given names. They were vegan. They were bald (by choice). Some of them were into S&M, for a while. They were creative, and attracted other artistic types. By the 1980s, they were off the road and settled all over the country. Scholars still wrote books about their movement decades later.

Fast forward a few decades, to around the time the Chimera was born, give or take a few years, and a gal named Missy decided to gather up a group (which eventually was to number over a thousand strong) of like-minded women who were into tattoos, piercing, free-thinking, free love (of either persuasion), glamour, Goth, extreme confidence, and for the most part pin-up girl good looks, who became The Suicide Girls. Similar naming process as the Ramones and the Van Dykes—same last name, stage-names for a first name. They posed for pin-up shoots. They did videos. They performed in small groups in clubs, opening for musical acts. They dressed the way they wanted, with none looking like the other. They exuded confidence and individuality. All of them were beyond unique. People who saw them couldn’t forget about them decades later.

Like their nomenclatural forbearers, the group of people who began to band together in the third full decade of the 21st century at various freewheeling gatherings like Burning Man, the Lebowski Festival, Extreme Ironing, and the Zombie parades in the Twin Cities and New york, had a few things in common: various forms of body modification, a “look at me!’ need for attention, jobs which allowed them to travel freely and often, an idiosyncratic life-view, occasionally coupled with an I-can-top-that! competitive urge which sometimes devolved into more negative attention-getting behaviors like graffiti-spraying, computer-hacking, and Griefer raids on various metaverses. Because they were into physical ornamental changes, someone came up with the name Guillochis, which referred to a border formed of two or more interlaced bands whose design repeated—since it was an architectural term, perhaps someone who worked in that field thought it up. No one knew, or cared. It just sounded cool, so those who kept meeting each other at these fests started calling each other that. They didn’t create any memorable works of art aside from their own bod mods. They didn’t have much of a sense of humor about themselves. They were about as nonessential to the basic structure of everyday life as a bit of superficial trim on a building. If they were remembered at all, it was for trashing other people’s artworks, getting thrown out of various festivals from coast-to-coast and throughout the vast Midwest, plus parts of Mexico and Canada, and getting banned from FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube, VLES, Second Life, and ReeLife, where they’d assumed the status of straw villains, since most folks living during the decades they existed barely knew who they were—or cared.

Until one of them, a flibberti-gibbety housewife who paid for her festival travels with travel to stays at minimal-risk clinical trials, became obsessed with a fellow guinea pig. In a way, their relationship was as non-existent-save-for-accidental-proximity as that of a couple of characters in a movie both of them just happened to have seen, the Coen Brother’s Barton Fink. On one level, the Guillochis was like the mad, murderous salesman named Charlie Meadows, while the other woman, an unmarried, unemployed type-designer who claimed to be guinea-pigging to ay for some body-contouring surgery after an extensive weight loss, was something of a Barton Fink, in that she was creative, and definitely uncommunicative, despite the most persistent efforts of her roommate to engage her in conversation, but on another, the housewife was something of a Barton Fink in that she was mind-numbingly boring yet wholly self-absorbed…while her trial-mate was the Woman With a Secret.

The Guillochies’ obsession morphed into an all-consuming need to destroy the woman she eventually learned was once dubbed the Unnatural-Born Chimera in deaces-old medical journal articles, and after a tirade against her on a ReeLife Set, the Guillochis had hoped that the Chimera would ask “why are you doing this to me,” but being disinterested in her, she hadn’t, thus robbing the Shadowfox Griefer Guillochis of a reply she’d carefully sampled from the film itself, Meadows speaking to Fink, telling him why he was provoking him:

“Because you don’t listen.”

The Last Chapter

Showdown at Fauxmeria Fest

(BLACK SCREEN/WHITE LETTERING:)

ONE YEAR LATER

It’s been said that Fauxmeria Fest began in the fall of 2027, when a group of plushies and furries got lost en route to the Plushies and Furries convention being held in Las Vegas, said Screw It, and decided to hold their own Happening in the desert just outside of the Las Begas Bombing and Gunnery Range. They had an RV, two cases of beer, six-and-a-half bottles of Honiozo sake, an Igloo cooler of California rolls and five bags of Thai sweet-and-spicy beef jerky, a case of Roman candles left over from the Fourth of July, four extra-large flashlights, eight rolls of toilet paper, and, essential to the inception of any legend, a digital camcorder. Plus their animal costumes, of course—two oversized housecats (one with tiger-print nylon underwear), a wolf, a lamb, a moose, and some sort of Really Big Bird with hot pink feathers and a fuchsia beak. One-and-a-half cases of beer, four-and-a-half bottles of sake (served cold), all the California rolls and most of the beef jerky later, the t.p. was unfurled, the Roman candles lit and launched, and the flashlights were illuminating the fur-pile which ensued, only someone had had the foresight to secure the running camera to the rear view mirror before diving into the pile, even though everyone was pretty well blitzed by the time they thought to don their faux skins, so heads were plunked down over the wrong costumes, and the effect was a cross between a child’s head-and-body-switch puzzle and a mythological chimera…only, when they heard the approaching Highway Patrol sirens and quickly shucked off their now slightly-gamy pelts, one of them did remember to shut off the camcorder and hide it in the RV before the fuzz showed up, so the event was preserved, uploaded to YouTube once they’d all made bail, and quickly dubbed “Fauxmeria Fest” by the over 40,000 people who saw the viral video within the first two hours it was on the site, before someone noticed what the Cat-headed Wolf and the Moose-Bird were doing off to one side and fired off a complaint which got the video yanked off of YouTube.

But the 40,000 people who’d thought to download the video passed it along, and by 2028, about a twentieth of the number of original viewers shwoed up outside the Bombing and Gunnery Range, faux-fur pelts mismatched and ready, along with just about everything alcoholic capable of being shoved in a car trunk without exploding in the heat, plus battery-powered light sources—using one’s vehicle lights was soon considered a no-no, lest one’s battery die before the SuperTroopers showed up, preventing a speedy exit. This time, over a hundred different videos, cell phone videos, and even some old fashioned movie film stock caught the action, and the “Fauxmeria Fest,” a sort of four-legged answer to the mostly-naked Burning Man celebration a few months earlier over by Black Rock City near Reno, was officially born…and once everyone not able to get away before the troopers arrived in both prowlers and helicopters paid their fines, it was decided that getting a permit might be more cost effective, along with charging a gate fee.

And by the time the Shadowfox had so boldly advertised the upcoming ’Fest on one of the Reelife Sets, prior to having her avatar ceremoniously sliced to sushi by a just slightly lesser cousin to Burning Man—the attendance was probably a fourth of the typical sixty-thousand or so nearly naked or more so people who roamed that desert fest on bikes or Mad-Max-meets-Fred-Flintstone-style tricked-out golf-carts, getting loaded, indulging in wild sexual antics, and indulging their creative side (even if they failed to put clothes on any side of their bodies), but Fauxmeria Fest did have a final event which closely rivaled that of the other fest’s triumphant lighting of the fifty-foot Burning Man wood-based sculpture…the Strut-n-Prowl, an animalistic mash-up of runway walk-offs, dog-and-cat shows, high-school science fairs, and bod-mod-competitions, done on a long raised platform out in the desert, surrounded by whatever ight crews each Fauxmeria brought with him/her/whatever. Like a pit-crew-surrounded beauty pageant-cum-talent show, performed by people either medically or sartorially altered into chimeras of a hyper-bizarre sort even the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians couldn’t have imagined, like Hunter S. Thompson’s worst acid-trip ever merged with the rejects from Noah’s Ark. And the voting was strictly crowd-based—whoever prompted the assembled furred/feathered/embossed/branded/implanted and physically-messed-up masses to make the most noise “won.” Not that a prize was involved—bringing one’s own bottle (can/goatskin pouch/keg/what-have-you) plus springing for an entry fee plus whatever it cost to cob together a Chimera get-up pretty much ate up any real profits—but for some people, the mere bragging rights, the ability to be known as the “Fauxmera of all Fauxmera’s” was prize enough…and it was an honor that the Shadowfox had craved ever since she’d attended her first fest, dressed in the leftovers from her two kids’ last Halloween costumes. Put on a bunny suit, top it with a Big Bird headpiece, and she was no longer a mere housewife, whom her neighbors never invited over for pre-soaps coffee klatches, but a creature of the imagination, a distinct member of a self-created pack—and the fact the yellow headpiece really didn’t fit all that well (being made for a child), which made it next to impossible for her to speak much, actually added to her appeal at Fauxmeria Fest. It prevented her from engaging in her typical Guillochis behavior as well; that first visit was the only one in which she and her brethren didn’t try to mess up the lighting by slapping dingles and cucoloris’ over the fronts of the lenses, thus breaking up the beam into weird branching patterns, or surreptitiously rub noxious pourables onto their costume paws, and onto the backs and fronts of unsuspecting furpilers.

Being physically altered, none of the Guillochis were ever caught, but their presence was known and barely (no pun) tolerated by the other attendees…by the time the annual Fest was to begin, in that year after the Shadofox-virtual-sushi incident in ReeLife, the organizers (aka the core six Plushies and Furries who’d begun the Fest) had decided to stage a covert hunt of their own “kind”—any Guillochis discovered on site would be dealt with, their way.…

* * * *

On the evening of the third day of noon-to-dawn fur-piling, preening, drinking, feasting, more fur-piling, ritually swapping headpieces while crawling around in a giant fake-fur-covered igloo-shaped half Bucky-ball built of rebar, drinking a lot more, sleeping wherever and whenever each person’s inner animal saw fit, skirtching (another form of preening), drinking much more (after all, desert heat plus sweaty costumes makes downing liquids a must), and shoving whatever food fit under the necks of their costumes into their mouths, someone put the sign-up list up by the Sandbox (aka the fifty port-a-johns sitting out near the far end of the fest site) for that evening’s Strut-n-Prowl.

The event was limited to the first twenty creatures to sign up, so the line for would-be performers began early in the afternoon, and once twenty…creatures were in line, that was it—a pair of bouncers with big bodies, blood-hound heads and cop hats shoved away the rest of the would-be-strutters.

Signee numero uno was the Shadowfox, who didn’t actually sign in, but left a paw-print after a panda-headed alligator rolled a paint roller covered with dark grape-flavor-ade over her costumed hand, then inked it onto the sheet, while a tattooed-and-implanted lizard man with a forked tongue wearing a Hello-Kitty! Tee shrt took her picture with a digital camera. Once the image of her fox-head-on-a-skunk body was affixed to the board lost-pet-notice-style, she was off with a mixture of cocoa-butter laced with cayenne pepper hidden in her paw-pads, looking to pollute the nearest fur-pile, never looking back at those fauxmerias behind her…a usual Fest mix of felines, canines, rodents, forest critters all jumbled up together. Including a porcupine with a wolverine’s head, who did pay close attention to each and every sign-in posted on the board before her.…

* * * *

As she waited behind the makeshift canvas “curtain” strung between two long pieces of rebar stuck in cement-filled five-gallon buckets in the sand, the Chimera listened intently as the Fauxmeria who’d taken the stage first began its “act”—as Jack had explained to her months earlier, while his friend Ivan Gionvanni did his tattooing work on her laid-flat-on-the-tattoo-parlor-table flesh, a Strut-n-Prowl was a cross between avian mating dances, jungle creatures in heat, and a county fair pet show: “You got your light crew, making sure the hand-helds are catching the shine of your fur and the texture of your paw and nose pieces. Then there’s your Handler, sorta like a carny barker, dog-walker and rock star roadie. He or she does the talking for you, explains what you are, unless part of your Fauxmeria creature is human, then you can talk for yourself. But mostly, you move it—shake it, strut it, see it jiggle, watch it wiggle. Animal style. Sometimes it’s sick stuff…sometimes, like ballet meets kickboxing. You never know what it’s gonna be—all depends on how the person decides to mix up his or her Fauxmeria parts, and whether those parts have an expected movement. You, you’re gonna do fine. Blow ’em outta the water—”

She ahdn’t had a chance to see what the Fauxmeria actually looked like—years before, someone who’d seen the old movie The Elephant Man way too many times got the idea of covering up the competitors with a huge burlap sack, in honor of that not-really-a-Chimera, let-alone-a-Fauxmeria gentleman in 19th century London, because despite his deformities, he sounded like a pretty cool dude anyhow—since both she and all the others had had said musty beige sacks pulled down over their heads and bodies by the roaming pig-dogs, before being hauled, along with their “crews,” over to the vacant space behind the big canvas curtain. Next to her, Mika-Maus (sporting bunny ears and leopard-skin-body paint) and Jack-and-Jacob (who’d interchanged elements from lion and tiger plushy suits), all with high-beam battery-powered lamps in hand/paw, waited for the first “act” to move around the curtain, mount the rough wooden steps en masse, and begin their Strut-n-Prowl. All her crew could see were the shadows cast by the moving Fauxmeria and light-bearers, while the Chimera could only make out hazy, cross-hatched flickers of light and dark, but when the light show began, she suddenly heard a voice say: “Behold, the Vixen-maid, Queen of the forest and the stream—” and the Chimera said to herself, You were right, you really do find it hard to “sell” yourself, as she and her friends listened to the Shadowfox thump and shake on stage, apparently doing something between fleeing the hunting hounds and dry swimming on plywood, if the Chimera was interpreting the shadows she saw correctly.

The Chimera did notice that the Fauxmeria on stage never referred to herself as a “Shadowfox”—perhaps that specific identity was just a shade too notorious? Or too associated with being a Guillochis?

Backstage was plunged into abrupt darkness with the “show” ended, a ehart-beat of silence, then…noise, yelling, screaming, barking, meowing, clucking, plus a few most raspberries, from Fauxmerias who’d branched out into the fruit and vegetable living-organism category.

Eighteen more acts followed, the Chimera chose to ignore their performances, since she was concentrating on refining her own slightly ad-libbed appearance.…

Next to her, Jacob whispered “Go time!” and they hustled her up onto the steps, and once she was centered, Mika yanked off her canvas drape to reveal…what the audience saw as a cocoon on a stick, only the “stick” was one leg, bound tightly in a grayish-brown wrap, while the rest of the Chimera’s body was hidden under a gauzy ovoid shape resembling a dry, layered husk…which flew apart in fluttering flakes when the two men hit her with the spotlights, revealing the Chimera wearing alittle more than nipple petals and a g-string, but nonetheless clothed in brilliant color and stark black lines, which, when she raised up her arms while simultaneously using her fingertips to pull out the folds of flesh resting along her sides, became wings—which Jack and Jacob illuminated form behind, forming patterns of color and outline which changed when the light hit them, thanks to being tattooed with different colors and patterns on either side of her deflated love handles and upper arms, while Mika said as she stood off to one side, shining a light on the Chimera’s face, “From a place of inner darkness, the Unnatural-Born Chimera emerges, triumphant—” and then she spoke for herself, just as all three of her helpers cut out their lights, and the bio-luminescent and UV inks within her flesh revealed yet another design on her skin, first the markings of a Monarch butterfly in the bio-luminescent ink derived from jellyfish, followed by the trio switching on small UV lights, whose blue glow revealed the delicate sweep and flutter of a luna moth, “—and augmented! What was once two within one becomes a triad, two from land, one from the sea!” and then she turned around, for the finale—the revelation of her own Blaschko’s lines, fine fern-like swirls fanning out on either side of her spine from buttocks to should blades, amid which UV ink fish swam—

Then, the chilly desert air was filled with a blast of sound, a swelling roar of approval which the chimera, now suddenly puckered with gooseflesh from both the cold and the thrill of her victory, cut off swiftly, with a single “shusssh!” behng a raised finger, before looking down at the crowd of Fauxmerias and seeing a hybrid of a fox, mermaid tail and sea-shell-pasty-covered human breasts and arms in one of the front rows almost directly in front of her, and then saying, in a voice which seemed to carry for miles upon miles in the frigid evening air:

“Vara Wilda Guillochis, otherwise known as the Happy Camper, and the Shadowfox Griefer, you, down there in the mermaid/vixen get-up—you and I have unfinished business!”

And as she pointed out the Fauxmera, the startled Shadowfox only had time to start to say “I’m not—” before the pig-dogs descended upon her, and she was lifted horizontally and carried off hand-to-hand, toward that faux-fur covered igloo-thing in the desert, while the crowd began shouting “Skin the beast! Rip her hide off!” and furry-pawed hands pulled away her costume, until all that was left were her shells and tattoos and piercings, and just before she was passed out of sight, the Chimera saw the VW Van tattoo on her leg, the one Ivan had done for her years before. Not his best work, she decided, as Mika placed the discarded canvas drape over her shoulders, but memorable enough for my purposes. Behind her Jack-and-Jacob said, “Wanna hit the road?” “We gonna stick around?” as the Chimera looked down at all the lighted cell phone cameras, red-dotted camcorders and camera flashes winking like moonlight on lapping ocean waves before her, paused for one more moment to allow everyone to capture that soon-to-be-uploaded shot of her in all her self-peace, me-and-her integrated tattooed glory, before she told herself, it wasn’t how little she did to me, but that she did it at all to remove a part of my life…not knowing it would drive to me the ultimate self-peace, as in me being one piece, then looked at her friends and—ignoring the distant shrieks and whoops of the people busily punishing the Shadowfox for all her past and current Fauxmeria Fest and ReeLife Transgressions—said unceremoniously, “Let’s split—”

(BRING UP MUSIC CUE, BLACKOUT, ROLL CREDITS—)

RIP: David Carradine (1936-2009)

Author’s note: While the Ramones, the Van Dykes and The Suicide Girls are all real groups, the Guillochis are not (thankfully). Likewise, Burning Man and The Lebowski Festival are also real, while Fauxmeria Fest is (so far) imaginary. But all the films, and their writer/directors, are very much real, even if ReeLife is a fictional construct (while Second Life, In Dreams and VLES do exist in the metaverse). The author is indebted to all the film-makers listed above, for their continuous ability to both entertain and inspire.…