Jeremy Steen
Parasite Logic
Under acoustic tile and flickering fluorescent lights, Douglas inserted his earpods and began typing. His task was to track, monitor, collate, decode, and, most importantly, assess the presence and level of threat this program posed to the American people. As he transcribed the episode—a long, rambling reassessment of abolitionist John Brown and his actions during the Pottawatomie massacre and the raid on Harper’s Ferry—he wondered how these voices had come to find themselves on The Agency’s radar. They were enthusiastic leftists, lampooners of the mainstream media and its mouthpieces, aggressive critics of US policy, both foreign and domestic, but none of this should have been too great a concern. Young people had always been intoxicated by extreme leftist ideology, believing it possessed some intrinsic magic capable of conjuring a more just world. Such was the ineffectual and immaterial nature of the fire of youth.
But fissures were forming in the thin membrane between chaos and social order. An empire in decline turns inward, carves up its body, removes all suspicious masses no matter how benign they be.
Listening off the clock wasn’t required, but after consuming over six hundred episodes of the podcast—an estimated twelve-hundred hours of content—Douglas found himself wanting to hear the voices at home, in the car, everywhere. To shake off this phantom bond, he would watch clips of ex-Navy SEALS unboxing survival gear or read Ayn Rand’s Wikipedia page for the hundredth time. The process was embarrassing, necessary, and mostly effective.
The voices belonged to three men who—if their profile pictures were to be believed—possessed beards and bodies in various stages of failure. They were, at most, two years younger than Douglas but their appearance was the inverse of his own. Long-distance running kept him lean but years of deskwork had rendered his complexion pallid and put rings around his eyes. The thumbnail images on their social media accounts did not depict the voices as paragons of wellness—they were weatherbeaten and jowly—but their eyes were bright, alive.
Every Monday, Douglas’s desk mate, a short, stocky man named Colin, would recount his weekend activities: live music, the cinema, dinner parties, bourbon tastings. Douglas would respond by describing the process of replanting a tree in his backyard or caulking the shower in the guest bathroom. The details would multiply and expand until the most basic task became an intricate web of minutiae; a minefield littered with bombs of boredom.
When they first started working together, Colin had asked in earnest about Douglas’s personal life. He still asked but his tone had become mocking with Douglas’s responses growing more longwinded and intricate in return, both of them waiting to see who would end the conversation first. Outside of this anodyne game of chicken, they rarely spoke. Douglas often wondered if they hated each other.
At his kitchen island cooktop, Douglas listened to the voices as he prepared the next day’s lunch. His son, Charlie, sat across from him, face flat, eyes trained on an iPad, as the light from the tablet flickered across his face as if it were a movie screen. Maybe someone somewhere was watching this show, YouTube Reflected on American Child’s Forehead, through the tablet’s camera. In fact, this someone could be one of Douglas’s coworkers. The Agency still had a division for listening and watching, though the advent of social media had rendered this mode of spy craft mostly obsolete. Americans were all too happy to inform on themselves, sharing with the world their every thought and impulse, criminal or otherwise. The older agents bemoaned this development. There was no thrill of flipping an informant, no need to build a profile and identify weaknesses, no need to remove fingernails or attach genitals to car batteries. It was all there, out in the open. There was no ink. There was no paper. There was no blood.
Since the divorce, this was how Douglas and Charlie interacted: two strangers immersed in separate yet adjacent zones of content. This arrangement didn’t seem to trouble either of them. In fact, Douglas was quite content as he continued his nightly ritual: pan fry the chicken breast, steam the vegetables, pack a lunch, listen to the voices, build a life.
Sharon, his ex-wife, entered the kitchen and began speaking. Her mouth moved but the sound was displaced. She pointed at him then at the side of her head. He studied her soft face and blue eyes and realized the words echoing in his head didn’t belong to her. The pods were still planted in the soil of his ears, roots burrowed deep into his brain until their roping fibers intertwined in the center of his skull, an invasive species, durable, impossible to kill. Then he remembered: Today was Sunday, time for her to take Charlie, extricate him from Douglas’s mausoleum. He dug the pods out of his ears and their noise cancelling effect evaporated. The sounds of the frying pan, the AC unit, his ex-wife, rushed into the vacuum, replacing the voices with a tidal wave of right angles and blurry static. He rubbed the pods’ waxy tips with the pads of his fingers.
“Can you hear me now?”
“I believe so. You sound like you.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Hilarious.”
Douglas flipped the chicken breast, noticed Charlie was gone.
“Charlie says you’ve stopped talking.”
“I’m talking to you right now.”
“Is that how you want to play this?”
“We’re playing?”
She took a deep breath. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
Douglas jiggled the loose pods in his hand like a pair of dice then returned them to their charging case. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m being immature.”
She smiled then her eyes darted to the side. “He said the last time he was here you only spoke to him to say goodnight. That’s two words over an entire weekend.”
“I said it to him Friday and Saturday. That makes four.”
“Goodnight. It’s one word.”
He studied the browned, bubbled surface of the skinless chicken breast. Words had recently lost much of their visual substance and become sound alone. Become. Be come. Alone. A lone. Goodnight. Good night. He couldn’t tell anymore. Any more?
“Tell him I’m sorry. I’ll try to think of something to talk about.”
“It shouldn’t be that hard.”
“It’s not. I promise.”
She exited the kitchen, the house, taking their son with her. Still at the stove, spiking sound waves stabbed at Douglas’s naked eardrums. The sizzling meat, the whirring exhaust fan, some phantom thumping from deep inside the house; all of it howled at him. He planted the pods back in his ears and the voices returned. Their laughter, three voices laughing, a smooth cluster of joy. Douglas relaxed into the rhythm. He was happy to be among friends.
Colin and Douglas met Vincent in the conference room for their weekly debrief. Looking around, every surface was blank, distracting, its lack of décor a rigid optical violence. Vincent sat back in his chair, shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled up, hair slicked back, eyes sharp and penetrating. He had recently been named director of the Central Texas field office and had taken a special interest in the Podcast Division. By Agency standards he was relatively young but amongst the Millennial analysts under his supervision he represented a tactile link to the old days. He spent his time stalking the office like a leopard, looking over shoulders and dropping sly remarks, his body long and lithe, a weapon honed while still in the field. His professional record was classified but consensus held he had more than a few bodies to his name. Douglas imagined him sweaty and tan, chomping on a cigar, standing next to a pile of burning corpses deep in some jungle somewhere. Colin was in obvious thrall.
“What do you guys have for me?” Vincent said. “Colin, you start
“OK, I’ve been listening to Burrito Supreme Court. There’s been some talk about term limits, court packing, that sort of thing. They keep skating around calls for ‘direct action’ but nothing substantive so far.”
“That’s all?”
Colin shrugged. “I can’t make ‘em foment revolution, boss.”
“You’re right. That’s not our department.” Vincent turned to Douglas. “Anything promising on your end?”
He shifted in his seat. “Gut Quantifier is static: dick jokes, arcane historical information, squishy Marxist/Leninist politics.”
“Based on your previous reports, the big brains in Langley are of the opinion their politics are not squishy. In fact, the concern is they are quite solid. Coherent.”
“They have good days and bad. Ernst Röhm does seem to come up a lot.”
“Who’s that?” Colin asked.
“A gay Nazi,” Douglas said.
“I thought they were all gay.”
“You are misinformed.”
Vincent leaned forward, his posture making an incremental shift from managerial to predatory. “Is there anything else?”
Douglas ran his finger across his phone’s glass surface. The text from his notes app flew across the screen.
“There has been some talk about Forty Man.”
Colin groaned. “Jesus. They’re still on that shit.”
“What are they saying?” Vincent asked.
Douglas checked his notes again. “They’re calling it a political assassination.”
Forty Man was a thirty-nine-year-old, self-proclaimed anarchist who fired on an FBI agent during a street protest earlier that year. A manhunt ensued and, in less than twelve hours, Forty Man was shot dead in the living room of his apartment in Northeast Portland. All evidence indicated he had surrendered before his body was riddled with bullets: the closest object within reach was the remnants of a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor that a police bullet had shattered, spraying the scene with alcohol and broken glass. In the intervening days, the oversized bottles became a protest symbol, with hundreds of videos posted by black-clad, dyed-hair dropouts attempting to consume the entire forty ounces in one minute and twelve seconds—the time elapsed between police arriving on the scene and Forty Man taking his last breath. The voices linked the death to an alleged assassination campaign targeting anti-fascist organizers, carried out by local law enforcement organizations at the direction of unknown forces within the Justice Department, or perhaps, even The Agency. Around the office, this theory was roundly dismissed but it had a way of sticking in Douglas’s mind, a pink piece of gum lodged in the crevasses of his gray matter.
“They’re saying he’s a martyr,” Vincent said.
“That’s more or less correct.”
Vincent wrote on the whiteboard: Gut Quantifier — Threat Level Elevated.
Douglas spoke too quickly. “Do you think that’s necessary?”
“Martyrs demand retaliation. Besides, aren’t these the same dinguses who said that when they ‘take over’ they’ll direct the military to execute every New York Times and Washington Post opinion writer who objects to having their salaries expropriated and distributed to homeless mothers in Oakland?”
“That was parody.”
“Whose side are you on?” Colin asked.
Vincent tapped his marker against the white board for emphasis. “It’s always parody. They’re just comedians. Problem is these clowns have shit for jokes.”
“I’m just trying to make sure we don’t allocate resources where they aren’t needed.”
“We’ll let the big brains in Langley decide.” Vincent slinked around the desk and put his hands on Douglas’s shoulders, giving him a tight squeeze.
“Good work, Douglas. This is promising.”
Douglas stretched for his Sunday jog, feeling guilty for barely seeing his son the night before. Charlie had played videogames in his bedroom, while Douglas locked himself in his study, a tiny room that barely accommodated his desk and computer. He had originally meant to spend a few minutes doing some prep for the coming week—organizing various transcripts and research documents—but he found himself playing Solitaire and listening to the voices until five hours had slipped away, joining the graveyard of time he had killed, murdered, butchered. When he went to say goodnight, the light was out.
He tied his shoes, adjusted his heartrate monitor, then allowed the rubber tips to enter his ear canals. This usually passed without reflection but occasionally the sensation was alarming. Not the sensation but the thought behind the sensation, the thought of his orifices being penetrated by an external object molded and fabricated for the sole purpose of entering his body and filling it with sound, information. He put feet to pavement and began moving through his neighborhood, the flat gray only interrupted by sparse trees and flashes of green lawns in between the many yards of caliche and cacti. This was the suburbs’ response to water rationing and extreme heat—green had become a status symbol. This observation was embarrassingly banal. He would need better content for The OSS Feed (or OSS on the RSS, he couldn’t decide)—a podcast of his own he’d recently begun fantasizing about. It would be comprised of his observations and commentary as a former spy turned leftist politico. He hadn’t yet cultivated the requisite knowledge or political opinions—as far as he could tell this would require massive amounts of reading, something there wasn’t time for—but he was working on his banter, his cadence.
After a few months of hosting and producing The OSS Feed, he would be invited onto Gut Quantifier, Douglas was sure of this. The interview would go so well, they’d offer him a recurring guest spot, maybe even fourth mic.
Voice One: So, you really spend eight hours a day locked in a little room, listening to podcasts?
Voice Two: Sounds like absolute hell. I’d rather have an adult circumcision than listen to any podcast.
Douglas: Well, guys, my job sucks shit. I’ll admit that.
Voice Two: Sounds like A Clockwork Orange crossed with Office Space.
Voice One: More like Dilbert meets Salo.
Douglas: Haha. But seriously, I actually love your show. I’ve been assigned to others that are, well, I guess I would call them punishing. But, yeah, I love listening to you guys.
Voice Three: But you’re not listening. You’re spying. You’re scanning, picking things apart. Looking for subliminal messages. Communist mind control.
Douglas: That was my assignment. But you guys changed things for me.
Voice One: How’s that?
Douglas: You showed me a different world. A world where our lives don’t have to be consumed by work. I never thought of myself as being ‘political’ but listening to your show, I don’t know, my eyes are open.
“What are you talking about?”
“The media teaches us to hate and fear each other based on political party, race, gender, sexuality all that shit. They want us divided so we can’t see what really matters. They don’t want us to see that we’re all workers and that we have to organize along class lines. We have to unite. Seize the means of production.”
“Doug, what in the world are you talking about?”
The air conditioning gave him a chill. The noise rushed in as he removed his earpods. He was standing in his living room. His shirt and shorts clung to him, sweaty from the summer heat. But he was cold. And his ex-wife was sitting on the couch, their son next to her. They were both looking at him. They were unamused.
Cars flew past as he entered the freeway. He knew he needed distance from the voices, so he scrolled through terrestrial radio stations, the alien options grating and distracting. The Tejano station bounced with comforting rhythm but the voices in between songs were unintelligible to Douglas, his complete inability to learn any language other than English perhaps one of the reasons he’d never risen in the ranks of The Agency; there was always a need for someone who could manifest terror in a foreign tongue. The rock—or pop or whatever they were—stations were even worse, either graveyards of nostalgia or unintelligible messages describing a future that would never come. Between bouts of overly compressed, thumping bass and tinny treble, the DJs’ voices clanged with thundering stupidity as they discussed shitting one’s pants while hungover or locking oneself out of the house while drunk. Without thinking, Douglas caved, switching the stereo from RADIO to BLUETOOTH. After a few seconds, the car’s speakers and his phone were joined by an invisible artery, carrying the voices Douglas wanted to hear.
Voice Two: Dude, I’m so tired. Some fucking asshole was outside my apartment blaring his horn all night. I think I heard gunshots, too?
Voice Three: That’s America, baby. My neighbor upstairs was blasting fucking Beastie Boys until three a.m. That’s what happens when you live in an atomized, alienated society. You turn into an absolute lummox with sub-fratboy music taste.
Voice One: You guys think we’re being psyopped? I could swear someone was following me on the train last night.
Voice Two: Plenty of our listeners think we’re the psyop.
Voice Three: Maybe that’s it. Maybe we’ve been doing this so long, we’ve finally gone through the looking glass. We’ve psyopped ourselves.
A driver leaned out his window, brandishing his middle finger. Douglas jolted back to reality then hit the accelerator, joining the highway traffic, adapting himself and his vehicle to the blinding Texas speed limit. Moments later he hit congestion. In the stillness, he noticed the voices were still talking but he had missed everything. All he could think about were black helicopters and white torture, Vincent and a pile of burning bodies. He tried to clear his mind, silence his thoughts. It didn’t work.
Vincent’s biceps strained against his shiny dress shirt as he raised a Styrofoam cup to his lips and blew across the opening in the plastic lid. He savored a single sip then folded his hands in his lap. “Of course, we’re psyopping them.”
“I didn’t think we used that term,” Douglas said. “Officially.”
“It serves a function. Colloquially.”
“You should be stoked, man,” Colin said.
“This is correct. I sent your report up the food chain. We’ve been authorized to escalate MKDingus as we see fit. We’re going to take the fuckers down.”
“MKDingus?”
“The operation. Are you feeling all right, Douglas?”
His back was wet. His mouth was dry.
“I’m just a bit surprised,” he said.
“They make north of $300K annually off subscriptions alone,” Vincent said. “They crack wise about killing state senators, talk shit about our economic system, our foreign policy. They excite people. They speak in a secret code, a hidden language, a language of vibes. Look around, check your social media or whatever. We are fighting a war of vibes. Vibes are more important than politics. The vibes dictate the politics. He who controls the vibes, controls the minds. He who controls the minds, controls everything.”
Douglas struggled to find his words. “But we must have something better to do. There must be real threats somewhere?”
“If there were, that information would be classified for someone with your security clearance. Think about it like you’re one of the big brains in Langley. With their revenue stream it would be unbelievably easy for these dickheads to fund real militants.”
“Is there any evidence of this?”
“Whose side are you on?” Colin bit into a chocolate donut. The crumbs filled the edges of his teeth and gums.
Vincent lifted his coffee cup to his lips, stopped. “I direct you to my previous comment regarding said information and your security clearance.”
“But this is my assignment.”
Vincent smiled. “And you’re doing a great job. Keep it up.”
Then, suddenly, the third voice disappeared. Douglas panfried his chicken breast, listening closely for clues. The remaining voices spoke of their comrade’s exhaustion, fatigue, paranoia. Douglas translated this into a breakdown of the nervous variety, bringing back childhood memories of his mother’s long absences. She would sit alone in her bedroom, nothing compelling enough to extract her from oblivion. Douglas stood at the cooktop and flipped the pale chicken breast, listening while the remaining voices tried to reconstruct their three-dimensional zone of communication, but with the bottom of the triangle gone, they spun off into the grey distance, lost beyond the noiseless bubble.
The voices kept guard over their personal information, creating a barrier between themselves and the audience. One of their running bits was making fun of their fans, calling them “hogs” or potential mass shooters. In this construction, their listeners lived with their parents or multiple roommates while posting inane, humorless quips, fancying themselves unappreciated intellectuals but being nothing more than degenerated pseuds. As a savvy listener, Douglas knew he wasn’t implicated in this; he was in on the joke and therefore above the fray. But now that the third voice had disappeared there was a vacuum, a noticeable vulnerability. While he respected their need for privacy, Douglas’s occupation meant he wasn’t just any fan. In The Agency, there were rumors of targeted energy rays, convoluted poisons, remote hypnotization, a thousand different methods to force a subject’s mind to rebel against itself. He thought again of Vincent, his cigar, the jungle, the bodies.
The voices needed his help.
Douglas went to flip the chicken breast then spiked it into the pan. He brandished the spatula like a knife, tip pointing downward. The pan bounced against the flat surface of the induction burner as he stabbed the hunk of pale flesh repeatedly.
He looked up. Charlie was watching him, face illegible, an expression that could be read as either analytical or terrified.
Douglas tried to speak, to say something to the boy, but, before he could find the words, Charlie disappeared. Douglas looked at the pile of smashed chicken and tried to name the mess. If he could call it anything other than waste, he could transform it, shape it into something worth saving.
He worked all night, reading transcripts and leveraging ISP data to triangulate the damaged voice’s location. By morning, he concluded that the damaged voice was confined in a psychiatric hospital in Midtown Manhattan. Frantically, he collected his son’s belongings then drove him to Sharon’s house. On the way, he played the voices through the stereo, something he never did with Charlie in the car. The boy didn’t seem to notice, locked in his own world of predatory gameshow hosts and breathless, wide-eyed influencers. Douglas pulled up to the front walkway and unlocked the door. It was Saturday, a day early. For this he would be punished. Charlie said nothing and exited the vehicle. From a certain perspective, their shared silence was admirable: efficient, streamlined, simple.
Remaining parked in front of his ex-wife’s house, Douglas took out his phone and booked a flight to New York City. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d traveled. Even given the dire circumstances, he was excited.
~
His jaw dropped as the neon apocalypse of Times Square exploded before him. Over stimulated by visual information, he played an old episode of Gut Quantifier, chosen at random. The voices, all of them healthy and untouched, guided him as the sidewalks opened up. He descended into a mass of bodies, surrounded by trinkets and hot dogs, noise and light. He pushed the pods in deeper, shutting out as much of the environment as possible. People yelled at him. He didn’t care.
On the plane he’d realized his mistake. His partnership with the voices wouldn’t begin when Douglas guested on Gut Quantifier; he would first invite the damaged voice onto The OSS Feed, after the voice’s full recovery, of course. They would discuss Havana Syndrome, plots to kill Castro, The Manson Family and MKUltra, Dr. Jolly West and Jack Ruby. Together they would solve history.
But something was wrong. The voices were being interrupted. No matter how deep Douglas pushed the pods, there were outside signals, sonic shrapnel bludgeoning the sphere.
Stepping into the street, a taxicab almost ran over his foot. The horn blared, blurring his vision and causing his fingers to tingle. The voices changed timbre and switched positions as a drunk, red-faced tourist with Colin’s voice screamed in Douglas’s face. Colin asked about Douglas’s plans for the weekend, if he had any intention of seeing his friends. Douglas said no, he didn’t need to see his friends—they were with him always, in his ears and in his heart.
He looked down and the street twisted into a spiraling staircase. Suddenly, he was a hundred floors up, looking over the railing. Through the pods, Sharon and Charlie spoke in unison, reminding him of his failures. He countered: silent or not, unlike his own father, Douglas was always there, always present. No one could take that from him.
Someone pushed him from behind and he shut his eyes and fell into the spiral. His body flipped through the ether as his surroundings fractalized and dissolved. He fell for hours then landed on his back, crashing onto starched sheets and a firm mattress. Above him, the darkness laced itself together, creating a ceiling of acoustic tiles and florescent lights. Somehow, he was there, in the room, in the psychiatric hospital. He could see the door. He could hear voices on the other side. The door opened and Vincent and Colin stood next to the bed. They said the project had been a success. They conceded Douglas’s involvement was regrettable, but The Agency would find a way to make it up to him.
Without the pods to protect him, their voices blended together. Static poured in from every angle and collided behind his eyes. This created bright colors and geometric shapes. These were immaculate creations, completely new, unspoiled. They had no name and for this Douglas was grateful.
Jeremy Steen lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and has previously published work in the Oxford American, New World Writing Quarterly, The Rejoinder, Short Edition, among others.
