The Displacement - Ch. 2

2. A Two-Faced Pillar

              Dr. Lyle Pillar was an early riser. Each day, he would wake up hours before the morning’s first light and go straight to his morning routine; slowly moving through the dark halls of the Pillar Enterprises building until he reached his goal. With the flip of a switch in the master control room, just a stone’s throw from the ground-floor entrance, every light in the building would flicker to life, and every machine that kept it at maintenance would begin to emanate its steady whirr. Then, with his task completed, Pillar would retreat downstairs to his well-furnished lounge, where, as was his custom, he would sit for a good long bit and relax in the gloom of the wee hours.

              Dr. Pillar did not drink coffee, for he needed no such thing to stay awake in the morning, and aside from that, he simply did not like the taste. It was a foul, bitter thing, as most things offered on this dismal planet were. He preferred vodka. That, in good contrast, he drank quite a lot of. If he admired, or, rather, did not despise, one thing about his current location, it was its liquor. Though he didn’t know much about the people of Earth, he could tell that when it came to spirits, they had no shoddy thing going.

              On that Friday morning, Pillar went straight for his vodka, for he knew he would need it. Though he likely did not know it, his plan for the morning took a page out of Nes Garrow’s book. He would have to think; think long and think deep, for every single thing that was to happen that day, he knew, would have to go exactly right. Were the slightest thing to slip out of his control, the whole plan could topple over like a stack of building blocks. And he had sworn by his own name that this could not -- and would not -- happen. So for what seemed like hours, Pillar sat and thought, completely alone; sipping his liquor and staring at the blank grey drywall.

              He had spent almost three months thus far on the primitive planet known as Earth, entire dimensions away from his proper place in the universe -- a small, distant planet by the name of Skaylia. He himself was not human, though he very much looked the part; his race shared a distinct similarity to the one walking on Earth, and indeed, this fact is one of the few that confuse even me. But for him, blending in was no part of the issue. He despised Earth in the way a dog despises its cage, for as a dog in a cage has no room to run, snap at things or do anything else that a dog might take joy in doing, here, he had practically no ground to work with. Most of the planet’s available technology was backward and primitive enough to make him cringe, and what wasn’t was still so different that working with it was nigh impossible.

              But Dr. Pillar was no slouch. For the sake of the plan, he had fought his way through like an explorer with a machete. He had learned of Earth’s culture; its history; its people. He had slowly come to understand its primeval methods of making things go: electricity, coal, and petroleum. And, though he would not likely mention it later, he had even cheated a little by bringing tiny bits of Skaylian technology back for use on Earth. He had tried only to do so for what he needed absolutely the most -- for instance, a few microchips, manufactured by such brands as the Quatri-Stellar Corporation, to incorporate into his various projects, and, less importantly to the plan but quintessential for him, a personal filtration device to take with him on occasional outings to the city of Stark. In the city, advanced as it claimed to be, the air quality was almost unbearable. Everything, it seemed -- every building, every car; even certain people with strange paper rolls in their mouths -- belched out sickening smog at a nearly constant rate. His device, a handy little thing that clipped discreetly to his belt, did its best to filter the air around him, but as it had not likely been made to deal with such a demanding job, it could not work perfectly, and much of the filth still got to him. He sometimes wondered how anyone stuck living in such a place could cope with it at all.

NOTE FOR RESEARCHERS:

The personal filtration device (PFD, as it was marketed) was also manufactured by the Quatri-Stellar Corporation, a grand producer of many things in its current location, the Catholia system. In case the fact that it produces advanced microchips was getting you on the wrong track, it is important to note that things of that sort are not the kinds it produces in the largest amounts. More common Quatri-Stellar products include Heavy Light-based digital watches, doors which open and close on vocal commands (and often fail to do so), technological goggles designed to enhance the experience of going to dance clubs, and, of course, PFDs.

              Pillar gazed downward to check his wristwatch. It was seven o’clock; exactly the time that he had specified for all Pillar Enterprises staff to be awake and ready for the big day. Sure enough, seconds later, he heard footsteps coming down the hallway, and when he turned to look through the lounge’s glass wall, he saw a man passing hurriedly through. He, like Pillar, was Skaylian; a young fellow with dark green hair that would have turned any head on Earth. On that day, decided Pillar, he could consider himself lucky, because he would be doing the first big honors of the morning.

              “You, young man!” Pillar called out, speaking loudly to be heard through the glass. Indeed, the man heard; he stopped in place, looking rather confused, then finally opened the door.

              “Dr. Pillar... sir,” he said, a nervous look plastered on his face. “Is there anything I can do?”

              “As a matter of fact... yes,” replied Pillar, putting on a small, crooked grin. “The Honouran generator downstairs... you know where it is, don’t you?” As he spoke, he practiced to himself the warm, friendly tone that he had been brushing up on for the past few weeks. It was part of the more minor things -- the finishing touches, as Pillar himself would have said -- that, since he and his colleagues had already dealt with most of the important stages of preparation long ago, he had taken the opportunity to add in. When the test subjects began to arrive, he knew he would want to appear as nothing more than a nice man letting them play with his technologically advanced toys. That was something that they would have to be convinced of, and his usual monotone would not likely have done the job. So, for quite some time by then, he had been practicing with it on everyone he spoke to.

              For a moment, the green-haired man seemed purely confused, perhaps simply because of how happy the doctor seemed to be. But then, finally, he spoke: “You mean... the LHFG? That big, noisy thing in the-”

              “I know what it is!” Pillar snapped, then quickly caught himself. Snapping was not good. He tried to think calm thoughts. “Well, then. Can you do me a favor and go start it up?”

              The man looked bewildered. “Start it... up?” he croaked. “But... I’ve never...”

              “It’s as simple as flipping the power supply, you dolt!” belted Pillar, who, by then, had given up on his warm tone. “For Christ’s sakes, you aren’t going to be vaporized! Can you do it or not?” The young man nodded vigorously.

              “Yes... sir,” he said, then quickly began to dart off. But Pillar clapped his hands, and he froze mid-step.

              “Hold it there,” he said. “You... what’s your name?”

              “Well, uh... it’s Elja,” replied the young man, looking utterly confused. “Elja Yenn... but why does it matter?”

              Pillar did not answer. “Go,” he simply said, pointing a finger down the hallway. “And make it quick.” Yenn said no more. He took off like a cannonball. In the next second, he was long gone.

              Pillar sighed as he leaned back into his chair, taking another sip of vodka. Yenn; he made a mental note of that name. He would have to take greater precautions toward who his staff hired. But he did not dwell on it, for Yenn was gone, and he was back in the company of himself, left to return to his pleasant reverie and his equally pleasant liquor.

              But that morning, luck was in for a nasty prank on Lyle Pillar. It was not a minute before the doctor’s privacy was disturbed once again. The sounds of another pair of feet coming down the hallway made him jerk his head back around, and had it turned out to be Yenn returning, he might very well have leapt from his seat and throttled him. But thankfully, for his sake, it was not. The new intruder was a girl; nineteen years old, with blonde hair and a short, stubby stature. Pillar knew it could only have been one person: Helen. His only daughter.

              If Helen Pillar was not the most unloved child in the multiverse, she was very likely a close candidate. Through most of her life, her father had been trying to forget her with a passion bested only by that with which he was trying to forget her mother. But she was a fact of the doctor’s life, something that would not and could not go away, and so he had tried at least to make some use of her. She functioned well as both an assistant and a test subject; so well, in fact, that anyone would have called it a miracle that she was still alive and in good condition, for all of the outlandish misadventures she was subjected to. Wherever Dr. Pillar came and went, she was almost always dragged along; across cities and countries on Skaylia and now, most recently, onto the dismal, repugnant rock that was Earth. Wherever she was, however, her daily life never much changed. What time she didn’t spend in her father’s lab she spent alone in some room or another, staring at whatever wall currently took her fancy. She didn’t mind this sort of life, for to her, it was normal, and she had never thought of anything outside her father’s work. Even her lack of love was no concern to her. She herself, in turn, didn’t harbor much love for anything in particular.

              “Helen,” said Pillar, returning to his monotone, for he knew that this was the one person who would not care otherwise. “What has you down here this morning?”

              “Nothing special, Father,” murmured Helen, who took well after her father’s droning. “Only checking in. When are the test subjects going to arrive?”

              “Not much longer, I suppose,” Pillar said. “An hour, perhaps. I told them all to be here by eight, so some of them may be on their way right now. I’m assuming you know what you’ll have to do.”

              “Yes, Father,” she droned. “You told me yesterday. And the day before that.”

              “Then I trust you can get it done.” Pillar gave a vanishingly rare smile, then eyed the bottle of vodka. It was nearly empty. He turned back to Helen. “What do you say to being a good girl and fetching me some more vodka? It’s in the compartment, two floors down. You know.”

              “You really drink too much of that stuff, Father,” remarked Helen. Pillar blasted her with a glare that could have melted through solid granite. Then finally, sighing, she submitted.

              “I’ll get it,” she said, and made her way to the elevator.



              The multiverse has a funny taste for coincidences. It was at the exact same time that Pillar himself was drinking that a few of his colleagues, stationed far away in another dimension, were knee-deep in spirits themselves.

              Two men sat behind the counter at the Eclectic Cowhand -- an old, run-down bar settled deep within the long-forgotten, rarely traveled back end of the city of Honourville. Such a part of the city, naturally enough, featured very little that ever drew in outside visitors, but the Eclectic Cowhand was a rare exception. For whatever reason, it had a certain fame around it -- perhaps for the more-than-a-little-overdone Honouran light display fixed directly above its main entrance. This glowing monstrosity portrayed, as one might expect, that for which the bar had been named: an eclectic cowhand. The neon, hatted man had four arms, each one of which clutched some different thing; one held a lasso, another a colonial cup-and-ball, another a string instrument not unlike a ukulele, and the last a full-sized laser rifle, which he gripped with one hand as if it weighed less than a slice of bread. The light display had been there for decades, since the very day the bar had first opened, and as the years had passed, it had become something of a local landmark, for to anyone standing in a quarter-mile radius, it was significantly hard to ignore. But if you were to ask any regular Eclectic Cowhand patron how the bar had made its way into the knowledge of so many slum dwellers, he would not likely mention much of its sign, for perhaps the real cause of its renown was its tendency to dole out drinks with dangerously high alcohol content -- and, to boot, for a price agreeable with the common man's wallet. It was a setup too good to be true; yet one that men like Mip Marvey and Garvin Screed would not have refused if their lives had depended on it.

              Marvey and Screed had many things in common. For one, they were both former members of the Honourville Police. Also worth mentioning was that the two of them spent much of their time at the Eclectic Cowhand. At that moment, they were on their second round of a drink affectionately referred to as Harmony.

NOTE FOR RESEARCHERS:

Due to the fact that the true name of the drink known as Harmony, one of Mentish origin, was too long, complicated, and lacking in vowels for most people to be able to pronounce, it was given its friendly nickname once it began to become more popular in places other than Mentum. It’s an ironic name, in a way, for after drinking any amount of it, the usual behavior of most people is nothing close to the usual definition of harmony.

              Both Marvey and Screed had been fired years ago from their original jobs as policemen. But, in truth, they had not held them for very long to begin with. It didn’t take long for the fact that Marvey had an alcohol problem to make itself obvious. Screed, in fairness, had never had nearly as much to do with liquor as Marvey, but since the two always seemed to be around each other, the decision to get him out of the picture as well had been practically unanimous. As soon as word had gotten to the chief, he had wasted no time in ousting them. Such was their unenviable story; though whenever the need arose to explain the incident to anyone else, they preferred to say that they had simply retired. But now it mattered far, far less, for their current jobs were much, much better, and that, unlike most things, was something that Marvey and Screed could agree on. For one, they had more down time than any working man could dream of. And in their case, down time meant drinking time.

              The three men gathered around Marvey, all of whom were equally as drunk as he, unleashed an outburst of cheering as the former officer downed his third shot of Harmony. “Ahhhh,” he said after finishing, raising his head and smiling like a lunatic. “Like holy alchemy. Like lead turnedth to gold, the shtuff.” Marvey was missing his two front teeth. They had been knocked out in a bar fight several weeks ago, and he was still getting accustomed to their absence.

              “More! More! More!” The chants spread through the bar as he slammed his shotglass down onto the counter. The bartender, a stocky man with a thick accent and greasy red hair that could just as easily have been a wig as his actual locks, turned to Marvey.

              “What yeh say, m’old friend?” he asked, chortling. “I'll let yeh have this’un fer free... if yeh can survive it!”

              Marvey gave a toothy grin. “Deal,” he said. The crowd cheered as he took his fourth shot and sent it down his throat in no more than a second's time. Garvin Screed turned away so that no one would see as he pressed his palm into his forehead. He had made a wise decision earlier that day -- he had chosen, for the time being, not to drink any more than his usual single shot of Harmony. Today was an important day, and even if Marvey didn’t, he had plans to be in his right mind for it. Not outrageous, I must say, was the fact that Screed was generally regarded as the wiser of the two, but that changed no part of the fact that if Marvey were to leap off a cliff, Screed would be close behind.

              At that moment, Screed was legitimately thinking about marching up to Marvey and downright stopping him from adding the fifth shot to his ever-growing bar tab. But then, suddenly, he felt a vibration against his wrist, and he knew immediately what it was. Marvey’s well-being would have to wait. What very well may have been the most important message he had ever been singled out to receive had arrived on his communicator -- a tiny holographic device that clamped around his wrist. Jerking his head down, he eagerly tapped against the tiny, projected screen that had sprouted up into the air. He held the communicator up close to his face as the tiny, greenish words of the message began to scroll through the air.

              “Greetings, Mr. Screed,” the message began. Screed could almost hear Lyle Pillar’s deep, booming voice as he read it to himself. “As you know, it is I, Dr. Pillar, and I am in need of your assistance. It's part of the plan, so you cannot mess this up.” Screed nodded with a small grin, as if Pillar were watching him at the very moment. He could already imagine the smile on his boss’s face when he came back to report his success, for he knew that whatever the mission was, for the two of them, it would be no trouble at all -- even, perhaps, with Marvey sozzled as a space pirate.

              “Allow me to explain,” the message went on. “From the Pillar Enterprises facility on Earth, I have finally managed to get the experimental Flume working. And, as you have already been informed, the Pillar Enterprises staff here have acquired a few knowledgeable individuals to pull into this little experiment. For now, I’m only going to single one out to send here to Skaylia. Any one of them will do, for I’m not sure if any of them will feel inclined to buck the plan. If by any chance we ever need more, all we’ll have to do is start the whole thing over. But that is of little concern to us at the moment. Here’s where you come in, Mr. Screed. Last night, I finished programming the coordinates for the arrival. You may want to write this down.” Screed paused the message hurriedly and searched his pocket for a pen that was not there.

              “Crunk,” he cursed to himself. He came from Kitiar, which meant he had two things -- a strong accent and an affinity for foul language. He then yelled toward his partner. “Mip! Got a pen on ya?”

              In his drunken state, Mip Marvey was able to do no more but cock his head and spit out “Wharrabouta… pen?”

              “A pen, Mip!” Screed insisted. “Do you got a crunkin’ pen?” Marvey did not respond. To Garvin Screed's luck, however, the bartender had a pen at handy, which he offered without a word. Screed continued playback of the message, and without anything more proper to write on, he simply scrawled the numbers onto his arm in handwriting that a first grader could have outdone.

              Pillar's message went on. “That's where the subject will be, and if everything goes swimmingly, he should be there at precisely two o'clock today, right on the dot. Not a second more, nor one less. Be there. And be ready. I’m confident that you know what I mean by ready.” Screed nodded with a small grin; he certainly knew what Pillar meant. He was Garvin Screed of the Pillar Enterprises Ground Operations Unit, for crying out loud, and he was ready for anything!

              Anything, that is, except for the next line of the message, which made him gawk.

              “One more thing,” it read. “Ground Commander Canterwelt is in charge this time. And for extra supervision, Trooper Slangan will be coming along as well. There will be no more of you and Marvey out on your own. Canterwelt and Slangan can stay sober, and the head units of this mission will need to be in full control. On the other hand, Mr. Marvey and you, Mr. Screed, are probably drinking something alcoholic as we speak.” There was a break in the text, and then the final sentences came into view. “This is more important to the plan than you could ever imagine, Mr. Screed. You and the rest of your unit cannot fail me. I expect success. Nothing less.”

              At that point, the message cut off. Screed slammed the power button with his fist, and the message dissipated into thin air. Commander Canterwelt! And Slangan, that low-ranked, bumbling numbskull? He couldn’t believe it. Worse, he knew then that he had been wrong about Marvey -- with him drunk, the whole thing would only come out worse. He did, however, recall what Pillar had said about Marvey, and then he looked up to see Mip clumsily tipping his fifth round of Harmony into his mouth.

              “Funny,” he said to himself. “How'n the blazes did'e know?”