From: stevec@bucrf10.bu.edu (Steve Connelly)
Subject: The Exorcist (part 1 of 2)
Date: 10 Oct 91 23:37:48 GMT


The Exorcist - part 1 of 2
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
	
	Father Young sat on a ramp of the aeroball field chatting with the
neighborhood boys he coached in the afternoons.  The boys made a disheveled
semicircle around him.  Jimmy, a skinny kid with a blond crewcut, was talking
to the priest.
	"You can't really tell what a person's like jus' from the bumps on
his head, can you?"
	The crowd chuckled agreement.
	"Yes, yes I can," murmured Father Young.  "Phrenology is the name of
the science.  Here, Jimmy, let me see the shape of your head."  The kids
giggled while the embarrassed Jimmy gangled over to Father Young.  The
boy wiggled restlessly while the priest ran his fingers over the boy's skull.
	"I can tell you that you're left-handed.  Is that correct?"
	"Uh-huh.  How can you tell that?"
	"Because the reflex stabilizer implant for your right hand is warmer,
meaning that you need it more.  And this bump back here says that you like
history."
	Jimmy laughed nervously at the priest's accuracy.  Someone asked,
"How'd you get that one?"
	"The verbal section of his temporal access rams are thick with
neural connections, meaning that he's accessing them alot.  You're all
scanning your history, right?"
	The gang mumbled unsurely.  Jimmy took the chance to squirt away
from the priest.  He rubbed his head.  "I don't feel anything."
	"Oh, but I've had alot of practice at it.  That's what a priest does,
helping you handle what's inside your head.  You can come to the church
anytime you want - you're all getting to the age where you might feel
confused, when your head tells you two different things...."  The boys looked
down and started shifting restlessly from foot to foot.
	Father Young stood.  "Well, it's getting dark.  I'll see you all on
Thursday."
	The boys bustled off, swinging their aeroball slings at the ground.
The priest walked back to the church, hoping that Father Sage hadn't seen him
using stereotaxic phrenology as a parlor trick to get the boys' attention.
The elderly priest would never treat the skills so lightly.  He was usually
found cloistered away in the sacristy, hidden under the black audiovisual hood
and motion control vestments, leaving the world behind to meditate in the
ephemeral realm of the Liber Omnis.  Father Sage considered a worthy use of
the skills to be the Rite of Vidimus Vivax, a ritual in which a parishioner
authorizes the father confessor to have full access to the all data relating to
his or her past.  In the compressed time of cyberspace, the clergyman required
only a few days witnessing the databanks before he would know the essential
truths of the life that had been spread out before him.
	However, Father Young wanted to help his parish with the simple
problems of daily life and so, as long as he was young enough to shag an
aeroball off the lip of an up ramp, he would tend his flock by meeting them
out in the field.  Besides, phrenology only worked when the subject's bones
were still growing.
	The large glass door swished open and Father Young entered his church.
He stopped at the doorway of the sacristy, but the head of Father Sage was
still hidden by the black hood, his fibergloved hands gesturing lightly in
front of him.
	Father Young walked quietly past the sacristy and into the chapel.  He
took a seat in the rear pew and admired the sunset showing through the
stained-glass window above the altar.  The design was executed in what he
always thought was a sentimental medieval motif, employing the traditional
webbed mandala to represent the networking of the Liber Omnis.  At the center
were the symbols of The Router: The Oculus, from which rays emanated outward
to illuminate and render knowable all of the world; and the Arci, winged
angels who flew on light delivering knowledge to the plain but happy peasants
that surrounded the mandala.  To The Router, the physical world was just
another source of data, and so he was unconstrained by physical space and time.

	The door of the sacristy slid open.  "Father Young, we must go
immediately!"  Father Sage's white hair was tossed upward like a wildfire.  He
was struggling out of the room dragging dusty cases of electronic equipment.
Father Young took the heavy case of batteries from the old man, and the two
rambled out to the parking lot.
	Father Sage whipped the auto through the suburban streets.  "I have
been contacted by the mother of a young girl who has suddenly taken ill.  She
has been infected."
	"Has a doctor already been -"
	"A doctor cannot help her."
	"Er, how will our communications equipment help?"
	"It is important that you not look into the girl's eyes, and that you
disregard what she says and how she looks.  Her true self is not manifest."
	The auto scraped to a stop outside a warmly lit brick house.  Father
Young lugged the padded cases, following Father Sage as he shuffled up the
walk.  The distraught mother opened the front door.  They did not pause to
speak.  Father Young smiled reassuringly, but the mother stared at him with
desperation.
	The infected girl lay on the bed.  While Father Sage unpacked the black
cases, Father Young sat at the bedside to comfort the girl.  Her face was
bloated and scarred.  Her lips were cracked and scaled and her eyes were
entirely gray.  Father Young gently put his hand against her forehead to
measure her fever.  Something was experimenting with her physiology.
	"We are here to help you," he whispered.  "I am Father -"
	"Father William Young," the girl growled, "and that is His Grace,
Father Graydon Sage.  I know who you are."  Her voice was a gently melodious
but inhuman rasp.  Father Sage went to the other side of the bed.  He lifted
the girl's head rudely and place an X-ray reflector behind it.  Ignoring the
girl's hissing, he pressed the scope against her forehead.  The screen
revealed a wandering, branching black thread that intruded into the white
image of the brain.
	"Do you see, Young?  The neural implant is disrupting every faculty.
The serpent will wind its way throughout her and steal her."  He removed the
xray equipment abruptly.
	The girl smiled at Father Young.  "Did you enjoy fondling the
innocent young Jimmy this afternoon?"
	"What?"
	"You did run your hands over the boy's body, yes?  And it was at your
own invitation, yes?"
	"That's nonsense," said Father Young, "I did no such thing."
	The girl smarmed, "That's a lie, isn't it, Father?  In fact, you once
fondled 30 children in a single year, yes?"
	"I worked with children in a seminary practicum.  It's ridiculous to
call my ministerial training -"
	"Quiet!" Father Sage barked.  "Do not listen to that beast, Young."
He threw an index finger in the girl's face.  "That thing is the source of
lies."  He turned and flipped open another case.  "However, in the demon's
arrogance, it has revealed that it is transmitting instructions to the implant
from a remote location."  With reverence, he fanned open a flimsy circular
antenna and stood it by the window.  "We need merely jam its signal, and the
implant will be inactivated."
	The girl howled and vomited a blast of green liquid onto the front of
Father Sage's cassock.  The elder grinned.  He sat and began to work the
tuner, looking for the incoming frequency.  He watched his amplitude readout
while his bewildered colleague watched the girl.  She began to squirm and yell
in a crowded, disembodied chorus.  Father Sage's eyes brightened.  Suddenly,
the girl began to cry a weak child's cry as the instructions to the implant
were interrupted.  Father Sage grabbed the microphone to send an outgoing
signal.  He stood and, to his colleague's surprise, he shook a fist in the air
and spat, "Demon, you will be vanquished.  I know you are powerful and will
thwart me in every way.  But in the end you will prove weak, for you will dare
not draw the eye of The Router!"
	The lights went out and the air conditioner spun up to a hurricane
force of freezing air.  The clergymans' portable batteries came on to power a
weak lamp and the jamming unit.
	A self-delivering pizza smashed through the window and knocked over
the antenna before splattering against the far wall.  The flight plan of
self-delivering chinese food was tampered with and the food strafed the
bedroom.  Self-propelling telegrams embedded themselves in the plaster like
knives.
	The clergymen cringed on the floor, using the bed as cover.  A
sawtooth voice came out of the girl and was joined by four stereo speakers.
"The Router has no eyes here.  I have the power over everything."  She laughed
with a manic violence that brutalized her thin body.  Pizza ran down the walls,
smoldering in the freezing room, while the tiny rocket on the tranport box
fizzled pitifully.
	Crouching, Father Young hustled over and righted the antenna.  Father
Sage tried to tune the jammer to the changing signal, but his hands shook in
the cold.  Father Young removed his cassock and wrapped it around the
old man.  "Surely The Router will notice this catastrophe."
	"If the intruder creates mischief only locally, he may avoid The
Router...."
	Hot air began to blast from the ceiling vent.  The clerics stayed low
and avoided the path of the scalding air.  The overhead lights in the bedroom
came back on and blazed to the point of exploding.  Insects swarmed into the
bedroom and settled on the splattered food.
	Now suffering in the heat, Father Sage removed his cassock, revealing
on his belt a silver dagger in the form of a crucifix.  He followed Father
Young's questioning eyes down to the knife.  "In case we cannot stop the
implant from controlling her.  One way or another, Father Young, she will not
be taken from us."
	Father Sage's sweating hands worked with excruciating precision on
the controls, and the growling again gave way to weak sobbing.  Father Young
congratulated him, but the old man pointed to the readout.  "I haven't found
it.  The demon is lying."  He slumped away from the signal jammer.
	A heart-shaped box of chocolates knocked over the antenna, scattering
candy like buckshot.  Another pizza followed, exploding against the wall.  The
girl erupted in gravel-throated laughter.  "If your going to eat your
pizza now, I'll keep the room hot.  If you want to save it, I'll keep things
cold...."
	Hundreds of insects had gathered on the walls and were buzzing around
the intense ceiling light.  Father Young crawled across the floor to a tall
dresser and struggled to slide it toward the window.  He glanced outside and
saw that the neighborhood was pitch dark.  Moving closer to the window, he saw
darkness everywhere.
	Whining voices from a shelf above caused the priest to jump away
startled.  Teddy Ruxpin, Kuddle Kitty, and Theo the Thesaurus said, "Uh-oh.
It looks like the local power grid is down in sectors 14e5a9, 14e5b2,
14e61f...."
	Father Young slid away from the window, brushing bugs from his face.
Insects were convening at the bedroom, now the only source of light and heat
within a mile radius.
	From outside the bedroom, the mother screamed.  Her vacuuming robot
crashed through the door and rammed into Father Sage, tossing him against
the wall.  Father Young dove across the room and wrestled the robot away, its
howling wheels cutting the floor.  He grabbed the robot by its narrow head,
swung it around once, and threw it out the window.  He crouched on the floor
to help his colleague.
	The girl growled, "I suppose you want me to pick up my room, eh,
mother?"  Father Young turned and saw the mother looking through the smashed
door, stunned by the sight of the room.  He jumped up and grabbed her away
from the aim of the bedroom window.  She was frozen, her face in her hands.
He led her down the hallway.
	The front door blew apart and the dented domestic robot whined
into the house, leaving torn divots of carpet in its wake.  Before Father Young
could intercept it, the robot screamed up the stairs and into the bedroom.  He
ran back into the bedroom and saw the robot standing in front of Father Sage,
who groaned, "Jamming the robot's signal is easy, but I can stop nothing
else."  He crawled out of the bedroom to the contented chuckles of the girl.
	The walls of the bedroom seethed with insects.  Steam and bugs flowed
out of the doorway and across the ceiling.  Father Young helped his quivering
colleague lie down on the hallway floor.
	"Surely The Router will notice the power outage."
	"Yes, and he will have it fixed," whispered Father Sage, "and perhaps
he will disable the offending account in the power company subnet, but he may
do nothing else.  We must find The Router and beseech his attention.  I am too
weak to go.  You must go, Father Young.  Enter the Liber Omnis and go to the
center.  The demon will place obstacles in your path, but you must not be
dissuaded."	
	"How will I know when I have found The Router?"
	"I don't know.  I've never seen him."

	Father Young carried his cyberdeck and AV hood into the living
room where the mother was sitting.  He wanted to assure her of his
determination and of Father Sage's experience and faith in the justice and
truth provided by The Router.  The sweating, bruised, insect-bitten,
food-splattered priest said, "Where's your external data tap?"




The Exorcist - part 2 of 2
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[ In an effort to disrupt transmissions to the implant that is creeping through
  the young girl's brain, Father Sage sent Father Young into cyberspace to ask
  the aid of The Router.... ]

	The system identified Father Young via retina scan and modeled him
into the cyberspace as a likeness of himself.  The priest was relieved to
appear clean and neatly dressed again.  He floated idly, waiting while the
nodes and arcs of the Liber Omnis formed before him.  Within arms' reach sat a
humble data sphere for kitchen water usage.  It's arc met with others at a
node representing water usage for the household.  Arcs from nodes progressed
inward to merger nodes which funneled into larger nodes ad infinitum until
they funneled into The Router.
	Father Young studied the nearby data node of the bedroom audiovisual
sensor and considered entering it to check on the girl.  However, the
sensor had already been disabled by the invader.
	With a hand gesture, the priest began to fly toward the center of the
network.  He veered away from the dense infomass of the local library so as to
avoid the distraction of flying through so much data.  He saw amongst the
library nodes visitors in assorted virtual facades.  Children as cartoon
characters scurried in and out of nodes while their mothers appeared as
thinner versions of themselves in the dress of the First Lady.  High school
bluntball players formed cliques of red-sweatered cougars while other
teenagers were snake-haired skeletons with eye patches surfing white
xylosynths in the manner of the moment's rock star.
	Data nodes would appear along the radius which Father Young was
traveling, and he would wind his way around them while maintaining his speed.
As he progressed inward, the nodes became more dense, funneling toward the hub.
	Father Young turned sharply around the horizon of a large merger node
and stopped abruptly in front of the boy, Jimmy.
	"What're you doing way in here at this level of abstraction, Father?"
	"I'm on a mission of the greatest urgency."
	"Yeah?  What's the mission?"  The boy stood straight up, motionless,
arms crossed, smirking slightly.  He stared intensely into Father Young's
eyes.  The priest turned away from him.  "I will not be delayed by you."  He
took off again, and the boy paralleled his course.
	"Why are you intruding in the girl's attempts to better herself?" Jimmy
said.  "She accepted her advanced, enviable new implant quite voluntarily.
Look."
	Father Young and Jimmy appeared in the center of yesterday's carnival,
invisible to the crowd of fun seekers.  They stood outside the colorful,
billow-padded arena of the Floatarama.
	The priest didn't recognize the previous day's recorded image of the
infected girl until she walked to within a few feet of him.  She and other
friends were stumbling out of the arena, breathless and giddy from the
pneumatic weightlessness of the Floatarama.  The girl studied a red capsule
and, goaded by her friends, she swallowed the tightly coiled neuroparasitic
receiver that would follow sensory impulses up her spinal cord and invade her
midbrain.
	"As you can see, Father, she took the implant eagerly."  Jimmy smiled
at the priest, who walked away from the scene.
	"It will not serve you to place data nodes in my path."
	Jimmy brought his hands over his heart.  "I will in no way impede
your movements.  Like the noble Arci, I am merely delivering relevant
information to you."
	The priest flew upward until he broke through the surface of the
spherical audiovisual data node and popped back into the sphere-studded
blackness of cyberspace, where Jimmy was waiting.  Ignoring the boy, he again
aimed himself toward the hub of the Liber Omnis.
	"I don't get you, Father.  You must really want to impress the teenage
girls.  Like you did when Maria said she'd only go to the prom with the
captain of the aeroball team - "
	"How did you know about that?" seethed the priest.
	"You can level with, padre.  I understand how the desires of decent men
like you can be twisted by womankind into impertinent acts of chivalry."
	The priest barked, "What could you possibly know about the desires of
decent men?"
	They stood in a crowded, dimly lit bar.  Father Young tried to fly out
of the crowd but found it difficult to move.  He bellowed, "Do you really
believe you can imprison me here without The Router taking notice?"
	Jimmy smiled and shook his head.  "The exit from the bar is the exit
from the node; I merely enhanced it with some common physical constraints.
You asked me a question, and I constructed this as my answer:  It can be shown
in a demographically significant manner that this place represents the desires
of decent men...."
	Father Young's sweating arms wrenched the motion guidance vestments in
violent twitches to move his virtual likeness through the crowd and toward the
exit.  A young bartender tapped a keg of beer that was postered with the
St. Pauli girl.  The bartender opened the tap and the beer running out onto
the floor congealed from foot to head into the girl's form.  Father Young
shook his head at the spectacle of the buxom blonde in clinging Octoberfest
dress.
	A bullwhip flew out of the screen of a televid monitor hanging above
the bar.  It wrapped the startled priest around his waist and pulled him into
the tv.
	Father Young landed on a sweltering desert island surrounded by
statuesque, teeth-gritting amazons in bronze brassieres and thin loin cloths.
He saw above him a tv screen that nearly spanned from horizon to horizon.
Through the picture tube he could see a distorted image of the bar's crowd of
fashionable young professionals watching his predicament with delight.  A
beautiful, spear-toting amazon told him that the only things on the island
were cases of beer, buffalo wings, insatiable women to be serviced, and
himself.  The priest grimaced and ran.  He evaded the reach of his captors and
headed for a clearing, but his escape was blocked by the Swedish bikini team
as they skyjumped in with beach party provisions.  He tried to push his way
through the identical blonde dancing automata, but he bounced like a pinball
off the copious bosoms that finally tossed him to the ground.
	The dazed priest was carried to a large gathering that circled a
likeness of Stonehenge constructed from several enormous bottles of Miller.
Curvaceous women were joined by unshaven young men sitting on motorcycles and
wearing t-shirts, tight jeans, and cowboy boots.  A Budweiser delivery truck
drove up and magically converted into a gigantic stereo speaker pounding out a
tribal rhythm.  While the men silently nodded, the thinly clad woman began a
ritual dance in a writhing, helpless manner that caused the disgusted priest
to shut his eyes.  The women rubbed their bodies rhythmically against the
huge, full bottles.  A bottle burst open and beer spurted out in forceful
pulses.  The place became suddenly cold and it began to snow.
	Father Young noticed that another bottle top was starting to yield to
the internal pressure.  He scurried into the ceremony and past the rabid
undulating women.  He reached the top of the bottle as it blasted open, and the
force of the explosion sent him upward and through the tv screen.
	Father Young fell out of the tv and landed on the floor of the bar in
a wash of beer.  The clean-cut, ethnically correct bar patrons retreated from
his puddle while laughing heartily.  The priest wiped beer from his eyes and
stumbled toward the exit.
	On a table near the exit, the priest saw an open magazine revealing a
photo of the infected girl, her immature body wearing only a leopard-skin
thong bathing suit.  The photo began to move, and the girl rose out of the
magazine to stand at the exit.  She leered at the soaked priest, who stopped
at a safe distance from her.  Jimmy appeared from the surrounding crowd and
walked to the broadly smiling girl.  He put his hand down the bottom of her
bathing suit and the girl purred with delight.  The boy said, "It doesn't get
any better'n this, does it, Father?"  The growling priest pushed through both
of them and out the door.
	He again set a course for The Router.  From the far side of the
sphere, Jimmy joined him.
	"Father, I suggest you turn back.  This close to the core, the data
merge is too complex for the novice to understand."
	The cleric wound his way around the now dense field of large spheres.
	"Father, my monitoring of the public audiovisual sensors has revealed
a crime in progress, a mugging.  If you turn back, I will help you stop this
despicable act."
	The priest pushed his fibergloved arm forward to increase speed.  His
arms swung violently as he guided himself through the forest of nodes.  Jimmy
fell behind.
	"Father, this is nonsense," the boy shouted.  "Only The Router can
sort through data at this density.  It is my studied opinion that you should
turn back.  I have only your best interest at heart...."  The shouting echoed
and faded away.
	The data spheres became so dense they began to overlap and form a wall.
Father Young slowed and for a moment moved laterally, searching for spaces to
pass through.  He groaned with frustration, aimed himself at the center and
flew into the wall.
	He entered a node and traversed the regulatory commission interim
working group transcripts without distraction.  He soon popped out the other
side.
	The next node was upon him and he was suddenly surrounded by the
viscous colors of infrapropagated marginal price catabolization as a function
of metastatic Keynes-Yeltsin market monotones, but he managed to maintain
a straight course through the sphere.
	Immediately, another node blocked the radius along which he was
traveling, and again he chose to pass straight through.  He came to a
stomach-twisting stop at the sphere surface and was told that he did not have
the correct permissions to view the nanorectograms of Mrs. Weenia Swinth
Farthing, 117 Treadmark Drive, New Melbourne, Antarctica.  Father Young moved
laterally and passed uneventfully through big league aeroball's goals per
sling-jump stats.
	He flew into the next node and impacted a simulated beta-neotron
particle, spraying text-labelled quarks all around the simulated bubble
chamber.  He the thudded off the side of the next node, and was told
that he had no permissions to see a meeting of the local chapter of Alcoholics
Without True Names.
	He sifted without incident through "Occurrences of RNA-Moderated
Dopamine Dishinibitor in the Works of Shakespeare", but he came to a
bone-jarring stop at the patented schematics of Fisher-Price's NMR Baby
Scan-Alot.
	The priest bore to the left and entered the protocol spec for the MIT
Consortium's X Sensors, version 11.  He didn't flinch as he flew through the
tangled vines and endless, ever-expanding growth of the protocol, forcing
himself to ignore the bespectacled skeletons trapped in the dense foliage.
The next node dazed him with the fog of the complete works of physics, all the
way from Newton to Einstein to Hawking to !Kungabadu to Chang-Running Bear to
theorem.phys.caltech.edu.
	The next sphere contained a three-dimensional lattice of beating
hearts.  Surrounded by the low buzz of the heartbeats, the priest moved
through the pulsing rows and columns that marched into the distance and
finally left the FDA study of epinephral derms for cardiac arrythmia.
	Father Young forged on into the next node of data.  He cringed and his
fibergloved hands clapped over his ears against the deafening static of the
audio transductions of all messages over the old InterNet for the year 1990.
Cowering against a million primitive whining voices, the priest tried to
continue on, but he had lost his course.  His arms flailed, sending him in
circles while the voices sapped his will to live.  He quickly lost all hope
for the future of man.  He screamed, "Why hast thou forsaken me?".
	Father Young appeared in a white room among great crystal columns and
gothic arches of ice that surrounded a shimmering altar.  He scrutinized a
glacial arch and saw that it was a bundle of millions of optical fibers.  A
deep, gentle voice said, "Since you seemed unsatisfied with the virtual
realities, I have taken the liberty of revealing myself to you as I actually
appear."  Father Young followed the thick flawless bundles that resembled
waves breaking onto a beach of frost.  The bundles cascaded toward the
cylinder of liquid helium that percolated around the mind of The Router.  The
dumbfounded priest vowed that one day he would show all this to Father Sage.
	The voice asked, "Why did you come here?"  The priest quickly recited
the pertinent names and addresses to the air around him.
	The voice said, "The transmissions are licensed and within public
carrier frequencies.  The girl's receiver can block the communications."
	"But she is unable to control the implant to turn off the signal."
	"She ingested the implant and its active receiver voluntarily."
	The priest barked, "She couldn't have known it would ravage her like
this."
	"We cannot deduce her intentions given the data at hand."
	"Voluntary or not, what the implant is doing is a crime, a moral
outrage!"
	The Router did not comment.
	The priest pressed on.  "Didn't you see the huge power outage around
the house?"
	"The outage was caused by a transformer known to have an 86% chance of
failure in the next week."
	"So, the criminal must have found that transformer and blown it
himself."
	"That is not the most probable explanation of the incident."
	The priest shook his black hooded head.  He tried another tack.  "The
intruder knows things about me that he could only learn by breaking into
private databanks.  Surely that's a crime?"
	The voice replied, "You gave unlimited access to all your data to an
anonymous external port in accordance with the protocols governing
Confidential Therapies, Confessionals, and Life Analyses."
	"What?  I have never authorized a full confessional for myself."
	"The change of access occurred eleven minutes ago and was verified by
retina scan."
	Father Young remembered looking at the girl's face while trying to
comfort her.  Had her colorless eyes been able to record his retinal pattern
and send it to the demon?
	"The criminal tricked us," the priest said.  "Don't you see?  I
didn't authorize a confessional rite voluntarily.  It only seems like I did."
	"That cannot be confirmed," said the voice.
	Father Young hung his hooded head.  Had the demon thought of
everything?  Was he so smart that he could avoid the omniscience of The
Router?  Father Sage hadn't thought so.
	"However," the voice began, "on one occassion, the user with access
to your history transmitted it to the girl."
	"Yes, the girl knew some of my history...."
	"Transmitting your personal data to her represents a breach of
confidentiality and a protocol violation by the transmitting party.....  The
offender's retina pattern has been excommunicated."
	"Um, what do you mean?"
	"The offender's accounts have been nulled and his transmissions
dis-licensed and terminated."
	The stunned priest removed his vestments.  He dragged the audiovisual
hood off his head, tossing his hair upward like a wildfire.  He became giddy
with relief.  The demon had been dominating, but The Router had crushed him
in a millisecond and with complete indifference.  Father Sage's faith would
be energized.
	Father Young ran up to the girl's bedroom where, among the rubble, the
mother was consoling the sobbing girl.
	The priest knelt next to Father Sage.  He gently closed the eyes of
the old man and draped the audiovisual hood over his lifeless face.