From: st3uy@jetson.uh.edu
Subject: : WtHiB57
Date: Fri Feb 10 00:45:00 MET 1995


	WtHiB57 :

	"What's in it?" I ask the happy-face-girl.  Her orange bowl cut hair
looks soft and feathery, her large red lips perfect, like a '43 Buick plush
interior.  My eyes focus on the clear plastic jacket she wears, black leather
bra underneath.
	As i pull the red-yellow concoction towards my mouth, the liquid foams
from the quick-after-affects-of-blender in an orange opaque cup.  The smell
of early 50's Tang and black market cooking cinamon assault my nose.  Tingles
at the edges.  Nose hairs prickle.
	The girl decides to respond, "Lemonjuice, orange treat, crushed ice
and kopf-chemicals."
	"Sorry, I know that.  I mean what's *in* it?"  Her eyes rise a little,
surprised at my questioning.
	She blurts over the thudding noise, "Part piracetim and hydrogene.
Slightly pure form.  From Switzerland."  She didn't exactly answer my
question.  I move on.
	I sip the sweet smelling kopfdrug, a little drip of orange flesh
slips down the side of the cup.  It reaks of a bready taste.  Like free market
sandpaper on the back of my tongue.  I've had better and worse.  A guy with
jawline blond hair and a purple t eyes me, "Arsehead, don't ask stupid
questions."  I push past and into the crowd of sweaty swingravers.  Kgb disco
guys and girls thrashing to screach-back screams and fifty-sampled hyperswing
hooks blast over neuralbase floor speakers.  Convulsing drugkopfers and
hardcore X'rs try to keep up with the excess of 160bpm skew.  The excessive
tequno-beat fad broke in about three years ago in 1956.  I simply push through.
My eyes connect with the Backwall; that at least being some minimal grip on
reality.  I disallow the smoking radiationlights and liquid ambitecture to
capture my attention, draw me into the euphoric trancestate, mass-reality,
the terra-incognita of consciousness.  Black leather arms and embodied sweaty
appendages grope at me as I slice through the crowd.  There is no *way* to
go around.  Only through.  Must reach the Backwall.
	The torpid bass pumps under my feet, my boxers practically ride up
of their own volition.  The mass of bodies push into me.  I murmur to myself,
"Faphead! get out of my way!"  The longlash diva I was refering to bears her
teeth in a feral hiss.  Orange tube-top and black micro-skirt adorn her
emaciated frame.  Past her I go.
	I hit the edge of bodies; limbs push me.  My momentum rises.  I pop out
of the crowd as if birthed by a constapated whale.  The noise immediately drops
to a murmuring deutschpulse.  The Backwall.  I grapple for a space on the
Backwall.  My eyes settle in the new darkness of the edge, now only looking into
the throng, no longer a part of it.  I nurse my kopfdrink a little, watching
the sentinels about me.
	Hyperculture was only too right in naming these particular ravers.  I
personally think they should be called deadheads or arsefaces.  I mean, all
they do is stand and watch.  Stand and watch.  Nothing else.  No body movement.
And their alone too.  They won't talk to you, to anyone.  They might drink
something.  Maybe.  Usually not.  Usually just wear some trendy hypercaught
fashion, not even realizing the social statement he or she might be making.
Deadheaddumbarsesentinals.
	My ear picks up a new sound.  To my right.  I turn.
	A total deckhead.  Black bodysuit, leather jacket-more-like-garbage-sak
material over-that, and some WWi diving mask covered with a pair of plastic
oversized machiner's goggles.  The individual shuffles along the wall, facing
the wall, air-gluing posters to the Backwall with a factory gun.  The fliers
slap quickly to the surface upon touching.
	I watch in quiet amusement.  The hermaphroditic deckhead methodically
spaces him/herself from the Backwall and sprays airglue onto the not-even-nearly
-clean space.  Then neatly unrolls one of the free market propaganda poster-
fliers in-hand over the spot.
	I'm in the way.  The deckhead motions for me to *please* move.  I do
so more out of curiosity to see what the flash-posters are than out of kindness.
*Spray then slap of poster-flyer*
	I stare at one of the fliers.  All it is is a white sheet with what
looks like black tv-xmitter static over the surface.  Two dots are imbedded in
the center of the fuzzy mess.
	I stare at the dots.  For at least a minute.  I'm hit.  Like a
retrograde vision.  From out of the static morphs a hyperdimensional image.
A neat threeD trick.  I stare at it for a few more seconds.  It reads:
	DOWN WiTH ThE iNfOCRACY	: BiTHEAdS UNiTE
	Under this is a hint-of-color-over the stylized-phrase: Beti 57.
	What?
	Tap.  The image is lost.  My eyes shift out of focus.  Tap.  Someone
pushes my shoulder, pinches my flesh.
	"Heyia Dos!" the really large girl smiles at me.
	I merely smile back.  Unfortunately I remember this person, this
particular female, from when I worked at GAPSony in the Mall upstairs.  But
that was years ago.  I fear I can't do the honor of remembering her name
as well as she remembers mine though.  My stomach curdles a little.  Actually
it curdles a lot.  I don't want to be talking to this person.  Her black
poofy hair radiates like a turn of the century earhorn; her hair seems to
exist soley for funneling all noise into her tiny head.  She wears a nasty pink
skintight shirt and a pair of theoretically, mind you theoretically, Roshe
multi-size xpandex pants.  Was she dancing?  The sweat wrings from her exposed
body portions.  My eyes widen in anticipation of escape.  I notice she's
trying to carry on a conversation with me, but ignore her as two
disco-tequeguards walk past us to my left.  The applegreen skin-plastic of their
blatantly hyper-regardless outfits demands the parting of the crowd.  The girl
pinches me again, "Dos!  I was talking to you!"  She pouts her lips; a slight
glob of drool exposed.  My stomach turns more.
	The guards come back, someone in their grips.  The deckhead.
	"Ouch fem!" I yelp as the girl pinches me for the fourth time.  Her
eyes widen in a how-could-you-scum-of-the-free-market-insult-me look.  I
immediately break from her grip and follow the guards.  Cautiously.
	They move quickly along the Backwall, shoving the deckhead with high-
handed force.  They finally stop at the club EXIT and word the deckhead for
a good two minutes.  They then shove the person out.  When the guards split,
I push through the door too.  It's the fire exit.  No elevator up to the
ground floor.  23 flights straight up.  I only curse.
	Bright white light.  Not what I expected in a fire exit shaft.  The
stairs ascend at about fifteen to a turn, spiralling up in perpendicular rows.
The deckhead sits at the top of the first landing.  I turn back to look at the
club door.  Nothing on the stark white space except the spraymasked word,
cLUB23, stenciled in black.  I return my attention to the deckhead.  Nervousness
creeps up my back, sweat prickles the skin between my chest and t.  I slowly
walk up the stairs.  The deckhead merely sits, legs pulled up to buttocks,
arms folded, holding the legs close.  A very heavy breathing emanates from
the character; through the mask.
	"Hul'o," I call mutedly.
	The mask turns to my gaze.  Starker black piping and clear goggles stare
at me.  The mechanically covered mouth produces a horrid transmorphing of the
individual's facial features.  I absolutely can not decide if its a man or a
woman.  To much mechi-distortion clothing.  An arm breaks from the mess of a
body.  It beckons me up, pats the step beside it.
	Slowly still, I walk up the stairs.  I sit.
	I merely stare into the goggles.  Black fatiguepaint smears around
the person's eyes.  Makes it that much harder to detail the features.
	A crack is heard from below.  We both turn.  The club door opens.
One of the guards in green sticks his head out.  Gives a dirty look.
	"Turp'n deckhead!"  The guard drops the airglue gun to the floor then
tosses the stack of poster-fliers in the air.  The door closes with a vaultlike
boom.
	The deckhead and I sit in the rain of white-static poster-fliers.  I
pick one up, "What's this?"
	Holding the flier in the person's face, I point to the black dotted
static on the page.  THe deckhead seems to laugh.  Maybe snicker like an
irish radio being tuned.  I push for more info, "And *who the hell is Beti 57*?"
One gloved hand fumbles with the mask apparatus while the other merely points
to the face being revealed.  My eyes squint.  The mask peels off in three
stages.  First the clear goggles, next the mouth-breather and peripheral piping,
finally the skin-tight diving suit is pushed down.
	A man's voice cuts the neon stairwell, "I am."
	"Funny," is all i manage.  "Are you like, a transvestite?  Or ambisexual
or something?  I mean why the female name?"  I'm only half kidding when I say
this.
	He seriously returns, "No."  He takes a brown oil rag from beneath his
plastic-bag jacket and begins cleaning the darkpaint smears from around his
eyes.  I soon make out his true appearance.  Very close cropped black hair,
stark-sharp chinline, deep brown eyes.  The phrase *bet i 57* in a minimal
font perches the left portion of his brow.  The mask obviously gave him a more
massive presence than is now apparent.
	"No offense, just curious," I return.  The man known as Beti 57 gets up
and begins gathering the fliers strewn on the stair well.  I watch.
	"Well, help me," he beams.  An odd request, but I've nothing else to
do.  Now the only way out is up.
	We collect what seems hundreds of fliers; he moves down the stairs, I
up.
	"What's with the name then?  Is it a tattoo?"
	His voice echoes from the stair-turn below me, it reverbs off the
white plastic walls, "It's a long story.  Has something to do with an art
piece a friend of mind did."
	I can't imagine, "How 'bout the short version?"
	The man known as Beti 57 drops the collected fliers, "Fap off!"
	"Oh come on . . . as if I'll ever see you again."
	Beti returns, "I said fap you!"
	"Thanks, no.  What's in your panties?"  I walk to stand the step above
him.  His darkening eyes penetrating my own.
	He returns coldly, "Don't argue.  Just listen."  Beti sits on the steps,
"The short version then:

	Wil, my room-mate, she'd known a guy at the University in the Medical
lab.  For two weeks she came back to the flat and would tell me about the
experiment bodies.  She'd describe them in detail.  Some without limbs or
minor appendages.  Blood.  Black and sticky, but soon sterilized.  I just
couldn't believe she'd tell me this stuff.  But it din't help that I listened
anyway.
	I found out though, she was scoping meat for a project.  She didn't
let me know this at the time.  But I wanted to know exactly what she was doing.
Two evenings later I'd tracked her down at the lab.  I didn't make any pretense
about hiding, I just walked in.  She wasn't so much surprised at having someone
watch, as just having me there.  I watched none-the-less.
	Shopping.  As if in the local chemists, she was trying to decide on
which body to use.  For what, I still didn't know.  But the stench collapsed
around me.
	Twenty minutes later Wil'd found the one.  Pre-beti.  Blond, starch
eyes, flaking skin, shriveled breasts and half severed wrists.  She was
ecstatic.  The tequ had a bodybag ready.  I could only think about the ethics.
Wil had never done anything like this before.
	We took my van back.  She hadn't thought about transporting the body.
She'd said it was just plain morphic field resonance at work that I came
tonight.  I was just plain scared.
	I've done strange stuff in my van, but never had a dead person in it.
Wil directed me to drive to the corner radio shack while she syphed.  She pulled
a static pad out of her paper jacket and tried to light the eye trodes.  The
older model needed a charge so she rummaged through my glove box and yanked
my jacklinker board out.  She reached for the bundle of wires behind the fore
of the van's shifter, picking the battery line; she clamped the jacklinker to
the wire down.  Geisting power from my engine, Wil placed the pintrodes at the
points of her eyes.  Her hands flashed over the static pad's keygrips;
immediately I saw the microsparks of synchroeng-light pulse under her lids.
I don't groove to pindecking.  Prefer reeldecks because you get two levels
of sensoria.  Pins only push ligths patterns into your eyes, no sound.  It
takes me too long to warm up to just synch patterns, but Wil's always been good
at reiterating on her own ideas.  She began to mumble.  I kept driving.
	I tried to slow the van to an obvious stop so I wouldn't have to
physically break Wil out of her trance.  That didn't work.  I couldn't decide
whether to tap her arm or rip the damn wires off the splice.  I reached for the
wires, her hand quickly slapped my wrist.  I backed away and she decked off,
pulling the pins from her eyes, crusty tearsand crumpled to her shirt.
	'We"re here,' I whispered.  She didn't speak or anything, just jabbed
the pindeck in my lap and bugged from the passenger's seat.  I waited fifteen
minutes in the parking lot, under the jelloed lighting.  Nervous from having
a body in the back.  She finally came out. Almost skipping.  She slammed the
door as she slid in.  'I won"t even ask,' is all I mangaged.  She smiled and
grabbed for the pin deck.  I then drove us back to our flat.
	She insisted we wait till almost 2AM before taking Pre-beti out.
I just wanted to leave, but I stayed in the parking garage for three hours.
Wil went and took a shower.
	It wasn't that hard getting the body upstairs.  Of course we didn't take
the elevator.
	In the apartment Wil went buggy.  She'd had a chair set in the middle
of the floor, seram wrap and aluminum foil rolls setting near by.  Everything
seemed planned.  I dropped my end of the body immedeately and gropped to lock
the door.  I could hear Wil digging in her art bag for something.  When I
turned around she had propped the body onto the chair and began smearing
coldware freezeform on Pre-beti.  A paint preservative, industrial strength
she'd picked up in the warehouse district.  I sat myself in the couch and
tried to turn the radio on, but all we got was static.  I turned it down
prefering the sound of Wil airstapling seram wrap and aluminum foil to the dead
body.  I had to e-tape her air pressure generator three times before catching
all its air leaks.  Wil only kept smiling.
	I woke up with my Frederick Douglas reader in my lap and Wil tugging
at my sleave.  She spoke a single word, 'Name.'  Fed up, I ripped a page out
of my book.  Page 57.  'Here,' she took the brown paper and scanned it.  Pre-
beti became Beti, short for Bethany, short for Lake Bethany, a word cut from
the page.  I spoke, 'Hell just take the whole thing.'  I started ripping all
the pages and Wil began taping them to the body.  The life of Frederick
Douglas spread all over the dead body.  The body a slave to the words.  Beti
a slave to the wisdom of a black man dead for over seventy years.  I layered
the last page, page 57 to the forehead of the structure.  I smeared the glue
with my hands making the paper wax clear on the body; next, wiping the sweat
from my forehead.  Wil handed me a de-naturing tube to clean my hands of the
glue.  It took five minutes to scrub the hardening glue off.  My hands itched
afterwards.
	Wil laughed.  'What?'  I couldn't believe i'd helped her in the first
place, but her smirking at me didn't make it any better.  She pushed me into
the bathroom.  Wil shoved my face close to the mirror, I couldn't do anything
but notice the puddy-like impression on my brow.  THe letters *bet i 57*
smeared from when I wiped my hands, marked on my skull.  I'd been labeled.
Wil laughed for fifteen minutes.  I just tried to wash it off, but the freeze-
form gel had already hardsunk.  It was permanent."

	Beti coughs, hands shaking slightly; seeming to ache for a deck.
	I looked at him with creased eyes.  He laughed, "Would you like
me to tell you what we did with the body afterwards?"


: ray Ogar (c)1993