The flickering neon of a roadside diner cast a sickly green glow on Mason’s face. The Pennsylvania night crawled with static. Fireflies blinked like short circuits in the swamp, and the air thrummed with unseen frequencies.
He tapped a manicured nail against the chipped Formica, the rhythm echoing the digital thrumming in his pocket – a bootleg newsfeed pulsing with whispers of conspiracies.
Mason, a gaunt man with eyes that as FCCtg mirrored the flickering fire, nursed a mug of lukewarm whiskey.
“They got us running lines, Dixon,” he rasped, voice a rusty hinge. “Lines that divide, lines that control. DBut who controls the lines, eh?
“This line, it’s a data stream, a way to control the flow of information, the flow of people. We’re just meat puppets, laying down the digital infrastructure for some unseen power.”
“Lines of code, lines of control. But who writes the script, eh? The goddamn Jesuitware, their black robes a firewall across the New World.”
Dixon, a slightly younger man with a permanent Bluetooth glint in his eye, scoffed. Smoke from his vape pen curled like a phantom download. “Jesuitware? Give me a network crash, Mason. It’s the Company, man. The East India Co. 2.0, their servers reaching across the globe, sucking the bandwidth out of every continent. You’re stuck in the past. This ain’t about land anymore, it’s about bandwidth. They’re drawing a virtual border, a firewall to keep the information have-nots at bay.”
Mason scoffed, a harsh laugh escaping his lips. “The Company’s just a front, Dixon. They’re all puppets,dancing to the strings of some vast intelligence, some god pulling the levers behind the scenes.”
Mason slammed his mug on the rough table, whiskey splashing. “Don’t be naive, Dixon. Religion’s the opiate of the masses, and the Jesuits are the biggest damn pushers. They’ll use this line to carve up souls as well as land.”
The fire crackled, casting grotesque shadows on the cold stone walls. A low, mournful howl echoed from the distance, a coyote or something less earthly. Dixon shivered, a sudden unease settling in his gut.
The diner door hissed open, admitting a burst of cold air and a cloaked figure shrouded in shadow. Mason and Dixon exchanged a wary glance. The figure slid into a booth across the room, its face concealed by darkness. Mason grunted, a flicker of agreement in his shadowed eyes. They sat in silence, two men caught in an invisible web, the surveyors becoming the surveyed.
“Gentlemen,” a voice like synthesized static emanated from the figure. “Your suspicions are…close.”
A cold sweat prickled Dixon’s skin.
Messrs. Mason and Dixon,” it rasped, the sound like rusty gears grinding. “Your progress has been…noted. But the line you traverse…it is a busy one.
“There are others…powers, lurking in the dark corners of the world.. They too have designs on this territory. And above everything stands the subjunctive” A verb without being, a ghost of grammar haunting the real.”
The stranger paused, its eyes burning with an inhuman intensity, “It is a cartographer of the unseen, a surveyor of the soul.It measures desire against reality, potential against actuality. And where these lines intersect, worlds are born or destroyed.”