Free Videodrome: Days of O'Blivion by Lee McGeorge

assault
Kermit the Frog.
    Then the vision
changed.
    He was inside the
Pittsburgh set. Deep red walls and an oiled bullwhip in his hand.
Footsteps came from behind and with them walked Deborah, the
sadomasochism expert he had hallucinated with. She disrobed as she
walked, sliding the shoulders of her dress away to allow the
garment to fall to the floor. She wore nothing underneath. She
walked to the steel mesh and clung to it with arms
outstretched.
    The vision
continued…
    The vision...
    “I must speak my
learnings,” he said aloud to Deborah. She didn’t respond. She clung
to the steel mesh, her back and buttocks presented as the target
for the whip in his hands. “The knowledge of Brian Spectrometer
must be shared. But my learnings cannot be written, they must be
spoken through the cathode ray tube. The gospels must be spoken
through the new medium.”
    Deborah let go of the
mesh and rotated to face him. Her breasts more swollen and her
figure more curvy in his fantasy than how she was in real life. She
reached her hands out to each side and gripped the steel mesh.
    “I must spread the new
gospels,” he called to her. “The gospels of the video-word shall be
carried forth not in books, but by the Prophet of Television.”
    The bullwhip seemed to
fuse with his hand, becoming an extension of his own body, his own
nerves extending into the whip. The body of a female S&M expert
presented as his target. He uncoiled the whip behind him and
readied to throw his arm and strike her.
    “Pornography and
violence,” he said, “are by-products of societies in which private
identity has been destroyed.”
    She said nothing.
    He threw the whip,
lashing the skin across her stomach. She shrieked in pain, her
fists gripping the mesh tighter. “It is the reality of the
video-word,” he said as he recovered the whip. “Violence, whether
spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and meaning.” He
threw the whip again, this time catching across her left breast
with an instant branding of the skin and a terrible cry of pain.
“Any loss of identity prompts people to seek the reassurance and
rediscovery of themselves through violence.” He recovered the whip,
coiling it in then casting it back out behind him. “Today, the
electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information
environment involves everybody to the point where individual
identity is extinguished.” He threw the whip again to elicit the
fiercest cry of terror yet from the woman. “Through violence we
shall regain our purpose.”
    He threw the whip
again… again… again…
    Then the vision
changed. The woman with her skin whipped into angry welts lay on
the floor, curled into a foetal position. Brian stood over her with
the bullwhip clenched in his fist. “Television has robbed us of our
identity. But through violence, we can retain our sense of identity
and purpose. Violence shall be the labour to restore our weakened
psyche… And we will see violence. By the flickering light of the
cathode ray, we will see violence.”
     
    ----- X -----
     
     
    Brian kept himself away
from any TV screens after the experience of the Double Interracial
tape. The crazy visions triggered by watching the programme had
been so startling and long lasting he decided his first order of
business was to create a Veraceo detector. His daily routine
constantly exposed him to low levels of the signal, but that tape
had left him with a splitting headache and residual hallucinations
that he was unwilling to repeat. After all, the last thing the
whisky maker needs is to be drunk at work.
    The way Veraceo worked
was to begin with a rotating spiral image in black and white that
was converted to a zero-light image recognised only by the parietal
lobe. The zero-light radiation pulsed from the screen at twenty
eight kilohertz.
    His detector was an
easy electronics hack requiring barely a few hours to construct. He
took the lens off a CCTV camera so that the tube and photosensitive
plate