Fear Itself

There was only one television in my home, and it was in my father’s office. I was never sure why this was, and my father just consistently told me that too much television was bad for your brain. I was never allowed to watch it, and as a child, I was okay to accept that reasoning; at twelve, however, I was sure that my brain was developed enough to be unaffected by watching a half-hour of television or a two-hour film. My father was adamant that I was incorrect.

But he was incorrect in assuming that I had stopped picking locks simply because he had asked me. Ever since I figured out how useful a bobby pin was, I kept them in my hair at all times, hidden beneath the roots of my lush, blonde waves. I didn’t pick the lock to his study door often, only when I was particularly bored, but I usually found that nothing had changed. He still had an empty desk and a bookshelf full of the same books I had poked through. He didn’t keep many files in his home office, at least none that were of any interest to me. I had sifted through his stacks of manila folders, all labeled meticulously, all organized alphabetically in specific filing cabinets. Files were boring, but the television wasn’t, and at twelve years old, I was feeling rebellious enough to finally reach for that remote.

I pressed the red circle at the top, and the screen flickered on, first appearing to be static. The images ran through rather fast, switching between vantage points within seconds until it finally settled on a wide view of a town square, all in black and white. In the center was what appeared to have once been a fountain, but it was dried up, and the centerpiece sat crumbled in chunks around the bottom. The scene didn’t show much. There was no sound, nothing audible anyway, a lot of chatter. It sounded like a mass of people talking, but I couldn’t distinguish who was who. It was just a barrage of sound, and I lifted the remote again, but I noticed this time that a red marker appeared on the screen, a spinning circle spitting numbers out in every directions. With wide eyes, I watched as the circle focused, eventually widening on one man in the square. The screen went white for a moment and flashed the word “LOADING” three times before a man’s photo came up: a man with a chiseled jaw, narrowed eyes, mussed brown hair and a scowl etched into his face. Information came up along beside it, words, and I thought I saw an age, a name, a location, but in my fright, I began to press buttons on the remote.

To my relief, the screen switched. “Wow,” I muttered, heaving an exasperated sigh. “That was the weirdest reality television I’ve ever seen.” I had read about previous decades where the popular thing was reality television, but it wasn’t real at all. “Must have been much better when it was scripted,” I added with a whisper, and my eyes glanced back up at the screen as a man appeared to address a cheering crowd from behind a podium: he had chestnut brown hair, slightly wrinkled skin, and an inviting smile. The image scaled down and floated into the top left corner, revealing a man at a desk. This man was different. He looked warm, but he didn’t look warm in a natural way like the man at the podium. The man at the desk had raven hair and eyes that looked black in the light above him. He smiled unnaturally, like his skin was pulled just a little too tight around his face.

“Hello, Earth. I’m Harland McCabe coming to you live from Commander Kennedy’s address at the Globe Theater today,” he announced in a strange voice, a tone that I simply didn’t recognize. He didn’t sound like me, and he certainly sound anything like my father. One thing that particularly stood out to me was how hard he pronounced his ‘r’s. It wasn’t smooth like I was used to hearing, but I was entranced. What in the world was I watching? The man continued to explain, and I wandered forward in a daze, eventually sitting in front of the television.

“Commander Kennedy has come to address the recent decline in terrorist activity around London,” Harland McCabe continued to explain. The longer I watched, the longer I felt like he was talking directly to me. The gleam of his sparkling teeth was almost hypnotic. “While he regretfully admits that the rebel leader Emmanuel Cassidy is still on the loose, they have been working to crack down on crime in the city of London and the rest of the world…” His voice no longer former words in my head. I wasn’t registering any specific thoughts. The information was there, but my mind didn’t feel present. I felt so detached; my shoulders slumped forward a bit. My eyelids fluttered, and in a brief pause in McCabe’s speech, I felt reality rush back at me full force. Shocked, I scrambled back for the remote and switched the television off.

I pressed a palm to my forehead, groaning softly as it pulsed and throbbed. I took a deep breath and set the remote back on the desk where it belonged. I tried to wrap my head around what had just taken place, but my mind still wandered back to those names: Kennedy and Cassidy. Who were those men? Why did I suddenly feel nauseas after watch five minutes of a broadcast?

Overwhelmed by it all, I retired to my room for the rest of the evening, telling my father that I wasn’t feeling well enough to eat or come down and chat. He left a glass of water on my night stand, made sure I wasn’t running a fever, and went back to his office. Eventually, I dozed off, dreaming of Kennedy and Cassidy all the while.