An essay by Blake Morely, as provided by Russ Bickerstaff
Art by Luke Spooner
For more stories like this, check out Mad Scientist Journal: Winter 2015!
We’ve all heard the stories and rumors about the shadowy company known as TranScend™. Any search for them online conjures up a pretty sinister picture carved out of breathless lies, rumors, and suspicions. Horror and anxiety over what the general public thinks they might be doing has overshadowed actual information on the company and what they really do. Ghost stories told around the glow of portable electronic devices have spooked enough people to get Congress to take notice. There’s been talk around Capitol Hill of looking into the feasibility of getting a committee together to discuss the possibility of launching another formal investigation into the company. This has made them understandably nervous.
TranScend™ has been meaning to set the record straight for some time. This is no easy task. The premium they’ve placed on client confidentiality has kept the public largely in the dark about who they are and exactly what it is that they do. To make matters worse, they’re so far ensconced in what they’re doing that they don’t have much time to concern themselves with the world outside their own operations. Journalists who come looking for information tend to get bounced around a lot. In and amidst all of the offices and sub-offices of the company that I have been routed and re-routed through, it has been absurdly difficult to get noticed by the company. Thankfully, I’ve climbed far enough into their good graces to put together this story. Chance and circumstance have awarded me the honor of writing about them. One of the company’s stipulations is that the final edited version of the story I write about them be no more than 2,575 words in length. (I am only kind of interested in knowing where they came up with that number and why.) Seeing as how I’m already well over 10% of the way to that limit, I’ll get on with it.
Carly Brown’s office is everything you would expect from someone providing an extravagant service to the ridiculously wealthy. It’s big and opulent. Choice areas of the office are occupied by abstract sculptures. Various bits of sleek, designer furniture have been persuaded to lounge around and look trendy. I make a point of telling Ms. Brown that it’s not what one might expect out of the office of some evil genius who turns wealthy people into gods to fulfill their twisted, power-hungry fantasies. She’s not amused by this. Ms. Brown is a very professional touch, right down to the conservative bright pink mohawk and tasteful designer tattoos along her collarbone. (Very high class.) “It’s a misconception that we’ve been battling for years,” she says. “I don’t mind the general public thinking we’re mad scientists here, but it’s always a little unnerving when fully-vetted prospective clients expect me to look like Dr. Frankenstein.” I wince a little bit as I know that I’m writing this piece for Mad Scientist Journal–a designation which quite nearly cost me the story. TranScend™ has had so many problems with PR that it is extremely reluctant to participate in anything written for MSJ.
It’s not surprising that people would have misconceptions about the company. If anyone tells you that they can create any kind of a universe for you that is tailor-made to fit your own tastes, you’re bound to think they’re crazy. You’re going to expect them to look and act the part. Granted, the next thing you’d probably do is ask to see a brochure. You’d want them to show you the courtesy of acting a little crazy (or at least mildly eccentric) beforehand, though.
“It’s not crazy to want a world that will fit you better,” Ms. Brown says. “It’s what all of us are doing on some level. Paint the walls a different color. Move the desk to the other side of the room–that sort of thing. As organisms, we are all trying to adjust the world around us to fit us better. It’s simple adaptation. We at TranScend™ are filling a basic psychological need for people to find a space where they feel most comfortable. We give those who can afford it the opportunity to fit together a whole universe that is designed to fit them like a tailored suit.”
Carly Brown’s first meeting of the day is with a young gentleman in a tailored suit. We’ll call him Jones. He made a tremendous amount of money in the financial services industry, and now he’s looking to TranScend™ into something a little more comfy for him. The initial interviews have gone well. The gentleman in question got through all of the entrance assessments with the highest possible score. He’s a rarity among prospective clients–he made his money with the specific idea of spending it all on a designer universe of his own through TranScend™.
Jones is part of the new breed of potential clients in that he’s made his fortune dreaming of exiting our universe and crawling into his own. TranScend™ calls them “caterpillar-grade” clients–those who have been born with the desire to climb into a chrysalis and come out the other side fully transformed. He’s a man who has done his research and could recite with unerring accuracy exactly all of the forms he needs to fill out and all of the interviews he needs to go through before he goes under the beam and is transported to the little universe that he has dreamed of inhabiting for the rest of his life. (Or the rest of eternity, if that’s one of the options that he chooses to go with.)
When the business first opened its doors, the TranScend™ service was new. No one knew the first thing about it. There were no “caterpillar-grade” clients. There were no screening procedures that would give someone any kind of Lepidoptera-based designation. Jarringly extensive background checks became absolutely essential due to the nature of the business. Clients were never fully aware of everything that was involved in getting launched into a custom-made universe. Mistakes were made.
Those with fabulous amounts of money prior to the emergence of TranScend™ generally loved the world in which they had come to be insanely wealthy. They wanted to transfer their wealth and friends and family and mistresses and so on to a world that was entirely their own. When they found out that the technology wouldn’t allow for more than one person to enter a newly designed personal universe, most sane people thought it was crazy. They went back to their huge estates and private islands and personal orbital satellites and forgot about TranScend™ altogether.
Those who DID have enough money to use the service and didn’t mind starting over entirely tended to be trying to escape something. They had committed murder or tax fraud or whatever and needed to evade punishment. What was worse, they all wanted ultimate power in the worlds that were created for them. Without proper screening, many of them went mad. Ultimate power sounds nice until it’s actually acquired.
Ultimate power in a closed system is enough to completely annihilate most people’s grasp of identity. The universes these fugitive would-be gods had created for them ended up being very unstable. This resulted in extra-dimensional hells that were their own kind of punishment. Since there is no backing out once a client has been installed in his or her own universe, these tailor-made worlds became a very sinister kind of pseudo-afterlife. After a few government audits and investigations, it became apparent to TranScend™ that it really needed to screen the people who had come to search for its services.
According to Carly Brown, omnipotence is only fun until you find out that there really isn’t anything that you can’t do. We are organisms with built-in biological drives to avoid a seemingly endless series of life-threatening dangers. Give any one of us the power to permanently eliminate any such threat, and most people will lose their minds. I’d asked Brown if there was ever someone planted into a world as omnipotent god who hadn’t gone completely mad. In response, she reminded me of the confidentiality agreement between TranScend™ and its clients.
The tortured madness that swept through the earliest clients of TranScend™ didn’t exactly do wonders for the company. Those first clients have colored the world’s perception of the business. It’s only a minor, cosmetic concern for a company that busies itself creating whole universes, though. The reputation that has come with those first clients hasn’t harmed the company financially. Even the earliest contracts made it perfectly clear that TranScend™ wasn’t liable for any damages. Not that there had been any lawsuits filed against them for former clients. Gods who are stark, raving mad would likely be totally incapable of pulling it together long enough to find a respectable trans-dimensional attorney.
For his current meeting with Carly Brown, Jones is discussing the philosophy behind what kind of world he wants spend the rest of eternity in. Being exhaustively familiar with the options, he knows that he doesn’t want to be a god with ultimate power over the universe that was being created for him in the hyperspatial factory of TranScend™. He’s able to list off the options he would like added to his package by the company’s own classifications and serial numbers. He has given a lot of thought to what he wants his world to be like.
There’s no telling how the reality of being in a world of your own design is going to change you as a person. If you think that tattoo you got on Spring Break fifteen years ago feels dated to you now, consider yourself lucky that it’s only ink in your flesh and not the entire substance of the world around you.
Without getting too far into specifics, there’s a specific group of people that Jones would like to be fabricated into his new world. They’re variations on family members and celebrities and historical figures. He understands that it wouldn’t be worth it if he had ultimate power over them. The problem here is that the people being created in his world for him could only be reasonable facsimiles of the people he wants from the “real” world. You can try to replicate celebrities and legendary people for your own personal world, but they are going to be different due to the fickle whims of causality. Things could end up quite a bit different than you’re expecting them to be based on your own designs and desires.
No client has control over the world once they’ve been placed in it (unless the dicey proposition of omnipotence is included in the package), so there’s no adjusting things if they don’t turn out quite as expected for the client. Jones had heard about this sort of thing before. He hadn’t really taken it to heart, though. He hadn’t considered the full complexity of the situation. Carly Moore is dazzlingly experienced with this sort of thing and she quickly points out half a dozen different ways that his heaven could end up being a fiendish hellscape if things don’t go quite to his specifications once his universe gets set in motion. He could enter a pleasant dream and then find out that he has to live in the nightmare it becomes.
You can have a world made to your exact specifications, but people will always be people with free will who are free to be whoever they want to be. And yes, the people you create can kill you. That’s part of the package. Just because it was designed for you doesn’t mean the whole thing revolves around you. Any universe made to your exact specifications ultimately becomes just like any other universe in many ways. There’s no telling how the reality of being in a world of your own design is going to change you as a person. If you think that tattoo you got on Spring Break fifteen years ago feels dated to you now, consider yourself lucky that it’s only ink in your flesh and not the entire substance of the world around you.
Armed with the knowledge of all of the ways his dream universe could go wrong, Jones has to think matters over before managing the specifics on the next phase of the project. Carly Brown describes this phase of the process as “a bit of a chess match with the potential client.” He’ll go back, make some modifications to the universe that he’s dreaming of, and then he’ll come back to her with a new design. Then it’s up to her to try to poke as many holes as possible in his design, and he’ll be sent right back out of her office. Brown would be a failure if she never approved a client to advance to the next stage in the process, but in order to do that, she has to legitimately lose a match of wits with someone who wants to be their own god.
Having passed through a dozen exams and interviews prior to this one, Jones is only about 25% of the way through the screening and testing process. He may never complete the process and go under the beam to enter his own universe. There are hundreds like him that are in some state of processing or other. For every one person who completes the transaction, there are quite a few who give up before they get there. You might think that this would be an issue for the company, but they have it covered. “The screening process is extremely expensive,” says Ms. Brown. Just making sure people will be okay in their own universe has become a huge money maker for TranScend™. “There have been a few fiscal quarters here and there where we didn’t complete the process with anyone,” Brown says with the slightest hint of a sparkle in her eye.
Jones walks out the door. There’s a lot of thought that will have to take place before his next meeting. The question of whether or not he will complete the process lingers around the room for a few moments before Brown calls in the next prospective client. She’ll talk to half a dozen more people before the day is through. Some of them greet her like she’s an old friend. They bring her cookies and gift cards and flowers. One of them even plays bass in a punk fusion band she used to sing back-up vocals for. She has all the time in the world to get to know these people and their most intimate desires. Many of the company’s clients have been in process for years. I ask her if some of these people might simply be paying to be her friend and personal therapist. Her only response is a mysterious chuckle.
Expensive friendships with Ms. Brown aside, TranScend™ has its successes. Roughly 20% of prospective clients make it through the full process and actually go under the beam. That might not sound like a lot, until one considers the fact that each successful client represents a whole new universe. Brown’s desk is lit by the endlessly scrolling, tastefully-rendered images of happy, successful clients on the wall behind her. By nearly any measure, the company could be considered to be wildly prolific. “Jones” might be one of those who gets his smiling face scrolling behind Carly Brown as she talks with yet another prospective client about what’s wrong with his or her dream universe. Time will tell. As it turns out, even the most insanely expensive luxury that money can buy cannot be bought with money alone.
Blake Morely is a freelance writer and shadow figure living in Mad City who engages in odd jobs whenever they come knocking on his door. Anyone interested in learning more about him need only enter his name into a search engine. Outside his own writing, his life is a big, messy, unedited narrative, and he likes it that way.
Russ Bickerstaff is a professional theatre critic and aspiring author living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his wife and two daughters. His short fictions have appeared in Hypertext Magazine, Pulp Metal Magazine, Sein und Werden, and Beyond Imagination among other places. His Internarrational Where Port can be found at: http://ru3935.wix.com/russ-bickerstaff.
Luke Spooner a.k.a. ‘Carrion House’ currently lives and works in the South of England. Having recently graduated from the University of Portsmouth with a first class degree he is now a full time illustrator for just about any project that piques his interest. Despite regular forays into children’s books and fairy tales his true love lies in anything macabre, melancholy or dark in nature and essence. He believes that the job of putting someone else’s words into a visual form, to accompany and support their text, is a massive responsibility as well as being something he truly treasures. You can visit his web site at www.carrionhouse.com.