Sometimes all you need to start a story is a name. Here’s one for you: Jan van Panopticon. A name like that tells you everything you need to know.
There’s a lot in a name—old fantasy books like to make a lot out of someone’ sobriquet. Authors in the 20th century loved to write about wizards who could control anything they wanted, just as long as they knew its real name.
Those books were on to something.
Not the magic bit, that’s fake, but the importance of names. A name tells you everything you need to know about a person. Jan van Panopticon for example. He was a dick. A dick who thought he was smarter than everyone else. A real “spent too much time in grad school” kind of guy. Knew a million words but couldn’t find a damn useful thing to do with any of them. Tall, long black hair, too skinny for his own good. Smoked too much. You know the type. This story is about him.
We weren’t friends. The only reason I even met him in the first place was because he used to come into my bar. Gaiter’s. I’m sure you’ve seen it. Real dive. Broken neon signs, none of the dart boards worked, cheap beer. I guess I should be clear here. I didn’t own the place, Desmond did, so it wasn’t “my bar,” but I did drink there a lot. So don’t try to call me a liar. I don’t lie about stuff like that. Not about Jan van Panopticon.
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Panopticon would usually show up at Gaiter’s around five, showing off some new thing that he’d bought that day. I don’t remember a single time where he didn’t strut in bragging about some new piece of tech, suit, watch, or fancy graft that he’d purchased. New new new. Always had to be new. If you asked him why, he’d say that it was his ethos. Fucking grad school types.
I can tell that you don’t believe me. Here’s an example. I couldn’t possibly make this up. One day, a couple of months before this story takes place, van Panopticon burst into the bar with a three-foot-long monkey tail grafted onto his ass. The stupid fucking thing couldn’t do anything but hang there like a limp dick, but no one else had one, let alone seen one, so Panopticon got one. He called it a “prehensile accouterment.” The tail was gone the next day, but he was the talk of Gaiter’s for damn near a month.
You’re probably wondering where he got the money for all this stuff. Gaiter’s isn’t in a very nice neighborhood after all. Well, that’s the wrong type of question to ask. None of us wanted to know where he got the money from. It’s not safe to know that kind of stuff. As long as he kept buying us drinks we were happy to not ask questions.
That reminds me. Panopticon always ordered the same thing. Three fingers of whiskey, two ice cubes, and a splash of real lemon juice. He called it a Scurvy Killer. Everyone else just called it a waste of money. Why waste hard credits on real juice when the synthetic is fine?
Anyway, most of us figured he was spending his parent’s money, rebelling by slumming it down on Earth. Maybe we were lying to ourselves, maybe we weren’t. Because, as it turned out, it wasn’t Mommy and Daddy’s money.
Back to the story. It was a Wednesday. Cold out. I was sitting in my usual booth when Panopticon walked in. Don’t ask what I was doing at the bar before five. The answer’s obvious, I was drinking.
I realized something was up right away. Panopticon was with someone. That was the first sign that something was wrong. Panopticon always came in alone. He might leave with one, two, hell, sometimes three, people. Men, women, whatever. Jan didn’t care. He’d leave with whoever, but he never came in with anyone. Ever. He didn’t have anything to show off either. No new nanotech watch, no flashy suit, nothing. The only piece of jewelry he had on was a diamond necklace which I knew for a fact he bought for a couple of credits at the flea market on Jackson.
I still feel bad for not saying anything. Not doing anything. The warning signs were there. All of us regulars picked up on it. But none of us did anything. Panopticon wanted us to do something too. Seeing that his first two silent pleas for help weren’t enough, he sent out a third. A last chance throw of the dice. He went up to the bar and ordered two beers. Soy beers. One for his buddy and one for himself. Not the Scurvy Killer. It was as clear as a hot summer’s day that he wanted us to help. But we did nothing. No one did anything. You can’t count on someone like me to do anything in a situation like that. I don’t have a name for it.
After he ordered the beers, everything went to shit. At least that’s how I remember it. These stories have a way of getting confused in everyone’s minds. Becoming bigger than they are. But I like to think that my version is the truth.
From what I remember, the following events happened, in this order:
1. Jan van Panopticon raised his glass to the bartender
2. Jan van Panopticon took a drink
3. His companion took out a short-handled Kalashnikov pistol
4. His companion fired that pistol right into Jan van Panopticon’s side
5. Panopticon collapsed on the floor, dead
6. The shooter put the pistol back in his pocket and looked around the bar
7. He said, “Let this be a lesson about spending your money wisely.”
8. He left the bar.
After that, myth takes over. I got out of there quick, but some people stayed. They still had drinks they didn’t want to leave. They tell me that a few hours later the police came, took statements, and generally mucked up the whole thing. No one knows why it happened. Some people seem to think that Jan van Panopticon had scammed the wrong person. Others think that he had lost a bad bet. You’ll even hear a few people say he never died, that it was all a big joke. To this day I’ve never heard a convincing theory about who killed him. Mostly no one around here is dumb enough to try and figure it out. I sure as hell don’t want to look into it. Dying like Jan van Panopticon isn’t on my to-do list. Everyone watching, but no one doing a damn thing.
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