What.
"You know," the Chairman said, as they walked through the halls together, "these things happen more often than you'd think."
What the fuck?
"So," Alan hazarded, "You're not going to turn me in to the cops?"
The Chairman laughed. "Of course not. To be honest, it's refreshing to see one of you come clean of your own free will, to a degree."
Alan struggled to keep up with the Chairman's brisk steps. "So, uh... Am I..."
"Free to go?" the Chairman finished. "In theory. But as long as you're by my side, no one is going to kill you, which I cannot guarantee otherwise."
Ah. Alan put some more pep in his step. After a few moments of dead air, Alan spoke up again. "So, uh, where are we going?"
The Chairman clapped Alan between the shoulder-blades. "My favorite place in the convention - The Artists' Alley. You haven't been there yet this weekend, right?" He said that last part with a bit more certainty than Alan was comfortable with.
"No, not yet..."
"No time like the present, then!"
Alan didn't know what the flying fuck the Chairman was playing at. But he seemed friendly enough. So much of him reminded Alan of Henry, but somehow amplified, and further removed from him by some orders of magnitude. Every time that it seemed like the Chairman was going to slip into the crowd ahead, never to be seen again, he stopped and looked back at Alan, waiting expectantly. And that look of expectation drove Alan forward. He recognized that he was being corralled, but that didn't make it not work.
"Hey," he said, but the Chairman ignored him, choosing to keep walking once Alan had closed the gap. "Hey," he said again, louder. Again, nothing.
Alan jogged up and grabbed the Chairman by the shoulder, and the world flexed somehow. It was time to give him a piece of his mind. "Mr. Chairman, just because I'm following you doesn't mean that I'm not still pissed at you, understand?"
The Chairman turned, slowly, removing Alan's hand from his shoulder. "Oh, I understand, Alan. It doesn't matter, though."
"Why-" Alan began, and the Chairman nodded towards the crowd around them, which suddenly was 100% comprised of convention staffers. Just as easily as they had appeared, they faded back beyond the borders of the crowd. "Don't get the wrong idea," the Chairman said. "They're protective of me, but what makes it not matter is the fact that I just don't care that you're pissed at me. You're still under my care as long as you're part of this convention."
"Huh-" Alan began, again, only to be shushed by the Chairman, placing a finger across Alan's lips. "And call me George, please. "Mr. Chairman" makes me feel like some kind of anime villain peering over arched fingers behind reflective glasses."
"George?" Alan hazarded.
"Better," the Chairman said. "Yes?"
"Why..." Alan struggled to find adequate words. Why wasn't he being turned in? Why weren't the cops getting involved? Why was the Chairm- George taking him to the Artists' Alley? "Uh... Just, why, I guess," he concluded.
George chuckled. "We'll get there in due time. Just hold on for now and trust me, okay?"
"Do I have a choice?" Alan said.
"Nope!" George said, cheerfully. "But knowing you, you would even if you did, correct?"
Alan took a second to parse the statement, another second to feel insulted by his input being so trivialized, and a third second to come to terms with it all and nod.
"Good! Now c'mon, let's go."
The Sunday crowds at an anime convention had their own character to them. Cosplays trended in a more cozy direction, cute pajama-clad holiday variants of characters, casual outfits, and the like, owing to the twin facts that the dedicated cosplayer was likely exhausted at this point, and that they'd also likely already checked out of their hotel, meaning that whatever they were wearing now, they would have to wear on their journey home - which for some involved a meeting with the TSA, or a 10 hour car ride. We've already touched on the impact these factors had on the average consumer, weighing them down with all the accumulated merch and swag of the weekend, but that presumes that they didn't plan for this. Alan's friends, being both dumb and overenthusiastic, either didn't plan or deviated from any plans they'd made, but for the people who were capable of complex planning, Sunday was a consumeristic frenzy. You see, if you wanted to minimize the amount of excess carrying-based labor, and wanted to shop as the closest thing to an idealized informed consumer, you waited until the absolute last minute to make your purchases. This was limited by the fact that some things went out of stock, and the fact that there was travel time between booths, and a bunch of other tiny little factors, but the long and short of it was that the experienced con-goer waited until Sunday to get their purchasing done.
Along with the big events of conventions being typically slated for Friday or Saturday, this shifted the populace mostly towards the Dealers' Room, where merch was sold, and the Artists' Alley, where... Well, we'll get to that when Alan gets there, won't we? Alan's friends, both those of many years and the ones he'd just acquired the other day, were among the many rushing through those halls, finding their destined purchases. And the closer Alan and George got, the thicker the crowd grew, to the point that their progress stagnated as they approached the high-ceiling'd ballroom and adjacent conference rooms that had been commandeered for the Artists' Alley.
"You know," George said, "We've been anticipating this. Every year, more and more people attend, and the pedestrian velocity of the Artists' Alley maxxed out oh, three years ago? We've been dealing with it by increasing the density of booths, thereby minimally increasing the width of the thoroughfares, but that looks... Inadequate, wouldn't you think?" He looked to Alan for confirmation, and Alan nodded instinctively.
The Chairman raised his arm above the crowd, traced a circle in the air, and like Moses parting the seas, the crowd in front of them was thinned by convention security staff, and he and Alan passed through into the Artists' Alley.
Past the twin pairs of twelve-foot-high double doors, flanked on either side by con staff checking ID badges, was a hall of indeterminate size. It was clearly too small for its contents, which had seemed to stretch it beyond its physical limits. Those contents were...
Well, physically, it was several hundred six-foot long folding tables, arranged into corridors and islands all throughout the room, most with wireframe structures reaching a good four feet into the air off of their surfaces, covered in all sorts of things - pillows, posters, figurines, plushies, comics, lanyards, coinpurses, entire costumes, keychains, backpacks, glasses from shot to beer to reading, most with even larger structures behind them, made out of PVC piping and clamps forming giant arches from which dozens upon dozens of posters hung. Here, the creatives of the anime community convened to sell their wares. Most of it was fanart, their own takes on characters and stories that everyone was familiar with, but there was always quite a bit of original content, and in terms of art styles, all commonality that defined "anime" melted away. Here, all styles were valid, so long as they made you feel something.
George let out a happy sigh. "God, look at the crowd today."
Boston, as a city, had once experienced an industrial disaster, back in 1919, wherein a vat of molasses had burst, flooding the streets and killing nearly two dozen people. The crowd slowly wading through the Artists' Alley was as close to that thickness as you could get without incurring casualties. George grabbed Alan by the wrist, and the two of them were swept up in the slow circulation of humanity, only a few paces behind a tall, thin man in pseudo-Victorian brown leather and white cloth with a vacuum-tube powered steampunk electric guitar, the amplifier on his back belching steam and spinning gears at regular intervals. George pulled Alan closer to him.
"Look around you. What do you see?"
Alan was sure the question was meant to be a deep one, but Alan, instinctively, was more concerned with giving the "right" answer than saying something more off-the-cuff. Sensing that hesitation, George elbowed him in the ribs. Gently.
"Uh," he said, looking across the aisle. "Sexy waifu posters? Perler bead 8-bit sprite art? Full Metal Alchemist temporary tattoos?"
George squeezed his wrist. "Technically correct. Try again."
They'd already passed onto the next island of booths, and Alan did his best.
"Triforce neon signs? Succulents in thematically appropriate potting for various series? Team Fortress 2 bara body pillow covers?"
George's head whipped around. "Wait, fucking really?" He dragged the two of them through the jam-packed flow of people to the booth, and after a bit of conversation with the artist, purchased himself a life-size reproduction of the Heavy, a large bald Russian man with an even larger gun, in the form of a double-wide body-pillow case, augmented with gel-pads (you know, the kind used in ergonomic mouse-pad wrist-rests) comprising his massive, Russian pectoral muscles.
"Okay, good eye there," George said, as they merged back into the flow of anime nerds, "but you're still delivering answers in the wrong format. Would you object if I stopped fishing and started pontificating for a bit?"
Alan blinked, and then shook his head. "Uh, go ahead."
George smiled back at him. "Thanks." He put his arm around Alan's shoulders. "I didn't mean it as a trick question. It's really simple, in fact, and everything you said was right, to a degree, you're just missing the point. All of this art, this vibrant explosion of creativity, it wouldn't exist without this community."
He was growing more and more comfortable with George, and so, Alan fired back. "I think everyone here would still be making stuff even without anime, and the fandom, and all that. Like..." The writer in Alan grumbled, and found a handhold. "Would Shakespeare have just not written anything if he didn't copy English history, or myths and legends and other plays?"
George smiled. "Yes, I think he would have. But certainly not as much. And I think we can agree that a world with more art is better than one with less, yes?"
Alan nodded.
"And it's oh so much more than that. This is an entire artistic ecosystem. There is a constant, ever-changing discourse about art, fiction, the nature of storytelling, what makes a story worth telling that is born from this community's shared experience of the media we love. We debate, we create, and we share."
"On top of that," he said, gesturing at the wider room, "this community is one of cross-pollination. Before the anime convention, there was the science fiction / fantasy convention, and we still carry that lineage within us. Writers, artists, musicians, sculptors, programmers, craftsmen of all varieties, we have created an environment rich in nutrients for them, for us, to grow on. We still call this an "anime convention", but it's for every kind of nerd. This is a home, do you understand?"
"Yeah, I think," Alan said. "I mean... When I'm at a convention, I feel like I'm with my people. Like... I'm safe to just be me? If that makes any sense?"
George's grin grew wider. "I'm glad to hear it, Alan. That's exactly what I'm hoping to provide. And in that comfort, we make friends. We make connections. We make art. We make a fundamentally more interesting and enjoyable world than what came before us." He stopped, and looked deep into Alan's eyes. The crowd flowed around them, a rock in the stream. "And that must be preserved."
Alan squirmed. "Y-yeah?"
"You know, Alan, people like you present me with one hell of a dilemma."
"We do?" Alan said. He tried to back away, only to find himself knocked back towards George by the pulsating crowd.
"When I find someone's been doing things like you have, be they a habitual offender or someone making some of their first awful consequences, I'm faced with no good options. See, when someone gets assaulted, raped, murdered, by an attendee or a guest, I could report that to the police, start up an investigation, and rock the community to its core with scandal and tragedy. It'd be the right thing to do, right?" He didn't wait for Alan to respond. "But that would fuck up everything on a fundamental level. All pretenses, real or illusory, of this place being "home", would be gone. When you thought of a big anime convention, you'd think of that one girl who got chopped up in a bathtub, not of the "community". Hell, instead of "community", you'd think of that one motherfucker who ruined everything. So, what am I supposed to do with this?"
Alan opened his mouth hesitantly, and George immediately shut him up. "Instead of causing a national scandal, instead of setting the public perception of nerds back by decades all the way back to the fucking Satanic Panic, I could cover things up. I could see your dumb ass drop a corpse out a 50th floor window, send my staff out to recover the body, scrub the area clean, delete all records of a "Sarah Goodman" ever being at our convention, and come up with a plausible cover story in which poor Sarah got overwhelmed, ran away, and disappeared off the face of the planet, just like a hundred other teens across the United States this month. But, I hear you think, that would be wrong, wouldn't it? And guess what, Alan?"
He grabbed Alan by the chin, pulling it up ever so slightly. "Uh, what?"
"You would be fucking right." Righteous fire burned in George's eyes.
Sweat dripped down Alan's forehead. "How many times has this happened?"
"Too fucking many, Alan. And it would happen so, so many more if I did nothing about it. Think about it. Imagine what would happen if word got out that these conventions were a viable hunting ground for creeps. If people kept getting away with that kind of shit." George smiled, a sad, violent, sarcastic sort of smile, the zombified expression of someone infinitely tired yet still driven onward. "I don't have to imagine, Alan. That was the way things were. In so many places in society, that's still the way things are. Those with power prey on the innocent. Celebrities with the tiniest bit of sex appeal prey on the inexperienced and underaged."
"I didn't have power," Alan protested.
"Oh, but you fucking did. Not over much, and not for long, but you had enough power just long enough to exercise it and end someone's life. Standard serial killer stuff, really - finding the tiniest way in which to reclaim power over something, anything, and capitalizing on it, when you've been powerless for so long. It's why so many start with animal abuse, though I've found none of that on your record. Thanks for not being that particular kind of awful, Alan."
"Uh, you're welcome?" Alan said. Exactly what would be happening to him seemed increasingly inscrutable. George's demeanor, in his exposition, had turned to fury, but there was nothing physically threatening about him. There was the convention staff, waiting in the wings, but Alan was still relatively free to move around... Though he was getting the sense that that couldn't last much longer. Wherever George's thesis was going, Alan felt it couldn't go well for him.
"Between biases in the justice system, people being too embarrassed and afraid of harassment to press charges, and general celebrity influence, no one was in the position to stop these scourges of the community. But, a few years ago, a solution presented itself. Down at Otakon, back in 2003, we found one of our celebrity guests dead in his hotel room, covered in stab wounds and his own blood. There had already been a quite a few stories told about him, and none of us would mourn his passing. We had quite the discussion over how to deal with the issue - we settled on covering it up, of course - but when we found the killer, we realized that she had handed us the solution to our problem on a silver platter."
A twinkle shone in George's eyes. "Sawyer showed us that we could just fucking kill the troublemakers ourselves."
Ah. So that was how he was absolutely fucked, Alan realized.
"She's with you?" he exclaimed.
"Of course! Best asset we've got on payroll. She figured you out on the first day, for god's sake. She's damn good at this, don't you think?" George said, proudly.
So being with George was just as bad as being with Sawyer. Being with convention staff was just one step removed from the chainsaw. The only real safety he could have at this point was getting the fuck out of the convention - either running away completely, or turning himself into the police. But there was no viable way to do either of those things. The crowd was so thick that he couldn't pull himself away from George in any meaningful sense, and if he just decked him in the face, he was pretty sure that convention security would coalesce out of the void to restrain him. There were no valid options.
Of course, Alan's assertion that there were no valid options was predicated on Alan's limited, non-omniscient perspective of the convention, and his inability to see what was going on right now two floors below, just outside of the Dealer's Room. The relevant sequence of events started, funnily enough, back at the very same group breakfast that Alan had attended that morning. While Alan's attention had been consumed by interacting with his hallucinatory rendition of Sawyer, Bill and Rich had been getting up to their own shenanigans.
You see, Bill had an idea for a funny bit.
One year ago, in that glorious Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Seven, Boston had been rocked by the specter of terrorism. The television channel Cartoon Network, in advertising its hit surrealist cartoon, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, commissioned the production and placement of LED signs of their pixel-art characters, "the Mooninites", flipping off the world, all over major cities across the United States. For about a week, this went without incident. But, eventually, a concerned citizen, wondering just what the hell this mass of wires, exposed circuitboards, and batteries they kept seeing around town, called the police, to see if they knew anything about it.
They did not.
In under an hour, the bomb squads were called, along with an arsenal of fire trucks and ambulances, to deal with the potential threat. News crews appeared, with helicopters circling the scene. And an hour later, a small explosive was used to destroy the Mooninite sign.
But there were still a half-dozen more across the city, and throughout the rest of the day, the bomb squad was scrambled, over and over again, shutting down major avenues of traffic, destroying what amounted to glorified Lite-Brights with extreme prejudice. The police, of course, described them to the press as "devices resembling improvised explosive devices", and then, as word began to spread of what they really were, "hoax devices", and then, as the embarrassment spread, the police arrested everyone involved in their manufacture and posting, as police are wont to do whenever they feel slighted.
This was all seen as a dreadfully funny illustration of the ignorance of older generations in the face of the creativity of youth, or something like that. Many laughs were had at the expense of the Boston Police Department, and a few months later, when AniMass 2007 hit, the jokes were everywhere, culminating in an anime music video compilation of explosions, all caused by poorly-edited-in Mooninites, to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. All in all, it was a good bit. The jokes ran their course, and no one talked about the Mooninite Incident much anymore.
But, to Bill, before it could truly be over, something had to be done.
Someone had to put the Mooninites back up.
So, in the lead-up to AniMass 2008, Bill had painstakingly recreated the Mooninite signs. Reference materials were scant, seeing as all of the Boston ones had been destroyed, and the ones from other cities had been rapidly snatched up by collectors, so he had to make a few guesses, and sprung for a few improvements, including brighter LEDs, and a vastly more robust power supply in the form of high-capacity lithium-ion batteries sourced from AliExpress. These upgraded recreations would be hung in several prominent places around the convention hall, and there would be no way for Bill to lose: Either they'd be left up and Bill would be symbolically righting a wrong, or they'd be taken down, and Bill would have staged a historical re-enactment that would go down in nerd lore and legend.
Right as Alan was being escorted to the Artists' Alley, two members of the Boston Police Department who had been wandering the convention, for fun, had discovered one of Bill's Mooninites, and engaged in some vigorous debate with Bill and Rich, who'd been his accomplice in all of this. As much as Bill liked the idea of the historical re-enactment, he didn't much like the idea of being arrested, and so, he did his honest best to explain just what the joke was.
"So, the joke is that we over-reacted to a potential threat to the security of the citizens of Boston, and you want to laugh at how foolish we all looked?" one of the cops said.
Bill swallowed, but no matter what he did, his throat was still running dry. "Uh, yes, sir." He started thinking about the not-impossible scenario that these cops not just detained him, but demanded access to his laptop. He didn't keep track of what laws he violated, but if they did take a look, he was sure they'd find enough to seriously fuck up his life.
He'd hoped that Rich, with penchant for all things cop, would get him out of this, but instead, he was staring at the Mooninite. At least one person appreciated it.
The other cop laughed. "That was pretty silly, wasn't it?"
"You aren't mad?" Bill asked.
"Nah," the second cop said. "If we can't laugh at ourselves, how can we relate to the citizenry? And if we can't relate to the average citizen, how can we protect and serve them?"
The first cop nodded. "Stands to reason."
"Stands to reason," the second cop concurred.
Relief washed over Bill like a tsunami, wiping away his worries.
"Hey, Bill?" Rich asked.
"Yeah?"
Rich pointed at the Mooninite. "Is it supposed to be doing that?"
"Doing what?" Bill managed to say, before noticing that the rubber coating on the wires linking the lithium-ion battery pack to the LEDs had melted, and was dripping onto the floor. The battery pack had swollen to twice its original size, looking like the unholy union of an over-inflated balloon and a very spicy pillowcase.
"N-" was as far as Bill got, before the bootleg lithium-ion battery pack exploded.
A klaxon, halfway between a submarine dive alarm and an air raid siren, issued at deafening volume from the public address speakers all around the Artists' Alley. Everyone froze.
"All attendees, a potential threat to public safety has been found in the convention hall. Police are on their way to secure the area. Shelter in place. I repeat, shelter in place."
What the fuck? Alan thought, along with, from the looks of things, everyone else. He looked to George, who'd already pulled out his phone and was asking hushed, urgent questions into it.
And then, it hit Alan.
This might be his last chance to get away.
He dove to the ground and rolled under the floor-length tablecloth of the nearest artist's table while George was distracted. Alan crashed into the legs of an artist, who yelped. She leaned down, peering under the table at Alan. "Hey, uh, do you know what's going on?"
Alan's eyes darted around. He found himself in the middle of a maze of art supplies and plastic bins, and it'd take some real wiggling to make it into the more robust shelter of the interior of the art-table-island. He looked up. The girl was chubby, with such a bounty of curly hair that it did not, and perhaps could not ever fit under the table with her head. "Nope," Alan said. She groaned. "Can I come down there with you?"
"Uh," Alan replied.
"It's a good hiding spot," she reasoned.
The instincts Alan had honed over years of being in high school after Columbine and 9/11 agreed. "You can have it," Alan said, "if you'll let me through." He pointed at large bin stuffed to the brim with charms, bracelets, keychains, and buttons in front of him, and the girl nodded, kicking it aside with surprising strength. He thanked her, and scurried through.
Behind the table, he pulled himself to his feet, but only in a crouch. As long as he kept low, George was unlikely to see him, at least not in the current chaos. He could feel the adrenaline shooting through him, keeping pace with that burning realization that he might actually have a chance to get the fuck out of here. Sure, there was a lockdown on the room, but even George had been caught off-guard, he could probably give security the slip if he acted quickly enough.
Alan started playing through the scenarios in his head. What he'd been hoping for this entire weekend, consciously or subconsciously, was probably impossible at this point. Simply going home as if nothing happened, and living his life as normal, just hoping that none of it was real, or at the very least, that cops wouldn't show up at his door. He wasn't sure at this point if cops would show up at his door, but with the convention staff being in with Sawyer, well... They had all of his personal information. She, or someone else like her, could find him, and turn him into a meat puree in his sleep. And confessing to a murder to the cops in order to prevent being rendered into his component parts didn't sound like much better of a prospect. His life sucked, and he didn't have much of a future, but at the least he could be fairly sure he wouldn't have much access to imageboards, anime, and video games in federal prison.
He slowly sidled up to the gap between two art booths on the opposite side of the island, hurdling over stacks of luggage and steamer trunks of art supplies. There were two valid escape routes he could think of - a door in the back left corner of the room would take him into the access corridors of the convention, and from there he'd have to improvise, but if he just barreled through the front door, ran past security and never stopped running until he was well outside of the convention center, he'd know all of the steps he had to take, and he could take advantage of the current panic. From there... Well, he didn't have any money, ID, or credit card, or anything at all, really, on him, but he was sure he could bullshit his way onto commuter rail. The T was more well-guarded, but if he could get to North Station on foot, he could either sneak onto the rail lines or a Peter Pan bus. He wasn't sure how, but he had the utmost confidence that he could pull it off.
After that... Well, he couldn't risk the possibility that after realizing he'd gone off the grid, the convention would rat him out to the police, and with the resources of the cops in a post-9/11 America, he'd have to avoid his apartment at all costs. They'd get to it before he would, probably, and while recovering his computer was important, it was probably impossible at this point. He hadn't gone long-distance hiking since a trip back in high school with a surprisingly athletic acquaintance, but at long as he kept going vaguely northwest, he'd eventually hit Canada.
Alan darted between islands, and took his time to scout his surroundings while he was in them. Why did he think that Canada would be safe? They probably had an extradition treaty with the United States. He'd have to take up a new identity, with a plausible backstory. Maybe he was a runaway from Quebec who'd been begging on the streets for years, bullied relentlessly for not knowing French. Yeah, that's what he'd go with. He'd get a job at some shitty retail establishment - maybe a gas station? As long as it wasn't a majorly-identifiable chain - and figure things out from there. But how in the fuck would be get hired? The sketchier the place, the less his lack of identification would matter, but he was stinky, and it'd only get worse from here on out. Idea! He could get himself a cheap gym membership under a false name and use that for a reliable bathroom and shower.
Alan kept his head low, and made a break for the entrance to the Artists' Alley.
Of course, he'd need some money to make that happen, so he'd have to do some street begging. He didn't have any busking-worthy talents he could use for it, but he could just, oh, I don't know, hold out a tin can while looking sad on a street corner, and hope passerby threw some coins in.
Where the fuck would he get a tin can?
Soup, right?
Soup cost money.
Well, he could just dumpster dive for some things, right?
He was very, very done with spending time in a dumpster after this weekend.
And what part of him, exactly, thought that he would be any more competent at this than the rest of his life so far? What, if anything, indicated that he wouldn't fuck this up royally?
And what, if anything, gave him the sense that he deserved any of that?
As Alan crossed the thresh-hold between the Artists' Alley and the greater convention hall, his legs turned to rubber. Without losing an ounce of momentum, he collapsed, his face scraping across the faux-marble floor. He made no effort to pick himself up. If he picked himself up, where would he go? What would he do? Why should he do any of it?
He had no idea how long he'd been laying there when George walked up to him.
"You uh..." George said. "You doing okay?"
Alan groaned.
George shrugged. "No matter. Help him up, boys."
Two muscle-bound convention staffers reached under Alan's arms, and pulled him to his feet in one smooth motion. If they let go of him, he'd have just fallen down again, and so, they didn't. "You know," George said, adjusting his collar, "I don't know if you're turning yourself in again or just really, really bad at running, but thanks for making this easy." George turned to someone Alan couldn't see.
"Bag him," he said, and Alan's vision went dark.