This hypertext written by Rick Lazarus and Jack Harrow talks about a man, “The Chief”, who was a brilliant student when he was young and grew up in a “great place”; but something was not normal in him, he started to reinvent himself creating other “himselves”.
This text is divided in 3 parts. All
the story focuses on the protagonist “The Chief”, but every part in a separate
way talks about one of this other characters (“The Secret Chief”, “Patch”,
“Shades”).
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Part
One
The action starts with “The Chief” in a café,
writing whatever crosses his mind, focusing, above all, on his agony of living,
since he does not want to live, he thinks the death is the most important thing
people has since it is the only thing we can assure in life. This way of
thinking is consuming him all the time and he finds an exit of this emotional
suffering by creating some other personalities of himself, some characters
identical to him but with their own minds (or, at least, that is what he thinks
he has created), living parallel lives, but in other times and spaces.
These facts take us to the conclusion that “The
Chief” is a schizophrenic man, and this creation of his doubles
is not a good “exit” as he thinks it is, since it, instead of helping him to
adapt himself to the reality and the life he lives, he starts to get away from
everything, living a life inside his mind that do not correspond to the real
life.
In this part, what gives us this first
impression of his schizophrenia is that, at the end of the part, he leaves the
café to go home, although he does not want to because he knows that “he” (as he
calls one of his created personalities) is at home, waiting for him, but he
cannot remember anything before going out home to go to the café. Even so, he
decides to go home because it is what he has to do, not without taking a last
look to the street before opening the door and finally, enter home. What he
finds inside his house is what reveals us what is happening inside his mind: at
first he sees a silhouette of a man but then we discovers it belongs to a man
identical to him, after this he decapitates that “man” and runs away with the mechanic
head and the letter in his breast-pocket.
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Part
Two
The action in the second part deals with the
fact that “The Chief” has already created a double of himself, and there is no
way back down to the reality. This first double is called “The Secret Chief”
and it is controlled by “The Chief” with a camera inside his head (this is only
in his imagination); he is supposed to be a writer and that is why this part is
about The Journals of The Secret Chief . “The Chief” (and “The Secret Chief”) think that this way
of living is the best but they know that it can end in any moment, as life.
The important fact in this part is the
confessions of “The Chief” when he escapes from his paranoia for a moment and
tells us the reason of creating his doubles: he was a brilliant boy in his
studies and in life, who wanted to live as many experiences as he could. He did
a master about the clones (first mechanical), and about how is possible to
collect all this “persons” with their own personalities in different spaces and
times, but there is a moment when he tells us that his reason for creating
these clones is to escape from his life, although he thinks he is already dead.
At the end of the part, they appear two other
characters, also identical to “The Chief”, called Patch and Shades. “The Secret
Chief” sees them when he goes out to the street and he hears a gunshot.
Suddenly they appear, Shades with a gun in his hand and Patch with a bullet
hole on his forehead, but with no blood.
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Part
Three
This is the last part and here appear all the characters, it means all his doubles.
First, Patch and Shades appear in a motel making an information of how many doubles remain alive and how many are dead. In this part, “The Chief” reappears and finds out that all his doubles are liars and they are just poor versions of himself. He starts to confuse the reality with his own fiction and ends up misleading himself with his doubles. It is a paranoia without end, and in his mind there is only one exit, the death.
At the end of the story, he dies but he does not know who has shot him, he thinks it has been some of his doubles but at the end we find out that he has committed suicide, ending, at last, with his paranoia and the labyrinth od different personalities of himself.