The real villain is the abuse. Not even the abuser - I have a certain sympathy for what my mother must have suffered when she was a child. The abuse is a set of lies that she made herself believe, a set of lies that wrapped around her pain. A set of lies she accepted because her pain was so much worse.
One of the hardest moments was for me to see that I carry that abuse in me, too.
In order to survive what I suffered as a child at my mother's hands, I wrapped my pain up in lies. I told myself the same lies she told herself. Maybe the lies of the abuse are like a computer virus, in this sense: an infected computer will spread copies of the virus to any other computer it comes in contact with. She created a situation where I had to take the lies into me in order to survive. Just as my grandfather had done to her.
There is a difference between us, of course. She surrendered to the abuse in a way I never did. I think perhaps the only difference is that I had hope where she had only despair. I can only speculate what she felt, but what matters is that I never totally surrendered to the lies of the abuse. Even though I carried them in me head for most of my life. All I did, all I was capable of doing, was just this: I didn't give up.
There is ... something in me that knows right from wrong. The soul, the heart -- any word I can come up with is going to sound hokey. But I have always known something was wrong, even when I couldn't admit to myself that I knew. There was always something calling to me. Something that told me there was a better way to be me. That I could be a better person -- it wasn't even a promise, it was a knowledge, something deep inside me that recognizes who I could have been. It knows Who I have always been and who I could still become.
And that ... light, it drives me to act brave when I don't feel it, to be kind when I have no reason to, to hope when I just want to despair.
I believe, I have faith that we all have that light in us. It is the thing in us that calls us to be better people. It's the bit that knows beauty, the part that hopes.
Some have learned how to ignore it, and that's tragic. Like my mother, they give up, and become capable of great cruelty and evil. Perhaps they believe that is all there is in the world.
But I know there is always a path, for anyone, to set aside the lies, to face the pain they conceal, and to heal. Maybe it takes longer the more pain there is, maybe the way is harder and the steps smaller. But the call is always there. For everyone, always.
That's how I view our world:
On the one side the lies of the abuse, that lets people believe that their cruelty is just.
And on the other, a call to truth. A light in the human soul that recognizes who we are, and will not let us forget that.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Larger Perspective - Interface Zero fiction
by Patrick Smith - set in the world of Interface Zero, 2089
Notes:
1 I wrote this for a supplement for IZ that never came close to getting published.
2 It was intended to be part of one of the metaplots .. plus, I love Dane and Patel too much to let this be their only tale.
3 Interface Zero was published by Reality Deviant publications. I don't know who owns the rights now.
on to the story:
It was the world - the tiny, egg shaped world floating in the space above the desk with it's promises of infinite pleasures whispering in his brain - it was the world that distracted him.
"Agent Costa?"
Costa was BOPE soldari - a killer as well as a cop. Even as his eyes registered the short, middle aged Indian man standing before him, his wrinkled trench coat and shapeless hat, Costa's hand was dropping to draw his gun.
Without question he would have gunned down the man. This was a crime scene, a lab set up for the production of a drug that was no less dangerous because it wasn't chemical. Anyone here who wasn't a cop was dead. But he didn't get the chance.
"Agent Costa!" There was a hand on his wrist, squeezing in just the right way and he couldn't move it. "Relax." Costa felt rather than saw the person behind him, and in that combat tried and tested part of his brain, he sensed this person would kill him very easily unless he did as the short man said.
"We're on the same side, Costa." the man explained. "We have some questions to ask. Could you go fetch your commander and tell the others we're here? We wouldn't want any accidents to happen."
Costa released the tension in his body, and the hand was suddenly gone. When he looked, there was a woman - a girl; young, short blond hair, rail thin under the black suit, white shirt and narrow black tie. Sunglasses covered her eyes as she leaned causally against the desk. He felt like he should sneer, and knew that would be a mistake.
He called up her ident, or tried to. Instead of the usual name, address, work info and criminal history, what he saw in front of his eyes was a puke green omega symbol, and nothing else.
"What are the Omega Protocols doing here?" he asked the Indian man.
"Trying to get a larger perspective." was the only answer. "Now go."
Costa backed out of the room, unwilling to turn his back on the two. The man in the trench coat was gazing at the view of the cityscape beyond the grimy nanoweave windows. The girl seemed to be studying her fingernails, but behind those sunglasses he was sure she was staring at him.
He closed the door to apartment #2001 and piped a call to the commander's TAP - let him deal with it.
It was the world . . . it had to be the world.
They listened to the heavy boots disappearing down the hall in silence. Finally Patel took off his fedora and spoke.
"Because Machismo is alive and well in Brazil. Because we going to get more cooperation if we intimidate them than we could by flashing our idents." He looked over at Dane. "That's why we did it."
"Did I ask?"
"You wanted to."
He ran his fingers along the walls, making a slow circuit of the one room flat while Dane knelt down by the desk.
"Anyway, I know how much you enjoy seeing big toughs scared off by a teenage girl."
"I'm 32," she protested for under the desk.
He didn't point out that she didn't look it. Her grandmother had genefixed her mother, and she could still pass for 18. Of course, she was lucky to pass for 21.
There was a ping and a virtual window opened next to him, the Protocol's symbol on it. The window slid open and Patel reached in to remove the file waiting there. The window closed and vanished.
“Central's sent an email,” He unfolded the file, the odd sensation of holding an object that wasn't there itching his hands. “We got the local police report.”
Patel folded it back up, then selected a carpeted corner of the room, away from the window, and smoothly sank into the lotus position. He drew a small kit from beneath his coat and opened it. "Alright, Dane, what have you got?"
"Well, the server appears home made - cobbled together from networked Booster Boxes. It looks amateurish. They pretty much glued it to the underside of the desk." She stood up and looked at him over the desk, the world still placid in the space above the desk. "It's definitely a MORG, and it's addictive - I can feel the damn thing trying to get into my head. It looks like the admins screwed up the config and were trying to tweak into something they could use without recompiling the whole thing."
She walked around and away from the desk, into the corner opposite Patel. “And it isn't. It isn't what it looks like. What have you got?”
“Scent analysis got a few traces – no solid idents yet. No one has been in here physically for months – I don't know if the locals have realized that yet. There was a lot of pipe traffic in here a few days ago. The BOPE are trying to trace them back to point of origin.”
“After a few days?” Dane snorted, then paused. “A few days... wasn't there a story on a big corporate raid around the Argentinian border sometime last week?”
“Two separate raids. Same day. On a single Nova Personnel site.” Patel checked his own Booster Box, strapped to his wrist like a watch. “It's the big blue building you can see out the window.” He finished fiddling with his programs, floating like jewels in the air before him. He waved his hand and they were sucked back into the Box as it passed by. He put on a pair of thin latex gloves (made from real latex, Dane knew, and worth a fortune) and opened a small glass jar filled with a white paste.
"You don't need that, you know. And it's illegal here." she said.
"Then you better keep our comrades from seeing it." He scoped up a bit of the paste.
"Guard the door."
"Sam...."
"From the outside." he clarified. "Keep them busy if they come back, I should be quick." When she made no reply, he stopped and looked at her. She held out for nearly 2 seconds before looking away, grunting, and stepping outside. She didn't slam the door. He knew her control was better than that.
Patel rubbed the paste (compound Ingno Cepar 125-x2, to be exact) across his throat and jaw, screwed the lid onto the jar. By the time the drug had truly started effecting the neuron firing pattern in his neo cortex, his real eyes were closed, his TAP had created a virtual version of his body in the space before, and the input/output flow to his brain had been hijacked. The virtual Patel stretched, scratched it's head, then walked towards the egg shaped world preparing to make the weird mental leap required to step inside an object smaller than one's fist.
Dane stood outside the door, fuming silently to herself. They called him 'The Monk,' - he had actually done a stint in a mountain monastery in the Himalayas about the same time her mother was getting knocked up on the outskirts of Atlanta. That was before he discovered the joys of police work.
She turned and started looking for a good spot for leaning when the building exploded.
No, not exploded. No damage, but she had felt - a wave, a wave in the Deep. She raised out of the combat stance. It must have punched right through the firewalls that lined the building, and would have come from . . .
She was through the door before she could finish the thought, moving through a swath of virtual light. Patel - virtual Patel - was standing in front of the desk with a triumphant smile on his face.
She glanced at his body - okay - and then the room – physically empty. Virtually, however: workstations, a data forge, the black floaty disks were probably pipe assists, a store of VRT weapons and armor . . . the game world was still there, but there was a perimeter field around it. To keep it out of the way, she realized.
"Where the hell did this come from?" She walked through a white board display, her skin tingling as she stepped through the object. "Somebody was planning some big fun."
"Not planning, " Patel said, "planned." His virtual form disappeared and his body twitched, stood up, and he was inside looking out of his eyes. "They hid this in the MORG. It should have been deleted after the raid, but somebody got greedy. Got stupid. We've got our lead."
"Boots in the hall." She said, "What say we put the BOPE's 'cooperation' to work?"
“Daddy's home, Daddy's home!”
De Silva waved at the the two little girls, their blond hair done up in pigtails, who ran to greet him. They halted their head long rush a few feet shy of the driveway.
“Not now, please! Daddy's had a long day.” He pulled his briefcase out of the car, and smiled at the little girls making puppy dog eyes at him. He laughed. “After dinner, okay?”
He trudged up the walk to the red brick split level ranch house, tired but happy. His wife opened the door as he approached, took his coat and briefcase.
“Hi, honey,” she pecked him on the cheek. “How was your day?”
“Good, I guess. I'm going to churn some numbers – give me a call for dinner?”
“Of course. Drink?”
“Sure. Thanks, hon.” De Silva closed the door to his study, sat in his chair and called up his workstation interface. Few emails, nothing pressing. His wife set down his single malt without a word. When he looked up at her, she smiled, then turned and left.
There was a report on his real kid – off at the boarding school he was receiving the new '88 chemical therapies, which should boost him two percentile in IQ. Even better, the empathy deadening syndrome had had minimal effect. Based on his performance scores at the school, he was a lock for a directorship in Yoi Jango Telecom someday.
De Silva made a note to visit the scamp when he graduated to middle school. He was checking his to-do list when something moved into his light. He looked at the window, and framed in the light of the setting sun was a short man wearing a trenchcoat.
“That's very good.” He said, “Most life-like. And you are?”
“Omega Protocols. You are Albrecht Melo De Silva, a manager in the Conception Group Department. A special projects man. Idea man - you're quite good at it. Thinking outside the box, yes?” The little man – well, Virtual Ghost – moved out of the light circling towards the door.
Albrecht raised a shotgun and fired.
The blast would have been echoing if it had been physical weapon but it wasn't. The attendant smoke - the virtual smoke - would obscure vision for the Ghost, even if it survived. Albrecht dropped filters to block out virtual objects (like the smoke) and shot out a command to the workstation (self-destruct all data). He rose, strode to the door, and opened it.
What was happening caught up with him, and he hesitated.
His chest exploded.
“I hate it when they don't banter.” whispered a voice in his ear.
Albrecht couldn't see it with the filter up, but he could feel the spike going into his back. His hands beat at his chest, trying to get a hold of the weapon they couldn't touch. There was a wrench, and a sensation of absence that was some how even worse, and he fell to his knees.
“De Silva, I am charging you with information trading, conspiracy to commit espionage (corporate), and hell, we'll see if we can stick you with anything for the MORG.”
Albrecht tried to raise his head, but found his voluntary muscle control was gone - the trojan in the program that must have just been jammed through his chest was messing with muscle control. Gun smoke – real gun smoke – tickled his nose and he made out the firing of guns – silenced, of course, but still audible. That would be the kids and the little woman.
“How and why, Albrecht? Your people hit Nova, but something else happened. You launch an attack, unrelated, hours after someone else? I don't buy it. Who was the first raid? Who was behind it?”
A pair of legs appeared in the doorway, dressed in black slacks and limping. "The kid got a lucky shot." A female voice explained. "We good?"
Though he was not a religious man, Albrecht prayed. His world was falling away and the abyss was opening before him, so he prayed. He didn't expect an answer.
He got one.
There was - light. A presence. Nothing changed, still the hard wood floor inches beneath his nose, the smell of blood and smoke, the voices of the police here to end him, but there was some thing else. Some thing was here.
He stood, enraptured with the most high, most scared, and turned to Patel. "I have done my father's will." he said. Then the hollow point slug from the gun of the the thing pretending to be his second daughter entered the back of his head, and he was done.
Patel and Dane stood in the council chambers in Omegaland. That wasn't it's real name, of course, but Patel kept calling it that.
"We're still fighting for the corpse, but between the BOPE and Yoi Jango, it isn't likely." Said the figures in shadows. "But this event will weaken both, and we can take advantage of that. Change is coming to Brazil, and perhaps we will have some say in the matter."
"Anything more about the upgrade?" asked Patel.
"The chip Albrecht had? The data you harvested was unenlightening. A prototype brain booster. We question it's importance - he could have received information or programming through regular channels."
"His records were trashed, his history deleted. I realize it's a long shot, but this piece of wetware is the only anomaly we can follow up on. No stone unturned."
"It's new technology, yes, but nothing radical. As a corporation, Ser Neurocom has as honest a record as can be hoped - the beta tests seem to be run in good faith. It may just be an coincidence."
Dane spoke up. "You weren't there. There was, at the end, there was something . . ."
"Ah. The 'odd feeling', We have reviewed your log, Agent Dane. Visual, auditory, virtual and even neural activity records. There's nothing there, other than a distraction that let the simulacrum get the drop on you. It happens.
"Anyway," the shadowy figures continued, "You both did a good job. Go to Detroit, investigate Ser, report back if you find anything. I hear they're playing the 1984 Tigers against the 1911 Giants - you should catch the game. That's all."
On a north bound plane over the Caribbean, Dane and Patel opened their eyes simultaneously. Dane stretched while Patel pulled out some files.
"You do believe Ser had something to do with this." Dane said. "That's why we're really going to Detroit, right?"
Patel studied a press release - the new Ser Neurocom Intuition Chip. He didn't look up as he said, "Same reason as always, Dane. Trying to get a larger perspective."
Notes:
1 I wrote this for a supplement for IZ that never came close to getting published.
2 It was intended to be part of one of the metaplots .. plus, I love Dane and Patel too much to let this be their only tale.
3 Interface Zero was published by Reality Deviant publications. I don't know who owns the rights now.
on to the story:
A Larger Perspective
It was the world - the tiny, egg shaped world floating in the space above the desk with it's promises of infinite pleasures whispering in his brain - it was the world that distracted him.
"Agent Costa?"
Costa was BOPE soldari - a killer as well as a cop. Even as his eyes registered the short, middle aged Indian man standing before him, his wrinkled trench coat and shapeless hat, Costa's hand was dropping to draw his gun.
Without question he would have gunned down the man. This was a crime scene, a lab set up for the production of a drug that was no less dangerous because it wasn't chemical. Anyone here who wasn't a cop was dead. But he didn't get the chance.
"Agent Costa!" There was a hand on his wrist, squeezing in just the right way and he couldn't move it. "Relax." Costa felt rather than saw the person behind him, and in that combat tried and tested part of his brain, he sensed this person would kill him very easily unless he did as the short man said.
"We're on the same side, Costa." the man explained. "We have some questions to ask. Could you go fetch your commander and tell the others we're here? We wouldn't want any accidents to happen."
Costa released the tension in his body, and the hand was suddenly gone. When he looked, there was a woman - a girl; young, short blond hair, rail thin under the black suit, white shirt and narrow black tie. Sunglasses covered her eyes as she leaned causally against the desk. He felt like he should sneer, and knew that would be a mistake.
He called up her ident, or tried to. Instead of the usual name, address, work info and criminal history, what he saw in front of his eyes was a puke green omega symbol, and nothing else.
"What are the Omega Protocols doing here?" he asked the Indian man.
"Trying to get a larger perspective." was the only answer. "Now go."
Costa backed out of the room, unwilling to turn his back on the two. The man in the trench coat was gazing at the view of the cityscape beyond the grimy nanoweave windows. The girl seemed to be studying her fingernails, but behind those sunglasses he was sure she was staring at him.
He closed the door to apartment #2001 and piped a call to the commander's TAP - let him deal with it.
It was the world . . . it had to be the world.
They listened to the heavy boots disappearing down the hall in silence. Finally Patel took off his fedora and spoke.
"Because Machismo is alive and well in Brazil. Because we going to get more cooperation if we intimidate them than we could by flashing our idents." He looked over at Dane. "That's why we did it."
"Did I ask?"
"You wanted to."
He ran his fingers along the walls, making a slow circuit of the one room flat while Dane knelt down by the desk.
"Anyway, I know how much you enjoy seeing big toughs scared off by a teenage girl."
"I'm 32," she protested for under the desk.
He didn't point out that she didn't look it. Her grandmother had genefixed her mother, and she could still pass for 18. Of course, she was lucky to pass for 21.
There was a ping and a virtual window opened next to him, the Protocol's symbol on it. The window slid open and Patel reached in to remove the file waiting there. The window closed and vanished.
“Central's sent an email,” He unfolded the file, the odd sensation of holding an object that wasn't there itching his hands. “We got the local police report.”
Patel folded it back up, then selected a carpeted corner of the room, away from the window, and smoothly sank into the lotus position. He drew a small kit from beneath his coat and opened it. "Alright, Dane, what have you got?"
"Well, the server appears home made - cobbled together from networked Booster Boxes. It looks amateurish. They pretty much glued it to the underside of the desk." She stood up and looked at him over the desk, the world still placid in the space above the desk. "It's definitely a MORG, and it's addictive - I can feel the damn thing trying to get into my head. It looks like the admins screwed up the config and were trying to tweak into something they could use without recompiling the whole thing."
She walked around and away from the desk, into the corner opposite Patel. “And it isn't. It isn't what it looks like. What have you got?”
“Scent analysis got a few traces – no solid idents yet. No one has been in here physically for months – I don't know if the locals have realized that yet. There was a lot of pipe traffic in here a few days ago. The BOPE are trying to trace them back to point of origin.”
“After a few days?” Dane snorted, then paused. “A few days... wasn't there a story on a big corporate raid around the Argentinian border sometime last week?”
“Two separate raids. Same day. On a single Nova Personnel site.” Patel checked his own Booster Box, strapped to his wrist like a watch. “It's the big blue building you can see out the window.” He finished fiddling with his programs, floating like jewels in the air before him. He waved his hand and they were sucked back into the Box as it passed by. He put on a pair of thin latex gloves (made from real latex, Dane knew, and worth a fortune) and opened a small glass jar filled with a white paste.
"You don't need that, you know. And it's illegal here." she said.
"Then you better keep our comrades from seeing it." He scoped up a bit of the paste.
"Guard the door."
"Sam...."
"From the outside." he clarified. "Keep them busy if they come back, I should be quick." When she made no reply, he stopped and looked at her. She held out for nearly 2 seconds before looking away, grunting, and stepping outside. She didn't slam the door. He knew her control was better than that.
Patel rubbed the paste (compound Ingno Cepar 125-x2, to be exact) across his throat and jaw, screwed the lid onto the jar. By the time the drug had truly started effecting the neuron firing pattern in his neo cortex, his real eyes were closed, his TAP had created a virtual version of his body in the space before, and the input/output flow to his brain had been hijacked. The virtual Patel stretched, scratched it's head, then walked towards the egg shaped world preparing to make the weird mental leap required to step inside an object smaller than one's fist.
Dane stood outside the door, fuming silently to herself. They called him 'The Monk,' - he had actually done a stint in a mountain monastery in the Himalayas about the same time her mother was getting knocked up on the outskirts of Atlanta. That was before he discovered the joys of police work.
She turned and started looking for a good spot for leaning when the building exploded.
No, not exploded. No damage, but she had felt - a wave, a wave in the Deep. She raised out of the combat stance. It must have punched right through the firewalls that lined the building, and would have come from . . .
She was through the door before she could finish the thought, moving through a swath of virtual light. Patel - virtual Patel - was standing in front of the desk with a triumphant smile on his face.
She glanced at his body - okay - and then the room – physically empty. Virtually, however: workstations, a data forge, the black floaty disks were probably pipe assists, a store of VRT weapons and armor . . . the game world was still there, but there was a perimeter field around it. To keep it out of the way, she realized.
"Where the hell did this come from?" She walked through a white board display, her skin tingling as she stepped through the object. "Somebody was planning some big fun."
"Not planning, " Patel said, "planned." His virtual form disappeared and his body twitched, stood up, and he was inside looking out of his eyes. "They hid this in the MORG. It should have been deleted after the raid, but somebody got greedy. Got stupid. We've got our lead."
"Boots in the hall." She said, "What say we put the BOPE's 'cooperation' to work?"
“Daddy's home, Daddy's home!”
De Silva waved at the the two little girls, their blond hair done up in pigtails, who ran to greet him. They halted their head long rush a few feet shy of the driveway.
“Not now, please! Daddy's had a long day.” He pulled his briefcase out of the car, and smiled at the little girls making puppy dog eyes at him. He laughed. “After dinner, okay?”
He trudged up the walk to the red brick split level ranch house, tired but happy. His wife opened the door as he approached, took his coat and briefcase.
“Hi, honey,” she pecked him on the cheek. “How was your day?”
“Good, I guess. I'm going to churn some numbers – give me a call for dinner?”
“Of course. Drink?”
“Sure. Thanks, hon.” De Silva closed the door to his study, sat in his chair and called up his workstation interface. Few emails, nothing pressing. His wife set down his single malt without a word. When he looked up at her, she smiled, then turned and left.
There was a report on his real kid – off at the boarding school he was receiving the new '88 chemical therapies, which should boost him two percentile in IQ. Even better, the empathy deadening syndrome had had minimal effect. Based on his performance scores at the school, he was a lock for a directorship in Yoi Jango Telecom someday.
De Silva made a note to visit the scamp when he graduated to middle school. He was checking his to-do list when something moved into his light. He looked at the window, and framed in the light of the setting sun was a short man wearing a trenchcoat.
“That's very good.” He said, “Most life-like. And you are?”
“Omega Protocols. You are Albrecht Melo De Silva, a manager in the Conception Group Department. A special projects man. Idea man - you're quite good at it. Thinking outside the box, yes?” The little man – well, Virtual Ghost – moved out of the light circling towards the door.
Albrecht raised a shotgun and fired.
The blast would have been echoing if it had been physical weapon but it wasn't. The attendant smoke - the virtual smoke - would obscure vision for the Ghost, even if it survived. Albrecht dropped filters to block out virtual objects (like the smoke) and shot out a command to the workstation (self-destruct all data). He rose, strode to the door, and opened it.
What was happening caught up with him, and he hesitated.
His chest exploded.
“I hate it when they don't banter.” whispered a voice in his ear.
Albrecht couldn't see it with the filter up, but he could feel the spike going into his back. His hands beat at his chest, trying to get a hold of the weapon they couldn't touch. There was a wrench, and a sensation of absence that was some how even worse, and he fell to his knees.
“De Silva, I am charging you with information trading, conspiracy to commit espionage (corporate), and hell, we'll see if we can stick you with anything for the MORG.”
Albrecht tried to raise his head, but found his voluntary muscle control was gone - the trojan in the program that must have just been jammed through his chest was messing with muscle control. Gun smoke – real gun smoke – tickled his nose and he made out the firing of guns – silenced, of course, but still audible. That would be the kids and the little woman.
“How and why, Albrecht? Your people hit Nova, but something else happened. You launch an attack, unrelated, hours after someone else? I don't buy it. Who was the first raid? Who was behind it?”
A pair of legs appeared in the doorway, dressed in black slacks and limping. "The kid got a lucky shot." A female voice explained. "We good?"
Though he was not a religious man, Albrecht prayed. His world was falling away and the abyss was opening before him, so he prayed. He didn't expect an answer.
He got one.
There was - light. A presence. Nothing changed, still the hard wood floor inches beneath his nose, the smell of blood and smoke, the voices of the police here to end him, but there was some thing else. Some thing was here.
He stood, enraptured with the most high, most scared, and turned to Patel. "I have done my father's will." he said. Then the hollow point slug from the gun of the the thing pretending to be his second daughter entered the back of his head, and he was done.
Patel and Dane stood in the council chambers in Omegaland. That wasn't it's real name, of course, but Patel kept calling it that.
"We're still fighting for the corpse, but between the BOPE and Yoi Jango, it isn't likely." Said the figures in shadows. "But this event will weaken both, and we can take advantage of that. Change is coming to Brazil, and perhaps we will have some say in the matter."
"Anything more about the upgrade?" asked Patel.
"The chip Albrecht had? The data you harvested was unenlightening. A prototype brain booster. We question it's importance - he could have received information or programming through regular channels."
"His records were trashed, his history deleted. I realize it's a long shot, but this piece of wetware is the only anomaly we can follow up on. No stone unturned."
"It's new technology, yes, but nothing radical. As a corporation, Ser Neurocom has as honest a record as can be hoped - the beta tests seem to be run in good faith. It may just be an coincidence."
Dane spoke up. "You weren't there. There was, at the end, there was something . . ."
"Ah. The 'odd feeling', We have reviewed your log, Agent Dane. Visual, auditory, virtual and even neural activity records. There's nothing there, other than a distraction that let the simulacrum get the drop on you. It happens.
"Anyway," the shadowy figures continued, "You both did a good job. Go to Detroit, investigate Ser, report back if you find anything. I hear they're playing the 1984 Tigers against the 1911 Giants - you should catch the game. That's all."
On a north bound plane over the Caribbean, Dane and Patel opened their eyes simultaneously. Dane stretched while Patel pulled out some files.
"You do believe Ser had something to do with this." Dane said. "That's why we're really going to Detroit, right?"
Patel studied a press release - the new Ser Neurocom Intuition Chip. He didn't look up as he said, "Same reason as always, Dane. Trying to get a larger perspective."
Friday, December 18, 2009
Saul Hated God - posted Dec 18th
Saul Hated God (working title)
By Patrick Smith
This short fiction is set in the cyberpunk world of Interface Zero, 2088. Specifically, in the Christian Coalition States that cover what was once the Southern US.
Colonel Saul hated God.
He was a Christian, and a good one. That meant serving God's will and His representatives on earth. But Saul hated . . . could not forgive God for the things he had been made to do.
And so, as his men rolled into the Appalachian farm house - a warren of the filthy subhuman dirt farmers - Saul was staring at the sky.
They had been wandering around these God cursed mountains for weeks, trying to hunt down that devil bitch and her coven - rebels against the Lord's Coalition of Christian States. Beneath the pissy, crappy sky, they had tracked her and lost her again and again.
He had finally set his men to questioning civilians. She was getting aid and support from somewhere. HQ Intelligence had merely nodded and the next day a dispatch was broadcast saying spy satellites had compromised atmospheric scrambling, and to do no ungodly act beneath a clear sky.
Colonel Saul studied the sky - a storm front was roiling to the west while to the east it was a deep, unmarred blue.
The dirty grubbers didn't even have the decency to resist. There was some shouting - a boy had run out with a squirrel gun and his men had had to put the child down. Other than that and the wailing, they quietly allowed themselves to be herded in doors to await the Inquisitor.
Inquisitor Jones marched up the ridge to where Saul stood, surveying the farm house and his men. He waited for a while, then coughed politely.
"Report."
"The people," Jones managed to put infinite contempt in to that word, "have not seen her, nor heard of her, nor offered her any aid." Jones did not add that they were not lying - Saul knew they would have been incapable of decieving an Inquisitor.
"Would they? If she appeared, would they help her?"
"Oh, yes, Colonel. Without question."
Saul watched the storm clouds slide across the sky.
"Burn it. No survivors."
Jones left in silence. Saul was glad, he didn't want to hear the joy in his Inquisitor's voice.
Colonel Saul hated God.
By Patrick Smith
This short fiction is set in the cyberpunk world of Interface Zero, 2088. Specifically, in the Christian Coalition States that cover what was once the Southern US.
Colonel Saul hated God.
He was a Christian, and a good one. That meant serving God's will and His representatives on earth. But Saul hated . . . could not forgive God for the things he had been made to do.
And so, as his men rolled into the Appalachian farm house - a warren of the filthy subhuman dirt farmers - Saul was staring at the sky.
They had been wandering around these God cursed mountains for weeks, trying to hunt down that devil bitch and her coven - rebels against the Lord's Coalition of Christian States. Beneath the pissy, crappy sky, they had tracked her and lost her again and again.
He had finally set his men to questioning civilians. She was getting aid and support from somewhere. HQ Intelligence had merely nodded and the next day a dispatch was broadcast saying spy satellites had compromised atmospheric scrambling, and to do no ungodly act beneath a clear sky.
Colonel Saul studied the sky - a storm front was roiling to the west while to the east it was a deep, unmarred blue.
The dirty grubbers didn't even have the decency to resist. There was some shouting - a boy had run out with a squirrel gun and his men had had to put the child down. Other than that and the wailing, they quietly allowed themselves to be herded in doors to await the Inquisitor.
Inquisitor Jones marched up the ridge to where Saul stood, surveying the farm house and his men. He waited for a while, then coughed politely.
"Report."
"The people," Jones managed to put infinite contempt in to that word, "have not seen her, nor heard of her, nor offered her any aid." Jones did not add that they were not lying - Saul knew they would have been incapable of decieving an Inquisitor.
"Would they? If she appeared, would they help her?"
"Oh, yes, Colonel. Without question."
Saul watched the storm clouds slide across the sky.
"Burn it. No survivors."
Jones left in silence. Saul was glad, he didn't want to hear the joy in his Inquisitor's voice.
Colonel Saul hated God.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Renautica - posted Dec 14, 2009
The Codeship Renautica
by Patrick Smith
The Codeship Renautica has a long history, but it begins with another vessel, in another time.
In the closing days of the Second Great Man-Intelligence War, a cabal of Humanity's greatest coders and the brightest AI's of the Union gathered in secret and wrote the first codeship, the Autonatica.
Designed to plumb the Virtual Deep, it set out in search of the Center of the Circle Without Delineation. It disappeared in the final days of the war, lost in the Great Translation, it's final fate unknown.
What is known is this: wealthy commercialist Phillip Roswell the Third recovered fragments of that codeship. Laborers in his data mines uncovered fragments, crude strings of bytes. The work of decompiling alone took the allocation of hundreds of thousands of man-months, before new construction could even begin.
Finally, though, Roswell unveiled to the world the Renautica: Redundant firewall hulls 12 Gigabytes thick, Deletion Ordnance with root access on up to 70% of all systems. A data furnace with peak entropy production rated at 7 billion nats. The codeship to end all codeships.
And yet, at the unveiling, when the binaries were linked and the Renautica was to be executed into being . . . nothing happened. The source code, once examined, was a simple (though elegant) sham. If the Renautica had ever existed, it was long gone.
Rosewell was ruined, of course, and went to his grave proclaiming his innocence and cursing some nebulous thief that was never found. The searches he burned out his credit rating on never produced any results.
But sometimes, tales are posted of some goldfarmer on the edges of the Outer Deep seeing something: a shining star, streaking across the theoretical space of night. And there's users who believe that out there, somewhere, sails the codeship Renautica: still hunting for the Center, a million minutes after the Circle's been erased.
by Patrick Smith
The Codeship Renautica has a long history, but it begins with another vessel, in another time.
In the closing days of the Second Great Man-Intelligence War, a cabal of Humanity's greatest coders and the brightest AI's of the Union gathered in secret and wrote the first codeship, the Autonatica.
Designed to plumb the Virtual Deep, it set out in search of the Center of the Circle Without Delineation. It disappeared in the final days of the war, lost in the Great Translation, it's final fate unknown.
What is known is this: wealthy commercialist Phillip Roswell the Third recovered fragments of that codeship. Laborers in his data mines uncovered fragments, crude strings of bytes. The work of decompiling alone took the allocation of hundreds of thousands of man-months, before new construction could even begin.
Finally, though, Roswell unveiled to the world the Renautica: Redundant firewall hulls 12 Gigabytes thick, Deletion Ordnance with root access on up to 70% of all systems. A data furnace with peak entropy production rated at 7 billion nats. The codeship to end all codeships.
And yet, at the unveiling, when the binaries were linked and the Renautica was to be executed into being . . . nothing happened. The source code, once examined, was a simple (though elegant) sham. If the Renautica had ever existed, it was long gone.
Rosewell was ruined, of course, and went to his grave proclaiming his innocence and cursing some nebulous thief that was never found. The searches he burned out his credit rating on never produced any results.
But sometimes, tales are posted of some goldfarmer on the edges of the Outer Deep seeing something: a shining star, streaking across the theoretical space of night. And there's users who believe that out there, somewhere, sails the codeship Renautica: still hunting for the Center, a million minutes after the Circle's been erased.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Personality - posted Dec 6th
Personality
By Patrick Smith
How did I get started?
How does anyone get started?
I'd messed around before: pot, acid, even heroin once or twice, but nothing too heavy. I'd seen too many dead end losers for that, folk who could barely wipe themselves after a shit.
But it was Alice. It was always Alice.
She was skanky – she smoked too much, had bad teeth, didn't take care of herself and smelled a little funny, but God she was beautiful. Big blue eyes, pale white skin, hair black as darkness and she could fuck like a hurricane.
Maybe I should start at the beginning.
It was the fall of '98. I was an Art major in NYCU. The term project for Oils II was to do an impressionist piece, in the style of the masters, and it wasn't coming together. I just couldn't see the way they did.
I mentioned it to Alice one night at a party after she screwed some frat boy, long before we started sleeping together. She came out of the back room and said, “I can help you with that.”
Oh, brother, could she.
Three hours later I was in some guy's apartment in Soho, with my sleeve rolled up and a belt tying off my arm as he readied the needle. Alice held my hand and I could feel my heart pounding like a piston.
“Just relax and let it happen,” she said. I did.
The guy approached with a syringe filled with some green, pink and orange goo.
“What am I shooting?” I asked as he found a vein.
“Van Gogh,” she answered.
I felt like shit that night, like I was dead and my limbs were moved by wires. Still, I painted. I chewed on my brushes, and there was no joy, only color, but I painted. I finished two self portraits before finding a knife and scratching my head up badly. Then I passed out.
I spent the next two days in bed sweating and shaking. When I finally left my apartment, I went back to class and turned the paintings in.
I got an A for the term.
I was hooked.
I don't remember who I did next. I had to do a poly-sci paper, so Alice introduced me to John. John hooked me up with some Edward R Murrows. Or maybe it was a dose of Amy Tan for creative writing.
What I do know is it wasn't too long till I tried it for fun. Me and Alice scored some Moby before we went clubbing. I remember being all socially conscious but when the music started I didn't give a fuck.
The first time I dosed without her was when she was in Chicago and John called to say he was holding Jim Morrison, 25 bucks a hit. Man, I might have drunk myself to death that night if it wasn't for a pair of Swedish exchange students. The were just out of high school, and I managed to talk them into a threesome back at my apartment. Thank God I threw them out before I crashed. Hung over and strung out, the next day I couldn't even get out of bed to puke.
I functioned for a while. Coming down was always tough, but it got easier. I'd try to get high on Fridays, so I was usually okay for Monday class. I lost my job as a cook when I came into work buzzing on Dali and shit on a plate and sent it out.
Pretty soon I could barely handle my classes with out someone, and I kept pushing it further and further. Alice helped
The next semester I had to give a speech. I wanted some one like Martin Luther King or Reagan, but she said, “No, Hitler.”
“But my teacher's Jewish.”
“No problem, we'll chases it with a little Mother Teresa. It'll work.”
And it did, it did.
I actually got a standing ovation, and I basked in it like a little holy dictator, filled with shame.
Things weren't going good with Alice either. We couldn't stand each other. We'd get in these huge fights, throw shit, and she'd walk out.
Then two days later she'd show up on my door step with a needle and some vials. She'd shoot de Sade and I'd shoot Sacher-Masoch and she'd beat me senseless and then fuck me bloody.
I forgot the paperwork and lost my financial aid. I spent the last of money on Gandhi and fasted.
It gets to be a blur after that – I lost my apartment. I didn't have any friends let by that point, so I ended up on the streets. I lost touch with Alice – she jumped in the East River and froze, and I didn't hear about it for two weeks. When I did hear, my only thought was, “Where'd she score Houdini?”
I nearly died a couple of times. The worst was when I did Malcolm X and went walking in Harlem, a skinny little white boy. I spent two days in Emergency in NYU Downtown before I could slip out and get back on the streets.
The last one was completely different. I'd hustled together ten bucks and went to see John. He was getting $15 for shit like Carottop, but I begged and begged and finally he gave in.
“This is new,” he said, slapping my arm to bring out a vein. “You can be my guinea pig.”
I looked at the vial, pearl with with little drops of red.
“Who is it?” I asked, as he jabbed the needle into me.
“Messiah,” he answered. “You want to save the world?”
You want to know what Hell is? Worse than all the shit I'd been through up till that point, Hell is when you see God every where: in the shadows of your dealer's face, in the beer and vomit stains on the carpet. When you hear God's voice in the hum of traffic on the street outside.
Hell is when you feel God's eyes upon you.
And you know He doesn't much like you right now.
I got out on the street some how . . . I must have run three or four blocks, though I don't remember it. Finally I collapsed. Some one called an ambulance. I was in bad shape – they tell me was clinically dead for three minutes.
By the time I came down I was in a locked ward on 24 hour suicide watch.
It wasn't easy, but I made it. I spent two weeks in the hospital, then six months in a half-way house, sharing a room with a crazy guy who didn't believe in dinosaurs.
I kept taking it one day at a time. I'd discovered religion, and that helped. The day they let me out I got on a bus to Chicago to be closer to my parents. I've stayed clean for four years.
I still hold on to the memory of Alice. I know no one else remembers her like I do. I can save that memory. Sometimes, when I'm in a weird mood, I tell myself if I pray hard enough I can save her.
The rest of the world I'll leave to the real thing.
By Patrick Smith
How did I get started?
How does anyone get started?
I'd messed around before: pot, acid, even heroin once or twice, but nothing too heavy. I'd seen too many dead end losers for that, folk who could barely wipe themselves after a shit.
But it was Alice. It was always Alice.
She was skanky – she smoked too much, had bad teeth, didn't take care of herself and smelled a little funny, but God she was beautiful. Big blue eyes, pale white skin, hair black as darkness and she could fuck like a hurricane.
Maybe I should start at the beginning.
It was the fall of '98. I was an Art major in NYCU. The term project for Oils II was to do an impressionist piece, in the style of the masters, and it wasn't coming together. I just couldn't see the way they did.
I mentioned it to Alice one night at a party after she screwed some frat boy, long before we started sleeping together. She came out of the back room and said, “I can help you with that.”
Oh, brother, could she.
Three hours later I was in some guy's apartment in Soho, with my sleeve rolled up and a belt tying off my arm as he readied the needle. Alice held my hand and I could feel my heart pounding like a piston.
“Just relax and let it happen,” she said. I did.
The guy approached with a syringe filled with some green, pink and orange goo.
“What am I shooting?” I asked as he found a vein.
“Van Gogh,” she answered.
I felt like shit that night, like I was dead and my limbs were moved by wires. Still, I painted. I chewed on my brushes, and there was no joy, only color, but I painted. I finished two self portraits before finding a knife and scratching my head up badly. Then I passed out.
I spent the next two days in bed sweating and shaking. When I finally left my apartment, I went back to class and turned the paintings in.
I got an A for the term.
I was hooked.
I don't remember who I did next. I had to do a poly-sci paper, so Alice introduced me to John. John hooked me up with some Edward R Murrows. Or maybe it was a dose of Amy Tan for creative writing.
What I do know is it wasn't too long till I tried it for fun. Me and Alice scored some Moby before we went clubbing. I remember being all socially conscious but when the music started I didn't give a fuck.
The first time I dosed without her was when she was in Chicago and John called to say he was holding Jim Morrison, 25 bucks a hit. Man, I might have drunk myself to death that night if it wasn't for a pair of Swedish exchange students. The were just out of high school, and I managed to talk them into a threesome back at my apartment. Thank God I threw them out before I crashed. Hung over and strung out, the next day I couldn't even get out of bed to puke.
I functioned for a while. Coming down was always tough, but it got easier. I'd try to get high on Fridays, so I was usually okay for Monday class. I lost my job as a cook when I came into work buzzing on Dali and shit on a plate and sent it out.
Pretty soon I could barely handle my classes with out someone, and I kept pushing it further and further. Alice helped
The next semester I had to give a speech. I wanted some one like Martin Luther King or Reagan, but she said, “No, Hitler.”
“But my teacher's Jewish.”
“No problem, we'll chases it with a little Mother Teresa. It'll work.”
And it did, it did.
I actually got a standing ovation, and I basked in it like a little holy dictator, filled with shame.
Things weren't going good with Alice either. We couldn't stand each other. We'd get in these huge fights, throw shit, and she'd walk out.
Then two days later she'd show up on my door step with a needle and some vials. She'd shoot de Sade and I'd shoot Sacher-Masoch and she'd beat me senseless and then fuck me bloody.
I forgot the paperwork and lost my financial aid. I spent the last of money on Gandhi and fasted.
It gets to be a blur after that – I lost my apartment. I didn't have any friends let by that point, so I ended up on the streets. I lost touch with Alice – she jumped in the East River and froze, and I didn't hear about it for two weeks. When I did hear, my only thought was, “Where'd she score Houdini?”
I nearly died a couple of times. The worst was when I did Malcolm X and went walking in Harlem, a skinny little white boy. I spent two days in Emergency in NYU Downtown before I could slip out and get back on the streets.
The last one was completely different. I'd hustled together ten bucks and went to see John. He was getting $15 for shit like Carottop, but I begged and begged and finally he gave in.
“This is new,” he said, slapping my arm to bring out a vein. “You can be my guinea pig.”
I looked at the vial, pearl with with little drops of red.
“Who is it?” I asked, as he jabbed the needle into me.
“Messiah,” he answered. “You want to save the world?”
You want to know what Hell is? Worse than all the shit I'd been through up till that point, Hell is when you see God every where: in the shadows of your dealer's face, in the beer and vomit stains on the carpet. When you hear God's voice in the hum of traffic on the street outside.
Hell is when you feel God's eyes upon you.
And you know He doesn't much like you right now.
I got out on the street some how . . . I must have run three or four blocks, though I don't remember it. Finally I collapsed. Some one called an ambulance. I was in bad shape – they tell me was clinically dead for three minutes.
By the time I came down I was in a locked ward on 24 hour suicide watch.
It wasn't easy, but I made it. I spent two weeks in the hospital, then six months in a half-way house, sharing a room with a crazy guy who didn't believe in dinosaurs.
I kept taking it one day at a time. I'd discovered religion, and that helped. The day they let me out I got on a bus to Chicago to be closer to my parents. I've stayed clean for four years.
I still hold on to the memory of Alice. I know no one else remembers her like I do. I can save that memory. Sometimes, when I'm in a weird mood, I tell myself if I pray hard enough I can save her.
The rest of the world I'll leave to the real thing.
After History - posted Dec 6th, 2009
After History
by Patrick Smith
In the night, Mike woke to the cries of his baby.
“It's your turn,” he mumbled. His wife only nuzzled her face against his back.
“Alright, alright” he said, as he slide out from under the covers, “just be here when I get back.” She meeped in sleepy pleasure.
As he shuffled across the room, something was bothering him. He couldn't figure out what.
Even as it occurred to him why isn't it cold? he walked into a book shelf.
His eyes flared open and the frigid air hit him like a slap. Fully awake, he shook his head. Just a dream.
He rubbed his eyes in the cold and the dust, looked over at his tiny single bed. The streetlight penetrating the blinds cast salmon orange strips of light on the wall, enough that he could see the fridge and hot plate, the books in shelves and in stacks across the floor, the clear area in one corner where he would meditate and, sometimes, pray. The one room apartment was dark and cold. There was no baby, no wife. He had been sleep walking. Dreaming.
He crossed over and fell back into bed. At least the bed was warm.
Just a dream.
Michael Gladwell loved History.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say he hated it. His parents had always tried to push him to other pursuits - business, or technology, or a career in the military, or anything. They hadn't believed him when he told them he wished he could.
The History department had been dying when he entered the program. “Out of favor with the Ministry.” Now, a decade later, he was the head of the history department by virtue of the fact he was the only professor in it.
But he could not put it down.
His enclave, the Darrowtown Enclave, was one of a half dozen or so in the world. Something like half a million people, roads, offices and apartments and hot dog stands, huddled behind the Wall. Who built it? Why? That knowledge was lost.
That was before the War.
Most of the world was wasteland. Beyond the Wall, a million million miles of blasted urban ruins where nothing grew, and only the ghosts felt at home. Literally ... the “Ethereal Resonant Echoes Manifesting Collective Hallucinations,” in Ministry-speak. Hallucination. Hallucinations capable of murder.
Of course, you knew not to ask those questions. You knew what it would get you.
Mike knew what he would get. When he ignored the subtle hints: “Past is dead, let it rest.” When he ignored the relentlessly dwindling salary and budget cuts. He'd known what was happening.
But he couldn't stop.
He had found records - clear documentation - of things that had never happened. A moon shot. Olympics. Revolutions happening in countries on continents that weren't there on the maps. Like some one had made up whole continents ... or some one had taken them away.
And the War. The Last War. Of that, there was no mention. Not the weapons, not the causes ... not even the enemy. All these fragments, pages torn from magazines, shreds of ancient newspapers, not one even mentioned the War.
It wasn't the challenge that drove him. There was something lost. There was a hole in his world where something should be and there was nothing there and he had to look. He couldn't not. So Mike went back to the stacks, the books, the artifacts of a vanished world, searching history ... because he didn't know where else to look.
The University was on the edge of the Darrowtown Enclave, some of the buildings towering tall enough to provide a view of the wasteland over the wall. He assumed they did, anyway, but even as Head of the History Department he rarely got above street level.
His office . . . the whole department, which pretty much was his office, was in the basement of the the sagging three-story tall Humanities building. At least no one bothered him. Usually - usually no one bothered him.
When he walked into the building's mail room, Barb grabbed him.
“You've got a guest,” she said quietly, her restless eyes flickering towards Marty and then back. Marty was Campus Security, and kept his job mainly by informing on teachers. He was at his station by the door, and despite the familiar reek of vomit and urine, he seemed to be asleep. Marty must have scored last night. “He's waiting in your office.”
Christos, I can not afford this. “Thanks, Barb.” He reached in his pocket and fumbled for the right bill. Her pudgy hand came up and his was suddenly empty.
“Don't mention it.”
The heat and the pounding roar of the furnace was overwhelming before he even got to the bottom of the stairs. His office was in back of the stacks, and filled with more moldy, disintegrating manuscripts than the campus library. The door was open and lights were on, but he couldn't see anyone...
“Hello?” he shouted over the thundering rumble of the furnace.
“Hallo!”
Stepping out from behind a shelf emerged a stump of a man: shabby brown coat and a rotted tooth grin. He held a package in one hand, the other was inside his coat. Mike knew it was resting on a gun.
“Oh, hey Jim!” he shouted, “Come on in, and let me see what you've got! Coffee!?”
“Right you are, Professor.”
What Jim had, once the door sealed out some of the noise and pleasantries were done, was a 3rd printing of the the second edition of “Saving Time: The Story of Chronodymanics,” dug up from some book collection in some basement ruin in the wastes. The paper was cracking, and it had minor water damage, but it was in remarkable condition. It was also illegal - the Ministry would execute Mike for just holding it.
“I've already got a copy.”
“Ah, come on. You know what I had to go through to get that past the Wall? To say nothing of hunting the damn thing up . . . there was a 'haunt on our arses halfway across the . . .”
“Look, I'm sorry. I can't use University funds for this one, and even if I could, the well's running dry. I've got,“ he opened up the drawer and pulled out a jar - mostly coins, but with a few bills folded in, “that. Rainy day fund.”
Jim hesitated - it was barely enough for lunch and a couple of beers, and Jim could tell that at a glance. Mike could see the calculations in his eyes. Still, it was literally all the money he had. He wouldn't have let Jim see where he kept it otherwise.
“Alright, then.” The other hand reached out, if you could call the clicking, metal, grease-caked prosthetic a hand, and the jar disappeared under his coat. “Alright. Don't be expecting any more, though, seeing as how you can't pay me ... I guess henceforth I'll have to take my business elsewhere.” Jim paused. Contraband books were not in high demand.
“I'll see you, later Jim. I get paid in a week, come back if you find anything else.”
Jim snorted, “I know the way out.” Only after the door closed and he had counted to 100 under his breath did Professor Michael Gladwell relax, breath out, and with trembling hands reach for the text.
It was a week later, after the first day of the new semester, that Mike picked up his paycheck.
The light was fading and the lamps were coming on in places. He should have been home by now, but his plan to cut class short had hit a snag.
Avoiding the shadows (muggings produced a few corpses every week), he aimed for the Administration Building. It was the tallest of the Darrowtown University buildings, glass and chrome, and looked more like a corporate office than an educational facility. As he opened the door, he couldn't keep his mind from drifting a little.
One class canceled, 8 students in the other and 2 no shows. Of the 8 students tonight, 3 were engineering students looking for an easy elective, and 4 were half-baked idiots looking for “occult wisdom.” Half of those might make it to the final. The last one, though . . . an Asian girl in thick glasses . . . didn't fit the profile. Any profile.
She could be a plant, but the Ministry hadn't run one through his class for a long time. Any way, they didn't employ 'ethnics,' never did. They might have changed that, but . . . she had been as snarky as any student, but she was listening. Really listening, and at the end she had asked when the War started. He stumbled something out, and none of the other students had noticed, but . . . no one ever asked that. No one.
The cashier's office was in the back, and Mike received the check with shaking hands - he hadn't eaten well for the past two days. The clerk looked at him with thinly veiled contempt, which he ignored. He turned to go.
There was a lady waiting, and she waved at him. “Professor Gladwell?”
“Yes?” he answered, out of habit.
“The Dean was hoping he could have a word with you.” She wore a smart business suit and had short blond hair and an open, infectious smile. Mike started to sweat. Would the building entrance be covered? His gaze flashed towards the door, and he suddenly found her hand on his wrist. He hadn't seen her move.
“You do have time, don't you?”
Although the bright smile never faltered, she was squeezing hard enough to grind his bones together.
“Of course.” He replied through gritted teeth. “Of course.”
The Dean's office was on the top floor - 40th or 50th or something. There was money here, and power. When the University actually admitted the existence of History, it was at best a memo from on high. He had never thought that they were written somewhere, and now that he was seeing it, his attention was else where.
The secretary (Ms. Maxie?) blathered on about the Dean and his office, and about the problems with the copiers. He had trouble focusing because she hadn't eased her grip, not in the elevator, or walking through the maze of halls and cubicles. In a lucid moment he remembered muscles were supposed to die from fatigue toxins if clenched too long, and then the pressure was gone.
They had arrived.
The Dean's office was dark - mostly dark, although a light shone down on the chair behind the desk. The high backed chair was facing the windows (a corner office looking out over the vast darkness of the wastelands) and a voice was speaking . . . reciting? No, not reciting . . . reading. Mike's blood went cold.
“Even without a technical understanding, the implications of the quantum 'Many World' theory seem clear: the future is not set. Broyle's model indicated something far more radical: neither is the past.
“The Ministry's Conflict Prevention Bureau restricts access to certain areas of knowledge, citing the laudable - I like that, 'laudable,' that's a good word - the laudable goal of preventing a recurrence of the technologies that led to the War. One cannot wonder at the assertion that not only must the technology be restricted, so to must knowledge of what those technologies are.
“Blah, blah . . .” the sound of pages being flipped, “Ah! Here we are . . . the possibility of not only defeating our enemies, but preventing them from ever having existed to challenge us! These 'Time Bombs' . . . heh, good one . . . would literally be an attack on time itself, and the consequences of . . . well, it goes on. Gets a bit dull. I couldn't figure out how the hell you wrote it, until... Well, here, this bit:
“Perhaps the most frightening thing about these weapons is that if they were used, we would never know. A historic general dies as a baby, and a nation disappears from our maps - from our present. We don't know it ever existed, because it never did.
“Now think if it wasn't a nation, but a friend, a brother, a wife. The events that created them never occurred. They disappear and you would not even know that your life had been changed.
“Hey, think about how they feel: You wake up Saturday morning with plans to spend the whole weekend existing, and then BAM! Now that's got to suck.”
The chair spun slowly around, and a sheaf of papers bound with strings was tossed onto the desk. The Dean flipped it open again, and Mike could see the tight, hand written scrawl. It had been in his desk when he left to teach class.
“You should be proud, Mike. Your first book.”
The Dean (never referred to by name, Mike wasn't even sure he had ever heard it) was young . . . too young, and somehow too beautiful - sharp bone structure, clear skin, perfect, white teeth, and pale blue eyes. There was a warmth in his voice - but even in the dim light, Mike could see that it never reached his eyes.
“Thank you, sir. And it's 'Professor Gladwell,' please.”
Mike didn't know what he was expecting - anger, surprise? - but what he got was a pure delight of laughter.
“That is right! Mike, what the hell was I thinking? Oh, lordy lordy lordy.” The Dean took a breath and shook his head.
“I am so glad to have met you. 'What do we need a history department when we don't even have a history?' That's what they said, Mike. I convinced them you'd turn up stuff - odd chants, weird bits of rituals we've lost - but this, “ he indicated the book, “this is beyond anything I'd ever hoped for. You, Mike, you have . . . potential.”
Mike was a bit taken aback. He had expected to be taken out back and executed. Not . . . complimented?
“Tell you what: an explanation. You like that crap, right?
“Here, look... cause and effect, action and reaction, all that causality shit, right? But what does it look like, a present without a past? What happens to the effect when the cause is blown to a shit pile of quantum vomit? Great wide blast craters stretching across centuries of human history, what then?”
The chair revolved again, and the lights went down. The two walls were floor to ceiling windows, and the view of the wastes, rolling out to the horizons and lit here and there by an burst of fire or a flicker of light - it was spectacular. Out there scavengers where searching and dying, half-real nightmares haunting sleeping minds and occasionally devouring unwary flesh.
“I'm glad we had this little chat, Mike. We're done.”
What happened next was confused. He remembered thinking of Ms. Maxie and starting to turn when there was the howl and burn of a constrained plasma field weapon and he was somehow on the floor in the corner and something horrible and chittering and metal was flying through the air and a searing arc of light burned the air and a wind rushed in and he had not even heard any glass break and he stared out into the night were the dark rubble had been skyscrapers reached to the heavens and their windows glowed brightly and he could see them, clearly see the people inside talking and eating and sleeping and they looked . . . warm.
Mike started speaking - there was a whisper in his ear, and he spoke. A translation of the Key of Solomon, a litany and prayer he had read a hundred times, but now he ignored the flashes and screams behind him and did not just recite the words. He closed his eyes and prayed.
When he finished, it was quiet. He rolled away from the jagged shards of what was left of the window, distantly wondering if anyone had been walking below. In the darkness of the office, he couldn't see much, but a figure emerged, highlighted against the sky. She lifted him up, threw his arm over her shoulder, and together they lurched forward.
“I can walk,” he protested.
“Not with a broken leg,” she replied. “Buddha on a stick, I hope we don't have to work together.” Past a sparking pile with the acrid stink of burnt metal. Out the door. “Nice one with the banish, thou.”
“Well, it was Solomon - a prayer for extending dominion over demons. My wife helped. Demons, of course, only makes sense. Never thought . . . I'm going to have to change the sylabus.”
He didn't see the small Asian girl smirk, and suddenly remembered . . . “There were towers.” He said. “They were . . . they weren't right. Or . . . we aren't right. We aren't right. It's not . . . it shouldn't be so cold.” The elevator arrived with a cheerful Bing! and they went in.
“So let's go fix it.” She jabbed the a button and the doors started sliding closed. He nodded in agreement.
“What broken leg?”
by Patrick Smith
In the night, Mike woke to the cries of his baby.
“It's your turn,” he mumbled. His wife only nuzzled her face against his back.
“Alright, alright” he said, as he slide out from under the covers, “just be here when I get back.” She meeped in sleepy pleasure.
As he shuffled across the room, something was bothering him. He couldn't figure out what.
Even as it occurred to him why isn't it cold? he walked into a book shelf.
His eyes flared open and the frigid air hit him like a slap. Fully awake, he shook his head. Just a dream.
He rubbed his eyes in the cold and the dust, looked over at his tiny single bed. The streetlight penetrating the blinds cast salmon orange strips of light on the wall, enough that he could see the fridge and hot plate, the books in shelves and in stacks across the floor, the clear area in one corner where he would meditate and, sometimes, pray. The one room apartment was dark and cold. There was no baby, no wife. He had been sleep walking. Dreaming.
He crossed over and fell back into bed. At least the bed was warm.
Just a dream.
Michael Gladwell loved History.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say he hated it. His parents had always tried to push him to other pursuits - business, or technology, or a career in the military, or anything. They hadn't believed him when he told them he wished he could.
The History department had been dying when he entered the program. “Out of favor with the Ministry.” Now, a decade later, he was the head of the history department by virtue of the fact he was the only professor in it.
But he could not put it down.
His enclave, the Darrowtown Enclave, was one of a half dozen or so in the world. Something like half a million people, roads, offices and apartments and hot dog stands, huddled behind the Wall. Who built it? Why? That knowledge was lost.
That was before the War.
Most of the world was wasteland. Beyond the Wall, a million million miles of blasted urban ruins where nothing grew, and only the ghosts felt at home. Literally ... the “Ethereal Resonant Echoes Manifesting Collective Hallucinations,” in Ministry-speak. Hallucination. Hallucinations capable of murder.
Of course, you knew not to ask those questions. You knew what it would get you.
Mike knew what he would get. When he ignored the subtle hints: “Past is dead, let it rest.” When he ignored the relentlessly dwindling salary and budget cuts. He'd known what was happening.
But he couldn't stop.
He had found records - clear documentation - of things that had never happened. A moon shot. Olympics. Revolutions happening in countries on continents that weren't there on the maps. Like some one had made up whole continents ... or some one had taken them away.
And the War. The Last War. Of that, there was no mention. Not the weapons, not the causes ... not even the enemy. All these fragments, pages torn from magazines, shreds of ancient newspapers, not one even mentioned the War.
It wasn't the challenge that drove him. There was something lost. There was a hole in his world where something should be and there was nothing there and he had to look. He couldn't not. So Mike went back to the stacks, the books, the artifacts of a vanished world, searching history ... because he didn't know where else to look.
The University was on the edge of the Darrowtown Enclave, some of the buildings towering tall enough to provide a view of the wasteland over the wall. He assumed they did, anyway, but even as Head of the History Department he rarely got above street level.
His office . . . the whole department, which pretty much was his office, was in the basement of the the sagging three-story tall Humanities building. At least no one bothered him. Usually - usually no one bothered him.
When he walked into the building's mail room, Barb grabbed him.
“You've got a guest,” she said quietly, her restless eyes flickering towards Marty and then back. Marty was Campus Security, and kept his job mainly by informing on teachers. He was at his station by the door, and despite the familiar reek of vomit and urine, he seemed to be asleep. Marty must have scored last night. “He's waiting in your office.”
Christos, I can not afford this. “Thanks, Barb.” He reached in his pocket and fumbled for the right bill. Her pudgy hand came up and his was suddenly empty.
“Don't mention it.”
The heat and the pounding roar of the furnace was overwhelming before he even got to the bottom of the stairs. His office was in back of the stacks, and filled with more moldy, disintegrating manuscripts than the campus library. The door was open and lights were on, but he couldn't see anyone...
“Hello?” he shouted over the thundering rumble of the furnace.
“Hallo!”
Stepping out from behind a shelf emerged a stump of a man: shabby brown coat and a rotted tooth grin. He held a package in one hand, the other was inside his coat. Mike knew it was resting on a gun.
“Oh, hey Jim!” he shouted, “Come on in, and let me see what you've got! Coffee!?”
“Right you are, Professor.”
What Jim had, once the door sealed out some of the noise and pleasantries were done, was a 3rd printing of the the second edition of “Saving Time: The Story of Chronodymanics,” dug up from some book collection in some basement ruin in the wastes. The paper was cracking, and it had minor water damage, but it was in remarkable condition. It was also illegal - the Ministry would execute Mike for just holding it.
“I've already got a copy.”
“Ah, come on. You know what I had to go through to get that past the Wall? To say nothing of hunting the damn thing up . . . there was a 'haunt on our arses halfway across the . . .”
“Look, I'm sorry. I can't use University funds for this one, and even if I could, the well's running dry. I've got,“ he opened up the drawer and pulled out a jar - mostly coins, but with a few bills folded in, “that. Rainy day fund.”
Jim hesitated - it was barely enough for lunch and a couple of beers, and Jim could tell that at a glance. Mike could see the calculations in his eyes. Still, it was literally all the money he had. He wouldn't have let Jim see where he kept it otherwise.
“Alright, then.” The other hand reached out, if you could call the clicking, metal, grease-caked prosthetic a hand, and the jar disappeared under his coat. “Alright. Don't be expecting any more, though, seeing as how you can't pay me ... I guess henceforth I'll have to take my business elsewhere.” Jim paused. Contraband books were not in high demand.
“I'll see you, later Jim. I get paid in a week, come back if you find anything else.”
Jim snorted, “I know the way out.” Only after the door closed and he had counted to 100 under his breath did Professor Michael Gladwell relax, breath out, and with trembling hands reach for the text.
It was a week later, after the first day of the new semester, that Mike picked up his paycheck.
The light was fading and the lamps were coming on in places. He should have been home by now, but his plan to cut class short had hit a snag.
Avoiding the shadows (muggings produced a few corpses every week), he aimed for the Administration Building. It was the tallest of the Darrowtown University buildings, glass and chrome, and looked more like a corporate office than an educational facility. As he opened the door, he couldn't keep his mind from drifting a little.
One class canceled, 8 students in the other and 2 no shows. Of the 8 students tonight, 3 were engineering students looking for an easy elective, and 4 were half-baked idiots looking for “occult wisdom.” Half of those might make it to the final. The last one, though . . . an Asian girl in thick glasses . . . didn't fit the profile. Any profile.
She could be a plant, but the Ministry hadn't run one through his class for a long time. Any way, they didn't employ 'ethnics,' never did. They might have changed that, but . . . she had been as snarky as any student, but she was listening. Really listening, and at the end she had asked when the War started. He stumbled something out, and none of the other students had noticed, but . . . no one ever asked that. No one.
The cashier's office was in the back, and Mike received the check with shaking hands - he hadn't eaten well for the past two days. The clerk looked at him with thinly veiled contempt, which he ignored. He turned to go.
There was a lady waiting, and she waved at him. “Professor Gladwell?”
“Yes?” he answered, out of habit.
“The Dean was hoping he could have a word with you.” She wore a smart business suit and had short blond hair and an open, infectious smile. Mike started to sweat. Would the building entrance be covered? His gaze flashed towards the door, and he suddenly found her hand on his wrist. He hadn't seen her move.
“You do have time, don't you?”
Although the bright smile never faltered, she was squeezing hard enough to grind his bones together.
“Of course.” He replied through gritted teeth. “Of course.”
The Dean's office was on the top floor - 40th or 50th or something. There was money here, and power. When the University actually admitted the existence of History, it was at best a memo from on high. He had never thought that they were written somewhere, and now that he was seeing it, his attention was else where.
The secretary (Ms. Maxie?) blathered on about the Dean and his office, and about the problems with the copiers. He had trouble focusing because she hadn't eased her grip, not in the elevator, or walking through the maze of halls and cubicles. In a lucid moment he remembered muscles were supposed to die from fatigue toxins if clenched too long, and then the pressure was gone.
They had arrived.
The Dean's office was dark - mostly dark, although a light shone down on the chair behind the desk. The high backed chair was facing the windows (a corner office looking out over the vast darkness of the wastelands) and a voice was speaking . . . reciting? No, not reciting . . . reading. Mike's blood went cold.
“Even without a technical understanding, the implications of the quantum 'Many World' theory seem clear: the future is not set. Broyle's model indicated something far more radical: neither is the past.
“The Ministry's Conflict Prevention Bureau restricts access to certain areas of knowledge, citing the laudable - I like that, 'laudable,' that's a good word - the laudable goal of preventing a recurrence of the technologies that led to the War. One cannot wonder at the assertion that not only must the technology be restricted, so to must knowledge of what those technologies are.
“Blah, blah . . .” the sound of pages being flipped, “Ah! Here we are . . . the possibility of not only defeating our enemies, but preventing them from ever having existed to challenge us! These 'Time Bombs' . . . heh, good one . . . would literally be an attack on time itself, and the consequences of . . . well, it goes on. Gets a bit dull. I couldn't figure out how the hell you wrote it, until... Well, here, this bit:
“Perhaps the most frightening thing about these weapons is that if they were used, we would never know. A historic general dies as a baby, and a nation disappears from our maps - from our present. We don't know it ever existed, because it never did.
“Now think if it wasn't a nation, but a friend, a brother, a wife. The events that created them never occurred. They disappear and you would not even know that your life had been changed.
“Hey, think about how they feel: You wake up Saturday morning with plans to spend the whole weekend existing, and then BAM! Now that's got to suck.”
The chair spun slowly around, and a sheaf of papers bound with strings was tossed onto the desk. The Dean flipped it open again, and Mike could see the tight, hand written scrawl. It had been in his desk when he left to teach class.
“You should be proud, Mike. Your first book.”
The Dean (never referred to by name, Mike wasn't even sure he had ever heard it) was young . . . too young, and somehow too beautiful - sharp bone structure, clear skin, perfect, white teeth, and pale blue eyes. There was a warmth in his voice - but even in the dim light, Mike could see that it never reached his eyes.
“Thank you, sir. And it's 'Professor Gladwell,' please.”
Mike didn't know what he was expecting - anger, surprise? - but what he got was a pure delight of laughter.
“That is right! Mike, what the hell was I thinking? Oh, lordy lordy lordy.” The Dean took a breath and shook his head.
“I am so glad to have met you. 'What do we need a history department when we don't even have a history?' That's what they said, Mike. I convinced them you'd turn up stuff - odd chants, weird bits of rituals we've lost - but this, “ he indicated the book, “this is beyond anything I'd ever hoped for. You, Mike, you have . . . potential.”
Mike was a bit taken aback. He had expected to be taken out back and executed. Not . . . complimented?
“Tell you what: an explanation. You like that crap, right?
“Here, look... cause and effect, action and reaction, all that causality shit, right? But what does it look like, a present without a past? What happens to the effect when the cause is blown to a shit pile of quantum vomit? Great wide blast craters stretching across centuries of human history, what then?”
The chair revolved again, and the lights went down. The two walls were floor to ceiling windows, and the view of the wastes, rolling out to the horizons and lit here and there by an burst of fire or a flicker of light - it was spectacular. Out there scavengers where searching and dying, half-real nightmares haunting sleeping minds and occasionally devouring unwary flesh.
“I'm glad we had this little chat, Mike. We're done.”
What happened next was confused. He remembered thinking of Ms. Maxie and starting to turn when there was the howl and burn of a constrained plasma field weapon and he was somehow on the floor in the corner and something horrible and chittering and metal was flying through the air and a searing arc of light burned the air and a wind rushed in and he had not even heard any glass break and he stared out into the night were the dark rubble had been skyscrapers reached to the heavens and their windows glowed brightly and he could see them, clearly see the people inside talking and eating and sleeping and they looked . . . warm.
Mike started speaking - there was a whisper in his ear, and he spoke. A translation of the Key of Solomon, a litany and prayer he had read a hundred times, but now he ignored the flashes and screams behind him and did not just recite the words. He closed his eyes and prayed.
When he finished, it was quiet. He rolled away from the jagged shards of what was left of the window, distantly wondering if anyone had been walking below. In the darkness of the office, he couldn't see much, but a figure emerged, highlighted against the sky. She lifted him up, threw his arm over her shoulder, and together they lurched forward.
“I can walk,” he protested.
“Not with a broken leg,” she replied. “Buddha on a stick, I hope we don't have to work together.” Past a sparking pile with the acrid stink of burnt metal. Out the door. “Nice one with the banish, thou.”
“Well, it was Solomon - a prayer for extending dominion over demons. My wife helped. Demons, of course, only makes sense. Never thought . . . I'm going to have to change the sylabus.”
He didn't see the small Asian girl smirk, and suddenly remembered . . . “There were towers.” He said. “They were . . . they weren't right. Or . . . we aren't right. We aren't right. It's not . . . it shouldn't be so cold.” The elevator arrived with a cheerful Bing! and they went in.
“So let's go fix it.” She jabbed the a button and the doors started sliding closed. He nodded in agreement.
“What broken leg?”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
